It was not enough for him to win the battle with Covid. Sante Notarnicola, the “bandit poet” of the Cavallero gang, whose story the film is inspired by, died at 82 years old “Bandits in Milan“by Carlo Lizzani. Arrested in 1967 together with Cavallero and two other comrades after a bloody robbery, Notarnicola was sentenced to life imprisonment. During his long detention he was the animator of a series of riots in prison, and in prison he He started to write, and he became free again in 2000, and since 1995, when he obtained semi-liberty, he has managed the Mutenye pub in Bologna, dedicating himself to the youngest people and to numerous social, solidarity and cultural projects.
Born in Castellaneta, in Puglia, Notarnicola, after spending a few years in an Institute for Abandoned Childhood, moved to Turin to join his mother, who in the meantime had emigrated. In the industrial capital of the North he began to frequent groups of workers and former partisans and with them he served first in the Fgci, then in the PCI, until in ’59 he began a series of ‘expropriations’ with some comrades, organizing robberies in banks and jewelers to raise money for the liberation movements in colonial countries; and it is during one of these robberies that, in ’67, he was arrested and then subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment: “from that moment (’68 and the BR are still far away) the judges will scramble to give him always different labels, as a troublemaker to subversive, from nappist to brigatista, from irrecoverable to irreducible “, reads the biography published on his website.
«Sante Notarnicola has left us – the farewell of the online communist newspaper Contropiano.org – Southern boy, worker, ‘bandit’ (as he said at the time of his arrest), political prisoner, poet, teacher of life and moral rigor. Without emphasis, without screams, with the serenity of those who know how to choose according to justice. Communist by choice of life and culture, not by organizational membership. A born fighter, who had also defeated Covid in recent weeks, ‘healing practically by himself’, as the doctors said, because at 83 and with the various problems he had had, even the dosage of medicines had to be cautious. He had returned home a few days ago, in Bologna, which had become his city after his childhood in Turin and 21 years of wandering in the ‘chamois circuit’, as they used to call the special prisons. We are still stunned by the news. We embrace his wife Delia and all the companions who have been by his side every day over the years ».