18	BEYOND THE HORIZON

I’ve already mentioned my eternal need to work. Study and work. To pay the bills, not because of ideology; I wasn’t yet acquainted with Mao’s little red book.

That summer, the summer of 1954, the summer I graduated from high school, I was at the point of going to work for Generali, the insurance company. I had filled out an application because I needed a job. I consoled myself with the thought that Kafka too had worked for Assicurazioni Generali. In the worst case, I told myself, that’s a great example.

During those months the RAI—which had started to transmit on January 3, the day before my eighteenth birthday—had been occupied by Catholics, progressive Catholics of that era, luckily, followers of Giorgio La Pira: cattocommunisti (Catholic communists) before the word existed.

In June, Filiberto Guala was named CEO. He was Turinese, a Catholic engineer, but who came from the FUCI, the progressive Italian Catholic university association, and had also worked at RIV, a branch of Fiat. He was highly efficient, and had been Fanfani’s point man for the INA Casa plan for housing—in other words, one of the few serious undertakings in postwar Italy. The first thing Guala did was to hold a public competition for employees; he was looking for staff. He met the handful of winners and realized immediately that he didn’t know what to do with them. A few came from journalism, mostly the fascist kind, but many were young actors with trained voices.

I remember them, my comrades: Ezio Zefferi, Paolino Rosi, and Tito Stagno, beautiful as the sun, Carlo Mazzarella, who arched his feet when he walked so he would look taller.

Guala thought: how am I going to launch the new television medium with human material like this? Simpatico and clever they may be, but still. . . .

So he started going around to the Catholic associations looking for someone, anyone, to give him a hand. He came to Turin and was told about Umberto Eco, Furio Colombo, and myself. Umberto was a national director of Azione Cattolica’s youth wing, a friend of Mario Rossi. I was a youth barely out of high school; they had already finished university.

In 1954 Guala hired us on a grant: 65,000 lire (the lira of the 1950s; it would amount to a few hundred euros or dollars today).

First we all did a three-month course, September to December, in Milan. We had to learn how to do everything: newscaster, host, functionary. When the three months were up, Furio and Umberto stayed in Milan and I went back to Turin: I wanted to go back home so I could live with my mother. I didn’t like living away, I was enrolled in university, I wanted to study as well as work.

But it was really fun, there were some unique characters: I recall Pier Emilio Gennarini, a super-integrist super-Catholic, but with a leftward twist, sort of a Romano Prodi fifty years in advance.

In Milan I had a really great time. I lived with Furio and Umberto, and in the evenings, when they didn’t drag me off to Santa Tecla—a den of perversity, they played jazz there and you could meet girls, which greatly worried my spiritual director, Monsignor Caramello—we stayed home and Umberto explained medieval philosophy to me, because I had an upcoming examination on that: Eloise and Abelard and so on.

In January 1955 I started working for the RAI in Turin. Everything was clustered together: the office, the university, my home.

I did a weekly program for young people directed by Furio, with Umberto as a consultant of sorts. Furio—what can one say? Even then he was the type who forced his team to really commit, I believe he ran L’Unità the same way, long editorial meetings . . .

The program was called Orrizonte. It was broadcast in the afternoon, at 6:00 PM, when the kids were still up. For a while nobody took any notice, they were all watching the evening news.

I interviewed Danilo Dolci not long before he went to occupy land in Sicily, and he announced on our program that he was going to do so.

Dario Fo and Giustino Durano also came on Orrizonte. Durano invited me to go on tour with him; he had created a revue company. He said to me, “You’re good, forget about the RAI.”

Michele Straniero and I invented a segment of Orrizonte called “Controviaggio in Italia” (at that time there was a radio program called Viaggio in Italia with Guido Piovene). The idea was to go around to Italian cities and do real, disturbing investigative journalism with help from young people who had organized themselves, from youth associations, from unions. We did two shows, from Asti and Piacenza, but when we got to La Spezia for the third we focused on the arms manufacturer Oto Melara, and therefore the problem of military procurement . . . and they shut us down on the spot. Just before we went on air there was a general rehearsal, which the head honchos in Rome could watch on a low-frequency channel. They immediately telephoned Susanna Egri, a great ballerina from Turin who had her own program in which she taught basic dancing. She was the one they always kept ready to go on the air in case there was a sudden “hole” in the schedule for political reasons.

Meantime I had to keep studying. There was an exam to prepare for on Kant’s Critique of Judgment, of which I understood absolutely nothing, not even the commas, a real disaster.

Guala was too free a spirit and was forced to resign by a genuine conspiracy between the Christian Democrats and the Vatican. He resigned on June 18, 1956. After a spell back at INA Casa, he became a Trappist monk at age fifty-three in the Frattocchie convent and was ordained as a priest in 1967.

Guala had always given us plenty of protection; with him out of the way, Marcello Rodinò arrived and everything changed. Rodinò was passionate about sailing. And not much else.

But for a couple of years the RAI in Turin had been a gathering point, a place for doing new things, for debating freely. A large slice of the Turinese intelligentsia took part: Luciano Gallino, Paolo Siniscalco, Vincenzo Incisa, Folco Portinari. From a little farther off, Emanuele Milano.

At that time I got to know Walter Bonatti, and we remained friends; we’ve even gone climbing together.

But I was getting tired and feeling cramped in that milieu. In 1957 I quit, and Monsignor Caramello found me a job as a teacher in the Casa di Carità Arti e Mestieri, a charitable vocational and trade school.