The memory of Franco Serantini, the Sardinian anarchist who died 50 years ago in Pisa
Its story in the book by Corrado Staiano
50 years have passed. It is May 7, 1972. Shortly before 10 am Franco Serantini, twenty years old, from Cagliari, who had embraced the ideas of anarchy, dies in the prison of Pisa. He had remained in the penitentiary for two nights and a day, without receiving the care he clearly needed. “Two days earlier - as Corrado Staiano recalls in the book“ Il subversivo ”(with the extraordinary drawings by Costantino Nivola) - in the center of the city, a demonstration degenerates into urban warfare, between barricades, Molotov cocktails, tear gas. At the corner between Lungarno Gambacorti and via Mazzini, Franco - who is alone as always - is surrounded and attacked by a dozen policemen of his age, studded with kicks, punches and batons with a ferocity that does not spare even a part of his body " .
A life that looks like a novel and instead is real in all its rarely happy junctions. Franco Serantini was born in Cagliari on July 16, 1951. He has no parents. After being abandoned in the orphanage, a tormented adoption in Sicily. Then the return to Sardinia where he is welcomed by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Giorgino. At 17, yet another turning point in his short life. The Juvenile Court, in front of the religious who manifest the impossibility of keeping him in the institute, directs him to the reformatory. Franco Serantini, with a clean record, with serious emotional deficiencies, faces a new journey, this time with destination Pisa, the “Pietro Thouar” Institute of Male Re-education. In the Tuscan city he builds solid friendships. Study and work. These are intense months, the happiest of his existence. Get in touch with the world of anarchy and with the movements animated by students and workers. Ideas, impulses, energies to make dreams, hopes, utopias walk. Until the evening of May 5, an evening of clashes and riots in the streets of Pisa. "On the evening of May 5, 1972 - wrote Staiano - nothing served to save from the fury of the police, between the vintner's shop and that of the upholsterer, a not tall young man, curly, shortsighted glasses, a serious and suffered face, Franco Serantini, twenty years old, Sardinian, anarchist, nobody's son in life as in death ”.
The judicial investigation is a trail of aspects that have never been fully clarified as has happened in similar cases, even very recent ones, in Italian history. There are those who wanted to cultivate the duty of memory. The “Franco Serantini” Library was born in Pisa in order not to forget the anarchist from Cagliari and his short but intense life.
