Pino Corrias: take to the streets in flesh and blood for Europe and peace

This article by Pino Corrias is published in number 13 of Vanity Fair Until March 25, 2025.

THEAnd words walk. Those who speak of armed war up to the teeth always roll on those that wave hope and peace. Sometimes it happens “the vice versa”. The other day in Piazza del Popolo in Rome – an event convened not by a party, but from the Amaca where Michele Serra lives – it happened that the blue of Europe overwhelmed the black that surrounds us for once. It is not a little, these days.
There was what you expect from a square, overlap with watchwords, cheerful faces, dialects – “I come from Modena, my friend from Salerno” -, of flags, signs. From the peremptory “Enough weapons!”, Until the opposite barricade: “Were the partisans not armed?”.
But the square is not a manifesto and not even a party program from which consistency is claimed. The square is first of all a feeling. This time the prevailing feeling was to meet again in the flesh and blood, Finally: no social, no virtual ghosts, no screen to separate, now that the war has become true, Putin screams it from Moscow, Trump is about a poker lap, where the chicken is Zelensky. Men and women die every day, threats and missiles burn borders, refugees to millions move. Not to mention the blood and to rivers
It flows in Gaza and in other fifty hells of remote geographies, remote pains.
“We are different, but together,” said the Piazza di Roma. We are “a people”, who are the most democratic word that exists when it does not fall into the ideological mince of populism, of nationalism, but widens horizontally between the floating tables of mutual rights and tolerance.
We noticed how precious health was when the siege of Covid spread. We are realizing how fragile peace is, after for two third thirds of century we breathed it as if nothing had happened. The square was not only fear for that lost time, but also its nostalgia. It was the request for a report of the words that have come on the road even from that rock of the Tyrrhenian Sea, the island of Ventotene, year 1941, when the full triumph of German tracked and fascist poison occupied the entire present and seemed impossible to imagine the upside -down world of a free, democratic, even federal Europe, without the barbed wire of the borders. It seemed impossible that the manifesto written on clandestine sheets, with a very small calligraphy from Altiero Spinelli and his two companions of Confino, Eugenio Colorni and Ernesto Rossi, was stolen on the postal post, landed in Rome and from there he was traveling until us. To imagine it it took it The identical, reckless utopia that is now reproached to the pacifists who ask Europe – not at all disarmed – not to throw 800 billion in the oven of the war workshops to manufacture other weapons, if anything to invest them in diplomacy, rights, equity. Knowing that only the European Union – in peace – will be able to face the much larger challenges of each individual state that composes it.

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