Hardly incasellable in every sense, Fallaci was a great intellectual who stood out from the pack, with no problem rowing against the tide. Indeed, seeing and talking about things from another angle with respect to the dominant one was her figure as an artist, as an intellectual and as a woman. Oriana, with her cosmopolitan nature, is one of the best known and most appreciated Italians in the world, an ambassador of the intelligence, pugnacity and integrity of Italians, far beyond the hackneyed and banal stereotypes that sometimes characterize them.
Un talent formidable e indomitable
If Liala represented the writer extraneous to any social and political problem, never dealt with in her books, despite having, like everyone else, her preferences, which went in the direction of the monarchist right, Fallaci was exactly the opposite: a journalist first and a writer later, although in his first place preferences there was the writer, always engaged on political and social issues. Of these he made the figure of her life and her art, without any fear of saying what she thought, whether she liked it or not, and often right in front of the powerful of the earth, all of whom she interviewed and in a way that was anything but accommodating . In short, a writer who had nothing in common with Liala, except for one thing: the extraordinary success with the public. Certainly different from that of Liala, spread over dozens and dozens of novels, with titles that no one remembers anymore, while hers is concentrated on a few unforgettable titles, with which she dominated the best seller charts for a long time: A man, Letter to a child never born, History interview, Inshallah, If the sun dies, Nothing and so be it, The power of reason, 1968, The Oriana's moon and a few others.
Certainly a courageous woman, with a character that didn't have much feminine, at least giving the adjective the sense with which it is commonly considered: respectful, submissive, conciliatory, ready to mediate, to apologize, never to raise her voice. None of this in our Oriana. On the contrary! In her career she has highlighted masculine attributes more than many colleagues… Which is no small thing for what can be designated as the prototype of the assault journalist, the star performer, in the true sense of the word, of the powerful of the time. Not only that, but the one who had a farsightedness and was able to grasp perhaps better and earlier than others what was happening in the world, and to describe it in her own way, as happened immediately after the attack on the twin towers.
The life
One like this could only be born in Florence, a city which in terms of character is perhaps the homeland of choice. We are in 1929 and Oriana was born of two Florentine parents, but of distant Romagna ancestry on her father's side and even Spanish on her mother's side: in short, a genetic mixture that would have given life to something unique, "more Florentine than Italian", as she loved to repeat herself.
The family is modest, the father is a craftsman who manages quite comfortably, has a few employees, but there is certainly nothing to waste, also because Oriana is the first of four daughters, to whom she sometimes acts as a mother. Edoardo Fallaci, the father, is a fervent anti-fascist, is monitored by the police and does not miss the troubles with the regime. He deeply loves culture, books, reading, and passes this passion on to his daughters, so much so that even Neera and Paola will choose the same profession as their older sister. From an early age Oriana read books after books, she lets herself be enchanted by literature and thinks of her as her future. Journalism will come as a necessity for work, as a fallback while waiting for the first option.
He is just 14 years old and joins his father in the fight against the regime. We are in 1943 and thanks to her appearance as a child with braids, Oriana rides her bicycle and carries messages, provides directions to partisans, helps Anglo-American prisoners to reach their lines. You are a fundamental pawn in the partisan struggle. And of this period she remains a heroic, mythical image, a poignant memory that remains with her for life, until her last days. TO
Florence still remember the request that Fallaci made in 2006, a few weeks after her death, to be able to spend the last period of her life in the tower house at the entrance to the old bridge, where she had fought alongside her father in the battle for the liberation of Florence from the Nazi-fascists in August 1944. It was not possible and so he withdrew, on his last leave from his city and from life, to a clinic in Piazza Indipendenza, in the city centre, in order to be able to see the dome of the Duomo . But her dream, if it can be defined that way, would have been to spend the last few days in memory of the most epic and glorious moment of her life, next to "father".
Il Quick start like chronicler
Immediately after the war, at the age of just 17, he began collaborating with a Florentine newspaper, The morning of central ItalyIn this sense, the figure of uncle Bruno, father's brother, a good journalist and later director of Epoca, which opens the way to journalism for her and her two sisters.
Initially Oriana deals with crime and judicial news, she goes back and forth between police station, court, police stations, residences and various places, always trying to arrive before the others, to beat the competition. It is hard and tiring work, which keeps her busy until late at night, and which is difficult to reconcile with university study. In fact, after high school she enrolled in medicine. But she soon realizes that both of her activities will not be able to follow them, that she must make a choice, and she becomes convinced that the art of Hippocrates is not for her. She abandons her and concentrates on her true passion, extending her journalistic sector also to costume, fashion, news and entertainment.
With the newspaper in which she writes, however, she quickly breaks down: the newspaper is Christian Democrat, she is of socialist tendencies, and this different orientation inevitably comes to the surface and makes coexistence impossible.
