Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 21, 1990 TAG: 9007210122
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CLYDE HABERMAN THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: ROME LENGTH: Medium
Last Saturday, Vanessa was driving to the beach with her father, Marco, when he fell dead at the wheel from a heart attack as they entered a tunnel along a stretch of highway near Florence.
Before dying, Moretti, who was only 33, managed to pull the car over to the tunnel wall and, according to press accounts, told his daughter to make her way home. Out she went into speeding traffic to seek help.
Cars whizzed by so fast that the gusts of wind they created repeatedly knocked the little girl down. Scratched, bleeding and in tears, she walked out of the tunnel and along the open highway, covering at least 1.2 miles over the next 30 minutes.
In that period, hundreds of cars passed, but not a single one stopped to help her until a motorist finally came to her aid and phoned the police. Saturday was the start of Italy's summertime exodus from the big cities, and, one newspaper wrote, "along the happy road of vacation there were no scheduled stops for attending to the pain of others."
The episode startled many Italians, and it landed on newspaper front pages along with commentaries about a country that, several writers suggested, may be getting too rich for its own good.
Italy's self-image - and outside reputation, for that matter - tends to be that of a warm country with caring people, especially where children are concerned. This was particularly true in less affluent but perhaps gentler days, some said, and so the weekend display of mass indifference left a foul taste in their mouths.
Vanessa is "a symbol of an Italy that we would like to ignore - a cold Italy, at times glacial, where in the best of cases each one thinks only about himself and a few others more or less close to him," a University of Padua sociologist, Sabino Acquaviva, wrote in the newspaper Corriere della Sera.
"We have begun to show the cold, glacial face for which only recently we used to rebuke other countries that once were richer than ours," Acquaviva said.
L'Unita, the Communist Party daily, lamented in a front-page commentary on Tuesday that this television age has made all disasters - from war to the plight of little girls - seem abstract and distant.
It is not the first time that Italians have asked themselves whether their prosperity, which became conspicuous in the 1980s, has come at the expense of traditional values.
In conversations, some here worry about the enormous sums that are spent on everything from stylish clothes to children's birthday parties, all in the name of "bella figura," or creating a good impression. In Rome, it is common to hear people bewail that the more frenetic, money-oriented pace of today has turned even basic courtesy into a thing of the past.
These complaints are not unique to Italy, of course, but that is small comfort to many Italians who fear that they are losing their essence bit by bit. And to have a little girl walk the highway in tears while vacationers zipped past her was more than some people could bear.
"Once there were no highways, and in some places not even roads," Acquaviva wrote. "There was child labor and the exploitation of children. But it was more unlikely that, out of simple indifference, help would have been denied to a child in trouble."
On Monday, Marco Moretti was mourned at a funeral in Pontassieve, a town near Florence. Vanessa was not there, having been sent to a relative's house. So she did not hear the parish priest, the Rev. Guido Barucci, when he said, "I urge you, dear child, to continue always to cry out, just as you did on those dramatic kilometers along the highway."
by CNB