There is a day Italy will never forget. A cold, expectant spring morning when millions of people woke up and felt something was finally changing. It was April 25, 1945.
April 25, 1945, is the day the Northern Italy National Liberation Committee proclaimed a general uprising throughout the territories still occupied by the Nazis and Fascists. It ordered all partisan forces in Northern Italy to attack Fascist and German garrisons and force their surrender, days before the arrival of Allied troops. On that day, Milan, home to the largest anti-Fascist resistance, rose up and liberated the city. At the same time, Turin and Italy's major cities were also liberated, thus marking Italy's path to the end of the war. On April 28, three days later, Mussolini would be captured and executed. It was not a regular army that took to the streets.
The Resistance was born after the armistice of September 8, 1943, at the initiative of anti-fascists and soldiers of the dissolved Royal Army. From a few thousand men, it grew to approximately 300.000 thanks to the participation of workers, farmers, and young draft dodgers from the Republic of Salò. Ordinary people. People who had chosen.
The proclamation of the insurrection in 1945 marked the beginning of the path that led the country and Italians to choose the Republic in the referendum of June 2, 1946. This led to the proclamation, in 1948, of the Republican Constitution. It was precisely the Resistance that laid the foundations of the Republic. The Constituent Assembly predominantly consisted of those parties that comprised the CLN, bringing their respective political traditions and inspiring the Constitution with the principles of democracy and anti-fascism that the Resistance had had to fight with weapons to achieve.
Il April 22, 1946, the government led by Alcide De Gasperi issued a legislative decree which officially established the celebration of the April 25th as a national holiday.
