“When we left with Exodus, 40 years ago,” says Don Antonio Mazzi, “the Leoncavallo was already there: What is surprised today is that in all this time a relatively small fact, like a social center in an occupied space, has been transformed into a question of astronomical proportions. While I am convinced that the question could have been able to resolve in a peaceful way already thirty years ago (When in 1994 the social center was moved where it is now, and it was the years in which the tension was much higher than now, editor’s note) in a much simpler way, which would have helped everyone to understand that there are certain situations that can be faced differently, in a more polite, more patient way, without reaching the wall against wall and putting police squadrons in the field, as if it were a civil war. Everywhere there are always some people, some guys, who need to see and dream of a different society, is an inevitable factual fact to societies and perhaps it is also right that it is so. If thirty years ago we had accepted these guys, perhaps we could have “interpreted” them and help them interpret this company and we would have been able to get for a different approach, from what has then resulted in thirty years later in the deployment of hundreds of police officers to free a busy house, now almost empty of occupants, on a day in August “.
The point is obviously not legitimizing the thirty -year occupation of a private property, ignoring the instances of the owner, to the sentences that recognize his right to him And also to that of 2024 that condemned the Ministry of the Interior to compensate it, but the fact that in 30-40 years there would have been time to look for a solution to free the private area by simultaneously giving an alternative, for example, giving Milan simultaneously in the management of the social center, which for some time seems to have lost the charge of tension and which has characterized other seasons – think of the violent reaction to the first eviction in 1989. And wounded – one of the many abandoned public spaces or a disused private area in concert with the owner. Something that could have been foreseen in concert with the municipal administration, which instead would have been notified only at the last of the eviction initiative activated by Rome, in advance of the eviction scheduled for 9 September.
Don Mazzi’s password has always been the same: “Speaking, communicating, looking for a way of dialogue:« What I have tried to do for 40 years, opening a breach of communication with everyone: with toxic, with terrorists, communication is the only way to face social difficulties, large and small ones. My modest opinion, of a priest who lives in the midst of the inconvenience and social difficulties, is: let’s go back to talking to us, we return to communicate, we leave the police aside, and we try to treat us as humans, knowing that the different have always been there and that they are not a misfortune but a wealth “.
