Alcide De Gasperi e la nuova Italia - 1^ parte

On March 19, 1943, the day of St. Giuseppe had offered the fragile excuse of reunification to celebrate a nomastic. The house of Giuseppe Spataro is in an elegant palace in Silo Umbertino, on the way to Cola di Rienzo, in the Prati River. At that time, however, above all, it is a place of return for Italian anti-fascism, in particular the Catholic one. The yellow living room of the house of Spataro is almost a clandestine operating center, the place in which to find, to discuss, to confront, to imagine the resistance and Italy tomorrow. From that political meeting, masqueraded by the party of a nomastic, to not go into the eye and to expel the fascist police, mature a document, few pages in which it is imagined, in return for democracy, a Catholic, but not clerical, national, but without authoritarian nostalgia. A reformer party, oriented to social justice, but strange to the socialist derives. The first copy in the styled cycle of that document is entrusted, because it is made to arrive in Sicily, to a certain Bernardo Mattarella, the father of Sergio Mattarella. A few months later, in the hands of the fall of fascism, the opusco is frantically stamped and displayed at 20,000 parrots all over the country. That text has prepared a lord who, in 43 to 62 years, was deputed before Mussolini canceled democracy. His name is Alcide de Gasperi. No one knows that the modest Libretto, given to the stamps in Frette Furia, contains the name of the party that will govern Italy for 50 years. On the front page there is written the constructive ideas of Christian democracy. There have been events and characters that have defined who we are. Collective moments and immense tragedies, stories of presidents and common people. Events that have marked a first and a second. Characters that, with what they have said and what they have done, have given shape to Italy. I am Lorenzo Pregliasco. I am Lorenzo Baravalle. And in which Italy is made, we tell the moments that have made the history of our country. To those like us, he has not lived them. Today we have 653 people. Piede Vettisino is a tiny country encased between the vali Trentine. It is the country where Alcide de Gasperi was born on April 3, 1881. At that time Piede Vettisino is part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not Italy yet. And Italy united, among other things, when De Gasperi was born only for 20 years. The Trentine is the last propagine of a multinational empire, a single state that contains different nations. If we overcome the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to a map of today, we will touch 13 countries. From Italy to Ukraine, passing through Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, as well as Austria and Hungary. In that world, the Trentine in which De Gasperi was born is a piece of empire with an Italian population. It is a land of periphery to which the central government guarantees a certain administrative autonomy. Alcide is a name that is not often heard. It comes from Greek, meaning strength, protection. And it is usually a name for those times. If we take the first page of the print, in the 50 years since 1867 to 1917, the name Alcide appears only 16 times, more than Palmyra, which comes out just nine times, okay? But from Giovanni, for example, there are 6,565, from Vittorio, 6,974, from Giuseppe, 8,229. Of course, Alcide would do De Gasperi, all attached, without the "de" separated, with which the story will pass. Someone will accuse him of having put the space between "de" and "Gasperi" to give himself aristocratic air, but he will always fight back, which is not the case. In fact, De Gasperi is written all attached to the records of the parish, but so he will also figure in the electoral lists and will sign his own documents, including our constitution. However, the world will know him as De Gasperi, detached, and so it will remain. The family of De Gasperi is not rich. He grows up with a strenuous Catholic sensitivity, but also with a natural instinct from the leader. He is not afraid to command, to decide, and not even to risk. On the campaign of the church of Civezzano, a few kilometers from Trento, there is still a sign, and the blow shot by a young De Gasperi to try the rifle of the father, Marasciallo della Gendarmeria. Then comes Trento. Alcide studies the Vescovile gymnasium, goes fast in urban subjects, literature, history, philosophy, except in those scientific ones. Mathematics does not like it. On the day of maturity, on July 20, 1900, he presents himself with the pockets of the shirt full of written and fixed formulas, a small trick to overcome the obstacle. Instead, the university de Gasperi does not frequent Trento, because there the university does not exist yet. The boy was born among the Trentine mountains, part of which he goes to the Brennero, and goes to study in the capital of the empire. In 1830 he had 400,000 inhabitants, at the beginning of the 900, when he lived there with De Gasperi, he had almost 2 million. And Vienna, the third largest city in