A photograph of Bobbi Campbell’s feet hanging on the door of a pharmacy on Castro Street in the autumn of 1981; Rosa Parks, the Black woman who, in Alabama in 1955, had refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man, called by Jesse Jackson many years later, now elderly, onto the stage of the Democratic Convention in Atlanta; Nelson Mandela, former President of South Africa, waiting patiently to go on behind the scenes of a national television show, sitting on a stool among extras, electrical cables and sponsors in evening dress; Mother Francesca Cabrini arriving in New Orleans, a few days after a terrible lynching of Italian immigrants, at the end of the nineteenth century, at the dawn of a new era. It is through small, deeply evocative details, in which entire seasons and events seem to gather, that Enrico Deaglio tells the story of the twentieth century. Starting from ten figures he encountered or crossed paths with over the course of his life and his work as a journalist: ten flashes capable of illuminating an entire century; personal stories that become vantage points on larger events, and on the way individual initiatives can affect the lives of many. With a style that brings together personal memory, reportage and historical reflection, Deaglio moves through a time marked by violence and promise, failures and possibility. At the heart of his narrative are not only the great events, but above all individual choices: acts of courage, responsibility, dissent or simple humanity that helped change the course of things. “Even in humanity’s darkest moments, there are righteous people ready to save the world. It is heartening to know that they existed. It is heartening to know that they exist. Even now.”

The eighties begin with a bang. At Bologna station, on August 2nd, eighty-five people die beneath the rubble. It marks the start of a decade that opens with a massacre and closes with a collapsing wall that signals the end of the twentieth century. In between come the wars of the mafia, the Camorra and the ’Ndrangheta, P2 and the fascists. In the South, people are killed with ferocity, while the country—carefree and distracted—pays little attention to the gunshots and changes its skin: it stops believing in politics and starts believing in television; the “people” become an “audience,” and individual success shapes a new moral code. The North prospers, and the desperate South is on the verge of becoming a narco-state. There are the assassinations of Piersanti Mattarella, Pio La Torre, Walter Tobagi and Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, but also the death of a little boy named Alfredo; there are the rises of Cutolo and Riina, and the steady voice of Giovanni Falcone, a solitary man, a great reluctant hero. There are Berlinguer’s funerals and an Italy both moved and moving in bidding him farewell; and then Bettino Craxi and Milan-to-drink, Raffaella Carrà’s beans and young Milanese craving hamburgers, while an enigmatic Cossiga becomes President of the Republic and we lose Italo Calvino, Primo Levi and Leonardo Sciascia. There is the most beautiful football ever played, with the Spanish World Cup of ’82, Maradona and Napoli’s scudetto, the snowfall of the century, Renzo Arbore’s nights, the “I must break you” of the Russian boxer Ivan Drago, the dawn of the PC, the new knights of capitalism—Benetton, Gardini, De Benedetti and Berlusconi: Italy rediscovering itself as modern and cynical, hungry for success and status. A widespread euphoria coexists with a gigantic and unprecedented criminal experiment that brands the decade like a hot iron. In Sicily, the State seems absent, magistrates are murdered, the mafia enters the stock market and the South becomes the testing ground for a delinquent form of capitalism that will spread throughout the country. And there are the dead. More than ten thousand. It is the “civil war that no one wanted to see.” Enrico Deaglio and Ivan Carozzi recount these ten years as a great civic novel, built through chronicles, voices, images, facts, dreams, fashions and fears. A choral narrative in which History enters homes through the evening news and advertising, through massacres and through music. The Eighties is a clear-eyed and passionate portrait of a country surviving its own ghosts: a decade of radical transformations, where everything seems new but nothing has truly changed. It is the story of how we began to become what we are. A grand fresco of history and reportage, an Italy discovering the power of television and money, swept up in a peculiar euphoria while the South counts its terrible dead. Italy in the eighties: a powerful, reckless, unsinkable ship. Like the Titanic?

