Not only Don Milani. After yesterday’s quotation from the Barbiana priest, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, also mentions the ‘Leopard’ in a passage of her introductory speech at the Porto Social Summit. “The world is changing and we too must change. As the famous Tomasi di Lampedusa said in The Leopard: everything must change so that everything remains as it was before”, underlined von der Leyen. Speaking yesterday at the ‘State of the Union’ conference organized by the European University Institute in Fiesole, the president of the European Commission quoted Don Lorenzo Milani’s famous motto, ‘I care’, hoping that “it is also that of Europe”. “A few kilometers from Florence – he declared – there is a village called Barbiana, and on a hill a country school where in the 1960s, a young teacher, Don Lorenzo Milani, wrote two simple words, in English, on a wall in that school: ‘I care’ “. “‘I care’ means I take responsibility, and this year millions of Europeans have said ‘I care’ with their actions, volunteered, helped neighbors, or simply wore masks to protect the people around them. . In this pandemic year and beyond this, Europe’s motto must also be: I care, we care. This is the most important lesson that I hope we can draw from this crisis “.
