Adnkronos Milan, March 17 (Adnkronos Salute) – Bergamo, March 18, 2020: a long column of military trucks passes through the night. There are about ten of them in a ghostly city, the streets emptied by the lockdown decreed now throughout Italy to try to stem the contagion. On board each vehicle are the coffins of the victims of a previously unknown virus, Sars-CoV-2, leaving the Monumental Cemetery.
That image – from the city that became one of the epicenters of the first, tragic wave of Covid – will go around the world becoming one of the iconic symbols of the pandemic. The convoy took the ring road towards the highway, to reach the Italian cities that in those dramatic days agreed to welcome the deceased destined for cremation. The Orobic facilities were no longer enough, there were too many dead. 5 years have passed since those shots that shocked Italy, a round anniversary that will be celebrated tomorrow. Because March 18, the day of the coffins of Bergamo, has become the National Day in memory of the victims of the epidemic of coronavirus.
The anniversary, established on March 17, 2021, will be honored again this year. The bishops of the region have announced that "the bells of all the bell towers of Lombardy" will ring "in mourning at 12 on Tuesday, March 18" to "invite people to remember, pray and hope". "Five years after the most acute phase of the pandemic, we continue to pray and invite people to pray for the dead and for their families", and "so that we can all find good reasons to overcome suffering without forgetting the lesson of that tragedy". In Bergamo, the starting point of the celebrations scheduled for tomorrow will always be the same: the Monumental Cemetery, the church of Ognissanti. We return to where the trucks left, so as not to forget. Exactly 5 months ago, the Municipality found itself having to specify the numbers and destinations of those military vehicles with their sad load, a wound that has never healed, to clear the field of any possible historical revision. The trucks that left from the Bergamo cemetery on March 2, 18 were 2020 "with 8 people, divided into three caravans: one towards Bologna with 73 deceased, one towards Modena with 34 deceased and one to Varese with 31 deceased".
And the 5-year ceremony, which will be attended by the Minister for Disabilities Alessandra Locatelli, will be inspired precisely by the theme of memory and that of 'discovery'. Memory, the municipal administration of Bergamo explained in recent days, "as a necessary act to honor and respect those who are no longer with us and what they experienced". Discovery "as a need to rework, in the broadest possible community dimension, the collective and individual experience that Covid represented".
This year, a route has been designed that passes through "three places that are particularly significant for the city": in addition to the Monumental Cemetery, Palazzo Frizzoni which will host the citizens' stories with testimonies collected in a podcast and the Bosco della Memoria (Parco della Trucca) which will exalt "the words of the younger generations through an action of memory". The Church of Ognissanti will be emptied of its pews "to recall the same situation that in 2020 saw it transformed into a mortuary". Installations, photographic exhibitions, moments of listening and active participation are the initiatives chosen to remember. Because memory, as highlighted in the presentation of the Day, "is the basis for rebuilding".