Appeals Italian students for the September XX
in view of the 150th Anniversary of the Unification of Italy
1. Today, XX September - the day when the new school year has started throughout the country - the Mazzini of Italy you devote to the party capital of Rome and national unity to address the appeal was Ugo Foscolo: "Italians, I urge you to stories."
Yes, that's an invitation to the study of history, because a country that has no past has no future. When, in 1831, Giuseppe Mazzini founded Young Italy to mend the pieces of the cultural identity of our country and direct it towards the advancement of humanity were your contemporaries at the time, from all regions, the first to join his Republican program: the project that would restore the Italians the awareness of being a nation.
Young Italy was really young: the patriots who adhere to it could not have more than 35 years: a disruptive element in a conservative patriarchal society and that today, paradoxically, the current back!
But the Risorgimento inspired by Mazzini was not only a process of territorial unification, because - above all - a big step that laid the spiritual foundations of our national community, defining the DNA with the values \u200b\u200bof humanism, culture and democracy.
why study history of Italy is all about understanding our roots, to question the problems of yesterday and today form their own idea, being aware of citizenship, to become able to build the future.
In particular, the present study Risorgimento means to follow the complexities and contradictions, which were very deep in a country that became very late and that a nation state in the plurality of its regions had a rich but also an inherent weakness.
2. Italy seems to have forgotten the Risorgimento, but can not enter the twenty-first century free of capital of moral values \u200b\u200bthat this experience has historical significance, if not in danger of losing something fundamental.
Rediscover the true Renaissance, what they did for men and women from all over Italy who aspired to the ideals of freedom and justice. Not disclosed by the dynastic legend Savoy monarchy, not the exploitation and nationalist rhetoric of the fascist regime, and not the scapegoat that today more than ever, "local movements and selfish - but also a recent film - they want it to cover the mistakes of the ruling classes that have pursued corporate and ideological interests.
Mazzinians We would like to share with you a hope to feel less alone in our battle cultural and civic life. We read of the decline of Italy and everywhere we see the signs, not only in the social and economic but also in the now permanent institutional crisis. Yet we feel that today more than ever are current values \u200b\u200bof the Risorgimento. Mazzini's idea of \u200b\u200ba plural and open country is the only one in the new century can keep alive a community oriented European and global integration.
The redemption of workers, women's empowerment, the republican constitution, solidarity International to the oppressed peoples, the political objective of the European federation, education development as a free man, the struggle for liberation from fascism, were all achievements of the renaissance spirit, goals early in the thought of the Italians Giuseppe Mazzini and reached who were able to look to the future of their generations.
3. The school was in the history of united a large factor in civil growth and social development. It's up to you to ensure that classrooms are not now a parking lot, but a place of real growth in the critical spirit which is formed and is known to understand.
Study the history of the Risorgimento, riappropriatevi the history of our country. And do not be discouraged if sometimes you will not find in textbooks, manuals often ideological, whose authors will tell only of processes, structures and techniques because they have forgotten that history is made by men and for men.
Ask your teachers, all teachers, to give you the tools to study: Go in libraries and archives, books and documents saved from the dust, be inspired monuments and headstones, read the newspapers past and novels that return the feelings and those of an era, sieved websites that can provide information, opinion, suggestion.
The school year just started soon crosses an important anniversary: \u200b\u200bthe 150th anniversary of the nation state. You decide if 2011 will be only a year in which to listen passively to the rigmarole of the celebrations, or is the time to maturity of a historical consciousness on which to build your future of Italians and Europeans who do not resign themselves to enjoy the world have inherited, but working for a better world.
Commit then to recall the historical dimension, to have greater knowledge and awareness of the past, to discuss among yourselves, to look for reasons - and also the illusions - of the generations who have gone before. With the same enthusiasm of the patriots who in two decades, two centuries ago, chasing a dream that became reality after all. And continue to do so if there is, as we have been in difficult moments of our history, those who take the witness: the dream of an Italy free and democratic nations bound in brotherhood all over the world.
After the first Renaissance that gave us the unity and freedom, after the second Renaissance that gave us a republic and democracy, is the time of the Third Renaissance, that of Italy of the People, where we can finally throw in the Europe Italy federal and Humanity, becoming - as Italians and Europeans - citizens of the world.
Genoa, XX September 2010
