Brescia massacre Foggia memory of Luigi Pinto program of initiatives

So as not to forget, because without memory there is no future, because today as yesterday the Constitution must be defended and old and new fascisms opposed. This is the meaning of the cycle of initiatives promoted on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the fascist massacre in Piazza della Loggia in Brescia, in which 8 people lost their lives, including the teacher from Foggia and militant of Avanguardia Operaia and the CGIL Scuola Luigi Pinto.

THE ORGANIZERS. Promoted by the Chamber of Labor of Foggia, Flc Cgil of Capitanata, Anpi and Arci provinciale, with the support of the Municipality and Province of Foggia and the Fondazione dei Monti Uniti of Foggia, the scheduled events were presented this morning during a conference press organized at the Palazzo dei Contadini, headquarters of the Foggia CGIL.

LUIGI PINTO, KILLED BY FASCISTS. Gino, as his loved ones and friends called him, was born in Foggia on 8 May 1949. After graduating from Itis Altamura he traveled around Italy for work: he was a worker in a sugar factory, a miner in Sardinia, until the first teaching assignments of technical applications in middle school which took him to Rovigo, then to the province of Mantua, and finally to Siviano di Montisola, in the province of Brescia. A militant of the CGIL Scuola and Avanguardia Operaia, in September 1973 he married Ada Bardini, a classmate from the school. On May 28, Luigi Pinto was in the square together with thousands of other people to demonstrate against the continuous provocations and attacks by neo-fascists in Brescia and the province. He died following the bomb explosion on June 1, 1974. He was 25 years old.

THE COMMITMENT TO MEMORY. “For us it is a commitment that is renewed year after year to sediment the memory of those events that affected the country and the lives of many people, the victims and their families – explained the general secretary of the CGIL of Foggia, Gianni Palma -. It is necessary both for our city, which was able to express an extraordinary capacity for democratic participation in those terrible days, and for current events which require us to pay maximum attention to attempts at revisionism or obfuscation of historical truths. And to always support that individual responsibilities are ascertained in courtrooms.” And for the president of the Anpi of Capitanata, Michele Galante, there is a thread that links “the commitment of many workers and citizens of the time, in defense of the Constitution and democracy, and that of today, when we try – through other streets – to empty our Constitutional Charter, our democratic citizenship pact”.

THE PROGRAM OF INITIATIVES. The program of events opens on Monday 27 May at 5.30 pm with the inauguration of the photographic exhibition “Luigi Pinto, a story through images”, hosted on the first floor of Palazzo Dogana in Piazza XX Settembre. Following this, at 6pm in the Court Room, there will be a screening of the documentary interview with Lorenzo Pinto “Another hundred are born”, created by the Foggia anti-fascist coordination. Followed by a musical performance entitled “The Last Hours of Luigi Pinto”, a dance written and performed by Bruno Caravella.
The conference “50 years since the Brescia massacre” will be held on Friday 31 May, again in the Court Room of Palazzo Dogana. Among the speakers were the magistrate and former senator Giovanni Pellegrino, who was rapporteur for the commission of inquiry into the massacres; Manlio Milani, president of the Fallen Association of Piazza della Loggia; Ferdinando Pappalardo, national vice president of Anpi; Laura Castelletti, mayor of Brescia. The president of the Province of Foggia, Giuseppe Nobiletti, and the mayor of Foggia, Maria Aida Episcopo, will deliver the greetings.
On Saturday 1 June, at 10 am, there will be the ceremony of placing a wreath of flowers on the stele commemorating Luigi Pinto on the city’s avenue of the same name. At 8pm, at the Umberto Giordano Theatre, with free entry by booking seats (at the CGIL and FLC offices in Foggia), the theatrical show “Gino” will be staged, produced by the Teatro della Polvere with a text by Marcello Strinati and directed by Mariangela Conte and music by Antonio Cicognara.

CULTURE AND ANTI-FASCISM. “For us at FLC – explained the general secretary of the knowledge category, Giuseppe Ciuffreda – remembered the teacher Luigi Pinto it is a duty towards the new generations. And doing so through a cultural medium such as the theatrical performance takes on an even stronger value and capacity for empathic transmission in our opinion.”. The author Strinati, present at the conference, recalled how “we felt the duty, but also the honor, of telling Gino’s story, and for this I must say thanks to Nunzia Pinto and Giovanni Pedone who opened us to their most dear and painful memories”. “Our commitment to memory is never rhetorical – commented Domenico Rizzi, provincial president of Arci – we owe it to Luigi and the other victims of the massacre. The memory of what has been requires us to look at the new fascisms and it is necessary to build a value-based as well as historical perimeter in which all democratic citizens must recognize themselves and feel belonging”.