42 spring-summer 2014/HesaMag #09 From the unions 1/5 Learning from

Angelo Ferracuti

Short story writer, novelist and playwright Angelo Ferracuti’s latest book deals with the “Ravenna tragedy”, a 1987 industrial accident in which 13 shipyard workers died in this port city in north-eastern . We asked him to talk about his unique approach to creating this memorial work and what the local community thought about his book, twenty-five years after the events.

Image: © Mario Dondero (p. 42, 44, 45) 43 spring-summer 2014/HesaMag #09 From the unions 2/5

1. CGIL (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro) is the biggest Italian trade union confederation with some 5.7 million members. 2. Mario Dondero is considered the father of Italian photojournalism.

My reporting career spans years. I go about it But my memories of it were quite super- These workers died because of negli- the only way you can for these first-hand per- ficial; apart from its ancient history, I knew gence by the contractor and owner of Mec- sonal stories from those involved, at least for nothing about the place. I didn’t know, for ex- navi, Enzo Arienti, because of the unscrupu- someone like me. I put so much of myself in it, ample, and was amazed to learn that Raven- lous use of subcontracting, the gangmaster senses tingling and nerves alert, sometimes na is Italy’s second biggest city after Rome in system, and illegal working (ten of the elev- just wandering around with no specific aim terms of geographical size, spreading over 653 en workers were undeclared labour, only trying to get a sense of the scene, what makes sq km. It is a maritime city, and yet the sea is one was officially employed by the company it tick, becoming part of the action. More out of sight; it’s one of Italy’s biggest ports, a managing the work), and a brutal capitalist than with fiction, this method of writing sto- main port of call on the Adriatic, but mainly mentality that puts profit before people’s ries from real life calls for a radical change a "land" city, i.e., agricultural. The centre lies lives: a mentality which was then prevalent not only in narrative subject matter, the form 8 km from the Adriatic, which is the length and would later be dubbed neo-liberalism. that you choose each time, but also the writ- of the Candiano canal which connects city to For the Ravenna firm systematically used er’s own deep feelings and beliefs. sea. So, the first thing that struck me was this the gangmaster system that allowed it abdi- The places where some stories have very clear separation between town and docks, cate all responsibility, and use cheap day la- happened themselves already form a kind of land and sea, between the ideal city and the bour by outsourcing different jobs to outside narrative, an explanation; they fuel questions real town – shrouded and sullied by work. contractors so as to cut costs and delivery and contradictions, especially because of times, having them work unbeknown to one their greater complexity in terms of relations another. that have developed over centuries in culture, Back to Ravenna My article was published in the CGIL’s1 in all the laid-down layers of humankind past Rassegna sindacale weekly which was bring- and present which makes us all what we are. I went back to Ravenna in 2007 to report on ing out a special Labour Day issue for 1 May, Cities big and small, towns, mountain the shipyard tragedy that twenty years ear- as well as in Diario, a magazine I was doing villages, seaside resorts, all these things that lier on 13 March 1987 had claimed the lives some work with at the time, using pictures conjure up a geographical place are crucial to of thirteen workers trapped in the holds of taken by Mario Dondero2, the legendary pho- the story we have to tell, they are the binder the Elisabetta Montanari LPG (liquid pe- tographer I had worked with on several occa- of the narrative, but also the setting in which troleum gas) carrier. They were employed to sions and who for me is "the master". it is contained, the scene of the action, where clean out the holds in the worst of conditions, I think I only stayed there three days, past and present come together and the fu- crawling like rats, often in the dark. They lost working under time pressure like any jour- ture can be glimpsed. their lives when a fire broke out on the fuel nalist, trying to get my head around the In short, Ravenna was a real eye-open- residue coated floor of the LPG tanks during basic essentials of this story from the past er for me. I had only visited it once on hol- a welding repair job causing toxic gases like without managing to connect it to the pres- iday with my family to see the mosaics, the carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide to ent. But I did have an opportunity to visit the mausoleum of Galla Placidia, the Basilica of form, but most of all because five contractors dock where the tragedy happened so many San Vitale and Dante’s tomb. Guidebook in were working at the same time on the ship years ago and talk to some of those involved, hand, we wandered the maze of streets in the unbeknown to one another, and safety rules like Burbassi, the fireman in charge of op- historic centre, then off to visit the mausole- were breached to the point where there was erations to recover the bodies; Sartoris, an um of Emperor Theodoric and the Basilica of not even a fire extinguisher which would have engineer now and a young employee of Mec- Sant’Apollinare in Classe. been enough to quench the flames. navi then; and the son of one of the dead 44 spring-summer 2014/HesaMag #09 From the unions 3/5

