I met Maria Giovanna Maglie it was a long time ago and after being lost for a while, due to some misunderstandings, we had started to feel and get together again in recent years. It happened after one of the many attacks, to which I wanted to respond forcefully and with indignation, that he had suffered throughout his life from some well-thinking companions of the regime who perennially insisted on assuming the right to the absolute truth. even before that of issuing licenses of morality and professional suitability.
It was the year 2019 and Maria Giovanna, professionally raised in the Unit, was “accused” of “craxism”: human closeness more than political with Bettino Craxi a constitutive reason to prevent him from returning to public television, Rai, in which pluralism and professionalism must be the norm, not the exception. This was a paradoxical situation, one of the many that pertain to the whole Craxian affair, which nevertheless testified well to the hypocrisies on which a certain local intelligentsia feeds and, at the same time, to the personality with which Maria Giovanna was endowed.
In fact, the many who have forgotten their ancestors or their steps in the socialist ranks, to the point of abjuring or whitewashing their own history, have been able in recent decades to rise to leadership positions and primary roles; who instead, like Maglie, with coherence even before with faith, did not deny his past, saw all possibilities excluded! A double standard that smacks of opportunism, a modus operandi he never intended to submit to. Maria Juana she has been a friend through thick and thin. Not only did he never deny his friendship with the socialist leader with whom he maintained, also and especially in the sad years of Tunisian exile, a relationship of esteem and friendship (I remember that he was one of the few who continued to write and call Hammamet), but he never left to say words of truth about the ’92-’94 biennium and the harmful effects of “fake revolution”. Loyalty and coherence with her own ideas that obviously cost her positions and career for a long time, and that in reality denies the vulgate convenience and mockery of those who saw in her embracing, in her own way, Craxi and the socialists, an option. convenience and opportunism.
Whoever has had the opportunity to meet this professional moved by a great gift, endowed with a brilliant and incisive pen, knows that her talent, not always loved but appreciable, was frankness, accompanied by a hardness typical of many strong and at the same time fragile time International politics, her true love from the beginning, and based on the detachment of a PCI that entertained itself in Byzantine formulas to avoid dealing with history, seemed to contrast with her provocative character. With her death, after a long and painful illness that she faced with integrity and dignity, we lose a strong personality marked by great passions. I personally want to remember Maria Giovanna with that deep look with which she scrutinized her interlocutors, with that contagious enthusiasm, with that desire for the future that she exuded from her reasoning. However, I also want to mention the woman, the friend who in Hammamet, on the 20th anniversary of Craxi’s disappearance, moved and in the midst of a wave of optimism, told me that I had achieved the task I had set for myself, having managed to take the rage inside him for granted. These are words I will never forget. Hello Maria Juana!
