PERUGIA – «April 25th is everyone’s holiday, because almost 80 years later we benefit from the fruits of the sacrifice of those who gave their lives in the name of the ideals of freedom and social and civil rights. Democracy, the fight against fascist and Nazi tyranny are constitutional values, which must be defended and shared. Today we celebrate April 25th, a celebration of the people, a celebration of Perugia and with Perugia and for Perugia.”
At the end of the official celebrations, during which important words of sharing were pronounced by institutional representatives, the powerful and evocative text written by Antonio Scurati and read, on the occasion, by Matteo Svolacchia resonated loudly. The attempted censorship of state television has become its opposite, that is, an extraordinary multiplier of civility and truth about fascism starting from the facts of the Matteotti murder. At the end of the commemoration, a colourful, festive and bubbling sea of people, over 700 people, shared the entire anti-fascist walk with Vittoria Ferdinandi and the Alliance for Victory, up to the electoral committee of Pian di Massiano. Perugia has set out to rediscover its parks from Sant’Anna to Pescaia, passing through Fontivegge up to Chico Mendes. And then the party at the Pian di Massiano committee, the speeches by Mirella Aloisio, Sara Belia, Roberto Ciccone, Francesca Tizi, Sarah Bistocchi, Lorenzo Falistocco, Andrea Stafisso and Lucia Maddoli and that of Vittoria Ferdinandi which we report below in full .
FERDINANDI’S SPEECH: «TALKING ABOUT POLITICS ON 25 APRIL IS LIKE BREATHING WITH LARGER LUNGS»
Happy April 25th.
Yesterday my brother didn’t escape a roundup, I didn’t wake up with the anti-aircraft sirens, going up here there were no panzers in Corso Vannucci, and none of you are shooting at Monte Malbe with the Francesco Innamorati Brigade against the Germans .
In some ways this is good news.
If I were in Gaza I probably couldn’t think the same way.
In high school I stumbled upon a phrase that has stuck with me: “Who knows if those who lived in the times of fascism knew they were living in the times of fascism.”
The banality of evil someone said.
Do we know what times we live in? What times are these? Talking about politics on April 25th is like breathing in bigger lungs. If I look at us, and I like looking at us, the faces are beautiful. We want to be on the street, to be here. You feel that you are not alone, that in politics it is possible not to be alone. Collect a witness. Yet instinctively, at the first contact with April 25th, you take a step back.
Do we, now at Pian di Massiamo at 1.30 pm on April 25, 2024, have anything to do with whoever stopped the Second World War… 50 million deaths… the Shoah, 30 million refugees in a devastated Europe?
The Tiber valley, between the provinces of Perugia and Macerata, was among the first to build a free zone, when the Nazis implemented the Alaric plan and took possession of Italy. And U.S?
I don’t know if I would have had the courage of the parish priest of Magione, Don Antonio Fedeli who offered himself as a hostage to the Nazis to have the bodies of tortured farmers returned to him, if I would have had the strength to refuse enlistment to go and fill trains running towards Auschwitz, like the boys from Ponte della Pietra who ended up shot by the Wermacht.
If you don’t feel the weight of that past, if that past doesn’t come to you as a commitment, as a present, if it doesn’t embody itself in the here and now, you don’t know that responsibility. If that past doesn’t concern you, the courage of those lives was useless.
It strikes me that this wealth – women and men ready to give their lives, not women, not men, girls, boys – comes to us in the form of fear, ambiguity, divisiveness, say the fearful.
I know, for sure, that I am anti-fascist. And anti-fascism is a virtue, it is not something acquired once and for all but it is a habitus, an exercise. You are not born anti-fascists, you become, through habitus, through daily exercise in defense of the values of freedom, equality and social justice.
This is why we are here, and we are here today. If I think about the good things about this country: the democratic tradition, the liberal, socialist, communist, feminist, Christian tradition, on April 25th… they were all on the same side. Everyone. And in the streets, not in the houses. On the side of those who liberated, of those who wanted to breathe with bigger lungs. From those worlds we were raised and nurtured. From there come the people who are with me in this Alliance. They were all on the same side and, apparently, we’re still there.
Welcome back, welcome back.
