Liberaformazione Marcella Di Levrano and the day of her new birth

In the existence of every human being, some fundamental dates remain imprinted as indelible and, for us and for those we meet along the path of life, remain the characterizing ones because they are unique.

First of all there is our date of birth and conversely that of death, but also other significant passages or happy moments mark our earthly days to such an extent that they deserve to be remembered and celebrated, sometimes even when we are no longer here.

This is why we want to remember Marcella Di Levrano today who redeemed a young life (1964-1990), full of suffering and pain, with a unique and disruptive gesture.

As had happened to many of her peers in the seventies and eighties of the last century, this beautiful girl had ended up prisoner of a truly ferocious “beast”: drugs, which then not only claimed victims but also inaugurated the new climb to the top of the world crime by the Italian mafia, in its various denominations.

Due to the frantic search for narcotic substances, which alleviated tensions and fears, Marcella ended up regularly frequenting what had initially seemed to her to be a company of fools, who in reality were not so fools, given that it was rather the dome of the sacred corona united active in the territory of Brindisi and Lecce, with large branches in the region and outside the region.

What the young woman saw and experienced in those terrible years we can only imagine. Wanting only to receive love, understanding and attention, she ended up losing herself in the vortex of addiction, frustrating the attempts of her mother and sisters who desperately tried to keep the family together, despite the daily tragedy. Only the birth of a little girl represented a moment of peace and serenity for Marcella.

In that troubled situation, here is the date that marks a point of no return between the before and the after in his existence.

It was June 24, 1987, when Marcella convinced herself to break the chains of that criminal system in which she had found herself, despite herself and due to her drug addiction, completely enmeshed.

Without revealing anything to those closest to her, understandably due to the fears and doubts that shake her, she comes out into the open – “puts her face on it” to use a recurring expression from Libera’s president Don Luigi Ciotti – and introduces herself to the Lecce Police Headquarters, to report to the police officials everything he knows about the Sacra Corona Unita, whose leaders he frequented and still frequents.

We remember that at the time the law on justice witnesses had not yet been introduced into our system and no protection was provided for those who told investigators the information in their possession regarding criminal facts.

A significant detail, clearly highlighted in the decree dismissing the proceedings for the murder of the woman by Alberto Santacatterina, a magistrate at the time in the DDA of Lecce, who speaks of information that is all the more precious because it is “totally disinterested” and ” occurred in a period in which no benefit was foreseen or even remotely conceivable”.

Marcella’s documented story to the police therefore entered the first maxi trial against the Sacra Corona Unita, revealing all its probative importance in supporting the investigations of the police and the construction of the accusatory system which then dealt an important blow to the mafia crime in that area.

And that date, which even sanctioned the death sentence of the woman, guilty of having “infamous” the mafiosi, triggering their brutal reaction, actually marked a new birth to life, to freedom, to hope for herself and for the daughter.

With this spirit, the name of Marcella Di Levrano was celebrated on the occasion of June 24th.

Last year she was remembered inside the Lecce Police Headquarters, where she had gone for the first time in 1987, in the presence of magistrates, representatives of the police force and members of the Libera association. And the atmosphere was truly that of a party, a celebration of life.

Instead of commemorating the day of her death, it was thus chosen to remember the day of her testimony, of the transition from the slavery of drugs to the freedom of the righteous, of which she has been part for a long time, well before 2022, the year in which the Ministry of the Interior approved his formal recognition as a mafia victim.

A long journey of ascertaining the truth about the murder of the woman which, for many years, her mother, Marisa Fiorani, carried out in solitude, until the meeting with Libera and with many and many who then took up her cause.

And this year too, on June 24th, Marcella Di Levrano will be remembered because, as underlined by a magistrate who accompanied her mother in recent years, her “gesture of courage can be an inspiration for all those who know but still choose to remain silent.”

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