A symbolic act. The David – the emblem of Florence, of the Renaissance, of aesthetic perfection, and an icon of world art – is shrouded in a black cloth, through which we can barely perceive its harmonious proportions. A bit surprised and a bit disappointed, people walking to Piazza della Signoria can no longer see it, but find a painful message instead: war kills Beauty.
“By shrouding the David – a symbol of freedom against tyranny – we want to pay respect to the thousands of victims of the war in Ukraine, both among civilians and the army, and also express Florence’s immense sorrow for what is happening at the very heart of Europe,” mayor Dario Nardella to L’Italo-Americano. “With this symbolic gesture, we want to deliver a strong message of pain, sadness, and mourning for all the dead of this unjust war.”
Flash mobs are more than sensational acts aimed at demanding the end of hostilities, they are the beginning of a movement that starts from the people. This is why Nardella, who is also president of Eurocities, a network that brings together the mayors of 38 countries and represents over 130 million people, launched an international event to ask for a ceasefire, Cities Stand with Ukraine, that will take place on the 12th of March in 200 European cities.
“Florence condemns war – Nardella continued – and is close to the people and the cities of Ukraine. Our town is fully committed to campaigning for peace and for the swift beginning of real negotiations. I remember when, on the past 26th of February, on the occasion of the Forum del Mediterraneo, 65 mayors and 60 bishops signed, in our Salone dei Cinquecento at Palazzo Vecchio, a declaration on the importance, for all people, of peace, justice, equal rights, and freedom.”
The symbolic shrouding of the David, on the day when we celebrated the 546th anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth, the 6th of March 1475, coincided with a series of demonstrations and candlelight vigils across Italy, a country hypnotized by the violent images seen on TV, afraid of the nuclear threat, horrified by the ferociousness of a war no one believed to be really possible.
Tens of thousands of people marched in Bologna, Milan, and Turin, but also in Naples, Trieste, Bari, Palermo, Genoa, and Cagliari. And then Siracusa, Modena, Bolzano, Reggio Emilia, Padova, Verona. In Venice, even Piazza San Marco, where large gatherings are usually forbidden for security reasons, was filled with the multicolored flags of peace. The emotional shock was too strong: it had only happened after 9/11 and after the Bataclan attack, where Venetian researcher Valeria Solesin had lost her life.
In Bari, the city that in February 2020, shortly before the beginning of the pandemic, had hosted the meeting of Pope Francis with the bishops of the three continents touched by the Mediterranean, mayor Antonio Decaro did something highly symbolic, too. Here, in a city that, historically, has a very strong bond with Russia, Decaro didn’t focus on our relationship with art and beauty, but on that we have with faith and hope, speaking directly to Bari’s own patron saint, who is worshipped by Catholics and Orthodox alike: “In 2003, Putin donated to the city a statue of Saint Nicholas, the saint of dialogue and brotherhood, of union, not division. I chose this symbolic place to express the strongest opposition to the military aggression against Ukraine and to demonstrate my closeness to its people. I wanted to leave here, at the feet of this statue, flowers in the colors of the Ukrainian flag. Here, where the Ukrainian, Russian, Belarussian, and Georgian communities of our city have been gathering to pray together for peace.”
In the capital, a powerful “No to war” came from La Sapienza, the largest university in Europe, with 700 years of history on its shoulders. After, tens of thousands of people marched in the streets of the capital’s historical center while, at night time, the Colosseum, just like the Mole Antonelliana in Turin, shined with the gold and blue of the Ukrainian flag.
Rome is just 2 hours and a half away by plane from Kyiv, just over 2.400 km. President Mattarella visited the Ukrainian Basilica of Santa Sofia, in the Boccea neighborhood, which is part of a community that, in Italy, counts 236.000 people: the largest in Europe, and the fourth here in Italy, after the Albanian, Moroccan, and Chinese. A stable presence since the beginning of the 2000s, as shown by the fact that 77% of Ukrainians in Italy have long-term visas and the vast majority of new arrivals are relatives of those already here. For decades, women (they are 183.000, about 80% of the Ukrainian community in Italy) have been taking care of our elderly. They became part of our families, learned our language, supported our country’s welfare.
In front of the terrifying images of destruction and people trapped in bunkers, traumatized by the faces of children escaping their country, and just quite emerging from the trauma of the pandemic, common people from every corner of Italy started collecting essential goods, medications, blankets and left with their own personal means of transports to deliver help at the frontiers. Many Italians – normal Italians – traveled to the border and brought help to those fleeing from war.
More than 20.000 of the over 2 million people who already left Ukraine are here, in Italy, guests of our families, especially in Rome, Milan, Bologna, and Naples, welcomed by their relatives, but also by strangers who, however, demonstrate in practice the words of our prime minister Mario Draghi during the “darkest days of European history:” this is “the time of solidarity and acceptance, which are fundamental values of the European Union that Italy has been applying for decades.”
It is written also in Article 11 of our Constitution: “Italy rejects war as an instrument of aggression against the freedom of other peoples and as a means for the settlement of international disputes.”
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