There is a point in this story that for me expresses a clear sense of the meaning of courage and what it means to act courageously. In 1996 a property in Lamezia Terme was impounded, in the Torcasio clan’s neighbourhood. It is the boss’s house. The seizure has enormous symbolic value, because it’s as if to say: the estate you built with dirty money is returned to the community. The Torcasio family is one of two clans that have dominated the Lamezia area for years. The other is the Giampà. The war between the two begins on 29 September 2000, when Giovanni Torcasio, boss of the clan, is killed by the Giampà family. From there a series of homicides is triggered, each time involving one or the other faction, and resulting in more than twenty deaths in little more than two years. To put an end to this vendetta, the families come up with the idea of a marriage: that is, they try to arrange a marriage between a Torcasio woman and an associate of the Giampà family, Giovanni Cannizzaro. In reality, the marriage plan is a ruse: what Giovanni actually brings to his fiancée’s house is an Easter basket filled with three kilograms of explosives connected to a remote detonator. Something goes wrong, the bomb does not go off, so the Cannizzaros decide to settle the matter personally: they take up a 7.65 calibre gun and begin shooting at the designated victims, killing Nino Torcasio and seriously wounding his brother Domenico.

This is how things were done in Lamezia in those years. Which is why, despite the fact that the house was seized, no one wants to go and live there. When the mayor decides to assign the residence to the police, they threaten to strike and say that the new space isn’t needed. It’s not true, and in fact they will later move to another facility. No one wants to go to that house for two reasons: the first is that it is a symbolic building, where Giovanni and Antonio Torcasio had always lived. The other is that six yards away there is another house, where the very same Torcasio family continues to live. The houses are close by, in fact, with entrances and exits designed in such a way as to allow for a quick escape from one building to another in case of a threat.