Italian journalist Franco Di Mare died at the age of 68 after a serious illness. He was a reporter in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) during the war, and later on other battlefields in the world. In Sarajevo in 1992, he adopted a 10-month-old girl, Stella.
He talked about Stella’s adoption in his book “Don’t ask me why”, based on which the movie “The Angel of Sarajevo” was made, where he told how his daughter was adopted. He was a war reporter, and he saw the little girl he adopted for the first time during a visit to a bombed-out orphanage.
“It was luck that only two children were injured then. Among the many blonde children I noticed one with brown hair, she was also the only one smiling. I picked her up, she hugged my neck and that was the beginning. Thanks to the Red Cross I managed to take the girl to Italy, and then I adopted her,” he said.
Di Mare has been a professional journalist since 1983, and in 1995 he became a special correspondent, dealing with the Balkan war, and the area of Africa and Central America. He has covered most of the conflicts of the last 20 years, including BiH, Kosovo, Somalia, Mozambique, Algeria, Albania, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Rwanda, the First and Second Gulf Wars, Afghanistan, East Timor and more.
In his last interview, he revealed that he fell ill on one of the battlefields. Calling home from his bed, connected to a respirator, he said that the asbestos particles he inhaled in war zones as a war reporter caused him to become seriously ill.
The book “Don’t ask me why” or the film “The Angel of Sarajevo” is based on the personal experience of a journalist who arrived in wartime Sarajevo in the summer of 1992.
He begins his story with words that express his belonging to Sarajevo: “I am a Sarajevo citizen. Yeah, I don’t speak Bosnian, and everything I manage to compose in the language of Abdulah Sidran barely allows me to survive in a restaurant. And, certainly, I don’t forget that I was born in Naples and I don’t have two passports, and yet my roots are in the waters of Posillipoand Miljacka, I became a man in the streets of Mergellina andand in the alleys that go up to Bjelave; my sensuous maturation was celebrated in the rows of trees park along Caracciolo street and among the artisanal alleys of Bascarsija, holding the hand of Jasna Mijuskovic. Her heart managed to embrace Naples, Belgrade, Rome, and Sarajevo…”, Klix.ba reports.
