Catanzaro is a city in Italy, capital of the Calabria region.
It is known as the city between two seas, as it is located at a point on the Italic peninsula where the Tyrrhenian Sea meets the Ionian Sea.
It barely exceeds 90,000 inhabitants, its main economic activities being tourism and the textile industry, famous for its velvets.
Many Calabrian families emigrated from that region to our country during the two world wars, many of them settled in the neighborhood of La Boca.
Chicho is a Calabrian immigrant settled in the Avellaneda neighborhood.
Last year he suffered two robberies in his house.
In one of them he was held hostage by the thieves for more than two hours. On that occasion they stole, among many other things, his wedding ring and an antique watch, a gift from his father.
Perhaps because he was faced with such an extreme trauma, the ephemeral nature of life in times of insecurity prompted him to organize a trip to visit the place where he was born, the place he had left 73 years ago with his parents.
He kept both the address of the house where they lived and the stories that his grandparents, parents and uncles told him over and over again. He remembered anecdotes of the neighbors and urban characteristics of what was once his town.
Finally he arrived accompanied by his wife at the door of that abandoned house, however, preserved. He asked a neighbor if anyone lived there, and received the answer that the owners had left many years ago and, according to what his grandmother had told him, had gone to Argentina.
With no intention of getting into trouble, Chicho went to the nearest Carabinieri (Italian police) station to introduce himself and ask if there would be any inconvenience if he entered the house.
They asked him for a day to verify if the registered domain name matched his surname.
The next afternoon he received a call saying welcome home.
It took him two days to work up the courage to re-enter the place where he was born in 1940.
A locksmith helped open the heavy door.
In the blink of an eye he traveled back in time 80 years.
The furniture, the worn fabrics, the crockery and cutlery, the burgundy velvet sheets and covers, everything was intact, lost and standing still in time.
Nothing and no one had entered.
The time that had passed respected the past, leaving it intact.
This story, which is true, is an example of what the concept of private property represents.
Nothing could be clearer.
Neither criminals, opportunists or the state, in any of its forms, interfered with the will and circumstance of this family.
Legal security involves all parties.
First, respect among peers, since the neighbors, aware of the abandonment, respected the decision of their owners.
Second, the coherent public administration, far from applying absurd taxes and auctioning off assets in demonstration of its power of expropriation, quickly accompanied the heir to take possession of his asset.
Third, legislation and predictable justice, which for more than 80 years has put the right to private property above cheap politicking.
It is probably because of issues such as these that countries are the way they are.
In Argentina, speculating with magic solutions only serves to, for a while, put the dust under the carpet without dealing with the real issues that have put us off as a society.
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