His father hardly knew him: he abandoned him with his mother and three penniless brothers and his childhood in Gavoi was very poor. At 17, in 1962, Angelo Licheri decides to follow the Luna Park in Rome with which he collaborated very young. And he moved to the capital. He does various jobs, even abroad, but then returns to Rome. He married a girl from Sant'Anna Arresi with whom he had three children, and in 1972 he rented a thirty-square-meter house in a popular neighborhood for fifty thousand lire a month. He found a job in the same street, as a delivery boy for a printing shop, and enrolled in the communist section of via Donna Olimpia.
When can he spend his holidays in Sardinia with his family.
He hardly ever reads the newspaper but that day he does and discovers that at 7 pm on Thursday 10 June 1981 a child fell into an artesian well in the countryside of Vermicino. They look for him for a long time until someone raises the guard and hears the laments of Alfredino Rampi, six years old, a prisoner 36 meters deep. A board lowered with a rope by speleologists gets stuck in the walls preventing the rescuers from descending while a probe with a microphone raises requests for help and a tube introduces oxygen into the well. A bottle of milk is sent down, meanwhile the drills drill the ground up to minus 32 meters. The goal is to get to minus 36 and then, through a horizontal passage, to reach the child. But the drill freezes. While it is decided how to proceed, the father, the mother and a fireman, Nando, talk continuously with Alfredino.
Various attempts follow one another, even with a pneumatic hammer, and when it seems almost done it turns out that in the meantime the child has slipped at minus 64. Two speleologists try but they have to give up.
Hundreds of onlookers arrive on the spot, even the President of the Republic Sandro Pertini is there to give comfort to the parents. The TV broadcasts live from the Vermicino countryside, non-stop.
It is June 12th, Alfredino has been in the well for 50 hours: Angelo Licheri has finished working at eight in the evening and rushes home to watch the television that keeps 32 million Italians glued to their hearts waiting for the happy ending. He is about to sit at the table with his wife and three children, between the ages of ten and five, but the Sardinian delivery boy cannot stand and watch. He had already gone into action ten years earlier, in Nuoro: in August 1971 he was working as a cook in a restaurant on the Ortobene when there was a fire that killed a shepherd. The children of a colony were about to be swallowed by the flames, Licheri had catapulted out: <I went to the colony, I loaded four children at a time and carried them on the road to safety, when I saved the last three I was a mask of smoke>.
He says nothing to his wife about his intentions, also because he suffers from asthma and has recently been operated on for an ulcer: a piece of his intestine has been cut. Besides, he has no speleological training. But he's small and thin, weighs 40 pounds, and he wants to try. He goes out, says he's going to buy cigarettes.
He drives his Ford for an hour to Vermicino, then continues on foot for three kilometers, making his way through the crowd.
They see him appear out of nowhere in an uncultivated field near that small town in the Roman countryside where Alfredino's parents are, hundreds of onlookers behind the barriers, the firefighters, the photoelectric lights. Rescuers ask for silence to hear the baby's voice through the probes.
<I have already done similar descents, I can do it>: Angelo moves with so much confidence and determination that everyone believes he is an expert speleologist and aware of what he is doing. There is a negotiation, the situation is desperate. They say "yes".
They dress him. They tie it to the ankles with a rope and lower it upside down to a depth of 64 meters.
His wife sees him on TV and to the anguish for Alfredino she adds that for her husband.
Angelo does not spare himself. As soon as he arrives where the tunnel tends to tighten he tries to remove the baby's hands, one is behind the bottom, the other under the left thigh. Freeing the one behind your back is difficult. He straightens the head that is stuck holding it with his head, grabs Alfredino's wrist and brings it back to its normal position. The child is like sitting on a chair. She wipes his eyes and mouth almost saturated with mud, wonders how he can resist. He tries to catch him under the armpits but he slips away like an eel. He tries to squeeze it at the elbows but slips away. He takes him by the wrists and hears a trac: they are abrupt when they pull him up and Angelo is forced to give up. Then try to lift his legs, even with the plastic strap, harness him by passing it under the armpits and behind the neck. Kick off. From above they pull but the belt breaks. Angelo shouts: "calm down, softly". They hear it and respond to it. Then give it another try: fix the strap with a knot and try to harness the child again but the strap is now short. He makes another try and it breaks again. At that point he tries to pull him up by grabbing him by the undershirt: but nothing, it's impossible.
In the meantime, Angelo talks to Alfredino: “I'll take you to Sardinia for holidays, at my house, there are beautiful places and you'll forget this ugly place”.
He tries for almost an hour, seven times the baby slips away. He can't make it, the frost is literally paralyzing him, Angelo is on the verge of collapse, he has a black cloud over his eyes: they pull him up perhaps just in time. And he despairs. On the surface he is supported by a firefighter, he does not even have the strength to stand, his gaze is lost in the void, they have to carry him in their arms to the ambulance that runs towards the Frascati hospital while the doctors give him a cardiotonic and place him on the I put on an oxygen mask.
Two hours later Alfredino dies. This was discovered by a Neapolitan speleologist who twice dropped into the well after Angelo: “He is stiff, he does not breathe”.
At the hospital Angelo Licheri speaks with anger: “I had to succeed, it was a commitment of honor, something I felt I was doing even at the cost of my life. We Sardinians are tenacious, proud, resolute. We always succeed in difficult enterprises ”.
Everyone pays homage to him, starting with the mayor of Rome who goes to see him. He was also invited to the Ministry of the Interior and presented himself in shorts.
Difficult to recover, impossible to forget. For years he dreams of death. A nightmare that never ends.
He separates from his wife, falls ill, diabetes forces doctors to amputate his leg, in recent times he is almost completely blind but all this is nothing compared to the wound that does not heal: defeat.
This tragedy is in the collective memory of the Italians, as is the photo that immortalizes the failed attempt of a generous man. Who never wanted anything, never sought glory or popularity. He lived on a small pension, "isolated but not alone".
Angelo Licheri died Monday morning in a nursing home in Nettuno. He was 77 years old.
For everyone he will always and only be Vermicino's hero.