Europe. Vivace, brilliant, cosmopolitan, chaotic, the capital of a complex world, the Austro-Hungarian empire that contains all Trentino within the continent of Tirol and many different peoples under the same flag. An empire through continuous tensions, the demands of independence of Hungarian nationalists, the difficulties of having together so many different ethnicities, Austrians, Hungarians, Italians, Croatians, Bosnians, Serbs, a state deviated from the social and economic balance and which yet still rests on an old prestige. It is the king of the Holy Roman Empire, made an army of the first relief and failed on the secular support of the Catholic Church. For the 19th century, Vienna is the place of new experiences and a life of a student as simple as that. It is the history of poverty and renunciation of many of those who would have become the new class of Italian leaders. The history of restrictions and misery of students who will live Antonio Gramsci in Turin a few years later. De Gasperi can not afford even a room in affliction, perhaps found in the bathroom of a bourgeois house, as it was common at the time. He has a bed in the student's house, for lunch he is waiting for the minister of the crouties of the mass of the poor in the Italian Church, the Madonna della Neve. For dinner, some honey to consume sitting on the bed. Only the high-level repetitions will then allow him to move in a rented room in the bourgeois. Even for the death of De Gasperi, as for many future leaders, the first real contact with politics, with living together, coincides with university life. He enters a tiny student association, the Italian Catholic Union, animated by a group of Italians who study in Vienna. Their motto is "Catholic, Italian, democratic". The social and civil commitment of the Catholics in those years, in those first fragments of the 20th century, is, however, traveled by a contradiction. From one side there was, gradually, a cycle of great significance, the "Rerum Novarum" of the 13th century. It is the document that sets the basis for the social doctrine of the Church, that is, the ensemble of reflections of the principles that regulate the vision of the Catholics with respect to the social and economic issues of the contemporary world. And if the Church wonders about the reality of man within society, it is also to offer an alternative to the sirens of the left, which, in those years, begins to organize itself in Europe with the first mass parties that revolve around workers and workers. The only way to prevent the people from being thrown into socialism, says a young Degasperi to the students who are gathered in the breweries in Vienna, is to go down now and, with that, to surrender. In this mission of the possibility for the Catholic world to talk about the masses, to the poor, to the last, Degasperi will be convinced of his whole life. Decends later, at the end of his political life, he will say "If the left means opening up towards social progress, towards justice for workers, then it is not true that we do not want to go to the left. We are, in principle, to the left, in this sense." But what the Degasperi did in Vienna in those first years of the 1900s could not be done in Rome, because if in the empire the Catholics can participate in political life, in Italy there is still the non-expedit, a device with which the Holy Sede, after the birth of the Kingdom of Italy, had declared unacceptable for the Italian Catholics to participate in the elections and, by extension, to national political life. The Catholics, in short, did not have to vote, nor, at least, to be elected. A protest against the Italian state that was born against the Church, threatening Rome with the Pontifical State. It is not the same in Vienna, indeed. In Austria the Catholic is part of the public life, the emperor calls himself his Catholic master, and the parties of Christian inspiration are legitimized. In short, the Degasperi, in the political empire, something that would be forbidden in the Kingdom of Italy, and perhaps something that he thinks of himself when he visits Rome for the first time in 1902. The brother writes, "The modern Italy ends and begins at the Pantheon. Beyond the Tevere there is St. Peter, or one or the other. The State is the Church, two realities destined to coexist, but in constant tension." In Trentino, at the end of the border, more than otherwise the tensions that are ending Europe at the end of the 1800s. For years, for example, Italian students in the Austro-Hungarian Empire asked for a university in Italian, in Trieste, but the bourgeois authorities did not give up to be afraid to foment the many nationalisms of that state from many nations. Then, in 1904, what seemed to be a turning point, the government allowed an Italian-language cathedral of jurisprudence in Innsbruck. When Professor Menestrina, Trentino, holds his first lesson, Italian students run from all Austria to celebrate. Among them, there is also one of the Gaspers, just over 20 years old. But the one that had to be a celebration quickly degenerates. German nationalists attack Italians, the clash is violent, the police intervene. 