Di Segni said that, as well as countersigning infamous laws, the king – whose body has just returned to Italy – had been “the accomplice of numerous crimes committed in Fascism’s 20-year reign”.
Last month, on the return of the bodies of Vittorio Emanuele III and his wife to Italy, the Savoy family requested that they be buried in the Pantheon, burial place of other Italian kings, but the government refused.
The bodies of King Vittorio Emanuele III and his wife Queen Elena must be buried in the Pantheon, grandson Emanuele Filiberto di Savoia had said.
“Its not the time for rows, I’m here to pay my respects to my grandparents,” he said in a chapel in the Vicoforte Shrine, where the bodies were moved to. He said “we have a document from the rector of the Pantheon, which authorises (their re-burial)”.
Pro-immigration, leftwing parties have risen up against the proposal to bury the king in the ancient Roman monument where other monarchs are interred as well as the Renaissance painter Raphael.
The UCEI head wrote to Culture Minister Dario Franceschini asking that the name of the king who signed Mussolini’s racial laws in 1938, be removed from public institutions all over the country.
Franceschini has since ruled out the bodies of king Vittorio Emanuele III and his wife Elena being re-interred in the Pantheon. “The burial at Vicoforte (in Piedmont) is the definitive closure of the affair,” he said. “History and memory prevents taking into consideration the hypothesis of a burial in the Pantheon”.
On January 18, the Union will be sponsoring a play at Rome’s Parco della Musica called The Trial to focus the attention on Vittorio Emanuele’s “misdeeds and shortcomings”.
It will also give Italians the opportunity to reflect on “their individual and collective responsibilities for that infamy,” Di Segni said.
According to the UCEI chief , the Union “has learned with dismay” that countless schools and libraries were still “dedicated by the Italians to the king who abandoned them to their fate”.
Vittorio Emanuele fled from Italy after agreeing an armistice with the Allies, without giving instructions on who soldiers and civilians should side with.
These institutions “tarnished” by the King, include the National Library in Naples, the third most important Italian library.
Di Segni expressed her “strong” concern over “the growing legitimisation of Fascism in the media and entertainment worlds” after the conservative Rome newspaper Il tempo recently devoting its front page to ‘Mussolini, Man of the Year’.