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Sergio Zavoli, master of television, died: he was 96 years old

Sergio Zavoli, journalist and master of Italian television, who died at the age of 96. Born in Ravenna on 21 September 1923, he transformed the information on TV with programs such as the Process to the stage – created in 1962 and dedicated to the Giro d’Italia – and La notte della Repubblica.

Above all, his warm voice was unmistakable: it remained impressed, made the listener at ease, enticed him to follow the broadcast. But the qualities of Sergio Zavoli, went far beyond: competence, seriousness, true culture, empathy and emotional participation (never too emphasized), tact in addressing the interlocutors with even the most burning questions.

A pure-bred chronicler, a master of radio and television communication, capable of inventing new formulas and ready to bring delicate and difficult subjects to the homes of Italians as well as president of Rai for six years, from 1980 to 1986, Zavoli had been for a long time previously and was still one of the most prestigious and recognizable journalistic faces, an authentic figure of reference for the public, not to mention his institutional role as chairman of the Supervisory Commission, a position held in age advanced, from 2009 to 2013.

Born in Ravenna on September 21, 1923, the young Sergio was grown up in Rimini, a city to which he had remained very close and of which he had told the whimsical and bewildered aspects in the memoir The boy I was (Mondadori, 2011). Among his closest friends was Federico Fellini, three years older, to whom he would always remain attached. And right in the seaside resort of Romagna Zavoli had carried out his apprenticeship as a reporter with the spoken newspaper, a sort of news broadcast on the megaphone set up with a couple of friends immediately after the war.
Then he went to follow the sporting events and in 1948, when he was still a university student, Vittorio Veltroni (Walter’s father), RAI manager, had called him to Rome. Here the crystalline talent of the young man from Romagna soon emerged. In radio commentary he had followed important football and cycling competitions, but also the disastrous flood of the Polesine in 1951. Investigations of the highest quality followed on the blind, on cloistered nuns, on refugees who fled from Hungary following the Soviet invasion of 1956.

At the beginning of the 1960s Enzo Biagi, with whom he had already collaborated on the radio, brought Zavoli to work permanently on television. Here he invented the transmission Process to the stage, in which he made comment on the progress of the Giro d’Italia day by day also to cultural figures such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alberto Moravia. It was a huge success, with the ratings skyrocketing, for the popularity of cycling, but also for the innovative formula, which immediately fascinated the people who gathered around the television screen. Another epoch-making program was the Birth of a Dictatorship. In 1972, the fiftieth anniversary of the march on Rome, Zavoli recalled the decisive and controversial turning point in a balanced, documented and involving way. Since he had started the work about four years before the anniversary, he managed to collect a large collection of testimonies from the protagonists of the time, by calling on exponents of all political tendencies, from fascists such as Giorgio Pini and Augusto De Marsanich (without forgetting Mussolini’s widow) to the first leader of Italian communism, later marginalized and expelled for his revolutionary extremism, Amadeo Bordiga.

If we consider that the events of black terrorism had revived the contrast between fascism and anti-fascism in those years, it must be said that Zavoli made a true masterpiece of historical dissemination, immune to any partisanship. With the RAI reform, the great Romagna envoy was entrusted with the direction of Gr1, then Bettino Craxi indicated him as president of the company in 1980. Zavoli, although a believer (Only faith prolongs man beyond his end, we read in one of his books), he had never hidden his sympathies for the PSI. His perhaps best known book is entitled Socialist of God (Mondadori, 1981), in which the autobiographical parts intertwine with reflections on the problems of Italy and on various crucial aspects of human existence.

As president of Rai Zavoli he found himself managing a very difficult phase, in which the presence on a national scale of the private broadcasters Fininvest license plates was affirming itself, with the consequent end of the public monopoly, while on the left the political conflict between PSI Pci came to white heat. However, his attention to the quality of the transmissions was always great. And when he ended his mandate, he returned to his favorite investigative activity, producing among other things a further milestone of television such as La notte della Repubblica, a program dedicated to the years of lead in which he also gave the floor to some of the more avid terrorists who had bloodied Italy until a few years earlier. Zavoli, in the early nineties, was then director of the television of San Marino, then of the Naples newspaper Il Mattino.

Tireless in writing, despite his many commitments, he also dedicated himself to poetry: for example, with the collection of verses A cautious look he won the Alfonso Gatto prize in 1995. Then in 2001 the election to the Senate came in the ranks of the center-left , with subsequent confirmations at Palazzo Madama. Thanks to his undisputed authoritativeness, in February 2009, Zavoli had been elected president of the Supervisory Commission on Rai, in a phase of acute tensions, due to an agreement between the major political forces that had contributed in part to speeding up the atmosphere around the public service. Not even the traumatic misadventure of the robbery suffered in 2012, with lots of beating, in his villa in Monte Porzio Catone, had not weakened the robust fiber. The following year he was re-elected and nominated chairman of the Senate library and archives commission.

The list of books published by Zavoli is vast, often adaptations of television investigations, with particular attention to the spiritual dimension of life and situations of suffering. This proposal should be remembered in his volumes The long life (Mondadori, 1998), Dossier cancer (Garzanti, 1999), The useless pain (Garzanti, 2002). His choice, many years ago, to bring the cameras for the first time into an asylum, with a report from November 1962 on the work done in Gorizia by Franco Basaglia with the aim of humanizing assistance, was also significant and very courageous. psychiatric. For his attention to the dramas of people in difficulty, Zavoli had been ironically nicknamed the moved traveler. An expression that actually pays homage to the profound sense of humanity that was the most authentic feature of his way of interpreting the journalistic profession.


August 5, 2020 (change August 5, 2020 | 10:05)

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