Joseph Fava
Places included in the "Regional Map of Places of Identity and Memory" (LIM) established by the Sicily Region with DA n. 8410 of 03/12/2009
The reference sector is that relating to "Places of historical personalities and culture - Places of anti-Mafia personalities - Giuseppe Fava - journalist, writer
The places included in the IWB:
- Verga Theater, via Giuseppe Fava (Catania)
FAVA, Giuseppe. - Born on 15 Sept. 1925 in Palazzolo Acreide (Syracuse), by Giuseppe, primary school teacher, and by Elena Fazzino, he spent his childhood and youth there. After the classical high school, in Syracuse, in 1943 he moved to Catania to attend the faculty of law. After completing his university studies (1947), he practiced law for a while, which however did not satisfy the robust literary vocation that had already manifested itself in the academic period; in the early XNUMXs he therefore began to collaborate with local newspapers (among them the Island newspaper by Nello Similar, the Courier of Sicily, The Latest) pouring into the activity of chronicler the interest and passion for the disturbing and dramatic aspects of his land and his time.
Professional journalist since 1952, he was editor and correspondent of various magazines (Time illustrated, Domenica del Corriere), dealing in particular with Sicilian things, current affairs and cinema. In 1956 he became editor of the afternoon newspaper Express evening, directed by Girolamo Damigella, remaining there until 1978; always from 1956 he began to collaborate intensively with another newspaper, Sicily, of which he was editor and correspondent.
In the meantime he had begun a literary activity - as a playwright, then also as a novelist - which, together with the collections of articles and inquiries, over the years would become an essential part of his way of informing and communicating. In 1966 with the comedy Chronicle of a man, performed in '67 at the Stabile theater in Catania, won the Vallecorsi prize; in 1967 it was published in Palermo Trial in Sicily, collection of journalistic inquiries already published in the newspaper Sicily, and subsequently a book of short stories taken from the same newspaper (Pages, Catania 1969); in 1970 the comedy was staged The violence (Catania 1969; from which the film is based Fifth Estate Violence by Florestano Vancini); in 1975 the F. acquired national notoriety with Respectful people (hence the 1978 film of the same name by Luigi Zampa), a novel on Sicilian culture and social life which, for its depth of denunciation and immediacy, is one step away from that direct militant commitment that would have characterized the years to come.
To consolidate the notoriety came other comedies (The proboviro, 1972; Nice beautiful, 1974, etc.), the publication of a second novel (Before they kill you, Milan 1976, but written in the XNUMXs), conducting a radio broadcast (You andio, for the first RAI network), the screenplay of the film Palermo or Wolfsburg by Werner Schröter, Golden Bear at the 1980 Berlin Film Festival (the third novel is inspired by the script, Passion of Michele, Bologna 1980), another book of investigations edited for the third RAI network (ISiciliani, Bologna 1980), and various other journalistic and editorial initiatives.
“Journalism - as he declared in an interview with Sicily of 25 Jan. 1975 - it can no longer be just a search for the news ... but a search for the truth on everything that interests society, the citizen, man ... a continuous, civil aggression of reality, first of all to discover the news (especially that which cannot be seen or hides himself), then to reduce this news to its absolute truth, and finally to interpret it ”(Cannavò, p. 150).
Man of multiple interests (among other things, the practice of drawing and painting, the passion for music, sport and sports journalism), socialist of ideals but without a card (Southern Newspaper, 11 Oct. 1981), viscerally linked to a certain sanguine and Verga Sicily - but Brancati's hedonistic ancestry can also be found - perhaps a reference to Christianity as a message of liberation and hope for the oppressed and suffering was not extraneous to his poetics. The realist root of his inspiration appears to be based on the same need for reflection of society as it emerges in the cold but vigilant gaze of the chronicler; that is, the literary medium allowed, especially in the happiest moments, a deeper penetration of information, able to make the human dimension a melting pot of emotions and situations linked in a horizon in which the individual and the collective sphere show themselves as relational spaces of a single universe; while above all in the theatrical works a grotesque and bitter vein emerges, of Pirandello ancestry. In any case, as a writer, he was among the few Sicilian intellectuals who, faced with evident signs of barbarism of civil society, proposed, well beyond testimony, the organization of dissent as a moment of awareness and participation.
