“Sunday was a historic day for our city. A city which, with the bombing of 6 May 1943, paid the highest price, of all the Calabrian cities, for our country’s alliance with Hitler’s Nazi Germany. That bombing was the dawn of a very tortuous, bloody path that led us to liberation from the Nazi-fascist regime. It was the dawn of a whole series of other tragedies that we have the duty to remember: I think of the Fosse Ardeatine, Marzabotto, Sant’Anna di Stazzema, just to remember a few”.
The mayor of Reggio Calabria wrote it in a post on Facebook, Giuseppe Falcomatà.
“This work – he added, created by maestro Paolo Raffa and promoted byAssociation “We for Santa Caterina” by President Serranò whom I thank, it is our Guernica. And as well as the name of the work of Pablo Picasso remembers the bombing of the city of Guernica, I suggested calling it “Reggio Calabria”.
It is a work on which the names Of 58 victims of Santa Caterina, the victims of the quarter, but which reminds us of the names of all those who lost their lives, of those who paid the price of that war. Thanks to this work we will also have these names engraved in our hearts. Forever.
There is a phrase from our national anthem, less “sung” and perhaps less known but it is the one that strikes me the most and it says this: “We have always been trampled upon and derided because we are not a people, because we are divided”. In this very short sentence, the recipe for ours is written future. That is, the need to find unity of intent, of views, of policies for the development of a country and a territory. But, above all, the need to be a people.”
Falcomata continued:
“You don’t become a people overnight, it’s not something mechanical. We become a people because we share a common history, a history of values, a history of moments around which a community, a country, a city finds its identity. This is an identity monument. Being a people and remembering are two things that go together. Because a people without memory is a people without history. And a people without history is a tree without roots, therefore destined to die.
We celebrate the memory of the victims, we honor their sacrifice, we remember what happened. But this monument it is, above all, a warning for the future. For those people who will pass by, who will remember this tragedy and how important it is to defend the values of freedom and democracy because they are not absolute values and must always be protected. Daily basis.
We thought, as the municipal administration, of institutionalizing the day of May 6th in memory of all the victims of those bombings.
It seems right to me, it seems right to me, it seems to me to be a strong “brick” on which to continue to rebuild our common history”.
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