ABSTRACT
In this chapter, readers explore the language of atonement, language from the prison in which Adriano Sofri spent five years of his life. During these years of detention, Sofri continued to write and publish articles for major Italian newspapers, and reconstructed an incredible historical landscape of the world outside and “distant” from him. Sofri also writes about his own life inside the prison and that of his fellow inmates. Imprisonment provides him with a privileged laboratory that overturns the conditions of estrangement, isolation, and confinement and allows him, instead, to become a sort of ubiquitous eye, wandering between the outside and the inside, the here and elsewhere. The excerpts presented in this chapter come from the collection Altri hotel. Il mondo visto da dentro 1997–2002. The main objective of this section is to highlight the experience of a man who, despite his intellectual involvement in the ideals of the Italian armed political struggle, chose not to focus on himself or on the questionable trial by which he was sentenced to prison. Instead, he used his powerful language to testify on behalf of others who cannot be rescued by society.
