Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Mr President of the City Council,

Mr Mayor,

Ladies and Gentlemen Counselors,

Mr President of the Region,

President Arnoldi and dear families of the victims,

we are located at Palazzo Marino, a place of democracy in the Milanese community, against which the ferocity of neo-fascist terrorists attempted to replicate, eleven years later, the massacre in Piazza Fontana.

We are here today because we feel the duty to remember, together, events for which the truth was revealed and justice was sought, amidst difficulties and obstacles, and often reaching unsatisfactory and vain outcomes.

The identity of the Republic is marked by the deaths and injuries of the National Agricultural Bank.

A frenzied attack against our civil coexistence even before against the very order of the Republic.

A lacerating tear; brought to the peaceful life of a community and a nation, proud to have left behind the monstrosities of war, the horrors of the fascist regime, which lasted until the Republic of Salò, the difficulties of the moral and material reconstruction of our country.

That 1969 was marked by one hundred and forty-five bomb attacks.

An unexploded bomb was found at the Banca Commerciale in Piazza della Scala, here in Milan.

On 12 December three more bombs exploded in Rome, at the headquarters of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, in Via Veneto; at the Altare della Patria, at the Risorgimento Museum; causing sixteen other injuries.

Previously, on 25 April of that year, two bombs at the Trade Fair and at the Exchange Office of the National Communications Bank, near the Central Station of Milan, had injured nineteen people.

On August 9, bombs exploded on eight trains in different parts of the country, injuring twelve passengers.

Again, on 19 November, in Milan, during a demonstration, the police officer Antonio Annarumma was killed.

We can well understand the meaning of the definition of "tension strategy" used by the British press to define that season.

In the middle, the grotesque coup attempt by the former commander of the X Mas of Salò, Valerio Borghese.

A spiral of blind and anti-popular violence, which was to continue in the following years, with the progressive emergence, alongside the black-based massacre terrorism, of a no less serious attack on life, inspired by delirious Red Brigade slogans.

I would like to remember Vittorio Occorsio and Emilio Alessandrini, magistrates who investigated the Piazza Fontana massacre, murdered a few years later, one by right-wing terrorists, the other by left-wing terrorists.

But the bloody attempts to take away the people's sovereignty have failed.

The Republic was stronger than the attacks against the Italian people.

Terrorist violence has subjected the civic conscience of our fellow citizens to a severe test.

The common feeling of unity, patriotism, solidarity, was, painfully but firmly, more aware and more solid after those attacks.

Fifty years after Piazza Fontana we feel, together with the families of the people murdered on that occasion, the profound pain of an unhealable wound caused to our coexistence.

Coexistence that is fully recognized in the Association of family members who, in recent years, has represented it well by demanding truth and justice and preserving memory.

Fully immersed in the history of Italy, of which the attack on the National Bank of Agriculture represents a sad, indelible page, we affirm the duty to respect a collective memory, in an affair whose origins and responsibilities are known.

Casual instrumental manipulations of the past, persistent rewritings of events, revisionist temptations fuel dark interpretations within which it is claimed to draw on versions for sectarian use, in an attempt to validate, a posteriori, choices of alignment, opinions of yesterday.

As President Napolitano recalled in 2012, on the occasion of Remembrance Day, "we are not groping in the darkness of an Italy of mysteries: we find ourselves faced with limits to be removed and problems of justice and truth still to be resolved, but in an Italy that has revealed very serious pitfalls by gradually freeing itself from them, that has defeated terrorism, identifying and sanctioning hundreds of the unfortunate actors, and that has safeguarded the safeguards of our democratic life".

The institution by Parliament of the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Domestic and International Terrorism and of the massacres of this type aimed to contribute to this aim. It corresponded to the need to allow our community to process and recognize itself in a history acquired and shared in the face of the tragic events of those seasons.

The passage of time does not place the attack on democracy carried out in those years among the old events that need to be removed: we will not make the mistake of thinking that these are issues relegated to a more or less remote past.

