The innocent life prisoner: Romano Ruju tells about Antioco Satgia

From Orgosolo to Volterra and Porto Azzurro, round trip. In the middle the drama of a young man, the victim of a sensational judicial error that leads him straight to life imprisonment. A tunnel following the murder of his brother-in-law, which took place in the 1930s. Then the war, the escape from prison under the bombings, the work for the Americans, the temptation of another life in the USA and the return to Barbagia, out of thirst for justice, not revenge. New vicissitudes, the truth that struggles to make its way, the return to prison between anguish and hope, probation when he is now ill and advanced in years. The story of Antioco Satgia, at the center of newspaper reports in the sixties and seventies, looks like a novel. And it is too. It is called "The Law". Originally the author, Romano Ruju, chooses “The Orgosolo Man”. Now his manuscript has been published, which remained for fifty years in an old chest. Not really forgotten since the author and the protagonist, who died a few years apart from each other, count on the availability of a publisher who, on the other hand, at the time - in 1971 - cannot be found. Now the municipality of Orgosolo is promoting the editorial initiative that posthumously rewards the work of Ruju, a Nuorese journalist and writer who died at 38 in 1973. And renews the rehabilitation of Satgia who comes out of Porto Azzurro prison on January 10, 1970. Final act of a massive mobilization that also involves the then bishop of Nuoro Giuseppe Melas to ask for the pardon of an innocent prisoner.

The first act of this harrowing judicial odyssey leads to the night of April 19, 1937, when Pasquale Manca is shot and killed at the entrance to his home in Orgosolo. The hereditary dispute over a house becomes the perfect motive for the investigators of the time. So Antioco Satgia, 28 years old with a passion for poetry, a swineherd by profession, despite spending that night at the home of a friend, Bore, who is the brother of his girlfriend Antonia Mereu, ends up in prison.

Satgia is the brother of Narcisa, Manca's wife who is under special surveillance and linked to the bandit Onorato Succu. Between the two brothers-in-law there is some rust due to the dispute over a house in the center, which was given to Satgia who does not accept the exchange proposed by Manca with another peripheral house. It is the trigger of a drama that upsets a man's life and drags him into a hellish vortex where a not at all obvious conviction remains, especially at the time, when in Orgosolo the figures of bandits such as Giovanni Battista Liandru and Pasquale Tandeddu dominate. : revenge does not serve to make a fairer society. Seven months after the murder, two false witnesses, Giovanni Floris and Anania Taras, give strength to the accusatory system of the Carabinieri Marshal and convince the Nuoro Assize Court that in 1938 sentenced Satgia to life imprisonment.

Despair is strong, like the strength not to give up. Satgia has a goal that becomes her salvation: to bring out the truth. The path is terribly bumpy also because two codes coexist in his culture: the official one of the law that sends him to jail and the barbaric one that would lead him to other dynamics to make himself justice. He manages to avoid them by trying instead to put other levers to good use, such as “s'accrarimentu”, a sort of process parallel to the official one, in the presence of local authorities, in a hidden campaign where false witnesses can finally confess their sins. Satgia, capable of neither generating nor transmitting hatred, shows so much heroism which, however, does not do him justice.

Experience the inaction, the first in the immediacy of the murder. It lasts a few days because he thinks it doesn't help if one is innocent. Thus he constitutes himself, confident that justice will find the real killer. It goes quite differently. Stay in jail for premeditated murder. From Nuoro he ends up in the Volterra prison where he learns of Hitler's invasion of Poland and everything that follows. He throws himself on the books. War reopens its hopes for freedom. The bombing arrives, he sees the horror of death before his eyes. In the chaos of Italy in 1943 he managed to escape from prison. The return to Orgosolo becomes possible, but not easy. He finds makeshift hiding places, relies on friends, fugitives like him, ends up being an undertaker just to survive in the expanse of the dead. With a false identity he wins the trust of the Americans who entrust him with the management of food: from Cecina to Trento, from north to central Italy. When the war is over, he does not accept the invitation of the Americans to follow them to the United States. The fixed thought of Orgosolo brings him back to his campaigns. And he goes back to being a fugitive, but in his own way. He manages to organize "s'accrarimentu". Before a popular jury - present mayor, doctor, deputy conciliator and retired carabiniere - the two false witnesses admit: one says he accused him because he held him responsible for the theft of his pigs, the other of having done so on the basis of wrong information. In short, there are elements to ask for a review of the trial and accuse the two of perjury. But the path is neither immediate nor linear despite Satgia relying on a successful lawyer like Pietro Mastino. He waits and resists as long as he can, manages to marry and have a child. In 1950, hunted by the carabinieri, tried by the harshness of the inaction, he was arrested. The bounty hanging on him will help the family get by. She passes twenty years beyond the bars despite the efforts of her teacher, who believes in innocence, and of the bishop who begs for grace.

Romano Ruju supports the press campaign in favor of Satgia with many articles and a beautiful and intense novel, also the result of an exchange of letters with the protagonist. The work has on the cover the old prison of Nuoro designed by the writer. It is published as the author left it, but fifty years later: the presentation on October 30, at 5 pm, in the municipal auditorium of Orgosolo.