This CD, Giovanni Falcone VIVAVOCE, was to be part of a project VivaVoce, to be submitted as a Socrates – Minerva project in October 2005. VivaVoce hoped to establish a network of Communities of Practice which would support teachers wishing to put digital repository content to more effective use in European public education. It would providing methods and tools necessary for the development of innovative learning environments. Its core aim was to promote pedagogical plurality. Teachers would be able to use ICT to help them exploit authentic repository content in pursuit of their own pedagogical values.
The authors, initially promoted and supported by CILTA (Centro Interfacoltà di Linguistica Teorica ed Applicata) at the University of Bologna, had been collaborating with Northwestern University, Illinois (Professor Jerry Goldman) and with the Spoken Word Project at Glasgow Caledonian University (Professor David Donald) since 1999 and 2004 respectively.
In 2005, we were pleased to obtain the support and encouragement of the Fondazione Falcone and Radio Radicale. The former, as well as providing authentic materials in Italian, would have supported our efforts to spread the culture of legality in citizenship education thanks to its schools' projects over the past fourteen years. The latter would kindly provide authentic digital audio material of the highest quality (under Creative Commons licence), as well as their expertise in problems connected with managing large scale digital archives.
We hoped to make available, via the Spoken Word repository, high quality, spoken voice materials, both in Italian and other languages, involving victims of politically motivated violent crime, together with related text sources, translations, links and annotations, producing learning objects which could be used by teachers and researchers from different disciplines and languages all over the world – or indeed by anyone who was engaged in the struggle – legal, political or cultural – against organised crime and political violence.
Suddenly, on October 10th 2005, three weeks before the deadline for project submission, we were ordered to ditch it. No explanation whatsoever was given, but it was immediately clear to us that by tackling the subject of legality, what is more in an interdisciplinary and multilingual context, we had run into an impenetrable wall of silence.
The fact that the University of Bologna, and the Chancellor Pier Ugo Calzolari in person, has now signed a cooperation agreement with Don Ciotti and Libera, making a public declaration on behalf of the university of Bologna to promote ethics and “legality” in all branches of University life, makes us hopeful that we will now be able to take up our work where we left off over a year ago.
The wall of silence we ran into in the academic world – and naively hoped to pass through effortlessly, like Alice in the Looking Glass - has made us all the more determined to contribute to the effort of preserving the memory of the men and women who died defending legality and democratic values. We want to make available their living voices. Vivavoce.
By no means all of the people killed by the Mafia (to name “just a few” – Boris Giuliano, Cesare Terranova, Gaetano Costa, Pio la Torre, Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa, Calogero Zucchetto, Gian Giacomo Ciaccio Montalto, Barbara Asta and her children, Rocco Chinnici, Beppe Montana, Ninni Cassarà, the young boy Claudio Domino, Giuseppe Insalaco, Alberto Giacomelli, Antonino e Stefano Saetta, Mauro Rostago, Rosario Livativo, Libero Grassi, Giovanni Falcone, Francesca Morvillo, Paolo Borsellino and their bodyguards, (Antonio Montinari, Rocco Di Cillo, Vito Schifani, Emanuela Loi, Walter Cusina, Vincenzo Li Muli, Claudio Traina, Agostino Catalano, don Pino Puglisi, Domenico Geraci) were killed in the line of duty, nor were they all public figures whose voice was recorded and preserved. But many of them were. And they died not just because they were doing their jobs, but because they were doing them well.
What is needed now is a permanent collection of their authentic voices, so that we can pass on to future generations the knowledge for which they died: so that we can help young people, for whom these bloody assassinations are already “history”, follow the “pathway of their words” and – to quote Nando della Chiesa again - challenge the attacks on their memory.
