Extract from the speech to the II° Congress of Popular Culture, Bologna January 11, 1953
"I am not, I have never demanded, nor do I claim to be a representative man of culture. But I’m representative of something. I believe I am representative of those deep layers of the humblest and poorest masses of the people who aspire to culture, who strive to study and seek to attain that degree of knowledge which enables them not only to ensure their own elevation as individuals, to develop their own personality, but to conquer that condition which gives the popular masses a higher sense of their social function, of their national and human dignity… Culture not only frees these masses from the prejudices that derive from ignorance, from the limits that ignorance places on the horizon of men: culture is also a tool to move forward and move forward, progress and raise the whole of national society…
I am, in a certain sense, a fugitive from that world where ignorance, superstition, prejudices, dogmatic openings that derive from this ignorance still prevail to a large extent. I know that world deeply. I have lived there and I know how much effort it takes to try to get out. But in that world, behind that wall, there are still millions of Italians, millions of our brothers. All initiatives, all forms of organization, all attempts must be made to rush to the aid of these our brothers, to help them free themselves from this ignorance, so that they too may try to feel the joys and torments of access to knowledge. We must go among those masses of our brothers, call them, stimulate them to new life, to knowledge, to know, to see high and distant; we have to go as a powerful tractor on a farmland for centuries to fertilize it and draw it to culture, to life, to the good of society…"
I've had it translated by https://documents.reverso.net
