Flashes of burning tears

I saw the same flashes of burnt tears and pain. I relived them in those lights of despair that shone through the frames of phones from rich, happy, opulent Switzerland. They were the same ones I collected in 1983 on the sidewalks of the Cinema Statuto: 64 dead, suffocated by the selfishness of progress. I was at Stampa Sera, a terrible day that anguished me. I smelled the same intense scent of sacrificed lives and the terrible sensation of death, due then to the absolute lack of prevention and a future. They were couples of friends, elderly like me, lovers who had granted themselves a break from the chaotic, convulsive, and absurd progression of life. Mayor Diego Novelli and Archbishop Anastasio Ballestrero, petrified in the parking lot near the Cinema Statuto, engraved them in my memory. They observed those black, curled-up bodies: the archbishop was praying; I don't know if the mayor did the same, recalling the days he spent as a youth at the Salesian Oratory of San Paolo. A heartbreaking scene. The bodies showed clear signs, not so much of burns, but of suffocation. According to Professor Pier Luigi Baima Bollone, the court's medical examiner, and Deputy Public Prosecutor Gian Carlo Caselli, "few died from the fire. Initial assessments suggest that most of the victims were suffocated by the smoke." This is the story I experienced, and it still gives me goosebumps. February 13, 1983, was a freezing and snowy Carnival Sunday, as Pier Giuseppe Accornero wrote forty years ago. A horrific tragedy at the cinema, near Piazza Statuto, resulted in 64 deaths, asphyxiated in a last, desperate attempt to escape the trap of fire and smoke that, with incredible speed, spread through the venue.

Then, on a grim dawn, the "Thyssen fire." Vittoria Doglio, a great chronicler and scribe of the events in Turin, called me. With Cardinal Severino Poletto, I toured all the hospitals, all the way to the CTO. I remember him telling me: "Unfortunately, they will all die." There were seven of them, all innocent victims. And I reported for TG1-2-3 and TGR. And I cried with them! An immense tragedy that I relive now with the same feelings I had then. It was the same flashes, the same faces, the same eyes that we all saw now: a massacre of young people that is incredible, but it is a harsh, burning reality. Job writes: "God gave, and God takes away" (Job 1:21). But here, God gave; we humans have taken away through a lack of prevention for who knows what, but those young people, with their eyes so fixed on the future, are no longer here. This is the reality; the rest is a useless corollary of guilt, sensations, hypotheses, and comments. Perhaps it's time we all think about it "together," as Cardinal Michele Pellegrino wrote. And let's start over, seeing without glasses, speaking, trying to understand. We need dialogue and listening, lots of listening!

Gian Mario Ricciardi
NP February 2026