THE PIETRALATA TRAGEDY | WHEN PAIN BECOMES INVISIBLE

It happens almost without our realizing it, we read a news story, stop in front of an image, feel disbelief, pain, perhaps anger. For a few minutes, what happened occupies our thoughts completely, then the day resumes, a message arrives, a phone call, a commitment, another news story, what seemed impossible to forget already begins to recede. It does not necessarily mean that we have become insensitive, the mind cannot remain constantly exposed to all the pain it encounters, in order to keep living, it has to select, limit, create distance, but there is a difference between protecting ourselves from what we cannot contain and becoming accustomed to no longer seeing the suffering that lives beside us.

The Pietralata tragedy, with three lives lost inside a home, cannot be turned into an explanation constructed from the outside, we do not fully know what those people were living through, what thoughts crossed their days, what help was sought, received or perceived as unreachable. Searching for a simple cause would serve mainly to reassure us, because it would allow us to place…