The president in San Severino Marche for April 25th. In his speech, he expresses positions in polite but clear contrast to those expressed by the President of the Senate La Russa, who had also asked for honor and respect for the dead of Salò
“It’s love of our country that moves us.” It is one of the most evocative (and applauded) passages of the speech Sergio Mattarellain the aftermath of the double signature at the bottom of the Security decrees, chanted from the stage of the Feronia Theater in San Severino Marche, the gold medal for civil valor received by the current head of state. And it is in the first lines of the text chiseled at the Quirinale to “remember” the April 25th – «the celebration of all Italians who love Freedom» which Mattarella gracefully and clearly distances himself from Ignazio La Russa’s position.
If for the president of the Senate and second position of state the partisans killed by Nazi-fascist “blind violence” and the dead of Saló are and must be equally honoured, for Mattarella the story is another: “It is love of our country that moves us. What, with immense sacrifice, the soldiers left in disarray, in the absence of orders after 8 September 1943, witnessed. The young people who fled the bans of the self-styled Italian Social Republic and who joined the partisan formations.” So no, they are not equal and Mattarella wanted to underline it and certainly did not do so «in the expectation of a history written in obedience to abstract ideological positions». History cannot be rewritten, this is the message in the 81st year of Liberation.
In the Marche, whose wonderful hills preserve the memory and traces of the battles of the Resistance, Mattarella recalls that «even in this place there are the roots of our Republic».
Born in 1946 «on the mistake of the war, on the opposition to an occupier who to redeem the shame of the collaborators who had supported him by privileging the party over the homeland». The reference is to the fascists, on whose responsibilities together with the Nazis Mattarella has never made any discounts. Remember Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, Enrico Mattei, Sandro Pertini, Giuseppe Saragat. It traces the history and the massacres. Listen to the letters of condemned to death by the Italian Resistance interpreted by Neri Marcorè and the poignant notes of Daniele Di Bonaventura’s bandeon, a sad ballad and «Bella ciao» in honor of the martyrs of the Resistance. He praises and pays homage to the partisans who shed their blood against “the dictatorships that had unleashed the Second World War and had made the rhetoric of war a value”.
And in the name of the military and civilian deaths and the victims of the Nazi concentration camps he launches his appeal for peace: «Peace for every person. Peace as a right of every people. Peace for every country. This is the meaning of Resistance. Oppose the violence of man against man.” This is why the international community gave life to the UN, to “aspire to free the world from the nightmare of war”. And here Mattarella once again condemns Putin and Trump without naming them when he observes that «in recent years, we are painfully witnessing anti-historic ambitions to weaken if not even remove those paths». What Western leaders should do is “give confidence in common institutions of peace”, strengthen them to counter those who aim to weaken them. We live in dark times, but nothing is lost. “Now and always Resistance!, says Mattarella, evoking Faulkner. And from San Severino he forcefully underlines “the character of our firm unity” and the determination of the Quirinale and the entire country “in the defense of our freedoms, our convinced openness to sharing, with other peoples, the values of justice and peace”.
The conclusion, which extends the “will to rise again” of the Marche to the entire country on the tenth anniversary of the earthquake, is entrusted to words of hope and national cohesion: «Italy, gathered around its Constitution, looks with confidence to the challenges of the future, together with the other European peoples. Long live the Liberation, long live the Republic!
