ALEXANDRIA. Farewell to the “Commander”. The appellation was common among Alexandrians of a certain age to indicate Remo Benzi, who died at 83: probably because he led the city’s traffic police for almost twenty years, from 1978 to 1994, crossing the entire decade of Alexandria ” to drink”.
He began with the one administered by Felice Borgoglio, who named him, to conclude with that of Francesca Calvo, with whom he was not very in tune with character and politically. Remo Benzi was born in Genoa (and it was enough to hear him speak to confirm it) in 1938, but the family fled to Tuscany during the war. His father was already in the Genoese municipal police force, in 1962 he too enlisted while studying as a surveyor.
From that period he remembered an episode: “I got the blond in the red spider.” It was Lorenzo Bozano, convicted of the kidnapping and killing of Milena Sutter, a case that shook Italy. In ’72 he won the competition for commander of the local police of Bassano del Grappa and faced the first “environmental” emergency, the 1976 Friuli earthquake, where he went to bring relief with a humanitarian column.
Experience repeated in 1981 in Irpinia. “Our team was among the best organized – recalls Carlo Bologna, of the Red Cross -: the Civil Protection would only arrive a decade later, there was not even a chain of command there and it was hard to understand where the authority was . Benzi, as a physicist, as an attitude, but also as a capacity for work, was the right man to impose himself ».
A man of emergencies, Remo Benzi was also a protagonist in the period of floods: in Alessandria during that of ’94, then in Casale in 2000, as in 1998 he was called by the then mayor Riccardo Coppo to lead the traffic police. In the previous four years he had obtained command of the Municipal of Genoa, his city, but it did not end well: it was a very hard battle with the Sansa junta (“to defend the traffic police from unjust and partisan attacks” he said) that led him to resign. . In 2002, after having briefly been head of the Provincial Police of Alessandria, he threw himself into politics with his usual impetus: he was elected city councilor of Genoa, a few years later he ran for mayor in Castelspina, the town where he had lived for years, where he left his wife Tina, three daughters, five grandchildren and where the funeral will be held tomorrow afternoon.