Rosy

In the early afternoon of 8 January 2007, Rosa Bazzi and Olindo Romano leave Erba in the back of a Carabinieri squad car. They think the officers are taking them to safety from the journalists who have been besieging their house since dawn. In less than an hour they find themselves inside the Como prison, where they begin a detention destined to become life imprisonment, convicted of killing four neighbours and seriously injuring a fifth – one of the biggest cases in recent news, known as ‘the Erba massacre’. Alessandra Carati met Rosa Bazzi for the first time in early 2019. Between July and February the following year, she visits her in prison every week in sessions that last for hours. ‘I vent to you as I do to the priest,’ the woman tells her, and overwhelms her with contradictory, unreliable, borderline unintelligible speeches. She forces her into her own chaos. The author believed that knowing her in person would allow her to separate the facts from the sayings; instead, proximity clouded the picture. In an attempt to understand, she seeks the eyes of those who have been with her over the past seventeen years: the psychologist, the lawyers, and then the chaplain, her husband Olindo through the letters he writes to her. She thus discovers a neglected childhood, her work as a child in the service of Erba’s families, her marriage at the age of twenty and her dependence on Olindo, and the arduous adaptation to imprisonment. Only then does she return to prison. Rosa, however, does not conform to any account of her, she continues to resist as an indecipherable disorder. It is precisely at that moment, in the renunciation of any image of her – and in the fatal question of where these images were formed, under what conditions, with what consequences – that Rosy emerges, as in a polaroid.