Thanks to each of us, because we were able to unite again, because we chose to all take a step back to take a thousand steps forward together.
It’s spring, even if it doesn’t seem like much today. And if I look at it it seems to me that the company is wonderful. It’s spring and you can see it on the faces of the kids in love on the street. The boys.
At least the ones who look up from their phone. But I understand them, I feel them. Because it’s fear that makes you keep your eyes down – and it doesn’t matter whether it’s on a screen or anxiety – I feel it. Cases of self-harm among adolescents have increased by 60% in the last ten years. Did you know? Do they tell you about it when they tell us about the Perugia of the white mill? In Umbria, as in Italy, suicide is the leading cause of death among young people. What air do we let him breathe to make him want to die? How much hate do they swallow? They feel alone, without cities and politics, and that is why they close their eyes to spring. Civil and political space has narrowed around our individual annoyances which seem to be the only way to give meaning to things. I understand the world through the fear it makes me. And we court that misery, we feel it is a home. And the boys close their eyes.
This is why April 25th disturbs us more than gives us joy. Because it marks the paradox we live in: a world that has become very small in meaning and value – what counts is what I do, what I feel, what I think -. Very far from the sense of that us that was the flesh of April 25th 80 years ago. What happens to others, be it the elderly man from Olmo who doesn’t make it to the end of the month, the family from Ponte San Giovanni who can’t find a nest, the inhabitant of Kiev or Gaza under the bombs, the migrant who dies at sea , the neighbor with whom I argue in the Silvestrini queue because it takes 6 months for a specialist visit and in some way it’s his fault, well, that pain, today it no longer seems to concern us.
I don’t know whether to call this resentment, this sadness, this fear and this inability to resonate with the pain of others, fascism. But I know one thing, I know that I don’t know how to live alone. I do not want. And I find no beauty in thinking that others are alone. And I don’t find any beauty in thinking that we left our kids alone.
Whoever scrolls through the names on our lists, from teachers to researchers to those who come from business and work, from associations, finds another world. A world that finds no attraction in sadness, fear and isolation.
I want what everyone wants. A Perugia that is ours. A Perugia that is ours, because it smells of us and of spring. A Perugia that, like that April 25th 80 years ago, looks up, where social struggles and Catholic volunteering know about each other, know precisely in the sense that they taste each other when they work, who rediscover the radical nature of the values that keep them united. Once upon a time they called it democracy, today we call it the Alliance for Victory. It’s the same thing, it’s the same spring.
Fascism, whose defeat today we remember – let’s remember it: the defeat – is this fear. This is why he has a program with a low, very small look. Institutionalized fear and sadness, black uniforms, made into a system, a practice of hatred, which becomes an apparatus. Look what they do with us, every day they try to transform an electoral campaign made of flowers, of smiles, of walking together through the streets hand in hand, of kindness, of ladies with sinals and smiles who prepare the cake for the text, they try to transform it into a bogeyman in which imaginary enemies are added every day: those who insult, who attack, who tear down posters, the extremist left. And they don’t understand how dangerous and reckless this continuous incitement to hatred is.
It is paradoxical to see them condemn fear and hatred while they are unable to sow anything else, because they are not made of the same material that dreams are made of but of that which is made of the fear of losing one’s seats. And not us, we are made of spring and dreams.
They say April 25th is a divisive holiday. How can you feel divided by people celebrating a liberation? Seriously, how do you do it? Divided by those who drove out the Nazis, built democracy, won the vote for women.
Without April 25th I wouldn’t be here. Literally. I would have no degrees or job. The fascist laws took away the professorships of philosophy and literature from women, forced girls who were expecting a child to be fired, to lower salaries, and to hiring no more than 10% in the company, I would probably now be churning out table tops for my country. So thank you, thank you Mirella for defending my freedom and that of our sisters. In front of you I will always continue to feel tiny, and rightly so. Because the effort I will continue to make to resemble even a fraction of your courage will make me better than I could have been without having known your story. Your story that today we all celebrate and defend together and that we will not allow anyone to rewrite.
Without the truth of Mirella’s body and heart who fought for us, we will not be here dreaming of bringing spring to our city. And for this reason we will no longer allow those who represent our institutions the cowardly ambiguity of not declaring themselves anti-fascist.
