Statue stays, says the mayor of Milan

MILAN — The colonial past of a highly revered Italian journalist has become a flash point in Italy’s Black Lives Matters protests, as detractors defaced a statue in his honor and seek its removal from a city park.

Milan Mayor Giuseppe Sala on Sunday resisted calls to remove the statue of the late Indro Montanelli, who had acknowledged having had a 12-year-old Eritrean bride during Italy’s colonial occupation in the 1930s.

Sala said in a Facebook video that he was perplexed by “the lightness” with which Montanelli had confessed to having bought the child bride from her father, in a widely circulated video of a 1969 talk show appearance.

But he said “lives should be judged in their totality.”

“Montanelli was more than that. He was a great journalist, a journalist who fought for the liberty of the state, an independent journalist. Maybe for these reasons he was shot in the legs,” Sala said, referring to the 1977 attack on Montanelli by two members of the Red Brigades terror organization near the park that now bears his name. “For these reasons, I think the statue should remain.”

Black Lives Matters protests have put a renewed focus on Italy’s colonial past.

Activists also are pushing for automatic citizenship for foreigners born in Italy to parents with permanent residency and to do away with laws that limit immigration.

Over the weekend, protesters covered the statue with red paint and scrawled “racist” and “rapist” on the base.

A group calling itself the Milan Student Network claimed responsibility in a video showing two people wearing hoods and gloves defacing the statue.

Montanelli, who died in 2001 at age 92, was one of Italy’s most revered journalists, honored by the Vienna-based International Press Institute in 2000 as among the 50 World Press Freedom Heroes.

A noted foreign and war correspondent, he chronicled contemporary Italy from its colonial era through fascism, Italy’s postwar reconstruction and the anti-corruption scandals that overturned Italy’s political class in the 1990s.