Origins matter, even in the radical family of Eugenia Roccella

Idealized parents, struggles and faith. From father Marco to mother Wanda: like the minister she went from daughter to parent. And then the memory of Pannella and that religiosity she admitted with difficulty even to herself

It would be nice to be able to open the book of one’s life like Bulgakov in the “Master and Margarita” or Nabokov in the “Gift”. Instead, no Patriarsie ponds or Tannenbergstrasse house numbers, he writes Eugenia Rockella at the beginning of his “A radical family” (Rubbettino): she has to settle for Riesi, in the province of Caltanissetta. There, on a spring night in 1954, Franco Roccella unexpectedly falls from Bologna into his father’s house, holding his six-month-old daughter, Eugenia. He and the baby’s mother, Wanda Raheli from Bologna, are too busy living to be parents, and the baby is handed over to Sarina, Franco’s older sister, a spinster destined to remain so and happy with that gift. This was meant to seem: a gift rather than an abandonment. “If not really a gift, a long-term loan. I stayed. The next day my father said goodbye and left, to resume the long escape that was his life, with his eternal Sicilian returns ”.