The European values of peace and freedom today “clash with the aggression of a neighboring country, larger and stronger. This puts us in front of some questions: the attempt to make history go backwards by those who pretend with the violence of weapons to impose their choices on a less large and less strong country is unexpected and surprising “. These values cannot be “sacrificed by tearing apart”. with respect to the answers to be given. This was stated by the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, participating in the ceremony for the 800th anniversary of the University in Padua together with the President of the Senate Maria Elisabetta Alberti Casellati and the number one of the European Parliament Roberta Metsola. At the opening of the ceremony, the second state office underlined how “freedom” is the “key word that has marked the history of this university incubator of ideas from which modern Europe was born”, a “curious, encyclopedic Europe in the relationship with knowledge, open to discoveries, sensitive to the contamination of ideas ». Elisabetta Casellati focused her speech on the theme of freedom, a word that stands out in the university’s motto, “Universa Universis Patavina Libertas”, “All freedom in the University of Padua, for all”. The president of the Senate underlined “the role of academic teaching and that legal tradition that has allowed Europe to progressively establish itself as a land of law and rights”. And again “the freedom of modern science, founded on the empirical-experimental approach developed by Galileo Galilei and developed in the medical field by Andrea Vesalio, founder of modern anatomy”. And finally “freedom in access to academic training where the Padua university, with the first woman graduate in the world, becomes the vanguard in women’s emancipation”. “The moral drive for freedom is the fil rouge of the entire glorious past of the University, but not only”, underlined Elisabetta Casellati, who also recalled “freedom at the center of the fertile exchange between the University and the productive fabric of a territory with multiple economic and social potential ”, a true“ flywheel of enterprise freedom; a driving force all the more important in a moment of economic emergency like the present one, determined by the pandemic and the war between Russia and Ukraine ”.
Among the excellences mentioned by Casellati, the Galilean School of Higher Studies, the Biodiversity Garden created within the Botanical Garden, the first university garden in the world, avant-garde aerospace research, “which sees the solid heritage of astronomical and engineering knowledge , physical, geological and technological become the driving force of the new ‘space economy’, ‘the commitment to’ a new vision of medicine ‘, fueled by progress in biomedical research and the University’s strategic contribution to the new Health Center “. The engine that drives this eight-hundred-year journey is the same today as yesterday: freedom as the foundation of culture and culture as the lifeblood of any path to freedom “, said President Casellati,” out of libertas there can be no progress. in law, in science, in medicine, in the humanities, in art, and therefore there can be no social growth. Only by remaining faithful to this vocation will we be able to fight the contemporary pitfalls of a knowledge society that too often confuses freedom with relativism. And together we will be able to continue to design the Europe of progress through knowledge ».