Oriana Fallaci

Oriana Fallaci (Florence, June 29, 1929-ibid., September 15, 2006) was an Italian journalist, activist and writer. She was the first Italian woman war correspondent. As the writer of twelve books, she has sold twenty million copies worldwide; As a journalist, she gained great international prestige, especially for her interviews with famous people. In 2007 the public park Quadronno Crivelli in the center of Milan changed its name to Giardino Oriana Fallaci (Oriana Fallaci Garden) in her homage.

Biography

Contribution to the Italian Resistance

Oriana Fallaci was the eldest of four sisters, Neera and Paola, also journalists and writers, and Elisabetta, adoptive daughter of the Fallaci family. Among her ancestors is a Spanish great-grandmother from Barcelona, who grew up in Mussolini's Fascist Italy. Her father, Edoardo, a bricklayer, was an active anti-fascist partisan, and undoubtedly influenced Oriana's ideas, who, still a teenager, was also a partisan during World War II. She participated in the Resistance against the Nazi occupation in her native region. The young Fallaci thus joined the clandestine movement of the Resistance "Justice and Freedom" living first-hand the events of the war: during the occupation of Florence by the Germans, the father was taken prisoner and tortured in Villa Triste, and later released, while Oriana took care of the transport of ammunition from one part of the Arno to another, crossing the river at the dry point, since the Germans had destroyed the bridges. For her activism during the war she received at the age of 14 the honorary recognition of the Italian Army.

1950s: The Debut in Journalism

After having completed secondary studies at the Galileo classical high school, and receiving scholarships several times, she entered the Faculty of Medicine: «I enrolled in Medicine because Uncle Bruno said that studying Medicine would help me to be a writer and At that time, the University was not free: it had to be paid for. Then I stayed in journalism that allowed me to write and, while I was doing my university studies, I wrote small reports for a daily in Florence » she says.

She left medicine to dedicate herself to journalism, encouraged by her uncle Bruno Fallaci, who was also a journalist and director of several weekly newspapers. She began working for the Mattino dell'Italia centrale , a Christian-inspired newspaper, where she dealt with different topics: events, judicial chronicle and customs. She was fired from the newspaper because she refused to write an article in favor of Palmiro Togliatti, as her director had ordered. And so after this she went to Milan to work at the weekly Epoca de Mondadori, which was then run by her uncle Bruno Fallaci, who, in order not to be accused of favoring her, entrusted her with the worst jobs (« infamous commissions").

In 1951 his first article was published for L’Europeo, in which he dealt with issues of modernity, worldliness and events. In the 1950s he toured all over America. In 1956 he traveled to New York for the first time to write about celebrities and worldliness (society, heart, etc). From this experience he derived his first book, The Seven Deadly Sins of Hollywood ( I sette peccati di Hollywood ), where he describes all the goings on in Hollywood. The book's foreword was written by Orson Welles.

The 1960s

In the 1960s he focused his activity in New York, where he settled. In 1961, she made a report on the condition of women in the East, a work that became the first great success of the writer, entitled Useless sex - A journey around women ("Il sesso inutile - Viaggio intorno alla donna"). In 1962, Penelope en la guerra ("Penelope alla guerra") was published, her first narrative work in which she recounts the life of Gió, an Italian girl who goes to New York to work as a script writer, and there he will meet people from his past.

In the days of the “space race”, he interviewed NASA technicians and astronauts. In 1965 she published the book If the Sun dies ("Se il sole muore"), a diary of that experience that the writer dedicated to her father. To write that book, she found the mission's project manager, the German scientist Wernher von Braun, who during World War II designed V2 ballistic missiles for Nazi Germany, which were launched over London and other European targets. The account of the experience of Apollo XI (1969) is collected in the book That day on the Moon ("Quel giorno sulla Luna"), published in 1970. The commander of Apollo 12, Charles Conrad, on the eve of the launch, he went to New York to find Oriana Fallaci and ask her advice on the phrase to pronounce when stepping on the Moon. Since Neil Armstrong had said: "One small step for a man, but one giant leap for humanity", the Florentine advised, given Conrad's short stature, the phrase: "For Neil it would be a small step, but for me it has been very big." The commander, who took with him to the Moon a photo of Oriana and her mother of her when she was a child, said exactly that phrase when she arrived at the satellite.

In 1967, as a war correspondent and special envoy for the newspaper L'Europeo, he went to Vietnam. He returned to that country of Indochina twelve times in seven years, and described the war criticizing both the Viet Cong (National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam or FNLV) and the communists, as well as the Americans and the South Vietnamese, documenting the lies and atrocities, but also heroism and humanity, of that conflict that was for Fallaci a bloody madness. The experiences of a year of war, which she lived in first person, were collected in the book Nothing and so be it ("Niente e così sia"), published in 1969.

