President Sergio Mattarella on Friday quoted Primo Levi in his speech for Holocaust Remembrance Day Saturday, saying”the history of deportation and concentration camps cannot be separated from the history of fascist tyrannies in Europe: it represents their foundation taken to the extreme, beyond all limits of the moral law that is engraved in human conscience”.

The Italian president said that “with these words, Levi carved out the judgement on the roots and prime responsibility of the most serious extermination, organised and planned against women and men defined as inferior races, the most serious carried out in the history of humanity.” Speaking at the Quirinale presidential palace during an early celebration of the “Day of Remembrance” entitled “The Righteous Among the Nations”, Mattarella went on: “The ideologies of racial superiority, the religion of death and war, predatory nationalism, the supremacy of the State, of the party, over the inviolable right of each person, the cult of the personality and of the leader, were deadly viruses, man-made, that spread rapidly, infecting a large part of Europe, unleashing barbaric instincts and plunging the entire world into a disastrous and ruinous war”.