The day before yesterday I went to the newsstand and bought an entire bat of newspapers. I read them all, from top to bottom. Just as I followed the countless broadcasts (with an easy tear) on TV dedicated to the death of Pippo Baudo. A deluge of words, memories, anecdotes, testimonies of affection by colleagues, soubrette, singers, artists, high TV officials. All sacrosanct. Baudo was, for sixty years, the absolute ladies of Italian television, the National Pippo. Yet, in the Spruloquy of superlatives, in this franting to celebrate the dear extinct, I was unable to find the person I met, which I had attended daily, not only for work. A holy, a sort of figurine instead of the individual I live in my memory. I have not been with him for a long time: four television seasons, in the mid -eighties. So, I collaborated with Rai just as a press officer for Baudo’s broadcasts. A fortune but also a massacring, formative work, which kept me busy full time without looking at the clock, the calendar, family rhythms. Before Fantastic 5 (success that consecrated Heather Parisi with the abbreviation Crilù and launched Eleonora Brigliadori), to follow Fantastic 6 (even greater success that revealed Lorella Cuccarini’s talent) and then Fantastic 7 (that of the competition between Cuccarini and Alessandra Martines plus the sketches of the Solenghi-Marchesini-Lopez trio). But it did not end here: while every Saturday in the early evening it was aired Fantasticthe next day was working on the episode of Sunday inwhich often recycled the guests of the show giving their more relaxed space and climate. The program lasted nine months, as much as the Serie A football championship (whose news was Vate Paolo Valenti). There is more: they were the warm years of the battle between Rai and the Fininvest by Silvio Berlusconi. The high floors of Viale Mazzini wanted a variety that the listening to the spring even in the spring, so the entire editorial staff moved to Montecatini Terme to pack Evening of honor: a show dedicated every evening to celebrate the career of a different artist, actor or singer who was. It was the first time, Sanremo aside, that Rai made a great early evening show away. In short, for four years, excluding the summer holidays, I worked and lived in elbow with Baudo, one who in front and behind the stage did not spare himself and therefore loved who did like him. Rixment that, closed the episode of Sunday inused to leave by plane to Catania, where a couple of days remained. At dawn on Wednesday, before embarking on the first flight to Rome, he telephoned me by pulling me out of the bed to agree on the interviews: never a skipped one. Newspapers, TV, private radio (was the boom): nobody had to be snubbed. Word of order: respect everyone’s work.
I remember Pippo’s meetings with his faithful authors: Bruno Broccoli (historian and philologist, true Neapolitan soul as well as Dad of Umberto, in turn television and archaeologist author); Giorgio Calabrese (lyricist for Umberto Bindi, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Mina, Charles Aznavour or Ornella Vanoni of famous songs like See you, our concert, the girl from Ipanema, and if tomorrow, died of love, tomorrow is another day); Franco Torti (author and great cinema expert, to whom no actor or diva knew how to deny himself) and Marco Zavattini (son no less than Caesar, poet and writer of neorealism). What a show their discussions! That incapable around a concept, to an idea of entertainment, to a character to be proposed to the public in this or in that other way. How much profession I learned stealing it from them. These are not these, however, the things that returned to my mind while the nets, all, without distinction, celebrated the television mourning. Rather, it was a ringing of flash, episodes. Like when, on January 6, 1985, the last episode of Fantasticwe came out of the theater of the victories late at night and discovered that it was snowed in Rome. A crazy snowfall, never seen. Everything was muffled. There was no one around, let alone the taxis. Claudia Vinciguerra, the historic journalist of the newspaper, had made the small hours with us Dayvery nice connects but without a car. I was already thinking about how to solve when Baudo overlooked that, with his vocation, he said to me: “Maurizio, you think of his friend Claudia”. I loaded it on my utilitarian yearning and together the Solcam we slowly the snow of half of Rome until you find a house. Closing the door, she said: “Thanks Pippo on my part.” He struck me, because at that moment I represented him, the team of the broadcast. I was one of the family. Here, Pippo liked to do the pater familias. In a television sense, of course.
He knew everyone who worked with him, more or less in the shadows: technicians, electricians, tools, cameramen, costumers, scenographers, editors. He was interested in their families. I had confirmed it a few months later, in May, when, at the turn of the lunch break on a Saturday of rehearsals for the umpteenth episode of Sunday inI went to the clinic to reach my wife: Lorenzo had just been born, my son, after a troubled birth. I remained an hour, then I ran off worried about the delay. Of course, Pippo noticed it but, having known the reason, he embraced me strongly: “Tomorrow we say it in transmission”. He laughed … I, shy and clumsy, asked him not to do it. He respected my desire but, at the end of the episode, turned off the cameras, wanted to break some bottles to celebrate: another child was born in our atypical family. A couple of years later, Lorenzo in his mom, sitting on the front row armchairs of the theater of the victories, waited for the evidence to end Fantastic. When Pippo entered the scene with his vocal, Lorenzo did not hold back and pointing the finger towards him exclaimed: “Standa!”. Baudo had introduced a Sunday infor the first time, a sponsor like the Standa department stores and had become the Gingle popular, the music that accompanied it. And for the child, that was Mr. Standa. Baudo, amused, bent over him stroking the little fan … Here, Pippo liked participation, sharing: fatigue, success, affections. This was the case in the following years, when the work had ended up separating but every now and then we found ourselves for an interview or to exchange Christmas greetings. Cultured man, true musician, great professional. But Baudo was above all a person with profound humanity, a character who never wanted to get on the pedestal and has always tried to share. Like that time that, in Montecatini, the tests are completed, hundreds of people of a certain age had gone back among the trees of the park, outside the prefabricated prefabricate in which they were Baudo and Ricciarelli, fresh spouses. She, ringed by confusion, did not want to go out but Pippo closed the discussion with a peremptory: “Katia, we can’t disappoint them, I’m here for us!”. I remember the roar.
I thought of this seeing the long line of strangers, common individuals, viewers in the queue to pay homage to him in the theater of the victories, “his” theater. I am sure that Pippo liked this thing. Just as he will like the funeral, celebrated on live TV this afternoon among his people, in the church of Santa Maria della Stella (to whom he was very devoted) of the Natìa Militello Val di Catania. Here we are, dear Pippo. Quiet: you will not be alone, not even on this last trip.
