Goodbye to Toni Capuozzo, the face of Mediaset who told the world from the front line

Silvio Berlusconi calls him to thank him and he thinks it is Cruciani. In the life of Toni Capuozzo, who died at 77 after announcing in October that he had cancer, there is also this scene: the media mogul, the journalist who grew up in Lotta Continua and the suspicion that such a polite call must necessarily be a joke. A small misunderstanding that tells about a relationship, and perhaps a career, better than many formulas and panegyrics.

The special was the one for the Knight's eightieth birthday. The risk, which came true, was that we had slipped into a product that was too laudatory. Hence the invitation to Capuozzo to have his say to tone things down. "There - he said - I said that I didn't vote for him." This is followed by general approval and finally the phone call mistaken for a joke. "I thought it was Cruciani." Capuozzo would return again to talk about Berlusconi. As for Milan, loyalty came from before: as a child, from seeing Gianni Rivera playing for the national team.

He was born in Palmanova on 7 December 1948, a Neapolitan father and a Trieste mother: already in the family a less simple geography than the Friulian label. The face, on television, seemed to carry with it all the previous nights. The dark circles had even become a title: "Dark circles of consideration", the collection of his articles for the Foglio.

Seven years to get my high school diploma, then I traveled around Europe with a friend. The PCI at nineteen, Lotta Continua the following year. Journalism began in 1979 on the newspaper of the extra-parliamentary left, covering Latin America. In 1982, during the Falklands War, he interviews Jorge Luis Borges: in the midst of a conflict over the islands, he finds a writer. Then the mafia for Giovanni Minoli's "Mixer", landing at the Mediaset networks and Tg5 of which he became deputy director. From 2000 to 2017 he hosts "Terra!", the television home of his reportages.

Yugoslavia, Somalia, Middle East, Afghanistan, Iraq. In 2002 he was stuck in the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem; in 2004 he was kidnapped with the Tg5 crew near Najaf. These are the stages that make up the CV of a correspondent who characterized the imagination of those years for all lovers of foreign affairs and reportage. But in Sarajevo, in 1992, something happens that stands out from the curriculum: a father entrusts him with nine-month-old Kemal, mutilated by a mortar attack in which he lost his mother. Capuozzo takes him out of the city hiding him under his bulletproof vest. The child is welcomed by his family and remains in Italy for a few years, before returning to Sarajevo after the war. To tell what it meant to go there, we can start from here.