The Massacre of Capaci, Rosaria Costa and Tina Montinaro: The love that remains

This article was published in the n. 20 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until 16 May 2023

“Hello, did he eat the baby?” The child was called Antonino Emanuele and on the other side of the phone was a very young father, just twenty-seven years old, Vito Schifani. Then, the Capaci massacre: 23 May 1992. From the Ciro’s bar in via Notarbartolo in Palermo, a few steps from the home of judge Giovanni Falcone, he made his last call to his wife. «Where are you, Vito?», «We are at the Ciro’s bar, waiting for the call». Rosaria Costa she was 22 years old and had thick dark curls surrounding her face. Her eyes stretched, her mouth always hinting at a smile. She had been a mother for four months. That day she had decided to arrange some family photos, there were those of the honeymoon in the Maldives, those of the marriage celebrated a year earlier, «in one of the most beautiful churches in Palermo, that of San Giuseppe dei Teatini, in the center historical. Everything was perfect.”

Until 17.58 of that same day, when 500 kilograms of TNT blew up the cars of the escort and the magistrate symbol of the fight against the mafia Giovanni Falcone. His magistrate wife Francesca Morvillo died with him, the agents died Vito Schifani, Antonio Montinaro and Rocco Dicillo. Those minutes, Rosaria Costa retraced them surgically 30 years later. To make them become memory. “I succeeded by telling my story during the making of the film Stock boys (produced by 42° Parallelo for RaiPlay). He was therapeutic. Even if, as I repeat right at the beginning of the film, I’m still stuck in this story». Because that story is life for Rosaria Costa and for all the families and victims involved in the mafia massacres. There are over a thousand, according to data from the archive of Libera, the association against the mafia founded by Don Luigi Ciotti, which stops its memory database at 2018. For those who lived 1992 in return, Rosaria Costa is above all a image, that of a slender girl, wrapped in a black jacket who from the pulpit of a church, with the weak voice of someone who just needs a hug, addresses the mafiosi and says: “I forgive you, but you have to get on your knees.” That same image became the cover of his first novel, in the bookshop for Rizzoli, The mafia doesn’t have to stop you. When it concerns that young woman, Rosaria Costa feels tenderness. She tells us about it from her home in Sanremo, the one she arrived in after deciding to leave her native Sicily because she didn’t want to feel like “the wife of the killed policeman” on the street, she wanted to be able to live with her son in the memory of pure love. What remains even when everything is blown up. «Now I am moved to see that girl who didn’t eat anything for two days, who arrived at the hospital still with her baby’s bib in her pocket, who was alone because then everyone was in their own pain. Mothers mourned their children. Yes there was police next to us but I was not supported by anyone. That Rosaria was strong, because despite everything she managed to memorize that day in every moment of it ». And the life that began on May 23, 1992, Rosaria slowly fixed in a diary that she began to write so as not to lose the memories. “A diary that has also become an act of rebellion for me, so that these dead are not remembered, especially by the institutions, only when the anniversaries of Capaci and via D’Amelio are approaching”.

Before returning to Palermo, Rosaria Costa waited 17 years. She came back with her son by her side, the same one who shortly after chose to enter the Academy of the Guardia di Finanza. Looking at her, Rosaria always seems like that young woman who wanted to be a tour guide but who at the behest of her father graduated from the teaching institute. «And luckily I did, because thanks to that diploma I met Vito one day while I was in line at the employment office». It is in her words that she glimpses the strong little girl that she saved by herself from the sea one morning when she, as she often did, played at throwing the life preserver out to sea to swim up there. The one who shortly after Vito’s death chose to live with her son for a period within a community of single mothers. “Because it was as if I needed to hear their pain, to see it.” The same Rosaria who carried the red roses in front of the tombstone of her love of her life together with her Bibi. Finally, the same one who one morning many years later, observing the seagulls from the window of her house in Sanremo and after having helped a baby seagull learn to fly, decided that she had to get help to still be a mother, wife and above all Rosaria . “So I went to therapy”.

He did too Tina Montinaro. He asked a professional for help when still, in Palermo at the end of the 90s, looking for a psychologist was not an everyday thing. She did it because she had an obligation: to be mother and father to her two children, Gaetano and Giovanni, who were orphaned very small. She tells it in the film following the first Stock boys. The Quarto Savona 15, by Giorgia Furlan and Gabriele Ciances, of which Tina Montinaro is the protagonist. «After Capaci I chose to remember Antonio every day: I never felt like a widow. Antonio has continued to fill my life for thirty-one years».

Placed next to each other, Tina Montinaro and Rosaria Costa postpone the same pain through eyes that sometimes get small, but on May 23rd he gave both two very distant lives. Which none of them had chosen. Tina remained in Palermo “because it wasn’t me who had to leave this city, but it was they, the mafiosi, who had to do it”. And from that day she began to travel throughout Italy, going to schools and squares to tell the story of her husband Antonio and the escort agents. Carrying around the Quarto Savona 15, the Croma crumpled by TNT and which she asked to be returned to the road. “To show clearly what they were able to do.” To build memory Tina Montinaro wrote the book You haven’t done anything to us, published by DeAgostini and which is aimed above all at the little ones. Because it is a duty to tell how you can lose everything and keep saying: “I was lucky”. Tina says it often, because if she looks back on her her life is the first word that comes to mind. «I was lucky, because in the pain known in childhood lived without parents I found the key to living what came later. When I was told that only the crossed fingers of Antonio had been found. He always kept them like this, because he was afraid and because when he got into the car with Judge Falcone he only thought of one thing: to protect his magistrate and get home safe and sound ».

In the words of Rosaria and Tina there is a common denominator that never changes: love. For Rosaria Costa the love that remains is the image of her Vito who never really became an adult and today is like a son to her, like that girl who cried in church while repeating that there was no love in that bloody Palermo from the mafia. For Tina Montinaro, the love that remains is feeling like a wife every day. «I often find myself here in the kitchen, while from the window I hear the shouting of the neighborhood where Antonio and I have become a family, and I still talk to him. Then I look at our children and I see him again here. In them I see the Palermo that after May 23, 1992 began to shout “No to the mafia”. And then I say to myself: “You took everything from us, but you didn’t do anything to us”».

facts and emotions

How do you remember when you talk about a massacre? What remains, after the images of the news, the crowds at the funeral? The authors, Giorgia Furlan and Josella Porto and the director, Gabriele Ciances, started from this question when they imagined the films Stock boys, two documentaries dedicated to the agents who died in the massacres of Capaci and via D’Amelio and produced by 42° Parallelo. «When such great tragedies occur, such as the mafia massacres of 1992», the authors explain, «what is public tends to crush the memory of the lives of those who were overwhelmed by the tragedy. We wanted to invert the two relationships, leaving the public, represented by the display cases and news services, as the background to the intimate story of the protagonists. Memory and remembrance settle in us thanks to emotions, especially when the contours of the facts begin to fade”. It means giving centrality back to ordinary people, like in the movies The escort boysand which have Rosaria Costa and Tina Montinaro as protagonists. The documentaries will be broadcast on Raitre, in prime time on May 25th and will be available on RaiPlay.

not to forget

Thirty-one years after Capaci, Rosaria Costa talks about herself in a book that traces her life as a little girl who grew up in a suburb and became a woman on May 23, 1992. The mafia doesn’t have to stop you (Rizzoli, pages 276, 18) is the voice of a woman who has chosen not to be afraid.

A choice that for Tina Montinaro, wife of Antonio Montinaro, is life and memory. She tells it in her book You haven’t done anything to us (DeAgostini, pp. 176, 14.90).

To subscribe to Vanity Fair, click here.