Tiatiò is a no-profit, cultural association founded by some friends in memory of Gianluca Scarpellini, commonly known as Luca. A Man who was born, lived his life to the hilt, got cancer, was treated for it and died in Bergamo.
And even though it’s as if a century has passed, it only started yesterday.
Although Tiatiò is dedicated to him, as anyone who has loved him will know when solving the mystery in the name, it does not claim to know the whole truth and is not intended to promote any adoration of Luca.
Aware of the fact that Luca was a Man, flawed as only a man can be, but compensated by his many qualities, his unquenchable thirst for life itself and its varied pleasures in particular, we are not here to extol any unique or extraordinary qualities of Luca’s, totally non-existent after all. Nor would we want to run the risk of finding ourselves resurrected one day and on the receiving end of Luca’s kicks, as he struggles with posthumous atonement due to the sins of others -  and thus even harder to expiate.

What made Luca so special was the way he accepted people for what they were – the powerful, bowed to willingly,  always mindful they are dust,  and the wretched, recognised and acknowledged – never embarrassing them, but actually helping them regain their dignity – something he did with anyone who was lucky enough to meet him.
And so, due to a sort of paradox, or salvific providence, it was his life lived in a carpe-diem-hic-et-nunc spasmodic search of pleasure – his raison d'être – that lead him to find God some years before the illness found him and returned him body and soul to the Sender .
Always ready with a slight bow for the Baron with the vulgar watch, or with a genuflection for a glimpse of what modesty normally hides, Luca’s life was one of contrasts and pleasures, of loves confessed and loves concealed.

And for decades the best concealed was also the greatest. The love for his Wife, his Woman, Mother of his children, renewed and reinvigorated almost obsessively and even more than before, right at the end of his life, before he knew his fate.

Luca’s moral stature could also be seen in his unprecedented courage when brought face-to face with cancer.  Anything but heroic, even while suffering intimately and fearing it deeply, he chose to mock it with infinite pride, as its companion Death, detested for its role in quenching a life, a personal quest that could only finish this way.

Living side-by-side with cancer, the real terror which at times invaded his eyes would cause them to lose their focus, and diminish the irony that he had decided would be its companion - a choice of redress as reckless as it was comforting.

And so it is in honour of Luca’s life of delights and duties, of all the shades from black to white of his once curly hair, and then of his hairless head, swollen and hot, smelling of chemotherapy, of his cigarettes left smoking in their ashtrays on their own, that we have decided to create something memorable in his name, and do what we can in the fight,  so that other Lucas will recover.

Tiatiò has been dedicated to this person so special in his ordinariness as to choose to mock cancer all the while knowing that he would be the loser, yet without minimising his drama in any way.
It is also a reminder that every victory for cancer represents a tragedy, but it can and must lose, bit by bit, day after day, and then we will be able to mock it and forget it.  And to remind us that it often finds fertile terrain thanks to a distraction, a habit, an error or an act of irresponsibility.
This, in short, is our way of mocking the Executioner, doing what we can in the hope of tripping him up on the steps to the gallows, even though we know he is always there, waiting, ready to greet us one and all

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