LETTER FROM ROME
“The Taliban were born out of extremist propaganda in universities (…) and I hope someone will have the decency to put an end to this dangerous drift. “ The very popular president of Fratelli d’Italia (far right postfascist), Giorgia Meloni, is not used to mince words, but even in the light of her usual excesses, the virulence of her attack on the Italian academic Tomaso Montanari, August 29 in the columns of the daily Il Giornale (right), has something unusual.
So what did this art historian specializing in baroque, elected in the spring to the post of rector of the University for Foreigners of Siena, do to deserve to incur the wrath of the leader of the main Italian opposition party? not to be assimilated to the new masters of Kabul? In a text published in the columns of the Daily Fatto on August 26, Tomaso Montanari challenged the merits of the Remembrance Day “In memory of the victims of foibe and the exodus of the Istrians, the inhabitants of Fiume and the Dalmatians ”, assimilating its establishment by the government of Silvio Berlusconi, in 2004, to a “Historical falsification”.
Since the publication of the article, the academic has been the subject of calls for resignation and multiple attacks from the right of the political spectrum (the leader of the League, Matteo Salvini, even advising the ‘academic of himself “To take care of”), but also, more surprisingly, the centrists of Italia Viva (the small party created by Matteo Renzi). Faced with this surge, it is clear that the exit of Tomaso Montanari only caused, on the left, an embarrassed silence.
These postures are very instructive, and deserve to be briefly explained, if only because the question of the memory of the victims of the foibe has been excessively politicized for decades, to the point of deeply blurring the perception of events.
One of the favorite themes of the Berlusconian right
The foibe are natural cavities carved into the limestone rock, which are one of the features of the relief of the surroundings of Trieste and Istria, on the current borders of Italy and Slovenia. At the end of the Second World War, these caves were the scene of mass executions of Italians, inhabitants of regions attached to the Kingdom of Italy since 1919, when Communist Yugoslavia was born.
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