It is our identity, our civil pact that left Piazza Fontana marked by those events. We need to be aware of this so as not to run the risk of being able to relive them.

Faced with the homicidal madness, the citizens understood that their leading contribution to safeguarding the democratic order was precious; and they reacted, as here in Milan, in a firm and united way.

The collective citizenship pact made it possible to defend the Republic.

This is what exponents of civil society, professions, trade unions, political parties, local institutions, magistrates, law enforcement officers and teachers have witnessed, suffered and done.

A reserve of ethical values, even unexpected, which sees, and saw then, our community as rich: a reserve sometimes deserted.

The country's questioning of its own nature and destiny is rooted in the victims of Piazza Fontana.

That season was a mirror of the soul, of the suffering of our people, called to strengthen a secular and civil loyalty to the values ​​of the Constitution: the citizenship pact - based on founding principles, civil ideals, plural but common history - left to us as a legacy by the Struggle of Liberation.

A loyalty asked first of all from the servants of the State: men from the security apparatus, the Armed Forces, the Judiciary, charged by the community with ensuring the serenity of civil life. You don't serve the State if you don't serve the Republic and, with it, democracy.

The misleading activity of part of the state structures was, therefore, doubly guilty.

A cynical plan, nourished by international connections to subversive networks, aimed at destabilizing the young Italian democracy, twenty years after the entry into force of its Constitution. Design that was defeated.

They were years in which the awareness of the democratic forces of having to defeat the subversive strategy led to the expansion of spaces for participation in the life of the country; with a growing role of trade unions in proposing and achieving equality and growth objectives; with a new weight on the condition of youth, also expressed through student struggles for the reform of universities.

That spring, the hot autumn of the renewal of employment contracts, was opposed to a bloody December.

President Saragat underlined this in his message of 31 December 1969, pointing out how the violence suffered was "the antipodes of that form of generous rebellion which animates youth against all injustice and which today is called protest, but which under different names is always existed."

Social forces, Parliament, Government, were able to react, giving rise to an intense phase of social, economic and civil reforms in the life of the country.

From the law on the Workers' Statute to the provisions to establish the ordinary Regions, in May 1970. Again: the law for the protection of working mothers, the recognition of conscientious objection, democratic bodies in schools, the age of majority at 18, the new family law; in a broad plan of cohesion and social inclusion.

However, terrorism continued - and perhaps also for this reason - to kill in those years, taking the lives of defenseless citizens and servants of the Republic, as happened with the massacres of Peteano, Brescia, Bologna, in a vain attempt to provoke public opinion , a desperate reflex in pursuit of any security, willing to trade democracy for presumed and misunderstanding order.

Democracy, on the contrary, proved to be strong. Able to defeat terrorism, with the tools of a rule of law, without ever giving up respect for fundamental human rights.

They are the values ​​of our Constitution.

The memory of the victims of Piazza Fontana urges the Republic even more to affirm their permanent validity.

Each people carries, within themselves, the stigmata of an autobiography made up of heroism, joys, cowardice, pain, acts of courage and misdeeds. We need to know how to deal with them, with rigor, truth and justice.

At the moment in which we remember the victims of Piazza Fontana - and with them, with emotion, Giuseppe Pinelli, Commissioner Luigi Calabresi, whose families I greet present - we know that we must call the political and social expressions of the country, the men of culture, the entire civil society, to a common commitment: to prevent the terrible fractures in which those facts were criminally inserted from being renewed in Italy.

The destiny of our community cannot be prey to hatred and violence.

For no reason can the life of a single person be put at risk for a perverse plan of a subversive nature.

To the relatives of the victims gathered here, to whom I address with respect, solidarity and affection - and to whom Italy feels it is indebted - we must be able to say that we feel bound by a moral bond.

Italians among Italians, citizens among fellow citizens, to be attentive guardians of the future of our country.

In fidelity to the institutions of democracy that have been given to us by our Constitution.