137 students are arrested and killed, and among them. He stays in jail for 20 days without explanations, and his first prison, but it will not be the last one. When he leaves, his conviction, his commitment for the dignity of those Italians outside of Italy, is strengthened. He writes, "The Italians, to whichever party they belong to, will be able to discuss, but on their national existence, on their language, they will never discuss, they will never transgress." When Alcide de Gasperi enters Parliament in 1911, he is not in Montecitorio, but at Reichstraat, on the Ringstrasse di Vienna. He is 30 years old and is the youngest among all deputies of the Italian representative. He was elected by the popular party Trentino, a party of Christian-democratic inspiration that gave voice to the Italian minority of the empire. That Viennese parliament is a group of languages, nationalities, and contrasting interests. De Gasperi finds it chaotic. Then, three years later, he explores the drama of the Great War. In 1914. Emperor Francesco Giuseppe orders the mobilization. 60,000 Trentini are surrounded by the Austrian army to fight on the Russian front. Some deserted and fled to Italy, but there are few. Trentino, land of frontiers, for three years will be the theatre of a very tough war fought on the mountains. De Gasperi continues to direct Trentino, his newspaper, trying to maintain a difficult balance between the superiority of the empire and the Italian identity. But his articles are censored more and more often. On May 22, 1915, he publishes the last number, then the forced closure. The government orders to move the population from the low Trentino to the north, to pick up 70,000 people in Austria and Bohemia in the town of Legno. Other 1,730, suspected of being Italian sons, are locked up in the Camp of Cazenau. However, in Trentino there are directives and the Italian nationality is under attack, even the Vescovo of Trento, Celestino and Dricci, great friends of De Gasperi. He, deputy to the parliament of Vienna, is deprived of any parliamentary immunity. But, despite having the possibility to stay in Italy, he chooses to stay close to his people, to dedicate himself to the assistance of the deported Trentini refugees. For Trentino, like the Venezia Giulia, the government has not yet completed. Trento and Trieste are the irredent lands. They have a population in most of Italy, but after the United States, they are left under the Osburge Empire of Austria-Hungary. However, a state with the Great War that transcends contradictions and rivalries that come to Galla and an economic crisis seems to have counted the days. On November 11, 1918, the Great War is over. With the revolt of Germany, all the armistices have been signed. The weapons are touching all the fronts. The Great War, which has involved 31 countries, and has seen the mobilization of more than 50 million men, is over. The Emanuele re-victory has gone to Trento. With the son of Baptists, he is accepted in the Palace of the Commune. A Mass will be celebrated at the feet of the Monument of Dante, symbol of the unity of the country. Then the king has left Trieste. The free brothers hug the soldiers of Italy. They throw flowers. They are forgotten days. The military conflict accelerates the desegregation of that great empire that contained many nations. The Gaspers, together with the other Italian deputies in Vienna, proclaims the will of the people who are afraid to go to Italy. It will be the fate of Trento, Trieste, and also of the High Adige. Here it is, the whole of Italy. But the country that comes out of the Great War is not the same that entered us. More than a million Italians are dead. In three years, the 3% of the population between military and civilians has disappeared. There is no country or family that has not lost anyone. The number of deaths in the First World War in Italy is three times higher than that of the Second. In a country that in 1915 had 8 million inhabitants less than in 1940. The conflict has destroyed the conscience, the social order. It has sucked in the trenches of peasants and merchants, workers and bourgeoisies, settentrionals and meridians. It has plasmed as a new mass identity. Decennies after the resurgence and unity has been the Great War, perhaps to make the Italians for real. And it changes a lot immediately after the conflict. In 1919, it is voted for the first time with the universal male suffrage. The events right to vote go from less than 3 million to more than 10 million. And for the first time, the voting system is proportional. The candidate is no longer voted, from college to college. The party is chosen. The more votes the party receives, the more seats it will have in parliament. The old liberal Italy is being remodeled, in which the politics was made of notable and clientele. A new Italy is being born, in which the parties represent new voters, workers, citizens, new social classes, their set of social justice. The Great War makes mass politics born. Just in 1919, Pope Benedict XIV oppresses the non-expedit. The