I saw these three letters – an r, an a and an i – in photos when I was a child. I don't remember the moment my mother told me my father had died. I knew it, I understood it, but I don't remember how or when. But I remember him showing me his pictures. He was there for his job as a radio commentator at the Tour de France, when cycling meant dust and effort, and he wore a suit like a worker. On this uniform, which I rightly imagined to be beige, there was only one lettering at heart level: Rai. I imagined him in that suit while he was on the radio microphone announcing Bartali's victory in the Tour, while he was telling the Italians about the funeral of the great Turin, while he was planning “La Domenica Sport”, which was broadcast on the first day of broadcast, before seventy years.
As Aldo Grasso recalled in his article, Vittorio Veltroni was the first director of the news. They called him in 1953 after someone on the experimental broadcasts broadcast a film about Stalin's funeral, but it had a small error: in the foreground was Stalin carrying a coffin on his shoulders, which intuitively should not have contained him. He was 34 years old at the time of his appointment. At 28, they appointed him to head the radio newsroom. In these years, the first post-war years, a team was formed consisting of Nando Martellini, Lello Bersani, Sergio Zavoli, Enrico Ameri, Pia Moretti, Aldo Salvo, Paolo Rosi, Massimo Rendina, Tito Stagno… and then Ettore Scola, Alberto Sordi , Ugo Gregoretti. Together with Zavattini they brought to life radio realism translated into documentaries and broadcast the surreal comedy of Alberto Sordi's Teatrino with Mario Pio and Count Claro.
In 1951, my father invented the Chain of Solidarity, a forerunner of Telethon, interrupting radio broadcasts to announce that the city would mobilize in a generosity contest to actively support the flooded Polesine. It was an avalanche of solidarity, wonderful in this poor and half-destroyed Italy. Sordi will tell of this in his own way, in a memorable scene from one of his funniest films, “It Happened at the Penitentiary,” in which he is drunkenly arrested on charges of helping to steal bolts of cloth. When he is questioned the next day, he learns that it is the deputy who is asking him the questions and insists that the commissioner be called instead. At the end, to prove that he can't be blamed, he shows his empty hand, slaps it with the other and says with a wild look: “Do you want to know why I'm innocent?” Here it is. I gave my coat to Polesine.
During these years my father gave birth to a boy named Michael Bongiorno, who lived in America and came to Rome. He gave him a column called “Arrivals and Departures” and then persuaded him to give himself a simpler name, Mike, and try the quiz. When my father died of fulminant leukemia at the age of 37, my mother Ivanka was hired in his place with the title of a simple civil servant. For me, Rai became a large building in Via Del Babuino, where the Hotel de Russie is today, and then in Viale Mazzini, whose birth we witnessed as a family and where she worked until her retirement.
My first childhood memory is always associated with Rai. It's a summer day in 1960, the living room windows open to reveal a beautiful Roman evening. A man wearing anachronistic sunglasses takes a turn as a flock of pigeons crowds the television screen. It was a CGE, one of those that turned on with the transformer. And then the shared experience of the TV and Rai generations, who in reality were the same: the Musichiere, Maestro Manzi, Cutolo's post office, Giovanna, the Black Corsair's grandmother, Father Mariano with his beard and his reassuring smile, the one who went to Carosello Bed Goes, The Adventures of the Tow Team, Davide Copperfield, Il Giornalino by Gian Burrasca with Rita Pavone directed by Lina Wertmuller and set to music by Nino Rota, Alta Pressione, Campanile Sera, Studio Uno and his library with the Cetra Quartet, Bonanza and Perry Mason, Doctor Kildare and Zorro with Sergeant Garcia, the Tuesday film, the birth of the second channel, the trial on the stage of Sergio Zavoli…
Around 1968, Bernabei's much-maligned Rai, TV7, was Fabiano Fabiani's 1:30 p.m. news program, hosted by Piero Angela or Andrea Barbato. The radio played the memorable Per voi Youth by Arbore and musically Bandiera giallo by Gianni Boncompagni. Constantly suspended between his duty as an official voice, his institutional role and his natural urge to interpret the new that was advancing in society, Rai was for me fundamental to Italian modernization, to the growth of knowledge and critical sense, even in the secularization of the country. Great civic achievements such as divorce and abortion would not have been possible without the cultural discourse that Rai courageously led throughout the 20th century.
As I look at the pictures the newscasters took the morning my father's casket left the front door of the house on a hot, sunny day in July 1956, and I scroll through them, going back and forth in the vision, I find myself among the participants in this melancholy procession, many faces of the future protagonists of the story of Rai. They were still children then, they had suffered, they were looking for the light after the darkness of the tunnel. I don't know if they wanted to change the world, but they definitely wanted to change the way they told it. And I think they succeeded.