Reading and listening to the stories about the Asinara prisons, one feels projected into a film, where an imaginary screenwriter with bipolar disorder decides to put hell in heaven.

On the one hand we have the prison guards, men of the state who sacrificed their existence, together with that of their families, on an island difficult to reach, disconnected from the rest of the world. And then, to think about it, with what tranquility you could work, when there were excellent guests in the house like Totò Riina who had just slaughtered both Giovanni Falcone in Capaci, and Paolo Borsellino in via d'Amelio, who had spent a month together on the island, during which they had a lot of bond with the prison police officers present in Asinara.

And what was going through the minds of these men when they interacted with Raffaele Cutolo, who had killed Giuseppe Salvia, deputy director of the Poggioreale prison, only because unlike the others he had rightly requested a search upon returning to prison from a trial hearing. A hard job, yet someone had to do it.

Brigades and anarchists, on the other hand, created chaos and riots, even going so far as to tear down the internal walls of the cells as a political act and because of them, even those who did not want to pass through them. The more relaxed, often thieves and drug dealers, led a different life from the others; in fact, they were engaged in various agro-pastoral activities, and in order not to have to spend the whole day locked up within four walls, they willingly agreed to take care of the cattle or some plot of cultivated land.

It is difficult to feel compassion for mass murderers and mafiosi, but life in the Asinara prisons was really hard, with extreme living conditions, where water was limited, where visits by lawyers and relatives were limited by the geographical nature of the island. In short, both for the agents of the penitentiary police and for the prisoners, what for us today is an earthly paradise, for them it was certainly hell.