His name is Alessandro Palma. Twenty years. Tuscan from Florence. In Trento as a non-resident student, enrolled in the second year of the Faculty of Law. Yesterday morning – with a tricolor handkerchief around his neck – he paraded through the streets of the center holding the banner of the city section, adorned with seven medals of valor. He was, he says, the youngest member of the ANPI at the Trentino celebrations for April 25th. «I grew up in a context of militant anti-fascism» he says. «My parents made me understand the importance of participation. So, when I arrived in Trento, I thought I’d sign up and lend a hand.”
Generational change
It is an important testimony for the ANPI. The association has been addressing the issue of generational turnover for some time. «Once only ex-combatants or relatives of fighters could register» explains the president of the local section Mario Cossali. «But for some time now we have decided to open the doors to anyone who declares themselves anti-fascist. Today 20% are between 20 and 25 years old.” The fact remains that, if we ideally reviewed the 1,300 Trentino members, we would see mostly elderly people. Even among the kids who crowded the Santa Chiara park for the “anti-fascist pasta” – therefore not strangers to a certain sensitivity – some used unflattering words for the old Anpi. “Don’t write it,” a young man told us, “but in my opinion many live on old glories.”
The mayor and «pop fascism»
Everyone, however, agrees with Mayor Franco Ianeselli’s analysis on the «pop fascism» (“Fascism in some segments of public opinion seems to have become a pop phenomenon. We could even smile about it if the trivialization of the regime didn’t seem in many cases to be a way to rehabilitate not only a historical period but antidemocratic impulses from which Italy has never completely freed itself”, the words of the mayor in his speech at Palazzo Geremia). The imaginary of the twenty years. The myth of the Duce, re-proposed in clownish guise. Roman greetings done as a joke or provocation. The time spent has certainly taken its toll on him. Surely, if today we come to find irony over what was a civil war, it is also because those issues are no longer living flesh. «Fascism is far enough away that we have lost awareness of what it was» commented an 18 year old high school student. “But not so far that those things no longer exist.” An interpretation with which even Alessandro, the young man who held the banner of the Trento section yesterday morning, fully agrees: «With pop fascism it doesn’t mean that reactionary thought has disappeared. Only it’s more subtle.”
