On Thursday 25 April, Mayor Alan Fabbri spoke on the theme of Liberation, quoting the expression, by virtue of which ‘the freedom is like air: you realize how much it’s worth when it starts to disappear, when you feel that sense of asphyxiation that the men of my generation have felt for twenty years, and that I hope you never feel.”
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“These are the famous words of Piero Calamandrei, jurist, politician and one of the founding fathers of our Constitution. It is called ‘Liberation Day’ which is celebrated every year today and remembers and celebrates the fall of fascism in Italy and the liberation from Nazi occupation, 25 April 1945. One historical watershed which marks the transition from oppression to freedom”, commented the mayor.
“For this reason today – continued Fabbri – is a day of celebration for everyone, a day to live together. Today is the day in which we remember the courage of those who, often with very different political ideas, recognized themselves in the values of anti-fascism , uniting in the common struggle for freedom. Freedom often defended at the cost of one’s life, in the terrible torment of those who remained, and we find it a few steps away from another symbolic place, the wall of the Castle, where it happened the massacre of the Estense Castle. Eleven opponents of the fascist regime were shot in the ‘long night of ’43’. Ferrara itself, in fact, played, for better or for worse, a central role in this transition from the regime to Freedom. As early as the 1920s, fascist violence broke out in Ferrara, which constituted and became a terrible and consolidated model.”
Hence the reference to another historical episode: “The human and political story of Giacomo Matteotti, whose anniversary this year marks centenary of the killing, is a clear and dramatic example of this. One of the most important Italian Jewish communities animates the city with its thousand-year history. Between 1943 and 1945 the Jews of Ferrara were persecuted and deported, while reprisals and massacres stained the city and its countryside with blood and violence. Ferrara must remember its past, it must make it known to the younger generations, so that that past is never repeated again. Knowing and protecting the memory, in the name of freedom, was what moved us, as an Administration, to name squares and streets, to organize events and in-depth studies, to preserve the memory and decorum of the monuments and places that concretely symbolize this which meant the Resistance in the Ferrara area”.
Fabbri added a reference “ai memorial stones of the martyrs of Freedom, like those recently remembered of the massacre of the X Martyrs of Porotto, cleaned and restored after decades of lack of intervention. I think of the naming of Piazza Darsena after the Jewish poet Giovanna Bemporad and of the many moments of in-depth analysis made in recent years about Giorgio Bassani. I am thinking of the collections of the Risorgimento and Resistance Museum, surveyed for the first time in their entirety and restored, deploying important economic resources for the maintenance and care of the books, plaques, banners, flags and memorabilia representative of our history”.
Furthermore, a nod to “the construction site of Palazzo Pico Cavalieri – formerly the ‘House of the Fatherland’, in Corso Giovecca – which is destined to become, in addition to being the headquarters of the combat and weapons associations, the new and important center of the museum of Risorgimento and Resistance. Not long left: the end of the post-earthquake damage repair work, with structural improvement interventions and restoration, and the consequent inauguration of this important headquarters are expected in 2025″.
The mayor concluded that “in a few days, Saturday 27 and Sunday 28 April, Ferrara will return to host ‘La Colonna della Libertà’, a parade of over 110 historic military vehicles from the Second World War and over 300 figures in uniform, who will recall what the ‘Italy lived on April 25th 79 years ago. All these pieces are breaths of energy and memory, which we wanted to return to the city, thus remembering our martyrs and honoring them. ‘Vital air’ that reminds us how precious freedom is, so that it will never be missing again.”
