Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Mr President of the Republic,
 
Mr President of the City Council
 
Dear Councillors,
 
Authority,
 
Dear fellow Milanese citizens,
December 12th is a date that no Milanese will ever forget. The Piazza Fontana massacre is a fundamental moment in the city's history. For our community it represents an occasion of pain, remembrance and solidarity. For the people who lost their lives, for the injured. And for their families, to whom every Milanese clings with emotion. I would like to immediately address the president and all the members of the Family Victims of Piazza Fontana association to thank them, on behalf of all the Milanese that I have the honor of representing. Our gratitude is immense towards your civil and moral commitment, which has promoted awareness of this horrible massacre. Your work of memory and search for truth is indispensable, because freedom cannot exist without truth, just as there is no democracy without justice. A truth and justice that are still missing, fifty years after those bombs that wounded Milan.

To pay homage to the victims of Piazza Fontana, on the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre, we meet in the City Council, the room where the ideas of all Milanese are represented, in the presence of the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella.

Milan was the first Italian city to be offended by the fascist massacre. No Milanese will be able to forget the noise of the explosion, the screams of pain, the fumes that covered the Duomo. Pity, solidarity and the search for justice pushed our community to unite in an embrace on the day of the funeral. Despite the pain, the Milanese were able to rediscover brotherhood and closeness in the religious greeting to the victims, pressed close to each other in a Piazza Duomo that had never been so full. Of despair, but also of love for our lost neighbor, and in a silence that was worth more than any words to condemn the massacre.

The images of the packed Piazza Duomo went around Italy and the world, reminding everyone that Milan would not give in and would always protect and remember its newly fallen brothers. At the entrance to the Duomo there was a sign: "Milan bows to the innocent victims and prays for peace." A testimony that is still current, like the homily of Archbishop Colombo. Our cardinal reported the words of two seriously wounded. The first told him: “It was a horrendous thing: but I prefer to have suffered it rather than having it done to others”; the other launched an appeal that had political forces as its first recipients: “This is not the way it goes. Do something now to change this world."

Piazza Fontana gave rise to one of the most terrible seasons in Italian history. Milan and Italy lost their innocence, as historians have pointed out, due to the bombs that exploded nearby. A murderous strategy aimed at extinguishing with blood the requests for modernization of the struggles of the sixties. And to subvert the outcome of the Resistance, the defeat of the dictatorship and the start of republican democracy. A wound to democracy that is still bleeding, because after 50 years the State has not been able to define the truth about that massacre. A burden and a sadness, as underlined on several occasions by Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and Giorgio Napolitano, predecessors of President Mattarella, who today honors us with his presence. A burden and sadness that has grown year after year due to the inability to provide a truth that would do justice to the dead, allowing society to move forward. A burden and a sadness for Milan as for Italy, hit too many times by terrorism after Piazza Fontana.

A painful season, but necessarily one to remember. Remembering is a civic and moral duty so that the past can provide nourishment for the present and the future. The memory of evil is indispensable for its defeat. The question posed by Primo Levi, “If this is a man”, contains within itself the observation that “this was done by a man”. The acceptance of evil as immanent to man is the premise for being able to defeat it. This is why we must be grateful to those who, like the Association of Family Victims of Piazza Fontana, like the other associations of relatives of victims of terrorism, remember an evil that has caused the most excruciating pain one can suffer, the loss of loved ones . They provide a valuable service to our community.

Our city will always be at the side of those who have lost their lives due to the enemies of freedom, democracy, rights and justice. And it will oppose those who aim to repress these principles at the basis of civil coexistence to bring us back towards oppression and discrimination.

Anti-Semitism, racism, fascism are poisons to be fought regardless of the political party with which one identifies. Democracy can be divided at the moment of voting as in institutional dialectics, but it is and must be united on the fundamental principles and values ​​enshrined in the Constitution. In Milan as in Italy there can be no space for those who think of crushing and offending man on the basis of different ideas, ethnic groups, or religions. This is what the memory of Piazza Fontana is for, a fascist massacre like several others that occurred in the seventies and eighties. This is what the memory of the victims of communist-inspired terrorism is for.

Piazza Fontana inaugurated a massacre strategy that aimed to recreate in Italy the conditions for the dictatorship, present at the time in other European countries. Then as today it is necessary to mobilize to prevent oppression, discrimination and intolerance from prevailing, favored by indifference. A cold wind of anger and violence blows. We must unite to counter it, extinguishing the reasons that drive it. An ethical and civil duty for us Milanese, to respect our history.

Milan is by vocation and conviction a welcoming, open, supportive and tolerant, humanist city. Centuries-old characteristics that have opened the wound in Piazza Fontana even further. And they made it harder to accept the injustices that followed. I think that good politics must always try to deal with history and I also think that those who represent the Milanese community must apologize to Pietro Valpreda and Giuseppe Pinelli for their persecution. A feeling of grateful memory which also applies to Commissioner Luigi Calabresi, a servant of the State killed after an offensive hate campaign against democracy.

The commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Piazza Fontana therefore reminds us how memory is justice and an exercise of civil ethics. Daily, so that it has the sense of paying homage to the fallen and not making their sacrifice in vain. Milan will always be at their side, as it has been done in the past and as it will also be in the future of this city.

Milan thanks you for your presence, Mr. President, and undertakes to build a more equal society which finds in freedom, justice and its openness to the world the way to contribute to a peace capable of opposing the horror of the massacre of Piazza Fontana.

We will work on this having faith in the fact that the splendid gesture of the meeting and the meeting of glances between Gemma Capra Calabresi and Licia Rognini Pinelli (not by chance two women, two splendid women) can be an incentive to live a new future by looking our past with open eyes.

Evil will never prevail because violence loses, always loses in the face of the strength of a people who find the meaning of their future in their living memory. We, in Milan, are like this.