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Thank you very much Christopher
It’s just under two year ago
that I travelled to Ferrara in Italy
in order to take part in the annual festival organised by Internacional
the terrific Italian magazine which has a close relationship with Roberto Saviano
and I was asked to take part in an event with Saviano.
As an author what one is used to is an audience of fifty or sixty
very intense, intelligent, smart people
who are listening to what you say
and coming back with critical remarks
And that is what one normally expects.
I walked onto the stage in Ferrara
to find about three thousand people in front of me
all screaming
obviously not for me
I was the warm-up act.
I had to tell a few jokes in Italian
After they tired of that, which was very quickly
on walked Saviano
and the entire theatre rose
This was being transmitted all over Ferrara
there were huge screens in the square outside of the theatre
there were cinemas that had been given over to this event
and people had paid money to go to the cinemas to see this
he walked on stage and it was just hysterical
So for the first and last time in my life
I understood what it was to be the backing band for the Rolling Stones
That really was what it felt like.
But, more than that
and really importantly
is that at that moment I understood
I had been the year earlier in another festival in Italy
when I had spoken with a magistrate
an anti-Mafia investigator
who had worked with the great Falcone, in Sicily
the magistrate in Sicily who was blown up in 1993
And when I spoke with this magistrate at the festival, who had worked with him
I was struck by the number of people who were there to listen to this man
because he knew Falcone
Falcone is a symbol for everything that is decent and good about Italy
And what I realised in Ferrara two years ago, was that Saviano
regardless of whether what he writes is good, bad,
indifferent, moving, not moving, it doesn’t matter.
He has become the embodiment of the hopes of those millions and millions of Italians
who are utterly sick with the corrupted institutions
that they have to face on a daily basis
and with the deeply corrupted politicians that those institutions throw up
and which we, as members of the European Union in particular, put up with
give credence to, take holidays with in the case of some leaders
and give them credibility.
And Saviano is the person in Italy more than anyone else at the moment
who represents the hopes and the aspirations of millions of decent Italians.
And that is why his position is so difficult.
Not just because of the fact that, were he to walk out of the front door without his five Carabinieri minders
not just because he might get machine-gunned on the street
whether it’s in Rome or whether it’s in London
or whether it’s in Stockholm or New York or Montreal,
but because of the fact that he carries those hopes.
And somehow Roberto now has the burden to transmit the political whirl
which to my mind undoubtedly exists in Italy
to confront both the informal state actors of the Camorra
of the 'Ndrangheta, of the Mafia
but also the formal state actors of Berlusconi and the pyramid that keeps Berlusconi up there.
That is his burden.
He somehow has to translate that power of popular sentiment
into a political force.
And that may be too much for Roberto
because he’s only one man
and he lives under an incredible amount of stress
But I believe that if anybody in Italy can do it,
it is Roberto Saviano.
And so for that reason, as an Englishman
as a British person
as a committed European patriot
I would like us all to raise our glasses to Roberto Saviano
Roberto!