Simpatico, carino, buono
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Between 1968 and 1970, as the Italian “Hot Autumn” was taking shape, families gathered around the television set to watch the RAI sitcom La Famiglia Benvenuti. Produced in two seasons —the first in black and white and the second one in experimental color — the series proved a great success with audiences over the course of its 13 episodes. Thanks to its simple narration of everyday life, the program came to embody the ideal prototype of the Italian middle-class family.

One of the most beloved characters, 9-year-old Andrea Benvenuti, was played by actor Giuseppe Valerio Fioravanti. Nine years after the role that made him the model child, “friendly, cute, and well-behaved,” Fioravanti would later embody in real life the leadership of the neo-fascist organization Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (NAR). Responsible, according to the courts, for a total of 95 terrorist murders (including those at the Bologna Station, which he has always denied), he would spend 26 years in prison before being released on parole in 2009.

The piece Simpatico, carino, buono reproduces as a soliloquy (plainly incomprehensible and without any textual order beyond being chronological) all the lines of the character played by “Giusva” Fioravanti over the two seasons of La Famiglia Benvenuti, suggesting, through these unconnected sentences, the breaking between the fiction and the reality.