Come ogni altro abitante del mondo libero, il 6 gennaio 2021 Anthony Sanfilippo è immobile davanti ai notiziari televisivi: a Washington, dopo un incendiario comizio di Trump volto a ribaltare l’esito delle elezioni presidenziali, migliaia di manifestanti hanno assaltato il Campidoglio, cuore e simbolo della democrazia americana. Ma per Tony – bibliotecario e archivista ormai in pensione – le sorprese non sono finite: pochi giorni dopo, infatti, viene a sapere che il cognato è stato arrestato per aver preso parte all’insurrezione, marciando al fianco dei ribelli con una bandiera di QAnon. E benché non condivida le sue convinzioni, accetta di dargli una mano. Dopo i fatti del 6 gennaio, la New Orion – una società che è in grado di associare analogicamente immagini, suoni e memorie nel tempo e nello spazio – ha tappezzato New York di annunci di lavoro. Sono stati in tanti a richiedere i suoi servizi: i clienti vogliono sapere se sta arrivando la fine del mondo, se ci sarà un crollo in borsa, se la follia americana dilagherà anche in Europa, se Trump sarà arrestato o se invece tornerà al potere… L’azienda ha bisogno di personale, così Tony sale sulla giostra: un lavoro come quello potrebbe aiutarlo a indagare le motivazioni del cognato, e in ogni caso l’idea di mettersi in gioco non gli dispiace. Inizia così un viaggio nel cuore profondo dell’America e del mondo intero, guidato dalle sinapsi e dai database della New Orion: il bibliotecario italo-americano va a caccia dei corsi e ricorsi storici e di tutte quelle analogie – inattese e sorprendenti – che potrebbero svelare le spinte sommerse che hanno portato all’assalto al Campidoglio. Prendendo le mosse da una serie di inquietanti corrispondenze – dai misteriosi delitti di Twin Peaks al mito della Rivoluzione d’ottobre di Lenin e Trotskij, dallo Sciamano di QAnon in cui sembrano reincarnarsi i predicatori del Sud ai replicanti di Blade Runner, dalle premonizioni di Francesco su un nuovo 1933 a quelle di Arnold Schwarzenegger su una nuova Notte dei cristalli – Tony ripercorre il fatale 6 gennaio 2021 alla ricerca della verità, fino a trovarla in George Floyd, che dalla strada di Minneapolis sulla quale è stato ucciso sta diventando il mito fondativo di una nuova America, e del ritorno alla democrazia. Quattro anni dopo, la storia sembra ripetersi, ma questa volta seguendo le regole della democrazia: nel gennaio del 2025 Trump torna al potere, e ancora una volta Sanfilippo e la New Orion si ritrovano a indagare sulle motivazioni sommerse che hanno reso possibile ciò che in molti, sbagliando, reputavano impossibile: dalle analogie tra Hitler e Trump al rapporto di quest’ultimo con l’uomo più ricco del mondo – Elon Musk –, dal corleonismo eletto a nuovo credo del Ventunesimo secolo all’insospettabile rilevanza della Groenlandia, dalle ombre del maccartismo alla novella età dell’oro promessa dal Tycoon a suon di dazi… Con originalità, coraggio e precisione, in un’edizione ampliata e rivista di “Cose che voi umani” (2021), Enrico Deaglio torna a trascinare il lettore nelle ombre e nei misteri degli Stati Uniti, scavando fino alle radici di un presente che è già diventato Storia.

Where were we left off? At that bomb blast in Milan that ended the “innocent” and “fabulous” sixties. A new decade was beginning, and the future had changed masters. The 1970s, the second volume of an Italian history that will continue to the present day, still live on in memory and turmoil: alongside remarkable and rapid political changes (the rise of the PCI) and social changes (the abortion and divorce laws, the closing of asylums and conscientious objection), they saw a dramatic violent turn, passed under the name of the “years of lead.” Right-wing subversion put bombs in trains, stations, and universities and prepared numerous coups; criminal groups-the Magliana gang, Cosa Nostra, P2, the then unknown 'ndrangheta-associated themselves with power and did the “dirty work,” and a part of the revolutionary left chose the path of armed struggle with unforeseen, bloody and unrepeatable results in Europe. And again: in an unprecedented degeneration of civilized living, 387 people are kidnapped and with the ransom money the Kidnapping Anonymous shapes “the development model” of the country. The 1970s saw us demonstrating together with Berlinguer, Pannella, Franca Rame and Dario Fo, attending too many civil funerals, marching for women's rights and against the war, dancing to Raffaella Carrà's Tuca Tuca, growing up reading Elsa Morante's La Storia, singing to the notes of Rino Gaetano, Dalla and De Gregori. At the movies people laughed bitterly with Fantozzi, Gian Maria Volonté was the face of commitment, Fellini won an Oscar with Amarcord, and the crude jokes of Amici miei were emulated in the stations. Jobs were beginning to be lacking, students were beginning to think about their future, and the country was shaken by the terror of massacres, kidnappings and bombs: the world seemed to be divided between those who wanted to change everything and those who defended the old order tooth and nail. And then, little by little, hope gave way to disillusionment: the dream of revolution collided with violence in the streets. Gone were Pier Paolo Pasolini, Peppino Impastato, so many young people were killed, and Aldo Moro was abandoned and left to die... The 1970s ended with the feeling that something was broken, that that possible future was gone forever. Yet it was then that we learned what it meant to fight, to love and to believe in a different world, at least for a while.

Everyone agrees: there had never been anything like that decade, and those that followed could not have been without them.
The sixties, the first volume of an Italian history that will come down to the present day, still live on in nostalgia and myth: in the songs broadcast on the radio, in the closets or cellars where one cannot get rid of an eskimo or an old suede miniskirt, or in the drawers where telephone tokens, ten-lira coins, concert tickets, the provisional unlimited leave, covers of 45s and 78s reappear...
The vast majority of today's Italians were born after the war, all of us therefore, directly or from the stories of those who were there, know something of that "fabulous decade" that saw us walk together with Fellini, Visconti, Togliatti and Moro, Mina, Monica Vitti, Claudia Cardinale, Rita Pavone, Catherine Spaak; run together with Abebe Bikila and Gigi Riva, read together with Italo Calvino, Leonardo Sciascia, Natalia Ginzburg and Gabriel García Márquez.
While we were growing up, the champion Fausto Coppi, the good Pope Roncalli, U.S. President John Kennedy and his brother Bob died; people who would change Italy like utopian Adriano Olivetti and visionary industrialist Enrico Mattei. Also dead were Commander Guevara, Buddhist monks in Vietnam, Pastor Martin Luther King and Jan Palach, the boot-wearing priest Don Milani; others grew up unseen, the Buscettas, the Sindonas, "the palm line." They frightened us with the bomb and the wars, but boys and girls began to say "enough," the cinema and the music were ahead (and by a lot) of the old world that ruled us, made up of old generals, old politicians, old magistrates, old professors, old fascists who found, at the end of that fairy tale, a way to take revenge.
And they set off the Milan bomb, with which the sixties ended. And there was no more innocence.
And to say that, before, at least for a moment, all the future had seemed possible.