In Palermo, students read the thousand names of mafia victims.

"Innocent victims are not numbers, they are names, stories, broken lives". This is just one of the many colorful slogans on the fence of the Teatro Massimo, during the thirty-first national day dedicated to the victims of the mafia.

Every year since 1995, it has been a fixed appointment, organized by the Network for Anti-Mafia Culture in Schools and Libera.

From the theater's staircase, dozens of children and young people from the 31 institutions that participated read almost a thousand names, from the well-known Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino, Giorgio Boris Giuliano, Mario Francese, Pippo Fava, Peppino Impastato, to the lesser-known, law enforcement officers, relatives of mobsters, or uncomfortable witnesses.

Schools play a fundamental role in countering mafia culture and in building social antibodies against the mafias. The mafias – emphasizes Giusto Catania, head of the Saladino school in the Cep neighborhood of Palermo, coordinator of the Network - feed on ignorance, inequality, and loneliness. Schools, on the other hand, can be the center of an educating community, where healthy relationships are cultivated, a sense of belonging is promoted, and concrete alternatives to mafia models are built.

"The mafia kills, silence does too. We choose not to be silent", another of the symbolic phrases of the day that saw ceremonies throughout Italy, but which has greater significance in Palermo for obvious – and tragic – reasons.

The square of the Massimo is crowded, hundreds of students, parents, teachers but not only: tourists and curious onlookers, attracted also by the sunny day, stopped even just for a few minutes to read the many signs from the schools.

The memory of the innocent victims of the mafias is not a rhetorical exercise nor a simple commemoration – concludes Carmelo Pollichino, provincial coordinator of Libera Palermo - it is a deeply political and civil act, which calls us every day to a concrete responsibility: to transform memory into commitment, names into action, pain into change.