Andrea Purgatori

"Alberto is a friend I respect; I don't consider him a competitor. [...] We share the choice to go to places where things have happened, we share the desire to bring a story to life with cinematic writing, we share the fact that we are not looking for television controversy, that we don't have to chase interviews with the politician of the moment. Apart from Ulisse and Atlantide, I don't think there is anything similar on Italian television. His ratings are extraordinary, mine are very good. This means that the audience is there."

"There is still much to discover and report on the behaviour of the Belgian security apparatus, which, since the Charlie Hebdo attack (January 2015), had more than a suspicion to eradicate the jihadist network that subsequently attempted the massacre on the Amsterdam-Paris train (August 2015), carried out the Paris massacre (November 2015) and those in Brussels."

"I have always done investigations or written screenplays. In investigations, the facts speak for themselves, while in screenplays, it is the dialogue and the actor's expressions that speak. This time, I wanted to take the reader into the minds of the characters, and you can only do that by writing a novel."

"My commitment will be to bring Greenpeace into national issues. To adapt our global campaigns to the emergencies we have in our territory. So, first and foremost, there will be remediation. Then agriculture, to continue our victories against GMOs and now raise awareness about the pesticides that are exterminating bees. And thirdly, coal. It is unacceptable that it is still one of our primary sources of energy."

"[...] I met Fiorenzo Angelini. At the time, he was only a bishop, but already the éminence grise of Catholic healthcare, with his fingers in five hospitals in Rome, four hundred properties and eight thousand hectares of agricultural land around the capital. He was the Giulio Andreotti of the Vatican, of whom he was a close friend. I met him in Kisima or Baragoi, I don't remember exactly. Anyway, on the road -so to speak- that led to Loiyangalani, on the shores of Lake Rudolf. He emerged from the bougainvillea of a lodge wearing a shirt, a pair of khaki shorts and a camera in his hand. Imagine Alberto Sordi in Will Our Heroes Be Able to Find Their Friend Who Has Mysteriously Disappeared in Africa?. Exactly. And after introducing himself, he asked for two pieces of information: where to get a good exchange rate on the black market and whether thirty thousand lire per kilo was an acceptable price for contraband ivory. It seemed like a joke."

"During my career as a journalist, I have met too many spies to enjoy an unrealistic narrative; none of those I met looked like James Bond. Rather, I have always been fascinated by the Stasi headquarters I visited and that part of the secret archive that was destroyed. There is a black hole in our collective memory that has never been thoroughly investigated. [...] We continue to be [in the aftermath of the Cold War] up to our necks, just think of Russiagate... Or the submarine in which 14 Russian sailors recently died. It is most likely a vehicle used for special intelligence operations."

"[Purgatori replies that he wrote a spy novel for many reasons, the first being:] because, having met many spies from the East, the West and many other countries over many years of work, I also wanted to portray their human side, which is very different from what we imagine. They are women and men like us, and like us they experience emotions, feelings, joys and sorrows, and it is curious, shall we say, that they have to live them, in a way, in the shadows. Even if sometimes these feelings then undermine the carefully planned projects that are supposed to change the world order."

"Oliviero was more cultured than me, quicker to understand, better at connecting the details and symptoms of the malaise that ate away at our future, if not entirely, then at least in large part. But he had one quality: he refused to give up. And so far, the journalist, the writer. Then there was the man. Or rather, first and foremost, the man. Generous and welcoming. In his own way, which was a beautiful way. His family knows what I'm talking about, his children know what I'm talking about. His grandson will know too."

"(About the Kidnapping of Aldo Moro) On that day, 16 March 1978, and for several hours afterwards, I believe that our country felt it was facing an insurrection, a civil war, or that a coup d'état might be underway. The gravity of that kidnapping and the level of the attack, directed at the heart of the state, were such that there were fears that there could be an offensive against our democracy. An offensive which, although limited to that event, was real."

"[The job of presenter and screenwriter] They are the same thing. At Atlantide, I don't improvise anything, it's all written in the script. I have to be convinced of what I say and I have to be careful with my words. I have to be precise."

"I was very close friends with Ilaria's parents, and I discovered, for example, that she conducted her investigations without accompanying the troops, thus rejecting an 'embedded” point of view, and did not sleep with the other Italian journalists because she considered that place to be controlled. This alone gives an idea of the risks she exposed herself to, in addition to being a female journalist in a predominantly male world of correspondents in Somalia in 1994. But it still happens: last year alone, 80 journalists died around the world. When it happens, it almost seems like collateral damage, but it is not, because journalists are unarmed and only seek to tell the truth with their pens and cameras."