“Being born in Palermo is a kind of punishment, but I’ve never left because it would feel like betrayal. Moreover, I can’t imagine Cinico Tv in any other place in the world.” To Franco Maresco, a brilliant, solitary director from Palermo, his city was the stage of a surreal comedy of rampant decay just as the Mafia was renegotiating the division of power and influence in the emerging Second Republic. Ruins, trash, scraps, underwear, flatulence and burping raided the TV screen at dinnertime in Italian homes in the spring of 1992, sparking hostile cultural debates about the limits of trash and the aesthetics of ugliness, the sense of post-history and post-humanity. It was the desperate and poetic world of the cyclist Francesco Tirone, the flatulist Giuseppe Paviglianiti, the failed singer Giovanni Lo Giudice, the “human scraps” Carlo and Pietro Giordano, the aphasic man in underwear Miranda, the berserk Abbate brothers. Today, almost twenty years after the television program’s debut on RAI 3, reappearing in fragments during Fuori Orario and Blob, the Cineteca di Bologna offers Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco’s entire cynical production (…). Twenty years ago that dialect (those bodies, landscapes, silences, decay) was the true voice, neither filtered nor dubbed, of a city that had become a center of national horror. While TV and newspapers (and later film and unmemorable TV series) bombarded Italians with clear images of a Palermo that had spawned a monstrous Mafia at work first in Capaci and, right after, in via D’Amelio. Alongside the emotions and horror flooding public and private television, often flowing into the compliant rhetoric of a political class in demise, RAI 3 took a courageous step that today is unthinkable: it broadcasted the root of horror with a realistic television program that today still is the most powerful televised operation of demystifying the Mafia (…). Prophetic images, with Tirone’s ode to Berlusconi, still a mere entrepreneur, cruel parody of an electoral success yet to come but already deep in the soul of the voter, whether from Palermo or Italian, “God crazy”, in the words of Maresco.

Giuseppe Lo Bianco, Adesso è cinico il cofanetto, “Il Fatto Quotidiano”, March 31, 2011