“Give humanity back to that memory”. The Region commemorates the Great War

A ceremony to commemorate the First World War was held today, in the chamber of the Regional Council. “We must give humanity back to that memory,” said Gianluca Marchesi, of the National Association of Alpine Troops. “Commemorating means having a common memory, being aware that life today, which has not seen war for 70 years, is in danger of forgetting these events that were endured and lived through by young people, fathers and mothers.”

The First World War caused 600,000 victims in Italy, of which more than 80,000 were in Lombard, either dead, missing or lost. “So, today,” said Raffaele Cattaneo, the President of the Regional Council, “we want to remember the pain of the victims and start a joint reflection on what the war meant, remembering that the fate of the society we belong to is the responsibility of each of us. The warning and commitment of the institution is therefore to repeat that we never want to see war again, as stipulated in Article 11 of the Constitution.”

The “suicide of civilised Europe”, as Pope Benedict XV defined it, “led to profound and indelible political and social change, which characterised the whole of the 20th century. In this sense,” Cattaneo remarked, “the Great War, for Italians, was the first, profound experience that led to the awareness that we were a single nation. The social divisions and the dramatic consequences that followed, must not prevent us from finding, in the events of 100 years ago, traces of an identity that, back then, began to develop, which we can see commemorated in every village, whether small or isolated, where there is a monument dedicated to those who fell in the war, an imaginary line of suffering that connects our communities.”