Speech Given upon Being Elected Mayor of Rome

Honored colleagues!

One sole consideration persuades me to accept the very high office to which your vote has appointed me, when dwindling forces barely enable the modest duties of teachers and of journalists in other employed fields. In ancient times, only a representative from the patricians could enter the highest Capitoline office because, in bringing his nobility to the courtly delegation, he ennobled the delegation of the Eternal City. You have desired, in the name of a new era, to affirm in this admirable center—the core of all active Italian strength and now the place of its modernization—equality of all citizens in the presence of communal rights and communal duties; this thoroughly affirms that public offices, honorary or otherwise, confer trust on one who guarantees competent industriousness, intelligent integrity; to whichever party or whichever school: for you, the one elected to public administration must be the man and the citizen, whatever his origin, not the emblem of patrician or plebeian submission, dogmatic or political. “Therefore,” in the words of a great Italian which initiated the dawn of the Risorgimento, “intellect joined with honesty in morality and sanctity of intentions is the rule of those chosen administrators.”¹

Starting from this enlightened standard, first and foremost, your choice would fall on that illustrious son of Rome, who, in his physical strength and intellectual youth is still, as in the past, among the brilliant visionaries, forerunners of progress and liberty in the national councils as in our council; [as he is now] appointed to greater duties, we must await from him—whom we wish a speedy and perfect reestablishment in health—advice and help that he entrusts to us. And, likewise, we would ask him, who, in masterfully directing our organization, led us to victory, to guide us from this seat. Unfortunately, invoking pressing reasons, both official and personal, he will not be able to bend to our wishes. Likewise, the distinguished jurisconsult, who filled this bright and meritorious paternal name with new luster; it was he who gave clear evidence of administrative science, of exceptional capability, directing the matters of the city by himself; in this way, many others had to come before me.

But your choice has fallen upon me, probably as a manifestation of the average temperature at which a block of ice melts. Can I now impede the affirmation of a principle in harmony with modern thought, destined to reverberate in the hundred cities, in the thousands of suburbs in the peninsula, impede it because the exemplification falls on my poor person, and because, although interlaced with honors, the heavy burden drops on my back? Indeed, I do not have the courage; wherefore, thanking you for the confidence expressed in your vote, all that remains is to promise my conscientious endeavor to the high calling of representing, not unworthily, the majority electorate that brought us to this glorious high ground, where the traditions of the past and the necessities of the future impose this arduous present task.

Among the duties under my jurisdiction is for me to preside over our assemblies, while, together with colleagues of the council I must answer to you for our actions. It is a contradiction in terms, due to the deplorable uniformity to which all the municipalities are subordinate to the laws that govern, whether for large cities or small rural aggregations. Thus, I will regulate discussions in which my responsibility can be implicated; nevertheless, you can rely on my absolute impartiality, my respect for all, whether from the majority or the minority, whether in favor of or opposed to the administration: the president of your assemblies, in his double personality, will not mention being the executor of your deliberations. [ . . . ]

There, perhaps, is the difference with the previous administration, because no one can reproach my illustrious predecessor, to whom I am bound in bonds of esteem and friendship, righteous civic-mindedness; but, inevitably, the past council needed to live timidly in the present with eyes oriented toward the past; we, instead, in our short or long life, depending on what destiny has planned for us, set our gaze on the future, on a great metropolis in which science and integrity direct us, together to our patrial destiny, with modernized artistic, industrial, and commercial activities. The looking glasses of the past administration will fall off under the scrutiny of future fates; we invert them to see across the breached walls of Porta Pia.²

We pay tribute to the good intentions of past administrators, preserving the debts due to their works; for, in truth, we cannot through and through accept the legacy that was left to us without the benefit of inventory. We do not wish to bring tribute of praise for the “elasticity” (so it is said) of a balance, when the balance closes in a draw for simply attributing the past advances to competence, along with the outcome of partial liquidation of the residue; such are, or appear to us, the last resources to which one resorts to balance the earnings with the expenses, when the passive aspect of fearful rigidity is assumed rather than the active face of carefree elasticity; nor can we applaud a new regulatory level that redoubles the extension of the city without a precise blueprint and without the indispensable reserves of provisions suitable to save our vast buildable state property from the skillful guile employed in the rigging of the construction market. I will not lengthen this critical discourse; what is done is done.

Accountable, therefore, for each of our deeds, we do not intend to extend our bond to third parties, or to the consequences that can arise.

Before touching our proposals and the administrative concepts about which we will inform you, permit me a confession. The madness of the taste of reform—in leaving one lured by the passionate statements of one who projects his gaze to the future, to that future painted with vibrant colors from his vivid imagination—is believed to be a renewal of the old [Latin] motto of the Riforma newspaper: instauratio ab imis fundamentis (the establishment of the very foundation). Surely one adapts to this, as to the philosopher Bacon, but not so for municipal administrators. Frankly, among the instruments of our modest endowment, like the inheritance left to us, we do not find the magic wand for actualizing the dream of Henry IV within the walls of a vast and airy home; it is not in our means nor do we believe in that which will do nothing but give immediate satisfaction to all of the just demands (I do not speak of those unjust) of the citizenry of every class. Ensure that those demands will be gradually satisfied, not without industriousness, nor without prudent courage in so doing; as long as we believe we can make it, not further. Promise little to preserve much; rather this than to promise much and preserve little, such is our mentality.