Towards the middle of 1968, the journalist temporarily left the front to return to the United States, to cover the death of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the student riots of those years. In a passage of Nothing and so be it Oriana ridicules «the vandalism of bourgeois students who dare to invoke Che Guevara, but who live in houses with air conditioning, go to school with dad's SUV and to the night club with the silk shirt».

Oriana Fallaci

On October 2, 1968, on the eve of the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico, during the repression of a protest demonstration by Mexican students against the military occupation of the UNAM campus, which today is remembered as the In the Tlatelolco massacre, Fallaci was wounded by a burst from a submachine gun in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City. Between 68 and 325 young people died there (the precise number is unknown). The journalist was injured and even considered dead; she was taken to a hospital mortuary where a priest realized she was alive. Fallaci defined the massacre as "a massacre worse than the ones I have seen during the war."

As a war correspondent, he also followed the conflicts between India and Pakistan, those in South America and those in the Middle East.

Regarding Spain, he met the then crown princes, of whom he comments in a letter dated January 8, 1967 in New York: “Yes, having lunch with Juan Carlos and Sofía is the worst. I know those two idiots. I interviewed them in Athens before their stupid marriage, and they are made from the same mold as Franco…” “It is not surprising that Juan Carlos and Sofía become King and Queen of Spain when the Assassin dies”, Oriana continues explaining in her letter, referring to the Spanish dictator. “They are his protégés. Since childhood, Juan Carlos lived under Franco's shadow and is his obedient robot. He describes Sofia as follows: “She is simply the daughter of that queen of Greece who […] was in the Hitler Youth and who had 50,000 socialist Greek citizens imprisoned.”

The 1970s and the meeting with Panagoulis

On August 21, 1973, the Florentine journalist met Alexandros Panagoulis, one of the leaders of the Greek opposition to the Dictatorship of the Colonels, who was persecuted, tortured and imprisoned for a long time. They met the day he was released from prison: Fallaci was his partner until his death, which occurred in a mysterious traffic accident on May 1, 1976. In 1975 Fallaci and Panagoulis collaborated in the investigations into the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini., friend of the couple. Oriana was the first to denounce the political motivation for the poet's murder. The same year she published the book Letter to a child who was never born ( Lettera a un bambino mai nato ), dedicated to a son that Fallaci was expecting and who, however,, she lost. For the writer it was a great editorial success and sold four and a half million copies worldwide. Fallaci described the life of Panagoulis in his novel Un hombre (Un uomo), published in 1979, and also in a long interview, which was later collected in Interview with history (Interview with the Story). Fallaci always considered the Panagoulis accident a true political homicide, ordered by politicians who had made careers with the military junta. The death of her beloved deeply marked the life of the writer.

Oriana with Ayatollah Jomeini

Her activity as a reporter was followed by interviews with important political personalities, analysis of the main chronicle facts and the most relevant contemporary issues. Among the characters interviewed by Fallaci were King Hussein I of Jordan, Vo Nguyen Giap, Pietro Nenni, Giulio Andreotti, Giorgio Amendola, Archbishop Makarios, his beloved Alexandros Panagoulis, Nguyen Cao Ky, Yasser Arafat, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Haile Selassie, Henry Kissinger, Walter Cronkite, Federico Fellini, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Nguyen Van Thieu, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Deng Xiaoping, Willy Brandt, Sean Connery, Leopoldo Galtieri (whom he directly called "torturer"), Muammar Gaddafi or Ayatollah Khomeini (during the interview, Fallaci rebuked him as a "tyrant" and took off his chador, which was required for the interview; Khomeini, irritated, referred to the journalist in a later speech calling her "that woman" and affirming that he should not be an example to follow). Some of these interviews were collected in the book Intervista con la Storia, published in 1974. Both in her books and in her articles and chronicles, she displayed a very personal, provocative style that always placed her in the most full controversy. In her work, Oriana Fallaci started from the hypothesis that the important thing in interviews is not the questions but the answers: If a person has talent, you can ask them the most trivial thing in the world: they will always respond brilliantly and deep. If a person is mediocre, you can ask him the most intelligent question in the world: he will always answer mediocre . In 1976, Fallaci supported the Radical Party lists, also for feminist campaigns.

The chancellor of Columbia College in Chicago awarded her an honorary degree in literature, calling her "one of the most widely read and loved writers in the world." Fallaci also wrote for important newspapers and magazines such as the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, Life, Le Nouvel Observateur, The Washington Post, Look, Stern, and the Corriere della sera.

Judgement in Tehran

From the 1980s to the end

In 1990 the novel Inshallah (Insciallah) was published, set in the world of Italian troops who in 1983 were sent to Beirut on a UN mission. Fallaci obtained permission to be credited with the Italian contingent from defense minister Giovanni Spadolini (1925-1994). The book begins with the description of the first double suicide attack by Islamic terrorists against the American and French barracks, which caused 299 deaths among the military. In 1991 Fallaci was sent to the Gulf War, the last time she Fallaci worked as a war reporter. Then she the writer retired to New York, where she lived in a two-story villa on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. There she began to write a novel that took her throughout the nineties, only interrupted by the events of September 11, 2001. At that time, Oriana discovered that she had lung cancer, which she would later call "the alien". The novel was published posthumously on July 30, 2008. The book, titled A Hat Full of Cherries (Un cappello pieno di ciliege), is about an Italian family saga that runs from 1773 to 1889.

