Being into the stories. Or being the story itself.

It’s a tough choice but also the best way to feel a story and make people empathize with it.

Fabrizio Gatti knows how to do so. He is an Italian investigative journalist and author who has chosen to live almost all the stories he wants to write about. His preferred investigation method is passing as one of the people of the stories he chooses. He wants to feel what they really feel before even talking about feelings.

I can safely say there’s no one else in Italy who has done the same.

Fabrizio writes for the Italian weekly L’Espresso and his reportage and undercover investigations have been translated all over the world.

“Investigation journalism is the epitome of journalism”, he says. “It’s different from daily news reporting. Of course, daily news reporting is something important for the community, but it happens everywhere, even in regimes. On the contrary, regimes don’t allow investigative journalism. Because it’s the expression of freedom. And we need to fight for it.”

Fabrizio Gatti has travelled most of the routes of immigration into Europe.

Between 2003 and 2007 he also crossed the Sahara desert four times with hundreds of migrants, infiltrated a gang of human traffickers in Northern Africa as a gangster’s personal driver, was rescued at sea, was jailed in the Lampedusa detention centre as an Iraqi illegal migrant, and worked as a slave labourer on a tomato farm in Italy.

His number one inspiration is Richard Kapuscinki. Kapuscinski believed that news is all about political struggle and the search for truth, not profits and ratings as is invariably the case today. Fabrizio is a kindred spirit.

  • He follows in Kapuscinski’s footsteps with a book called Bilal, on the road with illegal immigrants, an odyssey into the heart of darkness.

The stories told in this book are not some melodramatic made-for-TV docu-drama, they’re real stories that oblige you to think about the issue of forced migration. Fabrizio introduces us to illegal migrants not as a danger, but as people in danger.

I must admit that for me this book is compelling reading partly because of that human fascination with the ghoulish. The horror of what one man can do to another raises the question, what one man can do, so can another.

Bilal exposes a new kind of genocide.

 

  • In 2010 he wore a neoprene wetsuit and went to Sardinia to investigate a case of corruption and maritime pollution involving the Italian government.

He dived into the water of La Maddalena gulf with a biologist and a GoPro camera. He wanted to see with his eyes what was happening there.

With “La grande bugia di Bertolaso” Fabrizio makes you dive into the sea through his eyes.

 

Once again: collecting information from experts is not enough for Fabrizio. He has to see and touch what’s going on, he needs to collect proof for himself. He becomes part of the story, and that’s how he builds trust.

 

  • “Un unico destino” is his last work.

It’s a journalistic investigation designed for different platforms: an article for the newspaper L’Espresso, a web series of 5 episodes and a 52 minutes docu- film about the boat with hundreds immigrants aboard that sank in the Mediterranean sea the night of October 11th 2013. This is the biggest loss of civilian life involving the Italian Navy: 268 deaths, 60 of them children.

Here’s the documetary trailer:

This time Fabrizio wasn’t there, so he found a new way to tell what happened.

He tells the story of three Syrian doctors who survived the tragedy, but lost their families. They now have new lives and jobs in Europe but the pain is still there. As well as the guilt of having killed their own children in an attempt to escape the war.

That day has definitely changed the official rules of engagement in the Mediterranean sea.

  • With this initiative posted on his blog, Fabrizio goes beyond journalism and takes a side. Once again we see Kapuscinski’s style in the way the post is written.

It’s a human and heart-breaking piece about Lampedusa, an Italian island much closer to the North African coast than to Sicily and the rest of Italy. It has taken on an outsize role in the debate over illegal immigration, becoming, for many in Italy and across Europe, the face of the migrant crisis and the conduit for exporting Arab instability across the Mediterranean.

Fabrizio Gatti has been also rescued there as an immigrant. Rescued and helped by local people.