An April 25 without street celebrations. The coronavirus emergency also falls on the Liberation Day, for the first time without marches and demonstrations, the flowers and laurel wreaths placed alone, or with the mask on the face, in accordance with the provisions of the lockdown. Not to change, however, is the desire to remember history and values that are the heritage of the country and its identity, the songs and torchlight processions transferred to the web for a full memory that makes this 75th anniversary unique.
Once the controversy of the past few days for the anti-gathering circular that seemed to exclude the Anpi from the celebrations was over, in the year of the pandemic on April 25 it became the feast of an Italy severely tested by the virus, but not bent. A country that remembers this date "founding of the Republic, democracy, civil coexistence", as the Anpi recalled in these days, which wants to start again just like partisans and anti-fascists did 75 years ago.
Not an end in itself memory, therefore, but a flower of rebirth, the one sung in the famous 'Bella Ciao'. It is not by chance that it is called "#Bellaciaoinognicasa", the flashmob promoted by Anpi at 3pm, the time of the traditional Milan event which this year leaves room for a sort of virtual procession. In the field, many personalities from the world of entertainment, culture, journalism, sport, trade unions, democratic associations, who joined the #iorestolibero call for solidarity in favor of Italian Caritas and the Red Cross.
A choral, heterogeneous action that intends to involve everyone. "We will raise funds for the desperate, for those who have no home and cannot eat because the coronavirus has also taken away alms", explains Carlin Petrini, creator of the initiative together with the president of the Anpi, Carla Nespolo. On the social profiles of the Anpi and on various online newspapers, two other women will speak with President Nespolo: the partisan relay Maria Lisa Cinciari Rodano, first female vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies, and a young environmentalist.
And then video messages, interviews with partisans, songs of the Resistance and much more for an April 25 that wants to be rebirth, the swastikas that appeared in front of the town hall of Cavriago, in the Reggio area, canceled by the Tricolor. The flag that today also flies on the spire of the Cathedral of Milan, or that illuminates palaces and monuments throughout Italy, is more than ever the symbol of the party, the balconies of the houses that become the squares of this year and, at the invitation of the Anpi, turn white, red and green. From Aosta to Catania, from Turin to Venice, in an Italy to be written that, three quarters of a century later, wants to reinvent itself without forgetting its roots. For an anniversary to remember always, even today that the Italians are called to face together the worst emergency since the post-war period.
