Monumento ai caduti delle Guerre mondiali

The Torpignattara Cannon turns one hundred years old.
A century of history in the middle of a small square that, for many, is just a passageway. But for those who grew up near it, this cannon is so much more.

I've seen it for fifty years. I spent the first fifteen right around it. As a child, I played on it, like so many others. It was our "castle," our spaceship, our refuge on summer afternoons. We climbed it, ran around it, and we did it without knowing what it truly represented.

Then you grow up. Your eyes change, your heart changes.
Today I look at it and understand it. That cannon is a monument to the fallen of the First World War, a true piece of history, placed there not to embellish a square, but to remind us that someone fought—and gave his life—for our freedom.
It is thanks to those sacrifices that today we can walk freely, that Italian flags fly on public buildings, that we can speak, think, and disagree.

And yet, it hurts to see the state it's in today.
Not so much the monument itself—which deserves more care—but what surrounds it. Where once we children played, today people camp. They drink, they litter, they deal. Sometimes it seems that place is desecrated every day, as if the memory of those men had become invisible.
There's no longer any respect, no longer any silence, no one to explain to the children who those fallen were, where that cannon came from, why it's there.

Maybe we should start over from this.
To tell the story, to restore meaning where now there's only abandonment. It doesn't take much: it would be enough for everyone passing by to stop for a moment, look at it with different eyes, and perhaps explain to a child, like me, that it's not just a piece of rusty iron. It's a story, a life, many lives. It's a piece of us.