Italian Catholics can make politics. Don Luigi Sturzo, a Sicilian priest who has since moved to the border between pastoral and civil affairs, between Christian work and the presence of society in his problems, brings together a group of exponents in the Catholic-democratic world at the Santa Chiara hotel in Rome, two steps from the Pantheon. They set up an appeal, a programmatic manifesto that goes through the story as an appeal to the free and strong. They write. To all the free and strong men who now feel the duty of operating at the top of the country, without prejudices and prejudices, we make an appeal because united together they propunge in their interest the ideals of justice and freedom. The Italian popular party is born. The symbol will be a cross-crossing shield crossed by the word Libertas. Only two years later, in Livorno, the Communist Party will be born, and the story we told in the episode of "Who is Italy?" on Palmyra Togliatti. Among the first to join the party of Don Sturzo, there is the man who led the Trentini people, who represented the Valle di Fiemme in the Parliament of Vienna, and who is now a citizen of the Kingdom of Italy. Alcide de Gasperi feels that that of the Italian popular party is his world, that of the Catholics who want to count on politics without relying on the Church. When he was elected to the Parliament of Rome in Montecitorio in May 1921, de Gasperi, however, doesn't know that that time of promises and new hopes is destined to last very long. Alcide de Gasperi and Benito Mussolini enter Parliament together in 1921. De Gasperi is elected in the Trenti College, who for the first time votes together with the rest of Italy, since two years ago he didn't have time to integrate the electoral lists. De Gasperi receives little less than 15,000 individual preferences. Mussolini, on the other hand, is elected in the Colleges of Milan and Bologna, and the preferences with his name are almost 150,000. De Gasperi is in the popular party. Mussolini, in the national blocs, the list that in those elections hosted the fascist candidates together with the liberals of the old Giollitti, convinced to be able to domesticate Benito l'incendiario and his. And even if, in the chamber of the deputies that sit down in 1921, the people of De Gasperi are 108, and the fascists are only 35, the legislation that is taking place will be the one of Mussolini's consecration. Neither the liberals nor the populars seem to understand what is about to happen. They see the fascists as a necessary evil, a reaction mode against communist internationalism and the agitation in factories of the Red Biennial. Even De Gasperi looks at fascism with a certain prudence. He condemns violence, writes that Christianism does not inspire or feed nationalist and fascist ideologies which, founded on the instincts of race and on the strength of weapons, contradicts the fraternity and the Christian universalism. But his seems more like a counterattack than the fascist's. When on October 28, 1922 the black camels march on Rome, De Gasperi is in training in the camp between Lazio and Umbria. He stops at Orvieto, buys a card with the old portal of the man and writes to the family on a few words. Searching for the old portals of the old portals, De Gasperi goes to the camp in the village of Umbria, to the family. Searching for the works of the past greatness, a comfort for today's anxious wait. Step by step, with astuteness, impregnability, tactical capacity, Mussolini insinuates in the empty from the old class of liberal leaders. The more the others, the moderates, make up for it, and put their hands on power. And every day that fascism penetrates a little more in the institutions, the rest of the political world remains without voice. Even the populace initially chooses to collaborate with fascism, when the king, after the march on Rome, charges Mussolini to form the new government. On November 16, 1922, in Montecitorio, the president of the council seems to want to clarify who commands in front of the parliament. Shortly after, the camera votes in confidence. Among the 306 yes to Mussolini's government, that of Alcide de Gasperi, together with the favourable votes of Giulitti, and of another popular, Giovanni Gronchi, who will then be the third president of the Italian Republic. Here, because we are collaborators with respect to Mussolini's government, of Alcide de Gasperi in 1923, so that he can move the pendulum towards the equilibrium center, tempering and regulating the initial motor. But it is an illusion. With the electoral reform of 1924, the fascists conquer 70% of the seats on the camera. Don Sturzo, who was very critical of fascism, leaves the leadership of the PP, also for the pressures received by the holy seat, and the secretariat passes to de Gasperi. Then, the crime of Matteotti spreads away every uncertainty. Mussolini wants absolute power. When, in 1925, the first fascist laws, which comprise the freedom of print, de Gasperi has already spoken in one of his last public speeches, about a faction which is impoverished by the armed forces of power, and