Presidents Ivo Josipovic of Croatia and Giorgio Napolitano of Italy will organise during their meeting in Pula on September 3 the largest meeting with members of the Italian national community, promoting tolerance and multiculturalism, Italian Ambassador to Croatia Alessandro Pignatti Morano di Custoza, Italian Union president Furio Radin and the chairman of the Union's executive committee, Maurizio Tremul, said on Wednesday.
The Josipovic-Napolitano meeting will be marked by the concert "Croatia and Italy Together in Europe" at Pula's Roman amphitheatre called "Arena".
The Italian ambassador said the two presidents would first meet representatives of the esuli, "Italians who fled from Pula, Rijeka and Dalmatia" after WW2, then with representatives of the Italian Union, and with representatives of all Italian minority institutions in Croatia and Slovenia.
Radin, an ethnic Italian representative in the Croatian parliament, said "all citizens sharing the values of coexistence, tolerance and multiculturalism from this region" were also invited to the two presidents' meeting with members of the Italian national community. He highlighted the "symbolic significance" of the meeting, as it was the first time the two presidents would address such a large number of Italians.
Radin said the Arena was not randomly chosen for the meeting, as it represented the place outside of which the drama of the mass exodus, not only of Italians, had unfolded.
"However, the Arena is also the framework within which we, the Italians who stayed here, grew and socialised with members of other nationalities," he said, adding that members of the Italian minority expected a lot from the speeches of the two presidents, as the path which began in Trieste last year with a meeting of the presidents of Italy, Croatia and Slovenia "now resumes in Pula and can no longer be stopped."
"That's not the path of reconciliation, as we have reconciled many years ago. That's the path of the common European future," Radin said, adding that, although some recent events set back the position of the Italian national community in Croatia, such as the Constitutional Court's decision to abolish double voting rights, "as members of the Italian national minority, but also as citizens of this region of all nationalities and orientations, we want a future in which the past isn't forgotten but overcome, respecting everyone, rejecting nothing from our history, but looking ahead."
Tremul said that by organising the Josipovic-Napolitano meeting, the Italian national community wanted to contribute to the good relations between Italy and Croatia as well as to the common European future of the two countries.
Josipovic and Napolitano were to have met members of the Italian national community in mid-June but the meeting was postponed due to Napolitano's commitments.
