"The masses follow men more than they follow ideas. The reason is clear.
---- The masses are artfully kept in ignorance and continually beset by
the problem of life that they do not know how to solve. ---- Now, it is
more than logical that those who do not know how to count and need to do
so, invoke and resort to the accountant. ---- This is why the people are
the eternal victims of politicians, priests, militarism, slave traders,
and bad shepherds, and despite the atrocious experience of thousands of
years, they still do not decide to emancipate themselves, to walk by
themselves"
Bartolomeo VANZETTI in L'Adunata dei Refrattari February 24, 1923
In 2017, on the 90th anniversary of their death, in Villafalletto - a
town in the Cuneo area where Bartolomeo Vanzetti was born - Luigi Botta
screened the original film of the funeral of Bartolomeo and Ferdinando
"Nicola" Sacco on August 29, 1927; in the film, at the end of the
funeral, you can see the Archbishop of Boston and Governor Fuller
commenting "Thank God it's over". They could not have imagined the story
that followed. In those days in Paris, the Latin Quarter and the
American embassy were being set on fire by the workers' revolt against
what was considered a state assassination. That execution had not been a
mistake, but the application of the logic of the state: they had been
killed precisely because they were anarchists, knowing full well that
they were completely innocent of the specific accusation.
Luigi Botta is now the only researcher on the Sacco and Vanzetti case,
after the death of historians Robert D'Attilio and Ronald Creagh, and
since 1972, as a young journalist for a local newspaper in Cuneo, he has
been following the story, first with Vincenzina Vanzetti and, after her
death, alone, producing the fruits of continuous international research.
After the funeral, the bodies of our comrades were cremated. For decades
we were convinced that the Defense Committee, animated by the tireless
and generous Aldino Felicani, had wanted to keep their ashes together by
mixing them and then dividing them into urns kept first in the funeral
home and then in a bank. Those who went, like the writer here now, to
the cemetery of the village of Bart, Villafalletto, were convinced that
they had both remains in front of them, in the burial niche at human
height. We were convinced that the urns brought to Italy by Luigina
Vanzetti were all that remained of the two. Luigina travels, with two
funeral urns, through the entire mobilization of American anarchists,
from one coast to the other; she travels through the welcome and
solidarity of the workers' organizations of France - and here the
anarchists Luis Lecoin, pacifist, animator of the historic periodical
Union Pacifiste and Severin Ferandel take care of it - from the port of
Cherbourg on October 4, up to the border of Modane with Italy. Luigi
Botta reconstructs, almost hour by hour, the entire journey and the
ordeal of the two women, Rosa for Nicola Sacco and Luigina for
Bartolomeo. The two ashes were never mixed, but placed in four urns, two
by two, and Luigina returned to Italy with two urns, one for Sacco and
one for Vanzetti. Botta's story follows her in this odyssey of the
twentieth century. And it also tells of the constant correspondence
between Luigina Vanzetti and the Brini family, who had had Bartolomeo as
a tenant and companion.
Meanwhile, the two urns that remained in the USA, that of Sacco was
given to his wife and that of Bart, are found at the Public Library, the
Civic Library of Boston which preserves what remains of the trial and
the papers of the affair, with which Botta is in constant contact. In
Italy in 1927, in the midst of the fascist regime, neither of the two
urns, either in Villafalletto for Bart or in Torremaggiore for Nick, had
public funerals, but a simple blessing ceremony with a few family
members, and the police who accompanied them directly to the burial niches.
Today Giovanni Vanzetti, son of Ettore, Bart's brother, has finally
managed to reunite his uncle's ashes, thanks to the meticulous work of
Luigi Botta with the formal and formalist bureaucracy of the Americans.
What, in my opinion, is still valid today is the realization of a social
memory that is now acquired, as is the assassination of Giuseppe Pinelli
and Franco Serantini, of what it means to go through a state justice
system for every prisoner, for every man or woman hit and executed as
rebels, guilty of existing as such even if innocent of a single crime
invented for a state alibi. Then the torment that follows even after
having demonstrated the historical truth, like the torment that produces
deaths even after a war, even after having signed the peace. The Good is
the realization and memory that the behavior of the so-called state
justice is not an error, it is an applied logic, to which we must
respond with all the means at our disposal. To all the Sacco and
Vanzetti cases in the world, to their memory and to all the rebels
against every injustice, small or large.