The transition to the press that matters
Then switch to Epoca, the weekly directed by his uncle Bruno. For fear of being accused of favoring his niece, the uncle relegates her to the editorial activities, the more obscure ones and less suitable for showing off. He makes her learn all the way through all the work behind the articles of the best-known brands: hard work as a halfback. However, Oriana was born to be a striker, the first woman, she does not accept either to remain under the protective wing of her uncle, or to have to work her way up, and in 1954, at the age of 25 she passes theEuropean.
He moved to Rome and dealt with the affairs of the capital. It is here, under the guidance of Arrigo Benedetti, great director and teacher of an entire generation of journalists, that he refines his peculiar type of journalism, especially the interviews with the great, the famous, the powerful. Articles come out that immediately get noticed and that make people talkking. They are the result of a long preparation, of an in-depth study, of a very attentive attention to detail, of an effective system of cuts and highlights, of a maniacal re-reading of the piece dozens of times before dismissing it.
It's a more difficult and demanding job than you think, but one that bears fruit and projects Fallaci to the top of national journalism and in a global perspective. Her interviews leave a deep and unmistakable mark in the world of journalism, they are something that cannot be ignored.
A very fast career
The stages of his career from this moment begin to get faster and faster: from Rome he moved to Milan, from there, in 1955 he received his first assignment in New York, which was followed by many others in the following years. At just 26, he is already a well-known and respected signature. The interviews in the American capital cause a sensation and in 1958 they are collected in a volume: his first book is published: The Seven Sins of Hollywood.
Shortly afterwards she was sent to the East to address a very thorny issue: the role of women in the other part of the world, where the condition of women still has a very long way to go for equality, which is still far from finished today. She comes out of her second book of hers, Useless sex, released in 1961 for Rizzoli, with whom he began a long and fruitful collaboration that would last a lifetime.
Start la narrative
In 1962 Fallaci's other activity kicked off, the one she had dreamed of since she was a child, and similar, but not quite identical to the one practiced so far: fiction. It is a narrative that feeds on his interviews and his journalistic activity to arrive at personal and at the same time universal themes. Penelope to war is her first fiction book, in which she addresses the question of women and the role they are about to assume in the immediate future.
In the meantime, Fallaci continues her journalistic activity undaunted, publishing books that report the interviews already published in the European Championship. In 1965, If the sun dies, the account of the long months spent at the NASA center for space missions was published: a volume embellished with interviews with the top protagonists of the enterprise, such as von Braun and others. The success is obviously worldwide and the covers of the magazine go around the world.
Report da areas hot, Nothing e so is
Fallaci ranks globally as one of the most prestigious brands, listened to, revered, but also feared. And this will soon be seen, when he tackles another of the topics on the agenda, perhaps even the most thorny: that of war. From 1967 to 1975 he spent long periods in the main theater of the Viet-Nam war, and precisely in the areas where the clash was most intense and furious. Her numerous reports from the combat zones hit the mark once again, they were bought, translated and republished in the most authoritative newspapers around the planet, making her the most admired reporter in the world. In 1969 again from Rizzoli comes out Nothing and so be it, an account of that terrible war, which is also tearing apart our West, starting from the United States itself, with the continuous demonstrations against the conflict. The success is obviously resounding. And it could only be that.
The ability, the intuition, the flair, let's call it what we want, of always being in the right place at the right time, lead her to another important event: the student revolt in Mexico and the massacre in the square of the three cultures. She is so close, even there, to the center of the protest, that she is hit by the shots of the Mexican police against the students. She is seriously injured, is even believed dead alongside the tens or hundreds of fallen demonstrators, and is taken to the morgue. Then casually realizing that she is still breathing, she is transported to the hospital, and there she is saved. But she from the hospital bed she manages to represent for the "European" the chronicle of the Mexican massacre like no other journalist in the world.
Le great interviews ai potenti
The scenarios in which she moves become countless: she wants to see, understand and tell what is happening, and there is no global event which she does not attend and which she does not describe to her readers, who grow more and more year after year. All the greats of the world pass under her magnifying glass, and without ever omitting uncomfortable details: from Indira Gandhi to Ali Bhutto, from Haile Selassie to Golda Meir, from Yassir Arafat to Henry Kissinger, from Reza Pahlevi to King Hussein of Jordan and many others. After exiting theEuropean and on Corriere della Sera, to which he began to collaborate, these interviews became a volume in 1974 with the title of Interview with the story.
But our Oriana doesn't stop there, and in the following years her pen rests on other powerful people, always portrayed in their fundamental aspects and above all in the role they assume, with the aim of understanding and revealing the mechanisms of power, how this is articulates, what men and means it has.