In 1980 he was offered the direction of Southern Newspaper (a. I, n. 1: 4 June 1980) daily newspaper supported by a group of politicians and entrepreneurs from Catania, with whom journalistic professionalism became one with civil commitment, given that the editorial staff, made up largely part of young people who had found a professional and moral guide in F., decided to tackle the problems related to the modification of the economic-social fabric, which saw the emergence in the Catania area of relatively new aspects of power, such as the tight interweaving of finance, politics and organized crime. In October 1981, after some disagreements, however, the owners decided to fire the director (in addition to a chronicle without prejudice also towards episodes concerning property supporters, among the reasons for dissent there was the newspaper's support for the campaign against the installation of nuclear warhead missiles in the NATO military base in Comiso).
F. - who had interpreted his ouster as a reaction of the "business committee" managing much of the economic and political power to the newspaper's complaints and positions - responded by founding the Radar cooperative, based in Sant'Agata Li Battiati, made up of young editors partly from previous experience; the cooperative bought two 70/100 two-tone offset presses and started publishing the monthly The Sicilians starting from January 1983. Newspaper of information and commentary addressed to the whole island and, more generally, to the South, the newspaper immediately reached 10.000 copies sold (which appeared to be an unexpected success) and paid special attention to establishing itself in Catania of mafia-type phenomena and the denunciation of the intertwining of finance, public authorities and heroin trafficking.
The presence of the mafia in Catania seems to date from the early eighties - as the prefect CA Dalla Chiesa noted in a famous interview with G. Bocca (La Repubblica, 8 ag. 1982) - with the "historical turning point", which redefined and extended the map of mafia power, highlighted with the opening of the Palermo construction market to four large Catania companies. The Sicilians forcefully denounced the loyalty of the Catania political and entrepreneurial class to the new balance of power, but suffering from a "political" isolation due both to the obvious hostility of the adversaries and to the difficulty of gaining a hold on public opinion which, like democratic opposition, found it difficult to perceive the real extent of the changes taking place. This extension of mafia power came in fact to coincide with a crisis of representativeness of the institutions of local power and, more generally, with a crisis of planning and the compactness of the political class (Giarrizzo, p. 333), which left formidable passages open to pressure and infiltration by organized crime. In other words, it was a very hard and deaf clash around some decisive knots of real power, a clash against which a voice of denunciation - albeit isolated and sometimes generic - could have constituted a relevant catalyst for public opinion; on the other hand, turning off that voice constituted a precise signal, an invitation not to hinder the maneuver in progress or just concluded.
The F. was killed with a pistol, in an ambush, on the evening of 5 Jan. 1984 in Catania. The murderer was not identified and the series of misdirections that the investigations underwent place the attack among the many emblematic and obscure episodes of the contemporary Sicilian events.
Among the other writings of F., Mafia. From Giuliano to Dalla Chiesa, [Sant'Agata Li Battiati] 1982 (2 ed. Rome 1984, with one Afterword by the editorial staff of The Sicilians, pp. 129-144); Theater, I-IV, Catania 1988 (also contains unpublished and never represented works).
Sources and Bibl.: Necrol. in The Sicilians, II (1984), 1; Sign, X (1984), 46-47, pp. 6-24 (articles by F. Cazzola and A. Spampinato); G. Giarrizzo, Catania, Rome-Bari 1986, pp. 328-340; N. From the Church, Stories of bosses, ministers, courts, intellectual newspapers, citizens, Turin 1990, pp. 3-34; R. Cannavò, Goofy F.. Chronicle of a Free Man, Catania 1990. (Source: Encyclopedia Treccani)
Card insertion: Ignatius Caloggero
Photo: web
Information contributions: Ignazio Caloggero, Web
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