Manfredi Borsellino had been missing from Asinara for 37 years. He was just 13 years old, in 1985, when he kept company with his father Paolo Borsellino and his colleague Giovanni Falcone who in great secret, in a villa in Cala d'Oliva facing the sea, instructed the acts of the maxi Mafia trial, which ended in Palermo with numerous convictions of mafia bosses and affiliates. It was one of the biggest criminal trials ever held in the world.
Judges Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone, as known, were executed by the mafia in 1992.
A wound still open in justice and in Italian public opinion. That villa in Cala d'Oliva, which was actually a former prison of the penitentiary, is now the headquarters of the Forestry Corps. Inside, rooms have been created in honor of the two great servants of the state.
Manfredi Borsellino, 50, now Police Commissioner in Palermo, spent the weekend on the island, the former site of several prisons and now a National Park. He visited those premises, assisted by the former prison inspector Gianmaria Deriu, now a volunteer of the Park Authority and a great connoisseur of Asinara.
"I had met Manfredi Borsellino as a boy and now he is a great man, calm and kind - he explains -. After many years he has visited the island and the premises that for months have been his home and that of his beloved father and judge Falcone. He was clearly excited and it must not have been easy for him to immerse himself in that past that no one has forgotten. He came with his wife and three children. Perhaps he will be back in the week, before leaving Sardinia. "