LETIZIA BATTAGLIA BRAVE, PACIENT AND SILENCED FOR DECADES HEROIN OF THE MAGIC LENS

Abstract

Flaiano (Pescara, 1910-Rome, 1972) screenwriter and film critic - La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960) - wrote: ‘in thirty years’ time, Italy will not be how the governments will have made it, but how television will have made it. In this country that I love, there is simply no such thing as truth. Other countries have one truth. We have infinite versions’.

Flaiano's reflection makes sense in the light of the circumstances that have determined the way Italians have perceived and constructed reality in recent decades. Battaglia, a woman, a press photographer, a lucid observer of a society rotten to the core by organised crime in the city where she was born, and where she gave visual testimony of the consequences of confronting the Mafia, intuited almost from the beginning of her work the perverse effects of the Mafia on all the aspects that governed the lives of millions of women and men in a world of closed, patriarchal, conservative structures, anchored in traditions and codes that were imperceptible, if not unknown to outsiders. It did not take her long to understand that the fight against the Mafia depended not only on denouncing its actions, but above all on a thorough understanding of how it had permeated and moulded the mentality of institutions, families, individuals, of how Italians had come to assume a distortion of a reality that did not define them in their origins. She knew what had to be shown in order to begin to unmask and banish from consciences the ineffability of a phenomenon whose success always depended as much on fear as on the appropriation of consciences.