I didn’t want to tell stories about a backward village in the South in the hands of Mafia families. Many of the millions of viewers who watched us would have perceived them as remote, unrelated to them: stories that would not have had the power to engage the whole country. So I decided to talk about what was happening in the North, in Lombardy, in cement, in the drug trade, in the distribution of food and gas, in contract management, in the influences on local governments. I wanted to report what happens in the healthcare sector in Monza, in Novara, in the towns of Giussano, Seregno, Verano Brianza, Mariano Comense, Desio. These are not marginal stories, as they would have you believe. They are stories that concern everyone, the result of a system that is obeyed by those who at this time control much of my beautiful, ill-fated country. Yet my reconstruction of the Mafia’s infiltration in Lombardy, territory of the Lega Nord, was described as ‘infamous’. ‘For Saviano, the North is trash,’ they wrote in the papers, ‘For Saviano, the North is Mafia-run,’ simplifying to the utmost what I had presented in the broadcast, beginning with investigations into the infiltration of criminal organizations in the North and with the Legambiente’s reports on the ecomafia. As often happens, it’s as if the one telling the facts were at fault, the one exposing the mechanisms, the one who recalls the past asking the nation to face the findings as a unified front. The word that generated such an uproar in those days is ‘interloquire’, to have a say in. I had stated that the Mafia organizations have a say in discussions with political powers and that in the North, where political power is in the hands of the Lega Nord, the ’Ndrangheta chimes in with the League. I had based this on investigations which report continuous attempts by the ’Ndrangheta to influence the lists of candidates, and which describe intercepted communications among ’Ndrangheta members who speak of the League to one another as a party that they can influence, approach, control. ‘Interloquire’: a very broad term which does not by any means establish direct collusion or corruption, but which is a premise for suggesting that no one can feel safe and that no areas are immune from criminal money and the mafia-entrepreneurial alliance. Many politicians have even exploited the love story between Piergiorgio and Mina Welby (the first being affected by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, they both fought to grant Piergiorgio a dignified death without the assistance of a breathing machine) and the testimony of Beppino Englaro (father of Eluana Englaro, a woman who, after a car crash, has lived for seventeen years in a vegetative state) in the debate about the right to die. They tried to build consensus by discrediting people who gave strength and meaning to Italian institutions. ‘The good man will act only on maxims which he can at the same time will to be universal laws’: in the affairs of Beppino, Piergiorgio and Mina this Kantian principle was informed with blood, sweat and tears. And a defence of rights. Refusing to take a quicker way out, Beppino, Piergiorgio and Mina asked the institutions of our country for civility, understanding and the respect of a judgment from the Court of Cassation. They could have left Italy but they didn’t do so, turning their bodies into the battleground for a crusade in defence of fundamental human rights, in order to confirm the inalienable right of every individual to be able to freely decide on the type of care they undergo: treatment which is considered a cure and that involves keeping a patient alive at all costs.