but the campaign fails because in that period with Collettivo Zero we were offering free evening courses in Italian for immigrants and these courses were attended by young men and also a few young woman from every ethnic group imaginable ranging from Nigerians to Algerians Albanians and Colombians one evening the students all came in concerned and upset and one of them who was named Yussef a young Tunisian who I’ve known for many years he’s a young man who only needs to take a few more exams to get his degree in medicine he works in the fields every summer to get enough money to keep going he lives across the street from a friend of mine and speaks dialect better than he speaks Italian when he talks with us he normally speaks dialect and he attends the Italian classes because he wants to learn to speak proper Italian so this Yussef arrives that evening and says dimana me n’aggia i’ which is dialect for tomorrow I have to go away when I ask him why he says that his landlord explained to him that his presence is no longer welcome that he has to give up his room and it would be better if he leaves entirely and so that evening that’s all everybody talks about

the matter strikes me and my friends as serious and scary we feel violated all of the work we’ve done is about to be ruined as well as the danger of serious consequences for us because we are offering these Italian lessons in the church in a town near my town where that priest was killed Don Peppino a priest who always opposed the clans and who along with a few other priests in the area took considerable risks with his sermons and had taken part in all the demonstrations it was thought that he had been killed because he had refused to officiate at a funeral because all of the bosses were planning to attend that funeral it was the funeral of a clan member and he had just preached a sermon against them he was killed in his rectory on his own saint’s day St. Joseph San Giuseppe the nickname for Giuseppe being Peppino March nineteenth early that morning while he was putting on his vestments they came into the rectory and shot him in the head

after the lesson which actually never took place because the hour that we usually spent teaching Italian grammar this time we spent talking about what had happened other friends showed up who teach Italian courses for immigrants on other evenings because we divided up the week among us there were two people who teach that course so these friends showed up we told them about what had happened but they already knew they’d heard about it people were talking about it in the towns and villages in the streets where the immigrants lived no one knew what to do how to react fortunately we have relationships with Luigi and Chiara who are a point of reference for us not only in political terms but also socially because Chiara is also in charge of contacts with a variety of antiracist associations on a national level like Neroenonsolo and so Chiara had a good idea a smart idea that the only way to put a halt to this thing was to make a national case of it and so we all decided to organize a conference here involving all the antiracist associations with a presence in our area and the national ones as well