Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Mr President of the Republic, Mr Mayor, dear relatives of the victims, Councilor and Advisors, authorities, citizens, 

on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Piazza Fontana massacre, the Council Chamber, the heart of democracy in our city, has the great honor of welcoming and hosting the President of the Republic. A gesture of great sensitivity and attention on your part, Mr President, for the symbolic value that this date has for our city, for our community and for the entire country.

Fifty years, half a century. The Association of the families of the victims, who will participate in this extraordinary council today with its president Carlo Arnoldi, has gone through this time facing with great strength, dignity and rigour, the moral and civil urgency of pursuing truth and justice and of keep alive the memory of that attack that tore their lives apart. Today we have the opportunity to thank them, expressing our closeness and offering them the embrace of the City Council and all of us. A closeness also manifested by the presence of many citizens in the Gallery today. Thanks to your tireless commitment as witnesses, especially aimed at the new generations, your personal mourning has become the mourning of an entire community. In all these years you have met thousands of students, always making yourselves available to tell and make them understand what happened. It was a civil commitment in honor and in support of our democracy - because a democracy is all the stronger the more its citizens are able to understand what is happening, starting from a profound awareness of what has happened.

This day occurs in a historical phase in which attention to memory is particularly strong. The more some events recede, the more society becomes aware that their meaning must be preserved and renewed. This is a very important fact that makes us very responsible as representatives of the institutions. Culture that is not just an ornament of the spirit must be alive, fruitful, necessarily innervated by a memory renewed to the point of acting in the present. In response to this need for awareness, ritual celebrations, experienced as a due act, are not adequate, unless they are above all profound opportunities to renew that pact between generations which is the memory of what has been, as Liliana Segre reminded us, in Piazza della Scala, two days ago.

Today we want to remember what the Piazza Fontana massacre was: the subversive attempt made by the neo-fascist Venetian group of Ordine Nuovo to subvert the democratic state, with the aid and collusion of deviant apparatuses of some institutions, in order to destabilize public order and to break that relationship of trust between citizens on which democracy lives and is strengthened.

I like to see how much the city of Milan is taking action for this anniversary: ​​there are many events, demonstrations, moments of reflection that demonstrate how alive the memory is among the Milanese.

In three days, on December 15th, on the anniversary of the victims' funerals, we will open the City Council chamber all day for a day of discussion and reflection on that very important moment in which fear and terror did not prevail. That was one of the highest days in the history of our city, as Corrado Stajano wrote. The whole of Milan was present at that solemn and silent funeral: “a flood - again quoting Stajano - of women and men dismayed with pain. The conscious bourgeoisie and the working class then formed, with the seriousness of serious moments, a single body in the brotherly city. The possible coup failed that day."

The funerals of the victims were in fact the first response - a peaceful but very firm response - of the most authentic Milan. The Milan of workers, of families, the Milan of culture, of institutions, of schools, of the Union. Those who had fought in the Resistance for a freedom that someone wanted to destroy took part in the funeral. They all witnessed firsthand the opposition to a deadly subversive project. A project that was born defeated by the united and impressive response of a free and democratic people.

Ours is a solid democracy. It has demonstrated this with the firmness of its institutions and the participation of its citizens, when terrible events and anti-democratic intentions aimed to shake its foundations. In our republican history, the Piazza Fontana massacre was one of the darkest of these events, a watershed.

The embrace and thoughts also go to the many injured of that day, some of whom still bear the visible signs of what happened on their bodies.

I also want to greet Giuseppe Pinelli's daughters and wife who are present here. Pinelli was another innocent victim of that season and those days. First victim of unfounded and defamatory suspicions, then of an unjustifiable end. Milan wants to remove the oblivion from his name and reaffirm his honor and value.

This year also marks the forty-fifth year of the Piazza della Loggia massacre. I greet the Mayor, the President of the City Council of Brescia and Manlio Milani, president of the Casa della Memoria of Brescia. We have built together a project of joint initiatives, between the City Council of Milan and that of Brescia, to renew the memory of those five years between the two massacres and to tell the historical-political unity of that phase. Even in that case the matrix was the same and the civil reaction was equally strong to block what should have resulted according to the architects.

Our democracy, I am convinced, is solid. This means that we can look without limitations, without censorship and without the fear of succumbing to them, at the darkest moments of our past and our history. Memory is only possible starting from this certainty. The days and then the years that followed the Piazza Fontana massacre were one of these dark moments. Years in which deviant members of some institutions worked to distance the truth and mislead.

Today the lack of judicial truth is also the result of those plots and of the infidelity to democracy of men who should have been at its service. Remembering this, however, I also want to remember all the servants of the State who tenaciously fought for the truth and clashed with those who tried to hide it. The presence of the President of the Chamber last year and today that of the President of the Republic, for the first time palazzo Marino on the occasion of this anniversary, in an incisive and concrete way they recount the victory of democratic institutions, and highlight the censure of those who betrayed. Another Italy moved immediately, in its institutions and civil society, to find truth and justice in the name of all victims.

That Italy, that vast majority of our people who reacted, was the bulwark of our democracy and its possibility, its beating heart. Today and in the future it will be the young generations who will collect the testimony and teachings, which fuel our desire for tolerance, peaceful coexistence, full realization and exercise of the civil and social rights enshrined in the Constitution. The same ones that those responsible for the massacre would have liked to erase.

Milan, our city, does not forget. Thank you.