Welcome back, dearest Alberto!
It is an indescribable joy to know that you are free and ready to return to Italy, to your family and friends.
Many of us have been family to you during this period of unjust and harsh detention. You may not have known, but we shared it with your parents Armanda and Ezio, and with the good lawyer Alessandra Ballerini, concern, commitment and hope. We have never left them alone, we have not let the attention go out on you, a guiltless prisoner of a system of interests that uses people’s rights as a bargaining chip.
We didn’t have the power to bring you home, but we felt the moral duty to loudly urge anyone who was able to intervene every day. Everyone did it according to their own sensitivity: some through appeals, some with demonstrations, with prayer or with fasting.
Your name, your smile, your strength in enduring imprisonment for no reason, have accompanied us in this year of increasingly feverish waiting. The wait is over and now we don’t get tired of repeating it: welcome back, Alberto!
Don Luigi Ciotti
(HANDLE)
Welcome back to you, young generous man, son of an Italy that believes in peace, freedom and the dignity of all human beings. And who naturally also rejoices for the other prisoners returned today to their countries and families.
In these long months we have done everything to feel close to you, even putting a bit of your civil passion into our daily commitment. Thank you because, even without being able to talk to us, you taught us something.
Today the happiness of knowing you are free surpasses any reflection on how your liberation finally arrived. But a thought goes to the people of Venezuela and in particular to its poorest and most fragile inhabitants, to whom you wanted to bring help and who today face new trials. The hope is that for them too, over time, those rights and social justice that should be guaranteed to every human community will be built
