Italy, democracy awaits us

April 25, 1945 - April 25, 2025. The further we move from the days of the general uprising against Nazism and Fascism, the more we need to remember and commemorate what happened. Fewer witnesses and less transmission of the memory of the Resistance risk eroding the anti-fascist foundations of society, calling into question the Constitution and, consequently, the core principles of our social life.

We need new forms of narrative to address the current situation and raise the consciousness of young people in democracy. The challenge here lies in engaging them. Perhaps one path schools can take is to help them identify with the men and women of a given period, to understand their mindset, to appropriate their experiences, their emotional dynamics, and their interpretative frameworks.

Then it might even be moving to read the front page of Reggio Democratica, the provincial organ of the CLN of Reggio Emilia, which, in its first issue dated April 25, 1945, writes: "Today, when our province has been completely freed from the oppressive yoke, our heads rise to receive the kiss of freedom that once again shines on our banners. Twenty and more years of painful and hard-fought suffering […] guarantee our loyalty to an Italy that had lost its way and today finds itself in the splendor of these spring days when from the plains the patriotic formations of freedom—the first powerful, the others razor-sharp—bring the glory of so many hard-fought battles fought against an enemy often more powerful, always cruel. The new Risorgimento, through which Italy is being reborn today, is a genuine expression of the popular movement that has seen and continues to see all the progressive forces of the homeland aligned against the henchmen and the police of a despotic and bloodthirsty master who made arbitrariness the law and honest commerce. […]

Today we are so strong that we could annihilate in an act of legitimate—some would dare say dutiful—vengeance the Nazi-Fascist machine that mutilated us in flesh and in our families. But it is precisely in this strength that we find the will to exercise justice exclusively, forgiving the weak, straightening the crippled, and punishing the truly guilty. Everyone who, whether praised or passively, followed the chariot of tyranny was responsible, but on this day, we wish to be generous enough to forgive those who "did not know," recalling the words of the dying Just Man: "Forgive them, for they know not what they do." [...] To the families of our martyrs, who have already approached us, beseeching forgiveness on those who struck them so harshly, we wish to offer enlightened justice. [...] Freedom forces and popular masses, marching for the final leap! To you, who, together with the allies, bring us the great gift we never doubted, go the thanks of all the people and fervent wishes for the final battle that will definitively consecrate us as brothers with the peoples of the North. Then we will begin the hardest, but most luminous of battles: that of reconstruction. The Italy of democracy awaits us. It is ours, the true Italy. Long live freedom!
It hasn't always gone well; there have been settling of scores, vendettas, and betrayals, more or less serious, of the initial ideals, but that freedom was true, human, and therefore imperfect. Precisely that freedom of which Calamandrei wrote: "You realize its value when it begins to disappear." La Pira never considered it self-referential, but always embodied in society: "Freedom must serve to choose the supreme and personal good of each individual and the common, supportive, and fraternal good of all. Freedom is, therefore, the foundation of responsibility."


Renato Bonomo
NP April 2025