Festa della Reppublica

Alas, this has a lot to do with the youth of the Italian state as we know it today, which began in 1870 as a monarchy. The Republic of Italy was established on 2 June 1946, making this the 60th anniversary of the Republic. After such a great Republican tradition in many parts of Italy except the South, I personally tend to think of the Italian monarchy as an insult to a big chunk of the Italian population at the time -- even Rome had its rare periods of republic, the most notable having involved the very interesting character Cola di Rienzo.

However, as with all things here, there is a great deal of polemic. First off, lots of older people actually voted on the referendum -- Fulvia's parents, the lady I met in the grocery store. Secondly, the festa is celebrated with a military parade, which a lot of people think is stupid -- it sounds coarse, but that's the case. The current President of the Chamber of Deputies of Parliament, Fausto Bertinotti (you will remember him as the Communist who made the political alliance with the Fascists in 1996, causing Prodi's government to collapse), had to be at the military parade, but he didn't want to. As a result, there was a huge counter-demonstration today outside Castel Sant'Angelo, led mainly by the Partito Rifondazione Communista, which is Bertinotti's party. It seems that everywhere the ubiquitous pace flags are slowly disappearing -- even last year they were still everywhere, and you don't see them as much these days. There needs to be some galvanization of the movement.

Still. Very interesting. Also interesting is that Google (which is slowly taking over the world -- in fact this blog is hosted by a subsidiary of Google) is celebrating the holiday on it's Italian homepage:

My final comment regarding all of this is something that I came out of my latent knowledge while we were living here before and something that has become all the more obvious to me being back here again: in order to have a democracy, one must be able to actively participate in it. I would argue that the situation in the US is heading towards an oligarchy, whereas here there are so many people who are much more involved in politics and who actually can participate making the decisions made regarding them. As a result, this festa has little to do with demonstrating military capabilities, and even though it is mostly used as a day off for everyone and not really celebrated, it actually marks something very important, which has a great tradition on the Italian peninsula, beginning with the Greeks and ancient Romans, continuing to the present.