The 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy provided the Aspen Junior Fellows with a renewed opportunity at their Annual Conference to reflect on and bear witness to the country’s quintessential values, as well as celebrating the group’s tenth anniversary.
In the beginning, there was the catch-cry of “liberty and independence”: the Risorgimento ideal par excellence, expressing the longing of generations of those aspiring for an Italian nation, who – from the Congress of Vienna to 1861, as well as in the bellicose sequels of the following decade – devoted their thoughts and deeds and blood and hopes to the unification of Italy.
The seminar got underway with the participants recalling that when Charles De Gaulle met André Malraux in the aftermath of the Second World War, he said to him, “D’abord le passé”, meaning that a sense of history enables each of us to look back at the past to find our way out of a current critical phase and work towards building the future.
