Anna Politkovskaya, reporter for love

'' I imagine the body as a shroud, a sheet, which over the years adheres more and more to the soul underneath. When it is placed on the body, it takes its design: bones, strokes. Then the soul comes out more and more, until the plan of one's own interiority emerges in full. And in my opinion, even aesthetically, Anna was this ''. It is the evocative description that Roberto Saviano makes of Anna Politovskaja, and that Lucia Tilde Ingrosso reports in her '' Anna Politkovkaja. Reporter for love '' (Morellini editore, pp. 170), when it returns to the bookstore in the paperback edition for Adelphi also: '' Anna Politkovskaya, Putin's Russia ", with the translation by Claudia Zonghetti.

While Adelphi's book collects the journalist's public and private testimonials, Lucia Tilde Ingrosso's, more than a novel or a biography is an act of love, and tells the passion of a man between fiction and reality in love with Anna Politovskaya, with her work, with her ability to bring the truth to the surface through journalism with the aim of helping those who suffer.

In a moment in which the figure of the heroic journalist, killed by two assassins in Moscow on October 7, 2006 - Putin's birthday - also in the light of the conflict in Ukraine, becomes extraordinarily topical, retracing the history of his battles is important and compelling especially for those unfamiliar with the events. It is no coincidence that the protagonist of the book will be able to bring his nephew on the path of journalism by transmitting to the boy his passion, indeed his love, for this tiny woman but capable of restoring extraordinary strength.

THE PLOT - It all begins when the protagonist meets her by chance in a café in Paris, it's 2000 and he, Giorgio, a young professional from Mantua, projects his desires, his secret genealogy, the dissatisfaction of a marriage onto her. running out. Anna Politkovskaya will become a real obsession even if Giorgio will never go beyond stubborn discretion. These are the years in which she went to Chechnya forty times facing hunger, cold, torture and challenging death. In which she will be a negotiator at the Dubrovka Theater, unfortunately not in the Beslan school in 2004 because she will be poisoned and she will not even be able to reach the place where the massacre takes place which will lead to the death of over 300 people, including 186 children, and to the injury of other 700.

Giorgio follows her at a distance, sends her e-mails with no luck, and in the meantime he participates in all the Italian events that concern her. Until then meeting her at the Literature Festival in Mantua, her city, in a debate on 11 September 2005 moderated by Nicola Nobili.

'' Putin - says Anna on that occasion - has undermined the welfare state. After his reform, many children no longer go to school. The scourge of alcohol is getting worse and worse. The nationalist front is growing. Everyone says there is security now, but that's not true. The number of terrorist attacks is unprecedented in the Yeltsin era. War and antisocial politics are among Putin's main mistakes. ''

Less than a year after the tragic end, the execution with a final blow to the back of the head, in front of the door of his home, the shopping bags still in hand.

(Unioneonline / vl)