is reserved to use the armies of the Party to dominate the State, and the forces of the State to preserve the dictatorship of the Party. On January 22, 1926, de Gasperi is forced to leave the direction of his newspaper, "Il Nuovo Trentino". The time of democracy is over. A few months later, in Borgoval-Sugana, a group of black shirts comes to de Gasperi's house. They take him, bring him to Vicenza, and take him to an interrogation in the middle of the night. "Do you feel Italian?" they ask. "I've always been Italian, and I'm proud to be one," he replies. They then ask him if he wants to give up his political activity. "I can't take any action." They leave him, but the fascist newspapers write that he is penitent and has declared loyalty to the Duce. The persecution of the regime continues. The next year, de Gasperi tries to repair his clothes, but he is arrested at the station of Firenze. He spends three months in the cellar, then comes to condemn him. Four years in prison, reduced to two and a half in appeal. De Gasperi feels as if he is re-evaluated in his father's suspicion, but he does not deny the political mission. Sometimes I feel like a tip of the iceberg, but it was my conscience that imposed me on my duty, my convictions, the dignity, my loyalty to the flag, and my life. Politics was my career, or rather, my mission. As for many other illustrious Italians, who, after the fascism, will lead the new free and democratic nation, even for de Gasperi, there is the time of clandestine, of repression, of exile, of prison. As for Sandro Pertini, Pietronenni, Palmiro Togliatti, Ferruccio Parri, Giuseppe Saragat, and many others, men of different ideals and objectives, if not open to conflict, but ready to sacrifice freedom, affection, if not life, for the choice to resist. The High Council of Pi11, finding wonderful understanding in the enlightened will of Benito Mussolini, prepared the event that will give in history the name to this great pontificate, the Conciliazione. On February 11, 1929, the Terenensi Accords were signed, which ended the dissension between the Italian State and the Church Government. In the meantime, the Duce approached the Church. It was believed to be a new defender for the Church. The Gasperi is a fighter. He knows the value of the sticks, but knows that they will force a regime. He does not support inconsciency and vileness, so he calls them, with the Romanian observant, the Vatican newspaper Osanna Mussolini. When, three years later, the Duce affirms that the fascist state is Catholic, but it is fascist, indeed, and above all, it is exclusively and essentially fascist, the Gasperi will marvel at the delusion of the Catholics. Mussolini is not the man of the providence that some are ostinately imagined, but a sultry politician who has chosen to heal the relations with the Church before all for tactics. The fascist state is used by the Catholic religion to consolidate the regime. Mussolini, always given an anti-clerical fervent, understood that to make fascism the movement of all Italians, an alliance with the Catholic Church is indispensable. In the relationship between the Church and the fascist regime, we spoke with Giorgio dell'Arti, a historical journalist, curator of the Gasperia di Pietro, the story of the First Republic, and author, among other things, of the book La Marcha su Roma, published by the Nave di Teseo. It is evident that the Church on this test is in the arms and the Church has been a strong ally of fascism. He flied it, he supported it, he blessed it. The man of the providence, a man like Mussolini, if you are not deeply convinced of what Mussolini was doing. The Church, until the 23rd of July, had a certain attitude for the fear of communism. This was said, that is, that the Great Spauraccio was an atheist and materialist communism. However, let's say, the compromise with the extreme right, with fascism, is quite undeniable, there are the attacks, no? People of Italy, run to the arms! And show your tenacity! Your courage! Your courage! But will the war condemn Mussolini and fascism? In the first months of 1943, many seem already clear that the beautiful adventure next to the Nazis in a ruinous conflict, may even lead to the collapse of the regime begins to think. To the death of the Gaspers and the people in their clandestine understand that it would be good to be prepared. The shower will only fall in July of 1943. But first, on March 19th, something happens. In Rome at the extreme, as in a sign of hope for a new country, those who will learn to call the Christian Democrats will find themselves in a house in the Prati River. They say they are there to celebrate a nomastic. Part of this episode is already available on Spotify and on all the podcast platforms. The sources of the audio clips are indicated in the description. This is a podcast by Lorenzo Pregliasco and Lorenzo Baravalle developed with Spotify Studios. He collaborated with the writing of this episode by Alessandro Negri, the sound design and Stefano Tumiati, the studio foreman and Emilio Sartorio. This is the 27th of the month, every month.