Xylella and Salento. The wonderfully factual story of Daniele Rielli

“The Invisible Fire” by Daniele Rielli (Rizzoli) is a book that contains at least four. The architrave of the story is wonderfully factual: by collecting data, interviewing (and respecting) people of different opinions, studying and disseminating biology, the author reconstructs how it could happen that a bacterium from Costa Rica advanced in Salento for a decade, killing 21 million olive trees, without the quarantine measures suggested by science being implemented. It’s worth reading for that alone: to review the effort and time required to be a journalist, especially in the age of the internetan era that mixes absolute relativism and certainty of opinion, crumbling that sense of shared reality that makes the decisions of political communities possible.