Mural of Rights unveiled in Milan: a tribute to 200 people who have defended human and civil rights

The mural of rights, created on the façade of a building on Via Ortica by the OrMe - Ortica Memoria association and the Orticanoodles art collective, was unveiled yesterday morning in Milan, with the patronage of the City of Milan and the contribution of the Italian Red Cross, Cooperativa Antonietta and Cooperativa Edificatrice Ortica.

The mural is an explosion of colors: the rainbow flag wraps around the building from which the faces of two hundred people who had the courage to defy social conventions and who made the history of human and civil rights are displayed. The work also commemorates the faces of the migrants who lost their lives in the tragic Lampedusa shipwreck on October 3, 2013, in the days marking the 10th anniversary. The work is intended as a tribute to these two hundred people, in a style reminiscent of Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s Fourth Estate. The rights represented are those of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights approved by the United Nations General Assembly seventy-five years ago.

The faces include Altiero Spinelli, who, in Milan eighty years ago, along with other former prisoners and confined by the fascist regime founded the European Federalist Movement; Franca Viola, the first woman in Italy to refuse reparatory marriage; Masha Amini, one year after her murder at the hands of Tehran police. Also portraits of Amalia Ercoli Finzi, Don Virginio Colmegna, Franca Rame, Michela Murgia. Many Milanese portrayed: among them, Elda Mazzocchi Scarzella, who established, in Milan, an assistance center for mothers who arrived from German camps with children conceived during their imprisonment; Cesare Castiglioni, founder of the Italian Red Cross; Riccardo Bauer, architect of the rebirth of the Società Umanitaria in Milan; pedagogist Giuseppina Pizzigoni, creator of the renewed school teaching method. And again, Gianni Delle Foglie, pioneer, together with his partner Ivan Dragoni, of same-sex unions in Italy, with a symbolic wedding in Piazza della Scala in 1992 that caused a sensation. And then Alessandra Kustermann, the first woman head physician at the Mangiagalli Clinic in Milan and founder, in 1996, of the first anti-violence center and an emergency room for victims of sexual and domestic violence. Then the historic chaplain of the Beccaria juvenile prison, Don Gino Rigoldi, the founders of Emergency, Gino Strada and Teresa Sarti; Giovanna Cavazzoni, founder of the Vidas association that offers free social-health assistance to the terminally ill; Samantha Cristoforetti, Franca Valeri, Bruno Munari and others.

The mural is also meant to be an ode to freedom of expression through the iconic faces of journalists such as Ilaria Alpi and Miran Hrovatin, Anna Politkovskaya, Walter Tobagi, Giancarlo Siani, Giuseppe Fava, and activists such as Patrick Zaki, Vittorio Arrigoni, and Guido Puletti. Then there are the faces of Ambassador Luca Attanasio, forensic physician Cristina Cattaneo, magistrate Rocco Chinnici, Giorgio Perlasca who saved thousands of Jewish Hungarians from Nazi extermination, and Tina Merlin.

The right to health and the right to education and culture are represented by the faces of physician Carlo Urbani, psychiatrist Franco Basaglia and Nobel Peace Prize winner Henry Dunant, Save the Children founder Eglantyne Jebb, Don Lorenzo Milani and Malala Yousafzai. Up to the right to climate justice with Rachel Carson, Greta Thumberg and Autumn Peltier, Nobel laureate Giorgio Parisi, researchers Federica Bertocchini, Barbara Mazzolai.

Mural of Rights unveiled in Milan: a tribute to 200 people who have defended human and civil rights

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