As director pro tempore – like all directors – I have the honor of signing the fiftieth birthday issue of the newspaper. It is very likely that this is why Indro Montanelli and the extraordinary team of founders are turning in their graves, but I reassure them: the directors pass on, the original spirit lives identically in the editorial team where – as in a relay race – the values and original vision.
This is why I say without any doubt that today is first and foremost the celebration of the hundreds of editors, collaborators, printers and employees who in all these years have written, packaged and produced the newspaper for “our only master”, as Montanelli wrote in first leading article, which is the reader.
Rhetoric aside, it is obvious that a newspaper needs a financier, otherwise known as a publisher, with strong shoulders. And we have had it, first in the Berlusconi family and today in the Angelucci family, who have not skimped on what was necessary, despite knowing the famous theorem which states: «There are three main ways to lose money: wine, women and newspapers. The first two are the most pleasant, the third the most certain.” We thank them for three reasons. The first, without hypocrisy: for allowing us to realize our dream and our families to make it to the end of the month not badly; the second: for having had the sensitivity to understand that the newspaper is either this thing imagined by the founders or it has no sense of existing; the third, and most noble: because information, in its polyphony, is the architrave on which democracy rests and, therefore, never has an excessive price.
Of course, we have been and are a biased newspaper and, unlike others, we have always claimed it. We are because we are deeply convinced that the term super partes, so fashionable, is among the greatest deceptions in history, a lie to stay away from. We are wary of a man who claims to be neutral, he is lying: either you believe in God or you are an atheist, or you are straight or gay, there are those who vote on the right, those on the left and those who are anarchists, those who support Milan and those who support Inter. In short, a man lives by and for his ideas and words or he no longer lives and we, to put it in Totò’s words, lived modestly by ours, regardless of the value and skill of those who, in these fifty years, have represented them on a level political, cultural, institutional.
We have already had the opportunity to write it: fifty years ago walking around the city with the newspaper in hand risked insults and blows. Today, the survivors of that season and their heirs are the Italians who elect prime ministers and governments, their requests become laws because there is a democratic majority in the Italian and European Parliaments and new good seasons can be glimpsed coming from the horizon. In other words, time has been a gentleman and in our very small way we are proud to have contributed to ensuring that this time did not pass in vain.
Obviously thanks to Indro Montanelli for his courage
and thanks to Vittorio Feltri, who succeeded him – a seemingly impossible task – in 1994 saved the Giornale, allowing everything that came after and for us to remember this fiftieth anniversary of the foundation.