The with Panagoulis: Letter a un child May nato
The meeting with the most important man in her life, Alekos Panagoulis, a hero who fought and fought against the dictatorship of the colonels in Greece also dates back to the early XNUMXs. He is sentenced to death for having attempted the leader of the colonels, Papadopulos, but the immense popularity he enjoys induces the regime to change his sentence to prison.
As soon as he was released from prison in 1973, Fallaci interviewed him and began a relationship with him. It is an overwhelming love, even if stormy. Oriana admires the Greek hero who fights for freedom and who, despite having spent hard years in captivity, subjected to torture and terrible privations, still has the strength to fight and the enthusiasm to start over.
She also conceives a son with him, but he will not see the light. From this human, exciting but also dramatic experience, he was born Letter to a child never born: a resounding success, which puts it at the top of the editorial rankings in Italy for a long time and which travels around the world. In the form of a monologue with the baby she is carrying, Fallaci delves into the theme of abortion in her innumerable facets. A theme of great interest and relevance in the mid-seventies, for which she also receives criticism for the casual and imprudent management of her pregnancy. In fact, the doctor had advised her to remain absolutely still, but the author's decision not to interrupt her work, albeit with caution, would later cause her to miscarry.
Un mens
On May 1976, XNUMX Panagulis died in Athens in a car accident whose dynamics were never exactly explained. At the news of his death in the Greek capital, millions of people paraded shouting "he lives, he lives, he lives".
It is with these words that another resounding success begins, its greatest ever alongside the Letter, A man, released in 1979. It is a book about the life of his companion that again captivates millions of readers around the world with the power of the narrative, the heroism of the protagonist, his dedication to the fight for freedom.
Una season di great popularity
Between the seventies and eighties Fallaci went through the period of greatest glory and popularity. There is no prestigious magazine that does not take the honor of securing reports from her, American universities begin to study her more and more, the world of American culture appreciates her almost to the point of idolatry. All this pushes her to stay longer and longer in New York, where she has had a residence for some time, and less and less in Milan, close to the Rizzoli publishing house and its magazines, or even in her estate in Greve in Chianti at the gates of Florence. But when she assails her nostalgia for her he jumps on the first plane and she returns to her hometown.
In 1990 it was the turn of another best seller that went around the world, Inshallah, dedicated to the war in Lebanon, in whose territory he spends long periods to inform himself, investigate, interview, try to understand and tell the terrible tragedy of the Middle East, which is producing countless victims in terrorist attacks.
La disease
The clamor of the book and its international success do not have time to fully unfold that Oriana is struck by breast cancer, which she will define the alien in her life. We are between 1991 and 1992, precisely in the period in which she is elaborating another far-reaching editorial project: the history of her family, from her ancestors up to her. There are three centuries of history, which engage her day by day in a very long research and documentation work in places, cities, archives, centers in her region and in all the localities that have marked an important stage in her family.
She warns that time will not be unlimited, the disease, although under control, cannot in any case guarantee her all the time she would need, and so the work becomes nagging and continuous, day after day. She also neglects medical treatment so as not to interrupt him, while with her Olivetti Letter 32 she writes page after page and switches from one cigarette to another, continuously, to support herself and concentrate better. It seems like a race to see who will come first: her last book or her death?
The attack towers twins
It is in this phase that the events of the attack on the Twin Towers catch her. She is deeply shocked by it, it is an event that has mortally wounded her second homeland, she cannot pass over it in silence, and so she abandons the saga of her family for a while. In a fortnight she draws up a pamphlet, Anger and Pride, which goes around the world again, always placing first in the editorial rankings of the countries where it is translated.
Other interventions on the question of relations with Islam followed, in which she maintained a position of clear closure towards it, which earned her numerous adhesions, but also many criticisms on the way of relating to that world. Many parts of her opt for a less harsh attitude, more marked by dialogue, of which one of her most convinced and passionate supporters comes from the same land as her, from her own Florence, Tiziano Terzani.
An intense phase of interventions on the issue follows; to the first other pamphlets follow, in which he specifies and articulates his position better, but always in the same closing terms already adumbrated.
Oriana Fall us - writer
Time keeps ticking and the work on her family slows down, but it doesn't stop and Oriana goes on, trying to complete it. But the'alien in the end wins, albeit partially, the race. In 2006, at the age of 77, Fallaci died and was buried in the Allori cemetery in Florence. On her tombstone only three words: Oriana Fallaci — writer.
The work on the history of his familya, to which he had waited for fifteen years, will be released two years later, in 2008, with the title of A hat full of cherries. He does not arrive until his youth, as he had planned, but stops at 1889, the year of his paternal grandparents' wedding. But he will, once again, be full of success. According to some, a work of unique beauty, the best narrative proof of the "cursed Florentine rather than Italian".
