«Today we will celebrate a love that deserves a formal dress». Alberto Matano tells in an interview with Corriere della Sera his story with Riccardo Mannino on their wedding day, but also his life, adolescence and the definitions that he really doesn’t like. “We’ve been together for fifteen years. During a dinner, a couple of months ago, Mara, our best friend who is celebrating today, said it would be nice for us to get married. Riccardo immediately said yes. He was elated. I too was happy. Then, over the weekend, I went into crisis. I thought about everything around us, about the external dimension of something that concerned us so privately. In the evening, at home, we talked, we discussed, we got into a fight, we hugged and we decided that yes, it was the right thing to do ».
The reporter talks about happy childhood a Catanzaro, but also of the moment of isolation as a kid. «Around the age of 14 I realized with pain that I was not growing. My friends were at least eight inches taller than me. And then my room was locked, like a shelter from the world ». In that room books, poems, songs: from Sting to Bowie, from Orwell to Byron. The bullying has arrived. «I fought, I did not bend. I told myself I had to do it. I found the strength and all that good is happening to me is the son of that desire not to suffer. In third high school, after a summer, I grew up and became the way I am now ».
What would he say to that lonely kid? «I would hug him and thank him. His suffering and his strength were the essential condition of my joy today ».
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He was successful with girls, but at the age of 24 he broke a romance and 10 years of restlessness ensued. «I was looking for a belonging, even an exasperated one. I thought this gave me security. Someone succeeds. To me, on the other hand, a closed identity was close. A psychotherapist friend of mine one day told me about the psychosexual continuum as a point where each of us can be found, which is never the same as someone else’s. Then Riccardo arrived and everything in my life stabilized. My stability was a person, not an identity“.
No fences, no pigeonholing: sexual, but also political and working. It is not easy to explain oneself in the family, despite the support of the brothers. He told himself one evening, turning off the TV. “The turning point in my inner emotional life was when I told them how things were. It was not easy for them, in the early hours, to accept all this, I understand. Then from that moment they have always been by my side, always welcoming, supportive. Now Riccardo is seen as the fourth child. Today two things make me really happy: Riccardo’s gaze and my parents’ serene participation in this moment“.
The participation of his parents is also that of many Italians who have shown their support and their closeness to the announcement of the union. «We are overwhelmed by the affection of people who understand that we are two souls who have sought and found each other. Two people who love each other. That’s all. And it is beautiful. I’ll tell you this. The day before last night my mother received a phone call from an old friend of hers, a union activist like her, who told her: “I am very impressed because your son, with this gesture, is continuing our battles”. His emotion and mine told me that everything I have done in my life, even this choice, is the result of the atmosphere I breathed in that family, of the safe refuge I had, of the example given to them who are two people. respectable, simple, healthy, open and even courageous ».
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Source: Vanity Fair
