All those people (good communicators would say “sold-out crowd”) who last night were at the launch of the book Aria mossa said one thing only: they wanted to be there. They were real, living testimony.

They did it with their presence, with the will to tell something that, in some way, we must necessarily come to terms with. In one day — one single day — democracy, inside an Italian prison, was suspended. Unreason prevailed. Mistakes piled up only because some people, with their peaceful protest, had tried to stir the air.

The stagnant, stale air of going on thinking of prison as a closed place, with no way out, with no hope, met the voices — first faint and then ever more convinced — of many inmates and their relatives, who hoped to make the clouds disappear with a fine maestrale.

Things, then, took a different turn. That prison lived through one of the worst pages of its existence, and the city — stunned, stricken, silent — waited for the storm to pass. That prison was closed, and the new  penitentiary ended up on the outskirts of our consciences.

Yesterday’s large audience wanted to show that memory is necessary, that it takes courage to be there when certain topics are discussed. It wanted to remind everyone that the most wrong thing is to say, with arrogance and bullying: “We must throw away the key.”

The proof was your incredible applause, your emotion in the face of the words of the inmates, the mothers, the girlfriends. Before that living flesh, marked by a wrong life, but entitled to another chance. And, above all, entitled to dignity.

All the people who were there yesterday deserve applause for their testimony. It is good to know there is a city able to listen, reflect, reason and understand.

A sincere thank you for your presence. Social testimony not to be lost. Only from wrong stories can we gather possibilities because it is really true that “from diamonds nothing is born, from manure flowers are born”.