Voices of Nonviolent Activism in Post-War Italy
On 9 April 1968, the day of Martin Luther King’s funeral, a peaceful demonstration took place at the chapel of Rome’s Sapienza University. A typescript of the MIR, the International Movement for Reconciliation, gives an emotional account of it.
“The news hit us like a thunderbolt, then we recovered and on Saturday 6 April we organized a demonstration in his memory, the largest there has ever been in Rome. There were more than 500 of us in Piazza Esedra, where we gathered, including many young people. […] we shook hands and despite the police prohibition, walked towards the U.S. Embassy in two parallel lines, singing spirituals. Before we parted, we arranged to meet on April the 9th, the day of his funeral. On that occasion, our group was smaller, though no less deeply committed to promoting nonviolence in Italy. With us was Don Powell, who had personally known Martin Luther King and had worked with him during his time in the United States. This time, the march led us to the university, where an ecumenical meditation was held in the same chapel. After reading passages from the Bible and from Dr. King’s writings, the meditation took the form of an open discussion of ideas and how best to apply his teachings to our own context in Italy, with all its many challenges. In the end, it proved to be a new and inspiring experience”.
Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) visited Italy in December 1931, on his way back from the Second Round Table Conference in London, passing through Milan, Rome and Brindisi. A few photographs remain of his visit to the capital, showing him being escorted by Fascist leaders as he shakes hands with young balilla members and visits the regime’s social and youth institutions. His visit is also commemorated by a plaque near Monte Mario and several newspaper articles describing the crowds that gathered to greet the “Indian prophet”, chanting “Viva Gandhi!”. The Mahātma was already known to Italians, who in that same year were able to read a translation of his Autobiography, introduced by a preface by Giovanni Gentile. These are small traces of a great presence that also left a deep mark on cultural history in Italy, where Gandhi became a reference point for many 20th-century intellectuals and for the Eastern religious movements that spread throughout the country from the 1950s onwards.
His ideas of civil disobedience and active peace influenced figures such as the anti-fascist Aldo Capitini, who, inspired by Gandhi’s teachings, organised the first Perugia-Assisi Peace March in 1961. In the Catholic sphere, former priest Giovanni Pioli proposed an evangelical interpretation, while in Sicily in the 1950s-1970s, marked by poverty, the mafia and the absence of a welfare state, Danilo Dolci was called the “Gandhi of Sicily” for having reworked Gandhi’s teachings into forms of protest and civil action. Antonio Gramsci also measured himself against his experience, reading the Gandhian movement as a form of “passive revolution”, a transformation capable of slowly eroding colonial hegemony.
Gandhi himself, on the other hand, looked closely at Italy: an admirer of the Risorgimento and Giuseppe Mazzini, he dedicated two articles to him in Indian Opinion (in 1905 and 1909-1910) and counted Dei doveri dell’uomo (Duties of Man) among his formative readings, particularly appreciating the idea that the nation should include “the entire Italian people, that is, its farmers”. This reinforced his conviction that the construction of the Indian nation should be based on the dignity and participation of all.
The thread linking Gandhi to Italy has been renewed in more recent times with Sonia Maino, who became Sonia Gandhi, a leading figure in Indian politics at the helm of the Congress Party.
Aldo Capitini
Aldo Capitini (1899-1968) was a philosopher, religious thinker, pedagogue; at the center of his work and activity was the theory and practice of nonviolence. Capitini developed an original system of thought as early as the 1930s, which led him to embrace Gandhi’s teaching. In his ethical-political vision, however, other philosophical and literary influences and suggestions, from Kant to Leopardi, and a strong religious inspiration also converged. Guided by these convictions, Capitini strenuously opposed fascism, without ever taking up arms. During the fascist regime, experienced a life of hardship, anti-fascist commitment and, on two occasions, imprisonment.
After World War II he continued to devote himself tirelessly to promoting initiatives, movements, meetings: from the Social Orientation Centers (Cos), inspired by the idea of a participatory democratic practice, to the campaign for conscientious objection, to the establishment of the Centro di coordinamento internazionale per la nonviolenza in 1952.
His research also found expression in a large production of writings, such as Religione aperta (1955); La nonviolenza oggi (1962); Le tecniche della nonviolenza (1967). He edited the volume In cammino per la pace (1962), which collected documents and testimonies on the Perugia-Assisi march of 1961. Launched by Capitini himself, the initiative followed models already experimented abroad, in particular the anti-nuclear marches organized in England. The intention was to give life to a demonstration promoted by “an independent and integral pacifist nucleus” but open to all, to intercept and sensitize the masses to non-violence and peace.
At his death, Capitini was remembered in this way by the magazine of the Nonviolent Movement for Peace, constituted just after the 1961 march: “Free religious”, a “nonviolent revolutionary thought and actively promoted the future of a society without the oppressed and the opening to a liberated and fraternal reality” (Azione nonviolenta, 11-12, 1968).
International Reconciliation Movement (MIR)
In the early 1950s, one of the longest running religiously inspired integral pacifist groups, the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR), arrived in Italy with the acronym MIR, or Movimento internazionale della riconciliazione. An interfaith peace movement, IFOR was formed in the aftermath of the First World War, in 1919. At that time, the first core of the organization, founded in 1914 on the initiative of the British Quaker Henry T. Hodgkin and the German Lutheran Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, acquired an international dimension.
After the First World War, the movement devoted itself to nonviolence, disarmament and conscientious objection. At this time, IFOR launched the International Voluntary Service for Peace and established contacts with Gandhi, which were to deepen in the following years. One of the most active centers of the movement, the Vienna office, was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933.
In the United States, the U.S. Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) already engaged for some time in the struggle against racial segregation. In the 1950s, former and current FOR staff were trusted advisors to Martin Luther King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Bayard Rustin, by then executive secretary of the War Resisters League, and FOR national field secretary Glenn Smiley both played a major role in deepening Dr. King’s understanding of nonviolence as a philosophy and as a strategy for confronting oppression.
Meanwhile, European branches of IFOR devoted themselves mainly to the question of disarmament and East-West dialogue, with openings to Third Wordlist themes.
In Italy, the International Reconciliation Movement engaged in campaigns of nonviolent opposition to wars and conflicts, as well as in the struggle for conscientious objection, education for peace and nonviolence, and ecumenical dialogue.