Choice of freedom and peace

Ceremony in Piazza Capriolia Vaston the occasion of the Republic Day of 2 June.

Present, among others, the mayor Francis Mennathe deputy mayor Licia Fioravantethe assessors Anna Bosco e Nicholas Della Gattathe president of the municipal council Marco Marchesani, municipal councillors, representatives of the forces of law and order and of combat and weapon associations. After the blessing of Don Luca Corazzariparish priest of San Giuseppe, was deposited at War Memorial a laurel wreath.

Mayor Francis Menna in his speech he said: “Seventy-seven years may appear, especially for the younger ones, as too great a distance to be able to consider the extraordinary importance of what happened that June 2, 1946. However, they are not too many if we consider the topicality of that message: of that republican choice which, fulfilling the experience of the Resistance, gave us the fully alive identity of a civil community dedicated to a destiny of freedom and peace .

Millions of women contributed to that choice who, for the first time, had access to the right to vote. Italians who contributed decisively to freeing the country from the innumerable scars of the fascist dictatorship, the disastrous world war and the even more dramatic civil war.

They were “silent but blameless” promoters of the emergence of that culture of encounter which was the foundation of the season of pure institutional renaissance which was the Constituent Assembly. While, amid countless difficulties, the country was being rebuilt, Europe was already being looked at as a natural and complete horizon of the newborn Italian democracy. The European Union, the dream of great children of different nations once divided and opposed (I like remember, among these, our compatriot Altiero Spinelli), is now a reality to make progress and deliver better to those who will come after us. Above all today, we need to remember that if we have the good fortune to live free in our land and to be at peace with the rest of the world, if we have the opportunity to travel, getting to know ever new peoples and places, we owe it to the generosity of many yesterday’s Italians who often they handed over to their children’s future, to our future, what they held most dear: their own lives.

To all of you, to your families, to your fellow citizens of Vasto, to all Italians, my most sincere wishes for this day of celebration. Long live the Republic! Long live Italy!”.

The ceremony was concluded by the president of the Vasto section of the National Carabinieri Association Joseph Galante with reading the Prayer for the Fatherland.