Written by Sonia Trovato, translated by Anna Zorzi 

Should I die in 100 years, I’d like people to read the following words on my tombstone, which Nelson Mandela pronounced: “A winner is a dreamer who has never stopped dreaming. Vittorio Arrigoni: a dreamer”.

I have no fangs because I’m not a wolf, that’s what Vittorio Arrigoni wrote in a  composition at elementary school. And that is what one can learn from the  biography written by his mother, Egidia Beretta, titled Il Viaggio di Vittorio (Dalai Editore, 2012,pp 185), an extraordinary  portrait of her son, who spent his whole life fighting the “wolves” and defending the oppressed.

Although he became popular in the media and newspapers as a volunteer in the Gaza Strip, Palestine, his journey started in  a small town in the province of Lecco, near Como Lake,where he was born in 1975 “with his little  fist  clenched up in the air” as if he wanted to foretell his future as a revolutionary. He was brought up in a family of small entrepreneurs who taught him the value of antifascism and of solidarity. When he left school, instead of going on seaside holidays to Ibiza or somewhere noisy with his friends, he went to Peru, where he started the first of a long  series of  work fields  organized in Europe and Africa. Leggi il resto di questa voce →