3. Historical Journal of the workers, Massimo Padua, just a child when Italian left. his father died. Thirteen workers died like 4. The trial in 2011 rats, in the words of Cardinal Ersilio Tonini, convicted the CEO with a injuring themselves in the desperate bid to jail sentence of 16 years, escape, but knowing for five to ten minutes later reduced by a third on – an eternity in such conditions – that they appeal. were dying of asphyxiation. 5. A paper mill founded in 1905 which closed down in February 2013. 6. The Fincantieri group is Only connect Italy’s main shipbuilder. It has been restructuring in Unlike writers, journalists lack the leisure to recent years. be discursive – they have to cut straight to the 7. Centre of the Sardinian facts, the news – that’s their job. But as writ- mining industry. The coal mines closed down in the ers and storytellers, we do a different, slower 1970s. job – what Mario Dondero calls "connect- 8. llva, the largest ing" – going back to the scene time and again, steelworks in Europe, trying to zero in on the subject of our story alone produces 9 of the and keeping the flame that feeds the rage to 28 million tonnes of steel write burning. produced each year in Italy. It happened later on that the publish- er Einaudi asked me to write a book more or less based around the stories of the vari- ous work-related deaths I had reported on over the years, mainly for il Manifesto3. First thoughts were that I might look at the Thys- senKrupp case in which seven workers died in a fire on 6 December 20074. Then I thought about the Ravenna trag- edy, that I might be able to get a better han- dle on for it happening in a typical provincial town in central Italy, not so different from Fermo where I live. That’s how I came to write Il costo della vita (The cost of life) and how I went back to Ravenna in spring 2012. The biggest post-war industrial tragedy after the 1954 Ribolla brown coal mine disas- ter in which 43 workers died happened where nobody expected it: not in a depressed area of Southern Italy, but in the "red" Romagna – a labour heartland where the Italian Commu- nist Party was still a force – there, where wel- fare, democracy and a social security system interviewing fire-fighters, doctors, ambu- the envy of Europe had been created; a place lance support workers, nurses, local news re- where the CGIL left-wing trade union has porters, trade unionists, the relatives of vic- close to 100 000 members. In short, some- tims and surviving workers did I reach the where workers’ oversight should see that conclusion that what had happened in this the rules were followed. So I thought, if that port had sent a tremor through the world of could happen in Ravenna, it must be symp- work that might spell the end of the "social tomatic of something else going deeper than contract" which had been the foundation of this unique and shocking story. our democracy ever since Jean-Jacques Rous- Only after a year’s work, numerous seau. Two years earlier, the protest march by trips, getting accepted by a whole community, 40 000 Fiat white-collar staff after the 35 day 45 spring-summer 2014/HesaMag #09 From the unions 4/5

strike had ended in a dramatic defeat for the the Chinese model, losing its last marks of of those who are working, and can get pushed union. Shortly after, the fall of the Berlin Wall civilization. But it does not set out to be a to the background. I was struck by what one had led to the decline of socialism across the memorial as I first conceived it because I am worker told me after a presentation: "I’d rath- world, and with it many of the gains made by reconnecting the history of yesterday to that er die of cancer than stay on the dole," be- the 20th century labour movement. of today: work accidents are still happening cause having no job and no future kills the in the port of Ravenna notwithstanding the spirit even more than a lack of money and vow at the time that "never again" should it lousy working conditions. Wastelands and tombs happen; people are still dying, and workers’ conditions have got worse, exploitation and I have now been on a seven-month book tour illegal work have shot up. Stock responses of Italian rhetoric up and down Italy, and as often as not my In Ravenna as elsewhere, in the ship- talks to the public turn into a full-scale dis- yards, on farms, not to mention building sites Ask me who still remembers about the Mec- cussion meeting with speeches from work- and factories, where dismantling often kills, navi tragedy in Ravenna and I would an- ers laid off by failing companies, others with as at ThyssenKrupp, Isochimica in Avellino swer: not many. I was giving a talk in Bal­ serious illnesses. There is always one victim where asbestos was being worked, or that dini technical institute, and of the 300-odd of workplace violence, a young casualised sooty cathedral of Italian- capitalism, students, only two or three had heard their worker who has changed jobs 20 times in the Ilva steelworks in Taranto8 which alone families mention it. I was greatly struck by three years, on the dole, with a nervy rest- produces 97% of the country’s dioxin. This is the difficulty they had putting it in a spe- lessness and gleaming eyes, whose body the cost of capital, these are the workplace fa- cific historical context and their meagre already betrays his hopelessness fuelled by talities for which Italy can boast that it tops a knowledge of the world of work in general. loneliness and defeated by work. macabre league, and it is not just a technical Everything else apart, it was for them some- In my travels around Italy, all I saw or cultural problem but a political one. thing that happened before they were born, were wastelands, abandoned firms like Bur- In times of crisis, many issues and prob- with no connection to the ongoing present go5 in Mantua, occupied for a year, or Fincan- lems struggle to be heard in the consciousness they live in. tieri6 in Ancona, whose workers have gone through very hard times; I travelled through a Sardinia, battered by brutal industrializa- tion; the 20th century graveyard of Carbon- ia7, a symbol of death by decommissioning, to mention only a few of the many industrial sites that are derelict, in crisis, or dragging the community down. It mirrors what has become of a Europe- an country like Italy in an era of neo-liberalism, the tangible result of unbridled capitalism where the links between politics, business and organized crime are the norm. But it is also the product of uncontrolled relocations undertaken by the many "flies of capital", a capital which in the words of novelist Pao- lo Volponi "went through one collapse and crisis after another because that’s how it is – greedy, gluttonous, with eyes much bigger than its belly so that afterwards it suffers and obviously always makes others pay for its ills". My book is a narrative reportage, a so- cial novel as it were: a work of investigation and writing that reconstructs through the tale it tells a story of the past that speaks to the present, especially at a time of deep crisis when a further rolling back of rights could push today’s world of work closer to 46 spring-summer 2014/HesaMag #09 From the unions 5/5

