“Experiences like this, witnessing the drama of a kidnapping up close, change you a little inside. Even if the wounds heal, something remains.”
And how have you changed?
“Two years locked up in the Aspromonte caves, in sheepfolds or in narrow spaces, chained, blindfolded, forbidden to scream and unable to even stand up, taught me to control my emotions and suppress my anger. Today I am a man who seeks calm, a mediator who tries to avoid confrontation. When there is a dispute, I am the one who acts as the peacemaker. Let’s say I tend to avoid life situations from influencing me too much.”
Carlo Celadon, Italians remember him as a boy in the Tiggì pictures. A Christ reduced to skin and bones with long hair, on whose shoulder the head of Father Candido bowed. survived the longest kidnapping in Italian history: 831 days, from January 25, 1988 to May 4, 1990. Today, at the age of 54, he left Arzignano (the city where he was kidnapped by a Calabrian gang in the family villa) to move to Vicenza, where he works as an entrepreneur in the financial sector. He is married and has two children. And on Saturday the Breganze Film Festival will host the premiere of “800 Days”, the film by Dennis Dellai that won the Glass Lion at the Venice Film Festival and is inspired by his story. “In the past, several directors have offered me to make feature films or documentaries about my abduction, but I always said no. I didn’t want to make a spectacle of what I experienced, or for anyone to turn those years – which are dead and buried for me – into a commercial product.”
How did Dellai convince you?
“He promised me that it would not be a faithful adaptation, but that my story would serve as a starting point to make people confront one of the darkest pages of Italian history. I saw the film in previews and the director fulfilled our agreement. Now I hope that by going to the cinema, young people can reflect on a phenomenon – that of kidnappings – that seems far away, but in reality, until less than thirty years ago, disrupted the lives of many young people. I was just 18 years old at the time.
Does it bother you that many people still remember you as “the kidnapped boy”?
“The feeling of having been kidnapped is a lasting mark, as it is for those who were deported to concentration camps.” Every now and then someone brings up the story, maybe they recognize me and stop me on the street, but that doesn’t bother me. I react distantly. It’s as if this little boy isn’t me: I look at the photos taken after the liberation, when I weighed 45 kilos – now I weigh 90 – and I don’t recognize myself. For me it is instinctive to believe that it is another person.
Do you still remember those eight hundred days?
“Rarely. Every now and then I have a few flashes. I remember some of the hiding places. One of them was a tunnel that ran through the rocks of Aspromonte and was so low that I had to leave with the hood on my head and chains around my neck and ankle had to remain lying there. During these years, at least twenty prison guards took turns, but only a few were identified and arrested. Some of the others, as I later learned, were killed because of money problems. They were shepherds, ignorant and unscrupulous people. But behind them were definitely an instigator.”
Will he ever be able to forgive them?
“You have my indifference. However, I am pleased that last year the Court of Cassation denied the bonus permits to the gang’s telephone operator: when he spoke to my family, he was particularly sadistic. Justice must take its course, to the end.”
They kept telling her that her father refused to pay the ransom. But it wasn’t true…
“In reality, my father did everything he could, he even went to Craxi and De Mita to talk. But they taught me that if I was a prisoner it was his fault. I think it was a strategy to give me Stockholm Syndrome so I would be on their side. I had started to hate my father. Even after the release, when I realized that he had actually paid, I couldn’t overcome the resentment. Just two days later, I went to him, hugged him and cried.
The film tells the story of the kidnapping from the perspective of the protagonist’s girlfriend. She also had a girlfriend at the time…
“Her name was Gabriella and she died ten years ago. A special person that I think about often. I wrote her my letters from prison and told her that I would return to marry her. In reality, we realized at home that this experience had changed us differently and we separated. But we always stayed very close.”
Now she is the one who is a father.
“I’m not a particularly concerned parent, if that’s what you want to know. The smaller of the two never asked me anything about the kidnapping. I think it’s his way of paying respect to his father’s wounds.
September 27, 2023
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