In shaping our action to the criteria of the various essential public necessities and in investigating the means of fulfilling them, the first of these criteria is rigid administration. Rigid in the sense of limiting the spending at the entrance; not overstepping the means of our position out of impatience to improve services or aesthetic delights, and being compelled to resort to accounting subterfuge for hiding the Rifts in the financial statement.

The second is to strengthen, to the degree possible, our revenue, insufficient for the demands of our duties, reinforcing, equalizing the burdens to the potentiality of taxes, and no longer permitting individuals, social classes, professionals or political classes, from fleeing from community duties, with unjust inequalities and with grave damages to the treasury or to other operations.

The third is to uphold the laws strictly—and, maintaining the scrupulous neutrality of the ratio of schools or of parties in equal scales, and setting aside civil orientation in all of the offices of the city—so that, with the wide and full respect of individual opinions, they adhere to the expression of the moral and national collective.

The fourth, and for now the last, is to unknot the various administrations undertaken in the city; not only entrusting us to industrious work, the valor of our employees, the leaders of our Secretary General, but to recruit colleagues from among citizens of both sexes, with the goal of providing precious help: fast and efficient completion of various services. In one word, those four criteria thus summarily enunciated can be further summarized as the aspiration to rigor and equity in this civil and secular administration, by supported cooperation and by simplified decentralization.

But all of this, esteemed colleagues, like our attempt to realize the proposals herein expressed, is subject to a fundamental condition; to your sage advice, to the concordance of intents, to your active and unceasing cooperation. This will suffice. It is necessary, in our opinion, to emerge from the council, to direct ourselves to the citizenry, to enlist all men of goodwill and interested in lending their work to the city. A popular administration can only exist provided that it is built on a broad base; this is what we invoke: the community of forces in favor of the city, the consensus of individuals in general interests. The invocation is not so much for facilitating our work (just as we have come, so are we ready to leave without excessive regret) as it is to reinforce and illustrate that sound democratic sentiment from which we derive, and gather around the living forces of the country to conduct it on the path invoked by our elders and superiors.

Our esteemed colleague [Giovanni] Montemartini, in his lofty discourse, claimed for the new council a political character, as he was obliged to defend the autonomous towns from governmental intrusiveness, and to win more latitude and liberty for them. In effect, he precisely highlighted one of the political aspects of our administration, which will not be neglected: our aspiration must tend more toward the London County Council than to the Prefect of the Seine of Paris. But this is not the only aspect nor in my opinion the most important in question. Here assembled, men of the various parties and various schools, ascribed to different faiths, we have come to this sacred hill in the name of that great and elevated politic, which has had the virtue of gathering us in a sheaf; national politics before anti-unity; politics of liberty before that of intolerance; politics of progress before that of retaliation. It is the first time that the liberal elements, in the name of those political principles (after the elections led by Alfredo Baccarini), have routed a coalition of monopolists, of the fearful and of reactionaries; the first time that they rise up to preserve the Capitol, to assume the grave responsibility of governing Rome. And like the way in which this experiment developed—from many greeted with hope to many ostracized with fearful envy—many things, politically and administratively, depend on the ephemeral life of a board or a council: the rays, which will radiate from the lighthouse of Rome, will illuminate every Italian town, will indicate the paths to follow and those to avoid in the future.

Surely rivals realized this, and, with calculated self-restraint and with nothing less than deceitful participation, hoped for the failure of liberty, in their prompt revenge, counting on our effrontery, on tiffs that impatience or reluctance can generate among us. This prefigured a political suicide, a reckless administration, foretelling that our block, fruit of the groans and aspirations of the masses, phosphorescent with liberty, could, in short, deteriorate in days, as an example to men of good intent of the wickedness he was capable of, in his impotent frenzy.

We cannot rule out that the thrust out of which we thankfully arose could cause, at short notice, a revolt from behind that hurls us to the floor. It would be the greatest satisfaction for those ill-wishers who today, as in the past, enlist their least noble parties to enact their premonitions, and it would be a great tragedy for the cause of the democracy here and elsewhere. Such, O gentlemen, is political and civil responsibility, which we will strive to preserve. For our part we will not shy away, convinced that each one of us, symbols of this block, whence we trace our origin, will be sober in demands, steadfast in action, unmovable in the will to move forward, united, as we have submitted to our delegates, to arrive step by step at the fixed goal; convinced that each of us, connected by a protective moral bond to tolerance as the fruit of a free conscience, will form an adamantine resistance to struggles, to blandishments, to hidden dangers that partisan interests and extreme schools can devise to stop us in our path; convinced, because the name of Rome that we all love with equal and reverent love, and which resonates through each fiber of our being, the interests of Rome, the example of Rome, of Italian Rome, intangible, will be our domestic deity from which we will draw energy, wisdom, and virtue.