A participatory, high-octane meeting “I know but I can’t prove it” organized by Manifesto, attended by a num- ber of political activists could not have been I believe that non-fiction narratives like Il 9. The Italian Republican more different; there was a perceptible sense costo della vita must be meaningful instru- Party (Partito Repubblicano of a very intense sharing of ideas, includ- ments to be used by the labour movement to Italiano, PRI) is a secular, liberal political party ing across generations, and a detailed recall ask real questions about why certain things founded in 1895. of the social and political dynamics of the have happened and continue to happen: a way time. I also got the sense that local authori- in Ravenna, as elsewhere, to look at our own ties and institutions wanted not to talk about reflection. There are many aspects of this story this story in present-day terms, to relegate it that happened in 1987 which this city has not to the status of a historical event that could yet thought about locally, it has not questioned be celebrated with the stock responses of itself enough, it has not honestly reconstituted Italian rhetoric – tricolour-sashed mayors, what happened. Such as, for example, how in banner-carrying rank-and-filers, speeches the space of just four years in the mid-1980s solemnly pronounced every 13 March in an an ordinary manual labourer – Enzo Arienti – attempt to take the industrial outrage out of could have become one of the biggest handling the event and sever it from the labour strife contractors in the European shipbuilding of the present – when initially and for years industry. He had ties to large swathes of Ita- it was experienced as something shameful, a ly’s shipbuilding industry, and had very close mark of infamy, the greatest post-war trage- links with politicians and Christian Demo- dy to occur in a communist stronghold, a real crats. Arienti’s own defence lawyer, Achilles blow. To the point that when my book came Melchionda, declared in stupefaction that: "It out, there was not, as I expected, a single of- is incomprehensible and unacceptable that ficially organized public presentation in the for years this company was managed in a way city, except of course that of the CGIL. that appeared so lacking, vague and rough and As to the current mayor, while I was in ready in terms of accident prevention, without Ravenna writing my book, he never thought anyone ever noticing." to talk to me or give me an interview, which I No-one has ever managed to give me found somewhat suspicious. The upshot be- a plausible explanation of the tremendous ing that this centre-left public dignitary was rise that led Mecnavi from a turnover of 500 not happy about my telling the press how million to 30 billion lire in 1986. "I know," uneasy I felt about the public exploitation wrote Pier Paolo Pasolini, "but I can’t prove of the memory. Afterwards, at the first pres- it. I don’t even have clues". I also "know", and entation of the book last summer, when the reading between the lines of my book will deputy mayor – a PRI9 member (in Ravenna, tell you what I believe about this story and a stronghold of freemasonry and Garibal- the various interests that revolve around this di-influenced politics, the Republican Party port. But in Ravenna – and not only in Raven- is still very powerful) – I set a spontaneous na - we have to at least ask ourselves why such and very heated discussion going, in which a thing happened where it should not happen, this second leading light of local politics was and why it keeps happening regularly in Ita- truly torn to pieces by trade unionists, polit- ly, like an inevitability, laced with the croco- ical activists and readers of the paper I write dile tears of the usual platitudes as if it were Angelo Ferracuti’s book, for, but above all by Labour Court judge something physiological, imponderable with Il costo della vita, Roberto Riverso, who confirmed and added no answer, written into the DNA of the nation can be ordered from to the case I made in my book. that is infected by it.• www.einaudi.it