Giorgio Bocca called him "an anarchoid, a Russian (his mother was born in Tsarist Russia) half mad and undisciplined". A happy synthesis to introduce one of the most original and least classifiable pens of Italian journalism: Massimo Fini.
For twenty years (1970-1990), a leading signature of the European Championship, Fini belongs to that small group of journalists that everyone has read and read, even if they do not share their point of view. Above all, he is one of those journalists - like the aforementioned Bocca, Pansa, Biagi and Montanelli - who, with his articles, knew how to tell Italy better than a thousand bald wise men. Proof of this is, once more, the very recent "Journalism torn apart" (Marsilio Editori, 2021, pp. 832, also e-book), an impressive volume that collects Fini's activities as a reporter, correspondent and journalist. investigation starting from the seventies of the last century.
A forty-year history of our country, with its protagonists and its tumultuous and often not very edifying events, thus comes back to life thanks to articles that appear to us not at all aged despite some dating back to more than four decades ago. Conversely, they show us a still very vivid cross-section of crucial events and people who have transformed our society from an anthropological, sociological, but above all cultural point of view.
We see the events of the great Italian industry run live, from Fiat to Olivetti, passing through Alfa Romeo and the large editorial concentrations born in the 1980s. We hear dramas such as terrorism and drugs from the hands of the protagonists. We find the great changes in society: the crisis of the traditional couple, feminism, the first inquiries into the world of homosexuality. Then there are the meetings of Fini - through interviews or very enjoyable and balanced portraits - with the great protagonists of the twentieth century such as Aldo Moro, Gianni Agnelli, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli to get to Vittorio De Sica and Anna Magnani.
He will ask himself what is the meaning of an operation of repurposing pieces that belong to a world, that of twentieth-century Italy, which no longer exists. We can respond to an objection like this in many ways. First of all, these are very beautiful articles to read, written by a professional who conceives journalistic writing as something that belongs to the reader and must therefore respect him to the end. No smoke in the eyes, therefore, no literary conundrums to impress and not make people understand. Conversely, Fini's writing is naked, straightforward, honest. Secondly, Fini drags us to an era in which the web did not bring the world into our home, but you had to travel it firsthand to get to know it, pedibus calcantibus as the ancients said, that is, walking the road.
As Nino Nutrizio, editor of La Notte, the afternoon newspaper that has long since disappeared from newsstands, stated, journalism "is a job that is done first with the feet and then with the head" and Fini was faithful to this maxim. Too much head, moreover, makes things excessively rational and there is no good news, nor inquiries as God commands if you think too much. Finally, most important of all, if, as Benedetto Croce said, "History is the past seen through the eyes of the present", Fini's articles can help us understand what remains of those seasons, those protagonists, hopes, illusions and disappointments of those generations of the second half of the twentieth century.
If we want to understand Italy and especially the Italians of today, "Journalism torn to pieces" has what it takes to guide us, to support us like a good school manual, one in which facts and people continue to be more important than opinions, judgments and above all comments.