Awakening
The true monument to the 268 innocent victims of the Stava tragedy
is the silent, ongoing, tenacious commitment taken up and carried forward for all these years by the survivors.
The objective is to keep the memory of their loved ones alive,
to banish despair and to bring about a true awakening.
Not only was it a tragedy,
but also a call to establish new relations among people.
Life must go on, but not by removing these events from memory.
Doing so would re-create, inadvertently but quite tangibly,
the very conditions that led to that avalanche of mud.
Franco De Battaglia
Editor – Alto Adige Daily
in his introduction to “Stava perché”
May 1995