To remember Daniele Vimercati, who died 20 years ago (March 27, 2002), we are republishing an excerpt from the introduction written by Federico Guiglia to the book “Daniele Vimercati – Portrait of a journalist who loved freedom” (2003)
. can: there is nothing more pathetic than a journalist writing about another journalist. And the practice, unfortunately, is all the rage. Journalists love to interview each other, praise each other, speak well (or badly) about each other. Instead of restless witnesses of their time, they believe they belong to a club of teachers.
Here, Daniele Vimercati did not belong to the club. The club had never noticed this boy who came from the healthy province, from Bergamo, Italy.
Mind you, not that he was panting to enter the circle of those who no longer tell, but that they tell each other: he was still discreet, impertinent. But he deserved – how to say
– office access. He had been writing for several years. He wrote articles and wrote books. He wrote well.
In recent times he even appeared on television, conducting an established program on Telelombardia: Iceberg. A name, a mirror, because he too, tall and detached, hid a big heart under his big head that emerged with or without a hat (he liked to wear it). Daniele was not only a good journalist: he was also a good journalist. […]
Despite the posthumous praise, and truly from everyone, Daniele paid professionally in life for the original sin of having trained at the Giornale di Indro Montanelli, which was a training ground for freedom and Italianity in the years when anti-communism was synonymous with fascism and the homeland, naturally tiny, useless nostalgia. A counter-current gymnasium, which did not prevent but, on the contrary, stimulated Daniele Vimercati to become the first and most passionate narrator of the ‘League phenomenon’. Refined and intelligent storyteller, sometimes naive, always funny and amused. He sensed the national outlet that he could have, and he would have, that Northern party. This is to say that at politics he looked more presbyopic than short-sighted: he could stumble upon a controversy of the day, but he understood how it would end. He had the long stride,
His newspaper directions have been different, but his approach to the ‘mestieraccio’ has never changed. Meanwhile, he knew the fundamentals, that is, he knew not only to write but also to ‘pass’ a piece, as they say in the jargon, or to understand immediately what was wrong with a text before publication (even if the best of himself was given in the owner the articles).
And then he had a non-neutral but always honest relationship with politics. After all, only fanatics believe that there can be ‘objective’ journalism, and he, by the way, was a moderate. So he took sides, when there was to take sides – it often happened -, but without holding the pen like a sword. He did not cultivate the doubt that he could be wrong, but that, more noble, that the other might be right.
This is why it was nice not to get along with Daniele, which was easy, but to disagree with him, which was even easier. “Only a nationalist like you can get along with a federalist like me”, he told me every time that on the Borghese – he director, I deputy – we tried to tell the story of politics. […]
After all, you both came from there, from those paired desks in the Roman editorial office of the Giornale, and even before that from those long corridors full of light yet dull in the historic headquarters in Milan. It came from the pieces that one ‘passed’ of the other, and from the chessboard pieces, another passion, which one moved against the other. Black or white here too, no gray area, no compromise, no ‘Christian Democrat’, as we urged, ironic, before throwing ourselves to write the ‘funds’, to which we have been condemned over time (yes, condemned: three guessed comments not are worth a good story).
There is a lesson that can be learned from the journalist Vimercati
Maybe yes: that you can say bread to bread, without being anyone’s waiters and without going round and round against someone. If there is a third way between the journalism it undergoes and the journalism that rails, it certainly bears the name of Daniele. If journalism ‘lives’ without serving power and without using it, a little of this life is now fueled by Daniele’s testimony.
There remains, however, the bitter underlying question: why someone like this was not called to direct Panorama instead of the Borghese
Why someone like that was not invited to make his Iceberg for Rai or Mediaset instead of Telelombardia
Because someone like this, who in any place in the world, would have been professionally valued only for how, for how much and for what he wrote and wrote, here had to pay the unspeakable toll of never having been on the left
“There is a conductor of political talk shows that is better than Bruno Vespa and Michele Santoro. He is better, because he is not as snooty as the two pundits in the video, and because he does not have Rai behind him. His name is Daniele Vimercati… “. So wrote Aldo Grasso in Sette on February 21, 2002. Daniele had time to read the well-deserved consecration sanctioned by the television expert.
He was one of those rare and dear journalists who always remember to ask before ending the conversation on the phone: “How are
Mrs.
“. He was one of those journalists who like to travel for the sake of knowing a little more. Because before being a journalist, maybe you are, you can be people, citizens, fathers and mothers of families and many other things.
Ours is only the most beautiful job in the world, but in life there are missions a little more important, after all.
But we are digressing. At the end, we are afraid to face the truth, which is only one: we miss Daniele.
Federico Guiglia
