My greetings and thanks to Mayor Dipiazza, President of the Region Fedriga and to all Ministers and Authorities present. I also wish to thank and greet the President of the ‘Lega Nazionale’ Sardos Albertini and all associations and citizens in attendance.

I’ve been to Basovizza several times in the past, to pay tribute at this memorial, and each time I’ve gone away with something more in my heart. This is a special place, a place that never fails to leave you with something precious. An image, a look, an emotion, a story to tell when you get home.

I came here as a youngster, when few others did and when doing so meant being pointed at, accused and isolated. I came back here as an adult to finally mark the official Day of Remembrance, which swept aside, once and for all, the conspiracy of silence that had unforgivably shrouded the tragedy of the Foibe massacres and dramatic exodus for decades, leading to them being forgotten and to indifference. And I am here again today, with a few more wrinkles and shouldering responsibilities that, as a youngster, I would never have imagined I would one day have. I have come back to take on a commitment, to take on a solemn commitment, and that is to do my part to ensure the baton of remembrance that you have allowed to be passed on to us, with your tenacity, courage and pride, will be passed on to our children, and that our children will in turn pass this on to our grandchildren, to ensure the memory of what happened never fades, in defiance of those who would have wanted to hide it forever.

One of the fathers of our nation, Giuseppe Mazzini, said that the homeland is the family of the heart. If that is the case, and that is the case, then you who have defended, loved and thus helped build that homeland, are our family. You are mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and your memories are our memories, your tears are our tears, your stories are our stories.

The story of Monsignor Ugo Camozzo, the last bishop of Italian Rijeka, is a family story. As he left Rijeka to escape the controls and searches being carried out by Tito’s police, he cut his tricolour flag into three pieces and hid them in three different suitcases. He used the green part to wrap up a chalice, the white part a gospel and the red part a bible. When he got to Italy, he sewed the flag back together, restoring its Italian trinity. He died as an exile in Pisa and was buried with a cross and the flag of Rijeka over his heart.

The story of Angelo Adam, a Jewish mechanic, is a family story. He had 59001 tattooed on his skin, the number the Nazis had branded him with after deporting him to Dachau. He survived that hell and, upon his return to Rijeka, he resumed his trade union activities. Some tried to tell him that what he was doing could cause trouble, but he didn’t listen. On 4 December 1945, supporters of Tito took him away by force, together with his wife. All trace of him was lost, and when his daughter began asking questions, she disappeared too. Their bodies were never found.

The story of 39-year-old office worker Odda Carboni is a family story. Supporters of Tito took her and dragged her before the Foiba of Vines. She knew what fate awaited her, but she did not want to give her persecutors the satisfaction of pushing her over the edge, and so she threw herself into the pit, shouting: “Long live Italy”, just as many others died proclaiming their love for Italy.

It is true that we are here today to remember the innocent people who were slaughtered, but we are also here to once again ask for forgiveness on behalf of this Republic’s institutions for the guilty silence that shrouded the events of our eastern border for decades.

And we are here to pay tribute to all the Istrians, Julians and Dalmatians who decided to leave everything behind - homes, belongings, lands - in order to remain Italian, in order to keep the one thing Tito’s communists could not take away from them: their identity.

So, paying an extremely high price, Rijekans, Istrians and Dalmatians decided to be Italian twice over: Italian by birth and Italian by choice. They decided to follow their hearts, taking with them not just a handful of soil or some small fragments of the Pula Arena, but something that no political police or persecutor can ever take away from you: the love for who you are, for the land where your roots lie, for the family that brought you into this world, for the traditions that have accompanied you. Because, wherever you may be, that is your home; not what surrounds you but what you carry inside.

Italy did not return that love for a long time. It certainly did not always do so for those exiles who fled to rejoin their community. The train that left from Ancona in February 1947 to take exiles who had arrived from Pula to the various refugee camps has been mentioned and comes to mind. When that train arrived into the station of Bologna, it was pelted with stones. The milk for the already dehydrated children was thrown onto the rails. The exiles were insulted, and prevented from getting off by those whose homeland was an ideology, and who considered it a betrayal to prefer national belonging to that ideology.

That train was renamed the ‘train of disgrace’, but following this ceremony we will be going to Trieste station for the inauguration of another train, a historical train similar to the one that took the exiles to the various refugee camps in Italy. This train will travel from the north to the south of the country, not to reopen past wounds, not to cause divisions again, but to close a circle, to make amends for that disgrace, to accompany those exiles in spirit in an Italy that now knows their story and recognises their sacrifice, and to restore that sense of solidarity on which any nation worthy of this name is founded.

This solidarity is all about historical truth, which for us is a heritage that must also be shared with the peoples of the republics of Slovenia and Croatia, with the same spirit of peacemaking that led the cities of Gorizia and Nova Gorica to share the candidature for, and together be named, European Capital of Culture 2025.

With today’s ceremony and the inauguration of the ‘remembrance train’, we are commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Law no. 92/2004, which established this day of remembrance. This law marked a turning point, making it possible to write pages of history that had never before been written, and enabling so much progress to be made over the last twenty years. It is thanks to that law and to the tenacity of those who pursued it that today it is normal to talk about the Foibe massacres in schools. It is thanks to that law that films and television programmes today pay tribute to those events, also in prime time and certainly on public broadcasting channels. It is thanks to that law that the history of the Foibe massacres and the exodus have entered the history books, becoming the focus of research, documentation and in-depth study.

I also wish to thank the Italian Parliament, which in these very days is working to strengthen and implement that law because, of course, it is always possible to do more.

In short, it is thanks to that law that the karst river of remembrance was able to rise to the surface, joining with tributaries and becoming strong, fast-flowing. Today, that river glistens in all its beauty in the light of day, a light that can never be overshadowed no matter what attempts are made by reductionists, deniers or those wanting to justify that tragedy, which often still emerge.

An all-Italian story that we want to help carry into the future, also by establishing a national remembrance museum. This museum will be in Rome, Italy’s capital, because this story does not belong to just a small area along our border or what is left of the exodus from Istria, Rijeka and Dalmatia; it is a story that belongs to the whole of Italy, and the whole of Italy must have the chance and the opportunity to say thank you.

[Courtesy translation]