La vita che mi spetta. La storia vera del bancario che rischiò di perdere se stesso per salvare i suoi risparmiatori

Andrea Priante, The life I deserve. The true story of the bank clerk who risked losing himself to save his clients. In March 2012, news of the mysterious suicide of Gabriele Andriotto, a clerk in a small bank in the province of Rovigo, appeared in the newspapers. His car was found on the banks of the Po river, inside was his wallet and carefully folded clothes. After a few days, while the river was still being searched for his body, family and friends received his farewell letters in the mail.A decision, that of ending it, so difficult to understand, because Andriotto had a quiet and apparently perfect life: a well-paid job, commitment to charity work, a wife, a now grown-up daughter.Seven months later the newspapers returned to the case, because the banker was found by the police: he had faked suicide and was hiding in a trullo among the olive trees of Salento, where he lived like a hermit, eating what he found. For a few days the news held sway in the newspapers, among those who defined him as a hero, a new Saint Francis who had had the courage to give up everything to start a new life, and those who considered him a coward for having abandoned his family.Written in a style halfway between biography and novel, page after page the book reveals the background of an existence that was anything but perfect: the marriage had long been over, the love for another woman, the castle of lies. But above all it explains the real reason for the disappearance: a secret that has its roots in the attack on the Twin Towers and in the desperate attempt to ‘save’ hundreds of bank customers, who had trusted him, from the global stock market collapse that followed 9/11.