Enzo Biagi, an unforgettable witness of time

‘I had always dreamed of being a journalist, I also wrote about the theme in middle school: I imagined myself as an ‘avenger’ capable of redressing wrongs and injustices. I was convinced that the profession would lead me to discover the world’. this sentence was taken from the memoir of Enzo Biagi, one of the most important Italian journalists of the twentieth century both in print and on television, whose hundredth anniversary of his birth is remembered, which took place on Aug 9th 1920 in Lizzano in Belvedere, Bolognese. Indeed it was so: during his career (which also had a happy interlude in our newspaper) Enzo Biagi turned the world far and wide, telling it, always calmly, with extraordinary lucidity, managing to grasp every fact, every character, every situation.

As a journalist he was precise, transparent and which did not discount anyone and which was the way he lived - he recalled a few years ago in our newspaper Ferruccio de Bortoli - when he was just eighteen while studying he began to collaborate as a reporter at the ‘Resto del Carlino’. Then after the war (which he had spent joining the partisan groups of Giustizia e Libertà) in 1952, his first direction, that of the weekly ‘Epoca’ and the beginning of his term with RAI. Who in 1961 called him to direct the Tg and where, the following year, he founded the first television rotogravure. After leaving the direction of Tg, he moved to ‘La Stampa’ as a correspondent where he remained for a decade.

His link with RAI intensified in the 1990s until 2002 with the last episode of ‘Il Fatto’, a daily appointment - on air for over 700 episodes from 1995 and concluded after a long-distance controversy with the then Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Later he returned to the small screen in 2007 with a space which, emblematically, his first appearance on TV: Rt-Rotocalco television. His memoirs have left a very rich bibliography, made up of over 80 essays of a historical and documentary nature but also between memory and narration.

Despite having been direct and straight with many personalities - Enzo Biagi spoke very little about himself and his feelings. He took pleasure in reporting the loves of others, but he only said of his own ‘I’ve been married to the same woman for sixty years’ (interview with Corriere del Ticino, August 2000).

His journalism was attached to politics yet he was detached ‘Politics’, he argued, ‘is the highest expression of a man’s commitment: to manage everyone’s affairs’.

Biagi and the CdT: pills of great journalism

A friend of Switzerland ‘It is an orderly country that has always respected its commitments and that represents a model of civil coexistence for the whole world’, he said several times Enzo Biagi was with us for almost a decade (from 1994 and 2003) a collaborator of our newspaper by signing three series of columns: Enzo Biagi’s album, Brevi meetings and Letter to a Swiss friend, in which he proposed reflections on customs, almost always placing himself in the background, citing in abundance his favourite authors (often known in person): pills of great journalism in which the taste for detail, the accurate and truthful description emerged on the one hand, never sensationalistic but of reality - As when he wrote ‘There is always a tinge of sadness when you see an old man accompanying a young woman and what old Clemenceau said to a young friend comes to mind’ I will teach you to live, you will teach me to dream’.