The Capaci massacre has entered by force in the contemporary history of our country, and did so by dyeing a hot May almost thirty years ago with blood red, yet it seems to have happened only yesterday.
Giovanni Falcone, his wife Francesca Morvillo and the three men of the escort Vito Schifani, Rocco Dicillo and Antonio Montinaro died with 500 kilos of TNT in a tunnel of the A29 motorway that connects Palermo to Mazara del Vallo.
To operate the remote control that triggered the explosion was Giovanni Brusca, but the killing of Falcone was decided by the "dome", at the head of which was Totò Riina.
That 23 May 1992 Italy stopped, as well as the TV broadcasts that were interrupted to broadcast extraordinary editions due to the terrible news. It was a hot and sunny Saturday afternoon, and at 17.58:XNUMX pm the terrible explosion of the explosive killed lives without mercy.
Shortly after that 23 May, on 19 July 1992, it was Paolo Borsellino who blew up in Via D'Amelio together with the five escort agents Emanuela Loi, Agostino Catalano, Vincenzo Li Muli, Walter Eddie Cosina and Claudio Traina: two massacres that shocked and silenced Italy by slapping it.
The only "fault" of the two magistrates was that of swimming in a sea populated by sharks and dark shadows that also crawled around and inside the courthouses and perhaps also that of belonging to the "Anti-Mafia Pool", created to investigate the grip of crime organized with an epicenter in Sicily.
The trial for the Capaci massacre ended in 1997 with twenty-four life sentences for the men believed to be executors and instigators of the massacre, including Riina and Provenzano. Then there was the appeal and the Supreme Court until 2008. Just that year, Gaspare Spatuzza, began to collaborate, and from there a new trial was born, called “Capaci bis”.
Finally, in 2016 the Caltanissetta assize court sentenced four of the five mafia defendants in the trial to maximum sentence.
Today at the point where the remote control button was pressed there is a white house, and on it, with blue paint there is written "No to the mafia": a way to exorcise evil with an inscription that all those who walk the motorway that leads from the “Falcone e Borsellino” airport in Palermo.
Those massacres, however, did not bend the national conscience, which today lives on brightly through thousands of students.
In these days, about 70.000 students from all over Italy remember the victims of the mafia with the #PalermoChiamaItalia initiative.
Also this year they return in Sicilia with the ship of legality, which left Civitavecchia with many young people on board bound for Palermo, promoted by the Ministry of Education and the Falcone Foundation.
After the institutional celebrations, the squares and schools of Palermo will shout "No" to the mafia together.
The official celebration will also be attended by Pietro Grasso and Giuseppe Ayala, judges and historical witnesses of the historic trial against the Cosa Nostra instructed by Falcone and Borsellino, as well as the relatives of the victims and the survivors of the massacres.
A procession will start from via D'Amelio, and the second from the Bunker hall where the sentences were held. Both will meet under the Falcone Tree in via Notarbartolo, a symbol of life and continuous rebirth, where the magistrate lived, to celebrate the "Silence" at 17.58 pm, the fateful hour of the Capaci massacre.
During the afternoon, the projects of the “Universities of Legality” will also be presented since the twenty-three universities that have promoted initiatives to fight the mafias do not take a step back in this regard. The day will end with a holy mass at about 19 pm in the Church of San Domenico, recalling with a prayer the victims of organized crime and all the mafias, who have fallen over so many years. Finally, the celebration will be followed by a concert by the State Police band, in the Teatro Massimo in Palermo.
