Rome, 25 June (LaPresse) – “The path leading to the referendum and the election of the Constituent Assembly on 2 June 1946 was not an easy one. It was a high price to pay that enabled Italians to secure the right to lay down the rules of their own civil coexistence after the dictatorship and the war.” So said the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, speaking at Montecitorio during the formal ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of the first sitting of the Constituent Assembly. “That price was paid by the partisans, by the people subjected to the oppression of the Nazis and the Republic of Salò, by the soldiers left to fend for themselves and who then took part in the effort to restore honour to the Fatherland through the Italian Corps of Liberation and the more than 600,000 soldiers interned in Germany, through their refusal to serve the new invaders. It was paid for by Italians of Jewish origin who were sent to the extermination camps, and by those who, in the Jewish Brigade and the partisan units, took part in the Liberation of Italy and in the building of a new society free from the oppression of man by man.”
Constituent Assembly, Mattarella: ‘It was no easy road; the partisans paid a heavy price’
Rome, 25 June (LaPresse) – “The path leading to the referendum and the election of the Constituent Assembly on 2 June 1946 was not an easy one. It was a high price to pay that enabled Italians to secure the right to lay down the rules of their own civil coexistence after the dictatorship and the war.” So said the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, speaking at Montecitorio during the formal ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of the first sitting of the Constituent Assembly. “That price was paid by the partisans, by the people subjected to the oppression of the Nazis and the Republic of Salò, by the soldiers left to fend for themselves and who then took part in the effort to restore honour to the Fatherland through the Italian Corps of Liberation and the more than 600,000 soldiers interned in Germany, through their refusal to serve the new invaders. It was paid for by Italians of Jewish origin who were sent to the extermination camps, and by those who, in the Jewish Brigade and the partisan units, took part in the Liberation of Italy and in the building of a new society free from the oppression of man by man.”
