VIDEO | The exhibition on Berlinguer opens in Bologna: “No nostalgia, forward with young people”

The exhibition will be open to visitors (with free entry) from tomorrow until August 25th and will be accompanied by a calendar of events

ROME – “The places and words of Enrico Berlinguer”. Bologna pays homage to the historic secretary of the PCI with an exhibition which today, exactly 40 years after his death, will be inaugurated in the rooms of the Civic Archaeological Museum on the initiative of the Enrico Berlinguer association, the Fondazione Duemila and the Renato Zangheri Study and Research Centre, in collaboration with the Civic Museums sector of Bologna and with the patronage of the Municipality and Region of Emilia-Romagna. The exhibition curated by Alessandro d’Onofrio, Alexander Hobel, Gregorio Sorgonà and Carlo De Maria retraces Berlinguer’s biography through original audiovisual, sound, photographic materials and archive documents. After being hosted in recent months at the Mattatoio in Rome, the exhibition arrives in the Emilian capital with an additional section dedicated to the relationship between Berlinguer and Emilia-Romagna. The exhibition will be open to visitors (with free entry) from tomorrow until August 25 and will be accompanied by a calendar of meetings, debates, documentary screenings and guided tours (as well as a book of the same name, published by Pendragon).

It begins today, with the ribbon cutting, with the participation of Laura and Maria Stella Berlinguer and with a speech by the former rector of the University of Bologna Ivano Dionigi. Among the other guests announced: Don Matteo Zuppi, Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Massimo D’Alema, Walter Tega, Achille Occhetto, Valeria Cicala, Claudio Petruccioli, Annamaria Carloni, Walter Veltroni, Anna Del Mugnaio, Fabio Mussi and Livia Turco. Also today, among the events connected to the exhibition, the preview of the documentary film “Prima della fine. The last days of Enrico Berlinguer”, by director Samuele Rossi, as part of the Biografilm Festival, is also scheduled at the Jolly cinema.

The themes that emerge from the exhibition “also speak to us about today and I believe this is the most important element of this exhibition”, underlines Hobel. The collection of materials “pushes us to think about the legacy and current events of Berlinguer, which are not two necessarily superimposable things”, adds Sorgonà, underlining that among the 70,000 presences already registered in Rome, note “a large presence of the young generations, who crowded the two pavilions of the slaughterhouse and who we are certain will also crowd the beautiful room that hosts us here”. It is “an exhibition that spans an era and is able to tell the story of a people’s adherence to a political idea”, states the mayor Matteo Lepore. As mayor of Bologna “I am not interested in hosting an exhibition on Berlinguer to make it a hagiography or a holy card”, continues Lepore, but rather to better understand “a figure who must be seen today as a key to understanding the world, society and role of politics. Ours is not a nostalgic choice but one of future, of critical interest and public debate”.

But what would Berlinguer see in the outcome of the latest elections? Mauro Roda, president of the Duemila Foundation, tries to give an answer to ‘Dire’: “The awakening and the search for something new. In the last period Berlinguer has made us reflect a lot on the condition of women, on youth issues, on the need for democracy while science and technologies grow and advance. He knew how to dig into current events with the foundations of a philosophy which was also partly his youthful education and which looked first and foremost at living and working conditions. of men and women, therefore to the use of resources and work, to its methods and its purposes. And this is today’s theme”.