Today, as part of the consultations for coordinating European policy, Matteo Renzi, President of the Italian Council of Ministers, will receive the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the French President Franรงois Hollande.
The meeting will take place for security reasons aboard the Italian Navy ship “Garibaldi”, a name that could not be more evocative for many reasons, in the waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea of the Pontine Islands archipelago, off the island of Ventotene, where the Bourbon penitentiary of Santo Stefano (Saint Stephen) was built.
An intensely symbolic place to talk about Europe, as many intellectuals who opposed the fascist regime were deported and assigned residence on this island during World War II.
During their captivity, Altiero Spinelli and others, among them Sandro Pertini, who became President of the Italian Republic and is well known to the people of Nice for having regularly stayed in the city where he owned an apartment, drafted between 1941 and 1944 the founding act of Europe, the “Manifesto for a Free and United Europe”, which inspired, a few years later, Jean Monnet, Konrad Adenauer, and Alcide De Gasperi, the founding fathers, in their federating action.
In this “manifesto”, Altiero Spinelli, who was his whole life an exemplary leader and fighter of the European federalist movement, called for “a Europe of constitutional freedoms and democratic parties, a Europe of rights and freedoms”.
He was an unwavering visionary who, deprived of personal freedom by an oppressive regime, saw in “democracy a form of society in which political, ethical, and religious pluralism is the substance of everyone’s freedom”.
A message that remains wholly relevant in these times of populist and nationalist drift that could throw us back to that troubled and dark period.
Altiero Spinelli, after a life spent within European institutions, requested that upon his death, he be buried at Ventotene. His ashes are scattered in the sea where the ship “Garibaldi” will be moored today.
May his life lesson inspire the three European political leaders to continue his work.
by Garibaldino
