On a boat from Tunisia, the Italian coach’s “Tolo Tolo” style getaway

10/01/2020 Business, Health, Italy, World



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ROME – No, he is certainly not the former world champion footballer of the Brazilian team. And no, he’s not even the CEO of the Feltrinelli group. So who is this Roberto Rivellino who landed in Lampedusa ten days ago on a migrant boat who simply said to the astonished men of the coast guard: “I am Italian. Here is my passport”?

A journalist who wants to talk about migrant crossing, an undercover secret service agent? The policemen of the Agrigento mobile squad search for evidence of the story that looks like a photocopy of the plot of Tolo Tolo, the film by Checco Zalone: ​​the Italian who goes to Africa in search of fortune and then to escape an excessive mess gets on a boat together with the migrants.

And here is the story of Roberto Rivellino, a forty-year-old businessman from Molise who left Italy eight years ago to open a jeans company in Tunisia, and the September 20 on a boat with 53 people rescued a few kilometers from Lampedusa. It’s the weekend of the gust landings, 26 in 24 hours. But in the hotspot that explodes, with 1200 people, Rivellino stays a few hours later: “I am an Italian citizen – he says immediately – here are the documents.” But why should an Italian citizen risk his life on a boat instead of taking a regular plane or ferry?

“He needed to go back to Italy, he had debts and some unfinished business with the tax collector,” Rivellino explains to the astonished policemen. In short, rather than risk being stopped in a port or airport with uncertain prospects, it is better to rely on a “hook” and try to cross. And then with Covid, I was afraid of not being able to enter Italy. “

They gave him the Covid swab in Lampedusa. Negative But as he is an Italian citizen and has not committed any crime, Rivellino took a plane and quarantined 692 souls in the province of Isernia at his home, in Santa Maria del Molise. Where his story comes from The movie has been on everyone’s lips for days. “I personally went to check the situation – says Mayor Michele Labella – he has regularly registered with the health company and is observing the isolation.”
Forty years, a job in a construction company that soon fades, in 2012 Rivellino decides to try his luck in Africa. He leaves his mother and sister to run a bar and moves to Sousse where Ital fashion opens: special treatments for jeans, delavage, rinse, vintage effect. Clothes that are very popular among young Tunisians. But the Tunisian economic crisis is unforgiving: Rivellino cannot pay suppliers and meet tax deadlines. In short, it ends in a complicated situation to which Covid deals the final blow. The only way is to escape and return to Italy. In the streets of Susa it is not difficult to find who organizes the crossing. They ask the Italian for 4,500 dinars, just under 1,400 euros in exchange for a seat on a boat that seems more solid and reliable than those wooden hulls in which 10-15 come out at a time. We left at dawn on Saturday 19, in ’53, all Tunisians who look suspiciously at that strange fellow traveler. The sea is good, the crossing without problems, one small boat after another leaves the Tunisian coast. When Rivellino sees Lampedusa on Sunday afternoon, he breathes a sigh of relief, the coast guard patrol boat comes to pick them up. You have to manage the surprise effect at the reception.

Repeat their story to everyone. Agrigento prosecutor Luigi Patronaggio says: “He has a passport, he is an Italian citizen, but we are investigating his status.” In other words, check if they were looking for you in Tunisia. For Italy there is no crime. Good luck. For Rivellino, life begins again in Santa Maria del Molise.

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