GROSSETO – The Grosseto Rotary Club was born on 14 May 1954, and seventy years later that event is remembered with a series of events that reach their peak on the anniversary day, 14 May this year, with a celebration which will take place in the council chamber of the Municipality of Grosseto.
The program includes a greeting from the mayor of Grosseto at 5pm, Antonfrancesco Vivarelli Colonnathen (5.15pm) the greeting of the current president of the Rotary Club of Grosseto, Alessandro Antichiand at 5.30 pm a lecture by the professor Zeffiro Ciuffoletti (“At the origins of the miracle”) which will recall the post-war years (not only in Grosseto) which sowed the seed of that rebirth of Italy which went down in history as the “economic miracle”.
Already with the exhibition on “1954, the year in which Rotary was born in Grosseto”, which saw forty large panels displayed in the Cloister of San Francesco reproducing pages of newspapers from that year, it was possible to have a measure of the spirit of rebirth, of the enthusiasm that could be felt in the city through the “reading” of events. There followed – in 1954 – inaugurations (see Chamber of Commerce, or Enaoli), works that would have redone the face of the city (see Via della Pace), projects projected towards the future (hillside lakes, resurfacing of roads, construction of homes), and there were also utopias (see the idea of a motorway between Grosseto and Marina) or fantasies (sightings of flying saucers and even encounters with aliens were commonplace).
Also within the framework of the celebrations of the 70 years of life of the Grosseto Rotary Club, the visit of the Turkish Rotarians of the Galatasaray Rotary Club who came to sign a “twinning” with the Club chaired by Alessandro Antichi should be seen. Returning to the history of Rotary, in March 1954, on the initiative of a group of twenty-seven qualified people, belonging to various professional and entrepreneurial categories active in the local community, the birth of the Rotary Club in Grosseto was announced and on 14 May 1954, auspicious the godfather club of Siena, the “Charter” constituting the Club was delivered.
As mentioned, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the foundation, the Rotary Club of Grosseto, with the patronage and collaboration of the Municipality of Grosseto, promotes a reflection on the historical, national and local context in which the association was born and developed.
“For this reason – declare the organizers – they called one of the most accredited historians, the Grosseto native (he is from Scansano) professor Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, professor of contemporary history, Academic Emeritus of the Georgofili, member of the Scientific Committee of the “Rivista di Storia dell’Agricoltura” and of the Scientific Committee of the History of Italian Agriculture. Among his research topics are: Italian and European political history; the history of agriculture; the history of nutrition and the social history of communication. He has a profound knowledge of Grosseto, the city in which he studied and lived, and of the Maremma which was – and still is – the subject of several of his studies and research”.
“It will be a particularly stimulating meeting, the one with Professor Ciuffoletti, since “in the years after the Second World War, Italy experienced a phase of great economic and social transformation that went down in history as “the Italian miracle”. In that same phase Grosseto, a walled city with an ancient history of the malarial Maremma, experienced what we could define as a miracle within a miracle, not only in the economy but also in culture (just remember that the director of the Chelliana Municipal Library was the writer Luciano Bianciardi) . The great transformation entailed costs for an ecosystem as complex as the Maremma one, but it opened up to the world the discovery of a landscape unique in terms of environmental and historical values”.