His books and articles on the issues of September 11 aroused both praise and response in the political world and in public opinion. Through these, the writer denounced the decline of Western civilization, threatened by Islamic fundamentalism, considering it incapable of defending itself. Fallaci was of the opinion that the increasing pressure exerted in recent years by Islamic immigration to Europe, and in particular to Italy, together with decisions, in his opinion debatable, and the increase in attitudes of reciprocal intolerance, was proof of the veracity of his thesis. In her opinion, what is happening is a planned attempt by the Islamic world to Islamize the West, based on the structures of the Koran and that would be backed by more than a millennium of conflicts and hostilities between Muslims and Christians; this attempt would inevitably lead to a clash of civilizations.

Although she continued to express her anti-clerical views, defining herself as an “atheist-Christian” in her book The Force of Reason (La forza della ragione), she publicly declared her admiration for Pope Benedict XVI, who on August 27, 2005, received her in a private audience at Castel Gandolfo. The meeting was supposed to be secret, but the news was published three days later, while the content of the interview was never disclosed.

In March 2005, the newspaper Libero took the initiative to request signatures for the President of the Republic to grant Fallaci the position of senator for life. More than 75,000 signatures were collected.

The Tomb of Oriana Fallaci in the Evangelical Cemetery agli Allori of Florence (Settore I - XV - 10)

Fallaci died in Florence on September 15, 2006 at the age of seventy-seven, after a worsening of his health conditions as a result of cancer. He wished to die in his hometown: «I want to die in the Mannelli tower looking at the Arno river from the Ponte Vecchio. It was the headquarters of the partisans that my father ruled, the “Justice and Freedom” group. Members of the Partito d'Azione, liberals and socialists. When I was a child, she went there, and my battle name was Emilia. She handed out the hand pumps to the adults. She hid them inside the salad basket ». However, given the inadequacy of the site for a person in a precarious state of health, it was impossible for her to stay in the Mannelli Tower. The writer was admitted to the Santa Chiara clinic, where she died.

In 2015 Cristina De Stefano published La corresponsal (Editorial Aguilar, 2015), the first authorized biography of the famous journalist and writer. In 2016, a collection of 120 letters compiled in the book La paura è un peccato (Fear is a sin) , from her nephew and her heir, Edoardo Perazzi, came out. In 2015 Polish director Andrzej Wajda released the biographical film Walesa Czlowiek z nadziei (Walesa, the Man of Hope) where he presents a fictionalized interview of Walesa by Oriana Fallaci.

Works

• 1956, I sette peccati di Hollywood (The Seven Capital Sins of Hollywood)
• 1961, Il sesso inutile, viaggio intorno alla donna (Sex useless)
• 1962, Penelope alla guerra (Penelope in the War, Barcelona, Noguer and Caralt Editors)
• 1966, Se il Sole muore ("If the Sun dies")
• 1969, Niente e così sia ("Nothing and so be it")
• 1974, Intervista con la storia (Interviews with History, Barcelona, Noguer and Caralt Editors, 1986)
• 1975, Lettera a bambino mai nato (Letter to a child who was never born, Barcelona, Noguer and Caralt Editors, 1990)
• 1979, A uomo (A man, Barcelona, Noguer and Caralt Editores, 1984).
• 1990 Insciallah. ("Inshallah")
• 2001, The rabbia e l'orgoglio (Rabies and pride, Madrid, La Esfera de los Libros, 2002).
• 2004, The forza della ragione (The force of reason, Madrid, La Esfera de los Libros, 2004). It points to Eurabia's thesis and accuses the European left of being "anti-western". It's a sequel. Rabies and pride.
• 2005, Oriana Fallaci intervista sè stessa - L'Apocalisse (Oriana Fallaci interviews herself - The Apocalypse, Madrid, La Esfera de los Libros, 2005). There was a first edition in 2004, which did not include the long epilogue “The Apocalypse”, with the title Oriana Fallaci intervista Oriana Fallaci.
• 2008, A hoodie pieno di ciliege, (A hat full of cherries, Madrid, La Esfera de los Libros, 2009). A novel published posthumously in which Oriana Fallaci worked for ten years, and which deals with the history of his family.
• 2016, The paura è un peccato (Fear is a sin), published by the publisher Rizzoli, 2016. Collection of 120 letters made by Edoardo Perazzi.

Filmography

• The Grail (1968), screenwriter.
• L'Oriana (2014), a movie by Marco Turco with Vittoria Puccini.