It is difficult to talk about a missing friend, even more difficult when the friend had become a prominent figure in our hunting journalistic world.
written by Emmanuel Tabasso
Danilo Liboi, from Turin and first frequenter of the rice fields where he organized a tense for the ducks, then passed with his soul and heart to the mountains, especially those of the Val di Susa, he knew how to be bristly, pungent, arrogant and quarrelsome. But beware: in a world of accommodating opportunists, of wise conspirators, of lazy in thought and actions, these are superior class qualities, they are medals of rare value, they are characteristics that allow to appreciate, sometimes in health verbal duels, what is in the individual.
Inside Danilo's soul there were those qualities of strong personality, the result of education, study and culture taken and kept in reserve over the years, with these the ideal weapons of the verbal skirmish made of foil jabs, sharp sabers were refined. or burning lashes: the half measure did not belong to him and with this he guaranteed the interlocutor the impossibility of distorting his thoughts. Maybe you could not always agree with him on the matter dealt with, but you appreciated the honest and sincere contender who had no fears or fears in explaining his convictions with a wealth of reasoning and documentation.
He only told me a big lie when, for editorial reasons, I stopped writing for the two magazines he masterfully directed, Cacciare a Palla and Sentieri di Caccia: he was so angry that he told me “from today you will be an enemy”. I tried to ease the tension by correcting the term in adversary, but without distracting him from that brand he had given me. Here, the lie was only the result of disappointment, we got along so well for the job, and time had subsequently brought out the essence of our magnificent relationship, even at a distance and without frequent meetings. The last one in Vicenza on Monday afternoon when, alone in a corridor of the fair, we stopped to talk and once again I was unable to go beyond a laconic but very clear statement about his health: "let's talk about something else ”He said and the speech turned to dear Federico and his magnificent road opened in areas of the world such as Africa where his 19 years are all to be expressed with the careful sowing of dad since he was a child.
I believe that the germination of so many good seeds in future years will allow the child to understand and accept certain things. Before leaving, I tried a close connection for a meeting outside of work, a bit like passing the spoon near the boulder where the trout is, but it was useless. He embraced me, something unusual for him, with strength and friendship, the essence of a life certainly not long, but of prodigious intensity.
Emmanuel Tabasso