BY PIERLUIGI GHIGGINI
9/2/2026 – Never like this year Remembrance Daywhich falls tomorrow 10 February in memory of the martyrs of the Foibe Tito and of the Julian Dalmatian exodus in which approximately 300 thousand Italians were driven out of Istria and Dalmatiawas openly opposed by the left and local institutions. The episodes of various kinds are numerous enough to suggest a sort of team order, naturally to be developed according to the roles and attitudes of the protagonists.
This year too we witnessed the isolation in which the local institutions confined the demonstration of the Reggio Emilia right with the participation of Istrian exponents, as usual in front of the War Memorial, and which for good reason they wanted to counteract at the same time and a few tens of meters away with the garrison promoted by the social centers with the cry of “falsehoods and inventions underlying Remembrance Day“, with the risk – always looming – of accidents.
It’s no different Istorecowhich in other times had hosted an important exhibition of theifsml of Udine on the pogrom perpetrated by the IX Corpus with the complicity of part of the Julian communists, and the Tito occupation of Trieste.
Instead tomorrow evening February 10th The Institute for the history of the Resistance and the contemporary age commemorates foibe and exodus in its own way with a web-linked conference whose title starts off on the wrong foot: “Post-fascism and Remembrance Day“. With this, implying that the recovery of the memory of the Foibe would at the same time be the cause and effect of a resurgent “fascist culture”. Now, all opinions have the right to citizenship, even the most stolid ones, except that in this case a large part of the democratic, liberal, social democratic, Catholic culture (let’s remember the Osoppo Brigade) would end up being liquidated as post-fascist, perhaps fiercely anti-communist but certainly anti-fascist. Just not bad.
For its part, the government of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia, the one that handed over the First Tricolor to the pro-Hamas Francesca Albanese (and in fact largely absent on Saturday in Piazza della Vittoria) has chosen the path of talking about something else, or at least addressing the topic in a distant manner. In the room of the Library of the Arts, at 5pm on Tuesday 10th, the conference on “Stories of families and events of the eastern border” con The Nemec and Value Glorywhich will be an opportunity to launch a “Memory Bank” made up of documents, testimonies and personal stories of those affected by the exodus.
Certainly an announcement of considerable interest, and hopefully crowned with success, but – we will admit – very little compared to the initiatives planned throughout the region, starting from the next solemn session of the city council of Bologna .
But what most of all gives the idea of the hood ideological smog which still imprisons Reggio Emilia, is the false road license plate placed overnight to cover the real one of Via Martiri delle Foibe . Thanks to a workmanlike imitation, for a few hours the street remained named after Rabska brigadaa partisan formation born in the large fascist concentration camp of Treesin Croatia, where in 1942 up to twenty thousand Slavic prisoners were locked up.
Whoever organized the joke, with good graphic skills, essentially dismisses the tragedy of Tito’s ethical cleanliness as a “natural” consequence of Italian repression in Istria. And it goes even further. Much further.
In the scroll hanging below “Via Rasbka brigade“, like a contemporary pasquinade, the naming of the street after the Martyrs of the Foibe is told as a memory “sweetened and falsified to “tell a present that rehabilitates fascism”. That’s right: remembering ten thousand deaths (but in 1945 the carabinieri counted twenty thousand) and three hundred thousand refugees means “rehabilitate fascism“.
But here’s what’s written in the proclamation recovered, needless to say, by Marco Eboli, and which we can show you thanks to the courtesy of the former Reggio Emilia councilor
“Naming a street is a political gesture that seeks to orient the collective conscience in a precise direction. In the case of via Martiri delle Foibe, however, it seems that this conscience wants to be sweetened and falsified to tell a present that rehabilitates fascism, but not only. Transform executioners into martyrs.
In recent years we have seen the push of laws such as the one that established the Day of Remembrance normalization of fascism through a story built on the basis of a victimistic and vulgar nationalismfull of distortions, bad faith and political calculations, devoid of historiography…
We’ll save you the rest of the homework.
It is really difficult to find other testimonies outside of post-Stalinist Reggio that can compete with so much ideological intoxication. However, today it exerts an influence, in other times we would have called hegemony, which is decisive on the Reggio Emilia left and, what is more serious, on the council that governs the capital.
All this started while the President of the Region By Pascale writes: “Today we reaffirm the need to make Memoriesa, not only to remember the victims and their families, but to counter every form of denialism and strengthen a European conscience based on peace, coexistence and dialogue between peoples”.
And now, do you want to hand him over to post-fascism too?
The above is enough to explain Mayor Massari’s “strategic” choice not to actually celebrate Remembrance Day, as if he himself were a prisoner of this frankly reactionary ideological cage, or in any case held prisoner by his magic circle.
A strategy that “saddens and disconcerts” – writes in a harsh note the former councilor Eboli, now president of the Balder cultural association, to tell how and how much Reggio Emilia has gone backwards year after year, like shrimp.
“From 2006 to 2011, thanks to an effective collaboration between the Mayor Graziano Delrio and the undersigned, then leader of the National Alliance group in the Sala del Tricolore, the Day of Remembrance was celebrated with dignity, as required by the founding law. Exhibitions and concerts at Peri, to remember the Foibe, the Exodus and also symbolic figures of that tragedy, Norma Cossetto, a young Istrian student tortured and infobated by the troops of the communist dictator Tito and the communist partisans, to which “our city has not yet dedicated the street, which even the vote of the Reggio Emilia city council had decided to name after”.
“Well, over twenty years after the approval of the Day of Remembrance, on February 10th, the Municipality of Reggio Emilia is organizing an event inviting people to talk about something other than the Foibe tragedy, speakers who wrote little or nothing about Foibe and Exodus. This is one scientific political strategy to pretend to celebrate Remembrance Day, but in fact avoid talking about the Foibe. We will talk about the Exodus but it is disconnected from the original fact it doesn’t make sense.
We rely on an oral history project, which will see its fruits in a few years, with interviews with the families of those who had to abandon their homeland to escape communist persecution, with the risk that they may not have much memory of those events”.
And he adds: “I had personally proposed to the Councilor for Culture Mietto to integrate the Remembrance Day event with the presentation of the book by a person who was a prisoner in the camps of the Slavic communist dictator Tito, but this did not happen“.
Eboli appeals to Mayor Massari “to proceed quickly with the replacement of Via Tito with via Norma Cossetto or even a Graziano Udovisi who was miraculously saved from the Foiba and our adopted fellow citizen”; and finally to recover “that authentic spirit of worthy celebration of the Day of Remembrance of the Foibe and the Exodus, which belonged to his predecessor and friend Graziano Delrio, and together with this also all the photographic material, purchased by the Municipality of Reggio Emilia, so that in the coming years exhibitions can be set up again which give the real testimony of what the Foibe were and the Exodus”.
date: 2026-02-09 19:56:00
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