In Milan, the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella celebrated the 150th anniversary of the death of Alessandro Manzoni. The head of state laid a wreath at the funeral monument of the writer, buried in the Famedio of the Monumental Cemetery.
Mattarella celebrates the great nineteenth-century man of letters
Mattarella attended the ceremony a Manzoni house where the mayor Giuseppe Sala and the president of the Lombardy Region Attilio Fontana took part. Also reporting was Angelo Stella, president of the Fondazione Centro Nazionale Studi Manzoni, and Giovanni Bazoli, honorary president of the same foundation. The actress Eleonora Giovanardi read an excerpt from the Promessi Sposi, the famous historical novel by Manzoni. Below is the speech of the President of the Republic. “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 represents a fundamental charter, born after the horrors of the Second World War, which identifies the human person in himself. Without any difference, as a subject bearer of rights, thus barring the way to nefarious conceptions of supremacy based on race, on belonging, and, ultimately, on oppression, persecution, the prevalence of the strongest.
“Concepts and assumptions that are expressly placed at the basis of our republican constitution. In Manzoni's vision it is the person, as a daughter of God, and not the lineage, the belonging to an ethnic group or a national community, to be the recipient of universal rights, of guardianship and protection. He is man as such, not only as a member of a nation, as a citizen, to be the bearer of dignity and rights. Son of his own century, Manzoni had the peculiarity, which belongs only to the greats, of casting a farsighted gaze on society and on the historical reality of his time, capable of going beyond, connecting to the most lively and dynamic forces of Italian and European culture, pervaded by the aspiration for freedom, independence and self-determination”.
Manzoni father of the country
“An aspiration that cannot be separated from opposition and repugnance towards tyranny, the abuse of power, violence, injustice, especially against the poor, the humble, the defenceless. Manzoni has always avoided, due to his proverbial reserve and also for health reasons, political militancy in the strict sense. But he is considered, quite rightly, an inspirer and a driving force behind our Risorgimento and the unification of Italy.
And he is, to all intents and purposes, a father of our country. It is necessary to reflect on the tendency, recordable all over the world, of the ruling classes to pander to their own electoral or consensus base and its changing moods, recorded from day to day through polls. Rather than devoting himself to building wide-ranging policies, capable of withstanding the years and defining the future. Already in Betrothed, in the chapters dedicated to plague, Manzoni wrote graphically about these risks 'Common sense was there; but he hid himself, for fear of common sense ”.
(Photo quirinale.it)
