I Cento Passi

Studying history has always made me feel grateful; grateful I didn’t live in Fascist occupied Italy or under Castro in Cuba or in Cambodia under Soviet siege. I see clips of home movies or specials done for television covering the mayhem of the 1960’s; despite their grainy, washed out quality the images stand for something. Riots and truth under the dirt of deceit, the ever expanding recesses of the mind and heart, the richness of life and the depth of destruction are all revealed in still shots of picketers, army men ducking under fire, the long hair that smelled like sunshine and hay weed. I always thought that by now I’d have my something; something that felt so important. I don’t think its religion, or a person or a place…or a time period or a war. I think that the something I see in images of the 1960s is inside the individuals; they didn’t find something to be passionate about, they were finding themselves. Maybe; I wasn’t there. Maybe everyone really was just too high, or maybe those who knew themselves the least were the ones lost most often in the conflict of right, wrong, love, peace, war and the infinite struggle for power.
Giuseppe Impastato was a young man who believed in himself and his cause; battling the “Mafioso’s” control in Cinisi, Italy. Born to the life of the mob, Peppino, as Impastato was known, watched the fate of his family twist in the corrupt hands of the Cosa Nostra. At fifteen, Peppinno lost his uncle, the mob boss Cesare Manzella, to an exploding car and he watched his father kiss up to the man who killed Cesare for his position. Peppino spent the rest of his short life battling the mafia through newsletter, a radio station, a wicked sense of humor and an attempted political carreer to the detriment of familial relationships and the all important concepts of honor both within the mafia and Italy as a whole. In 1978, at the age of thirty, Peppino was taken from his car, very probably beaten, wrapped in TNT and blown apart on the railroad tracks running through Cinisi.
I recently watched the Italian made film, I Cento Passi (One Hundred Steps) by director Marco Tullio Giorana, which covers the life and death of Peppino Impastato. Interestingly enough though made in 2000, the film is extremely difficult to find and the U.S. does not have permission to market or make the film; perhaps because the topic deals heavily with mafia and modern Italy’s silence. Initially Peppino’s death was considered a terrorist act gone awry and then a suicide. In 1980, after grueling efforts put forth by his mother, brother and peers in the activist community, Giuseppe Impastato was added to a list of murders committed by the mafia. In 1996 the case was reopened and on April 11, 2002 Gaetano Badalamenti, the man who killed Peppino and Casere, was issued a life sentence.
When this film was made in 2000 the case was still unresolved; this movie represented the need in the hearts of many Italians for that resolution. An Americanized soundtrack of the rock rebellion of the late sixties and seventies bolstered the many evidences of the penetrating influence of the mafia, which I understand still exists today. This film felt important to me and I wanted to share; even just the story is interesting. The truth is always prettier, always more gruesome, always more fantastical than anything we can dream up.