Mafia: a book from Baudino to explain it to young people and make them aware citizens

“Why are you doing adult stuff?” From this sentence addressed to him by a friend, Stefano Baudino, journalist and writer, born in 1994, he felt the need to write his latest book, “The mafia is not a thing for adults”, published by the Aliberti publishing company. Baudino has been interested in the subject since he was very young and in recent years, in addition to writing about the Mafia, he goes to high schools to explain it to the boys. The book is aimed precisely at them “so that students can interface with something in which, otherwise, not even adults would be able to involve them effectively”. For the author, this theme must also enter schools to make eighteen-year-olds aware that they are preparing to vote for the first time: it is no coincidence that the essay opens talking about an imaginary bully, Fabio, who manages to get away with it thanks to the ‘silence and a network of allies that allow him to master at school on the skin of the weakest. The parallelism with bullying was born precisely to allow young readers to better understand what the mafia is and what its identification codes are. Baudino does not limit himself to retracing the history of the Cosa Nostra’s last decades, from the killing of Falcone and Borsellino to the maxi-trial and the State-Mafia negotiation. He does much more: he delves into the various collusions between the Cosa Nostra and Italian politics, showing us how the mafia thinks, what plans it has and which parties he would have focused on to try to implement them. By reconstructing the facts and citing the testimonies given in the various trials by the repentants and by the mafia themselves, together with the sentences formulated, the author wants to arouse indignation in the reader towards some politicians, men of the police and secret services , of institutions that would have favored and covered the Cosa Nostra in some circumstances, such as the failure to capture Provenzano and the disappearance of Borsellino’s red agenda. From the decision of the former Conso Keeper not to extend the 41bis to hundreds of mafia members of the renunciation by the current government to defend the law on life imprisonment wanted by Falcone: what emerges from the book is a policy that is sometimes colluded, other times too weak towards organized crime which, after the years of massacres and attacks, has now given itself an entrepreneurial role that allows it to act undisturbed in the ganglia of society and the economy. The book closes with a touching interview with Borsellino’s brother, Salvatore, who, after retracing the conflicting relationship with his brother as a young man, reminds us of the mission that his mother had assigned to him when Paolo died: to disclose and recount his battle against mafia. Salvatore has been doing this for 30 years by going to schools and founding the Red Agenda Movement, which Stefano Baudino is also part of. “I am the brother of a soldier”, says Salvatore who is dedicating his life so that Paul’s sacrifice was not in vain: “the fire that killed him came from behind, from those who should have fought together with him and instead they shot him “. With a touching parallel, Salvatore Borsellino compares his brother to the death on the cross of Jesus Christ, explaining that “love is what characterized his life and even pushed him to sacrifice it”. If Salvatore left Sicily, Paolo Borsellino stayed there until the last day, driven by the desire to make it different, better. “True love consists in loving what we don’t like in order to change it. Love is what inspired Paul’s entire life, ”Salvatore tells Baudino in the book. An essay that recalls the value of the true servants of the state, of their lives and their sacrifice, and that provides – first of all to the new generations – those antibodies necessary to make our nation aware of its ghosts and finally free to look ahead.