24 September 1961: from the belvedere of the Giardini Carducci in Perugia one could see the plain below teeming with lights that, without a break, reached Assisi and higher up the Rocca of Frederick II.
Buses, cars, motorcycles, Vespas and even bicycles with their lamps lit against the falling dusk were the makers of that immense winding column that unspooled towards Perugia, together with the natural offshoots leading back to the other home towns of those taking part in this first peace march, conceived and willed by Aldo Capitini [1].
Once the speeches were over, at the close of the march, riding a “fast” Lambretta driven, recklessly, by Pietro Conti[2] we had gone straight back to Perugia meaning to watch the outflow of the many thousands of people who had gathered for the march; the vantage point could only be the belvedere mentioned above.
While I was thinking that it had been an unforgettable day, enchanting, cheerful, a day of friendship, I said to Conti, “It really was a fine demonstration!” He looked at me and said softly, “It is true, perhaps something more, beyond our expectations, in turnout and in meaning; now and then politics holds surprises in store for us.”
The clear, sun-filled day had begun early with the final preparations, then, from Piazza della Repubblica, seat of the Communist Party federation, on towards XX Giugno, the starting point of the march.

Indeed! XX Giugno itself, a place and a date laden with manifold meanings and values, in the heart and memory of many Perugians.
It was on 20 June 1859 that, in this place, “the massacres of Perugia” began and ran their course, massacres carried out by the mercenary troops sent by the Pope to crush the will of the Perugian patriots, who were fighting for a united and free Italy.
It was in this place that, on 8 March 1944, the “rebels” were shot who were fighting against the Nazi-Fascists to win back their own freedom and that of the whole country.
It was on 20 June 1944 that Perugia was liberated, returning to its hope in democracy and freedom.
Thousands of people were already stationed here; many Perugians, several members of parliament, mayors with the tricolour sash and well-known intellectuals who had joined the march.
A host of young people and placards and peace flags, no party sign or symbol, only men and women: so Aldo Capitini had wanted it.
Already numerous were the people who had come from the other regions, from the Veneto all the way to Sicily, and pacifists too, gathered from various parts of the world.
People make ready to set off. It is a small man who places himself at the head of the march, just after the banner, a strip of bedsheet on which the meaning of this march is traced.
The banner, which would be carried along the whole route, in turn by Pio Baldelli, Italo Calvino, Giovanni Arpino and Andrea Gaggero, reads: “Peace march – for the brotherhood of peoples, Perugia – Assisi”.
The small man willed this march with all his will, stubbornness and patience, but also with the strength of his culture and of his utopian capacity, victorious on this day, to conceive of politics.

The march is now unstoppable; it comes down swiftly along the San Girolamo road as far as Ponte San Giovanni; from here on the procession, like a river receiving water from its many tributaries, grows ever more numerous and imposing.
Along the edges of the road, continually, groups of people, mostly farming families, wait to join the march.
At the crossroads, the people who have got down from the buses, arrived there from who knows where, slip into the procession carrying new placards, with new demands for peace.
In all the inhabited centres the march passes through there is a small crowd waiting, ready to flow into this extraordinary river.
Meanwhile the procession has a life of its own; a full band sets the marching rhythm for one section of it.
A very young American girl, perhaps in Perugia to attend the University for Foreigners, carried her placard about at a brisk pace; she seemed the symbol of the lightness of that day, beside the ascetic, almost severe figure of Aldo Capitini.
An image underlined by his attire: he was the only one in the whole march to have worn, throughout, a jacket, a tie and a hat.
From another branch of the procession a song rises little by little, accompanied by a single guitar, that slowly draws in dozens of young people, even those who hear the song for the first time and already claim to know it,

“ Dove vola l’avvoltoio?
avvoltoio vola via, vola via
dalla terra mia, che è la terra dell’amor…”

Other young people, some way off from these, as though in a dialogue or as if it were a singing contest, struck up:

“Avevamo vent’anni e oltre il ponte
oltre il ponte ch’è in mano nemica
vedevam l’altra riva, la vita
tutto il bene del mondo oltre il ponte”[3].

The march’s halt at Santa Maria degli Angeli allows the marchers to take a little refreshment, before the last stretch towards Assisi, and to greet with warm applause a couple of newlyweds coming out of the Basilica.
The marchers now climb towards Assisi and pass through it, but in the little town all is silence: the shops are shut, the windows barred, no one in the street or in the dense web of alleys of this splendid town, where throughout the year thousands of pilgrims converge from every part of the world to venerate Francis, who was born here and preached precisely peace and the brotherhood of peoples.

But that silence, rather than seeming a detachment, a separation, a rejection, risks appearing as a form of regard for a demonstration one may perhaps not agree with but which, one senses, deserves respect for the dignity, the severity mixed with cheerfulness, with which it expresses itself.
And yet, many years later, it would be the very Franciscans of the sacred convent of Assisi who were among the promoters of the Tavola della pace, the association that would organise the future marches.
At last the marchers, some twenty thousand of them, pour into the meadows in front of the Rocca of Frederick II.
Now the speeches begin: from Capitini to Guttuso, from Ernesto Rossi to Arturo Carlo Jemolo and Guido Piovene, while thousands of participants keep streaming in amid songs and rhythmic chants.
Capitini then asks for two minutes of silence for the victims of all wars.
That multitude stops all at once, an unreal silence envelops the Rocca and runs through all those people, who had risen to their feet or knelt for a silent prayer.
Perhaps in that moment the meaning of that day became clear.
But even when the speeches are over and the crowd begins to disperse, a great many, above all the young, seated on the Rocca’s lawn go on chanting slogans and striking up the songs of peace, as if to bear witness that the commitment to peace should not be entrusted to a single day but to all the days of our life.

(photo courtesy Studio Medici)

Notes

[1] Aldo Capitini was born in Perugia on 23 December 1899. A reference point of anti-Fascism, he was driven out of the Scuola Normale of Pisa by the rector Gentile for having refused to sign the pledge of loyalty to Fascism. A university professor of the history of religions, philosopher, poet, apostle of nonviolence, vegetarian, champion of direct democracy. He died in Perugia on 19 October 1968.

[2] Pietro Conti was born in Spoleto on 8 September 1928; at the time deputy secretary of the Perugia federation of the PCI, future first president of the Umbria Region, then a member of parliament and of the national leadership of the PCI; without doubt the most representative Umbrian politician of the Communist Party. He died in Perugia on 7 September 1988.

[3] Dove vola l’avvoltoio and Oltre il ponte, two ballads with lyrics by Italo Calvino, set to music and sung by Sergio Liberovici, composed at the end of the 1950s and pressed on vinyl in the Cantacronache series. Fausto Amodei sings them along the route of the march, while others he improvises together with Franco Fortini.

Aldo Peverini has written articles and essays on advertising and communication, both commercial and political, including a study and survey on the state of advertising in Umbria, later published. He has worked for around thirty years in the field of communication and advertising, both commercial and institutional and political, founding communication agencies or working as a consultant. He recently edited the volume Quando la politica era passione una cronistoria, of the 1970s in Umbria, recounted, annotated and with an ample photographic apparatus. He is the author of the text and screenplay of the Storia di Perugia a fumetti published in 1980, whose second edition is currently being printed.