Yesterday, April 25, was the Festa della Liberazione in Italy. Liberation Day is one of three secular public holidays in Italy. Labour Day (May 1 – stay tuned!) and Republic Day (June 2) are the others. It commemorates Italy’s liberation from German occupation and the rule of the Nazis on 2 May 1945. (This was the day of Germany’s formal surrender.) The holiday falls on April 25 because on that date in 1945 the Italian partisans declared a general uprising against Nazi rule.
Italians first celebrated the holiday in 1946. But it remains divisive because far-right groups and their political leaders regularly refuse to celebrate it. Sure enough, this year there was an incident in Azzate, northwest of Milan. A neo-Nazi group carrying a banner with the fasces, the symbol of the ancient Roman magistrate’s power, adopted by Mussolini (and from which we get the English word, ‘fascism’), confronted an anti-fascist protester. The police had to intervene to prevent violence.
In Rome, the President of the Republic lays a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. This tomb is at the ‘Altar of the Fatherland’ on the exterior of the Vittorio Emanuele II monument (above). If you’ve been to Rome you can’t miss it. It sits in Piazza Venezia near the Colosseum and the Forum, and is (to put it mildly) a busy piece of architecture. (We don’t much like its mixture of styles.) It was completed in 1935 to commemorate the the first king of Italy after its unification.
This year, the President of the Republic was joined by the Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni. Her presence was not a given, since she herself as a youth joined the Italian Social Movement, a group founded in 1946 by followers of Mussolini. Prime minister since October, she has toned down some of the more virulent aspects of her party’s rhetoric. But she remains opposed to LGBTQ rights and immigration. For what it’s worth, she said yesterday that her party was incompatible with nostalgia for fascism.
The holiday also commemorates resistance against fascism and Nazis, not least the Jewish community of Rome. These partigiani (partisans) opposed the fascist government even before World War II started. Under German occupation, they were treated brutally when captured.
(Photo: Public Domain)
Liberation Day also commemorates one of the worst of these incidents, that of the Fosse Ardeatine, a quarry on the outskirts of Rome. On 24 March 1944 the Nazis executed 335 people, including civilians and Jews, in retaliation for an attack by the partisans the previous day that killed 35 German soldiers. Yesterday the mayor of Rome, Robert Gualtieri, visited the Museum of the Liberation of Rome. The building was formerly the headquarters of the Gestapo in Rome; today it pays special attention to the Fosse Ardeatine massacre.
Although many shops close for the holiday, many were open, as were many restaurants (this is Italy, after all). Because the holiday was on a Tuesday, Italians like to fare un ponte (make a bridge) to the weekend by taking the Monday off too. We were out among the Romans yesterday in the historical centre on a glorious sunny day. There were long lines at every gelato store and at the usual monuments. Nothing could have seemed farther than those dark days of Italian and European history that the holiday commemorates (just as Memorial Day where we come from features cookouts). But the day was, for us, a reminder of what many had to sacrifice to make present-day Italy possible.
