“Look here, what piece is coming out.” “Have you seen my guitar around?”. “Tonight we start with a new song …”.
For 41 years, this voice continues to speak like this in the memory of those who do not want to cancel it for anything in the world. Indeed, he only wishes that, so sunny and engaging, it remains within reach of the fingers typing on the computer “davidecaprioli.it”, discovering on that site everything possible by Davide Caprioli, university student of economics, born in Verona on 3 February 1960, died on the morning of 2 August 1980 as a result of a bomb detonated in the Bologna station. Leaving Ancona early, to go home with his girlfriend Ermanna and her mother, during the stop due to the change of train, Davide has the misfortune to leave them at the bar at the wrong time. That brief shift, in the direction of the timetable, is enough for him to blow up and die a couple of hours later in the hospital, while the two women remain unharmed.
Thus it happens that among the 85 victims and over 200 injured in the most serious attack in the history of the Italian Republic, which occurred by neo-fascist terrorists according to what was reconstructed in court with a lot of definitive convictions, Davide, at the time leader of the Dna Group , is recognized as the “boy with the guitar”, grown up learning Jimi Hendrix solos by heart and always ready to remember, one chord after another played in the kitchen while cooking pasta, like that wonderful Beatles piece does.
Exactly so, with his inseparable instrument on his shoulder, despite having been gutted by the bomb just exploded, Davide appears in a twelve square meter triptych painted by the street artist Andrea Tarli. The work, made with acrylic colors on a frame of cardboard panels, has won a special announcement launched by the Student Council to be destined for the University of Verona, which will exhibit it for the first time during the ceremony scheduled at 12.30. on Monday 2 August, the day of the 41st anniversary of the massacre, in the atrium of the Faculty of Letters, in via San Francesco 22.
Sitting on the platform of the station, under the famous clock whose hands have since been blocked to everlasting memory at 10.25 am, an absorbed David, and at the same time alert, becomes the fulcrum of a representation where victims, witnesses and rescuers appear and they fade among the tears and patches of a daily reality suddenly raped by the terrorist act that transforms the departure for a holiday by the sea into a run with mermaids. It is only a glimpse of the total, kindly granted a preview by the author and the university before the official presentation, but sufficient to incorporate the figurative and dramatic qualities of the triptych signed by Andrea Tarli. Anyone who knows the painting of this forty-eight year old from the Marches of Ascoli Piceno can imagine the touching accuracy lavished on bringing out the characters and backgrounds of such a tragic page in the history of Italy, which has become the subject of that neo-humanistic poetics with which Tarli has already transformed into Art any wall or ruin of the most diverse urban scenarios, in Mosciano Sant’Angelo, province of Teramo, as in Lisbon. For him, this inauguration also has the flavor of a personal revenge, given that it takes place in Verona itself where his mural “Red Shoes”, painted four years ago in the Santa Lucia district as a testimony against violence against women, was canceled at culmination of a crescendo of controversy grafted by members of the League and supported by other street artists.
“As soon as I saw what came out of the packaging with which Tarli sent us this new work of his, I felt a shiver run down my skin” says Stefano Ambrosini, 27-year-old biotechnology researcher, president of the Student Council since last December after the elections won at the head of the UDU list, the Union of university students. “Davide Caprioli was a student of this university – explains Ambrosini – and it is enough to remember him in a country where we tend to remove everything, starting with what happened after World War II. It is a scandal that educational programs in high school ignore the massacres and terrorism that bloodied our history in the second half of the twentieth century ”.
In an Italy that arranges itself and, in emergencies, pulls on what happens, there is also Davide’s girlfriend, Ermanna who, immediately after the explosion of the bomb, grabs and carries with her the gutted guitar of her “boyfriend” . Forty-one years later, it is an instrument that, despite being reduced to those conditions, continues to “play” in its own way. This is revealed by Cristina Caprioli, a 65-year-old medical technician to whom we owe that authentic heritage of historical testimonies dedicated to the memory of her brother, and created together with Augusto Bolognesi, who was Davide’s classmate at middle school. “Yes, this guitar has been carefully analyzed by the forensic police – says his sister. – This means that, even with its neck destroyed and its strings shot in the air, it carries with it some traces of that massacre, of which the hidden motives, the most unmentionable complicities continue to escape us ”.
Mysteries and principals at the center of the new trial which, since last April, has been held in the assize court in Bologna.