Antonio Lombardo
https://umanitanova.org/sacco-e-vanzetti-non-e-finita/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
---- The masses are artfully kept in ignorance and continually beset by
the problem of life that they do not know how to solve. ---- Now, it is
more than logical that those who do not know how to count and need to do
so, invoke and resort to the accountant. ---- This is why the people are
the eternal victims of politicians, priests, militarism, slave traders,
and bad shepherds, and despite the atrocious experience of thousands of
years, they still do not decide to emancipate themselves, to walk by
themselves"
Bartolomeo VANZETTI in L'Adunata dei Refrattari February 24, 1923
In 2017, on the 90th anniversary of their death, in Villafalletto - a
town in the Cuneo area where Bartolomeo Vanzetti was born - Luigi Botta
screened the original film of the funeral of Bartolomeo and Ferdinando
"Nicola" Sacco on August 29, 1927; in the film, at the end of the
funeral, you can see the Archbishop of Boston and Governor Fuller
commenting "Thank God it's over". They could not have imagined the story
that followed. In those days in Paris, the Latin Quarter and the
American embassy were being set on fire by the workers' revolt against
what was considered a state assassination. That execution had not been a
mistake, but the application of the logic of the state: they had been
killed precisely because they were anarchists, knowing full well that
they were completely innocent of the specific accusation.
Luigi Botta is now the only researcher on the Sacco and Vanzetti case,
after the death of historians Robert D'Attilio and Ronald Creagh, and
since 1972, as a young journalist for a local newspaper in Cuneo, he has
been following the story, first with Vincenzina Vanzetti and, after her
death, alone, producing the fruits of continuous international research.
After the funeral, the bodies of our comrades were cremated. For decades
we were convinced that the Defense Committee, animated by the tireless
and generous Aldino Felicani, had wanted to keep their ashes together by
mixing them and then dividing them into urns kept first in the funeral
home and then in a bank. Those who went, like the writer here now, to
the cemetery of the village of Bart, Villafalletto, were convinced that
they had both remains in front of them, in the burial niche at human
height. We were convinced that the urns brought to Italy by Luigina
Vanzetti were all that remained of the two. Luigina travels, with two
funeral urns, through the entire mobilization of American anarchists,
from one coast to the other; she travels through the welcome and
solidarity of the workers' organizations of France - and here the
anarchists Luis Lecoin, pacifist, animator of the historic periodical
Union Pacifiste and Severin Ferandel take care of it - from the port of
Cherbourg on October 4, up to the border of Modane with Italy. Luigi
Botta reconstructs, almost hour by hour, the entire journey and the
ordeal of the two women, Rosa for Nicola Sacco and Luigina for
Bartolomeo. The two ashes were never mixed, but placed in four urns, two
by two, and Luigina returned to Italy with two urns, one for Sacco and
one for Vanzetti. Botta's story follows her in this odyssey of the
twentieth century. And it also tells of the constant correspondence
between Luigina Vanzetti and the Brini family, who had had Bartolomeo as
a tenant and companion.
Meanwhile, the two urns that remained in the USA, that of Sacco was
given to his wife and that of Bart, are found at the Public Library, the
Civic Library of Boston which preserves what remains of the trial and
the papers of the affair, with which Botta is in constant contact. In
Italy in 1927, in the midst of the fascist regime, neither of the two
urns, either in Villafalletto for Bart or in Torremaggiore for Nick, had
public funerals, but a simple blessing ceremony with a few family
members, and the police who accompanied them directly to the burial niches.
Today Giovanni Vanzetti, son of Ettore, Bart's brother, has finally
managed to reunite his uncle's ashes, thanks to the meticulous work of
Luigi Botta with the formal and formalist bureaucracy of the Americans.
What, in my opinion, is still valid today is the realization of a social
memory that is now acquired, as is the assassination of Giuseppe Pinelli
and Franco Serantini, of what it means to go through a state justice
system for every prisoner, for every man or woman hit and executed as
rebels, guilty of existing as such even if innocent of a single crime
invented for a state alibi. Then the torment that follows even after
having demonstrated the historical truth, like the torment that produces
deaths even after a war, even after having signed the peace. The Good is
the realization and memory that the behavior of the so-called state
justice is not an error, it is an applied logic, to which we must
respond with all the means at our disposal. To all the Sacco and
Vanzetti cases in the world, to their memory and to all the rebels
against every injustice, small or large.
Antonio Lombardo
https://umanitanova.org/sacco-e-vanzetti-non-e-finita/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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