“I can’t get that girl’s screams out of my head anymore.” Pasquale Sgrò doesn’t look for them, he has them on him. It tells of a twenty-two year old who ran towards her husband who had fallen two meters, already motionless, already elsewhere. It is a scene that cannot become statistical, but remains in the life of those who see it. From there we start again every time: from the silence after the noise, from the gaze of those who remain.
Sgrò has known these stories since 1980, when he began entering the factories and construction sites of Central Italy. Places that smell of solvents, of cut wood, of hot iron. Spaces where work is a right, but can become a risk if haste takes the place of attention. He was an inspector when the profession didn’t end up in the newspapers and continues today, as a consultant, to set foot in places where everyday life has turned into tragedy.
«In an inspection you are first a person, then a technician», he says. “You take the emotion off your face, not your memory.” His books are made of these memories. The first stories were born as short comic stories: true events, heard on a sidewalk or read in a Supreme Court ruling. Sgrò imagined, knowing it, the pace of the victims, the exact point at which the wheel stops turning, the moment in which a distraction becomes irreparable. Then came the novel The other inspector (Corbaccio), and with it Domenico Dodaro, the labor inspector who returns to Lucca after a bereavement and finds a textile factory where a girl is killed by the warping machine.
A story that is very similar to that of Luana D’Orazio, even if fiction keeps its distance. «I have seen dozens of warping machines. I know what it’s like to go into it afterward. I know what stays in the eyes,” he says. Dodaro’s character is not a hero, he is not a vigilante: he is a man who knows the struggle of limits. He is fragile, stubborn, marked. «The inspectors», explains Sgrò, «experience a particular loneliness. They are not looking for a murderer: they are looking for the technical truth that precedes the tragedy. And that truth is often uncomfortable for everyone.”
When Rai decided to bring this matter to television, Sgrò was called as a consultant. He followed the writing, corrected the hierarchy of roles, indicated the tone of conversations, the way in which an inspector enters a company, asks for documents, questions the workers. He spent days on set. «When I saw Alessio Vassallo get off the train with his bag over his shoulder I saw myself as young again. The same. Same hair, same pace. It affected me more than I imagined.” The series, broadcast from 2 December on Rai 1doesn’t look for spectacle. It remains adherent to the real profession, to the ways, to the often long and tedious times of inspection work. He talks about what it means to return to the office with doubts, notes and the feeling of having only skimmed the surface of things. It shows the effort to explain, to insist, to convince a company that prevention is not an obstacle but a form of respect. Enter into the complexity of relationships with entrepreneurs, union delegates and often frightened witnesses. «The real issue», he explains, «is that security concerns everyone, but often it belongs to no one».
Pasquale Sgrò insists a lot on the language. As a technician and as a writer. Words like “fatality”, “destiny”, “tragic coincidence” weigh on him. «These are words that erase. And by canceling they absolve,” he says. «Behind a death at work there is almost always a behaviour, a choice, a negligence, a broken chain. It is more convenient to talk about fatality, but fatality is the mask of irresponsibility». In his stories there is all this: the fragile culture of safety, the banality that kills more often than the noisy machine. Like someone who falls from a ladder. «These are not exceptional cases», he continues, «they are Italian normality: we think that what we have been doing for years is safe only because it has always gone well. Until it’s no longer good.” Then he adds a detail: «Often the entrepreneurs I meet after an accident are destroyed men. They didn’t want to hurt anyone. But too often they have confused shortcuts with efficiency.” This is where prevention, for the former labor inspector, must become a gesture of civil maturity. Not a legal obligation, but an education of the gaze.
The heart of the issue, for Pasquale Sgrò, is also institutional. In Italy, controls are entrusted to too many bodies: the national inspectorate, local health authorities, INPS, Inail and the Carabinieri. Each depends on a different Ministry. Skills overlap, languages are confused, responsibilities are diluted. And above all there are few inspectors. «Too few. Thousands of companies go without audits for years. It’s mathematical: we can’t do it.” Then there is the issue of professionalism. «We cannot expect an accountant or a philosophy graduate to write the risk assessment document. Everyone must do their job. Safety requires technical training, not improvisation». It’s a phrase that should cause more discussion than it happens. The most weighty addition comes almost at the end: «Do you know what hurts me? When after yet another death someone says: “He was just a worker”. But what does it mean? That life is worth depending on who lives in it?”. This is perhaps the reason why he writes: because telling means restoring dignity. Even to those who have no voice. Even to those who were left under a car that should never have moved.
His new book and the Rai fiction serve exactly this: to bring the issue back into people’s homes, into the living room, into a family’s dinner. A reminder that four deaths a day at work are not a fate, but a collective responsibility. «Security», he states, «is not a budget item: it is an item of conscience». Pasquale Sgrò entrusts the closure to reasoning, partly as a former inspector, partly with the attitude of a writer: «Work must give life, not take it away. Security is not a signature. It’s a form of respect. And respect is never negotiable.”
