Benevento
“April 25, 2024 in Benevento will be remembered for an extraordinary, plural and, finally, also youthful participation, which also arises from the work of the ANPI aimed at involving the territories and preparing a generational change”. Thus in a note the Italian Partisans Association of Benevento comments on the large participation of people who marched yesterday for the demonstration on April 25th.
“In thanking all the towns and citizens, the unions, the parties, the associations that made this event possible, we want to strongly reiterate a request that emerged from the intervention of the provincial president, Amerigo Ciervo, which follows the mayor’s declarations in January and to the painstaking work of a Commission established by the ANPI, composed of authoritative scholars and teachers (Angelo Bosco, Gaetano Cantone, Erminio Fonzo and Teresa Simeone, therefore, on the day of Liberation, officially asks the Mayor, who fully recognizes himself). in the values of anti-fascism, to repair a serious wrong as soon as possible. Toponymy has a very great function in the civil religion of a community. It must remind the polis of significant events and facts and of men and women who have offered a revealing contribution to the history of that community community, in some ways, seems to have stopped at the Risorgimento, the First World War or the exploits of Italo Balbo, the well-known fascist hierarch from Ferrara, leader of the “Atlantici”, responsible for the violence that killed Don. Giovanni Minzoni, the parish priest of Argenta. In Benevento there is an avenue dedicated to the Prince of Naples, but there is no square or street named after the Republic. And, since the nineties – they point out from the Anpi -, there has no longer been Piazza Giacomo Matteotti. For the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the kidnapping and barbaric killing of the first and most important martyr of fascism, we officially ask the mayor of the city of Benevento to provide for this lack and to act as soon as possible, naming a street or a central square after to Giacomo Matteotti. We know that the mayor is not insensitive to this issue, and in fact he did not hesitate to accept the request of Solot and ANPI to name a space after Maria Penna, a Gappist from Benevento killed in Florence eighty years ago. A few months ago he publicly declared that «in Piazza Santa Sofia there is an incredible concentration of history, cultures, civilizations and architecture, difficult to find elsewhere and therefore I believe the time has come to give a different consecration, this year being the centenary of his death, to Giacomo Matteotti, assigning him a new public space, as it should be. I think placing his memory elsewhere is a serious way of remembering him.” The ANPI, declaring itself available for a meeting on the issue, awaits a decision on the matter quickly.
