"For having carried out an extraordinary action in the serious emergency of migratory flows, an action that has become at the same time a universal example and a beacon of a broader vision of Europe, a sign of a profoundly human civilization and firm in the double action of rescue and protection of integrity of the rights of all men".
With this motivation, the Navy received the Galileo 2000 Prize last night at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence.
"Concrete actions, carried out in simple daily life at sea", as underlined the chief of staff of the Navy, team admiral Valter Girardelli, at the time of the awarding of the award.
Among the other winners of the XNUMXth edition of the prize - in all seven as the works of Mercy, realized, precisely, at the end of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy - the Greek government, the community of Sant'Egidio, the Red Cross of Kos, the Muslim in France, the Dortmund rabbi Avichai Apel and the doctor from Lampedusa Pietro Bartolo, author of the book Tears of salt, a collection of testimonies of dramatic situations resulting from migratory waves since 1991, which underlined how fundamental the collaboration with the Navy and beyond was.
"I, the sailors, immediately renamed them the angels of the sea - said the doctor from Lampedusa - thanks to their contribution, their courage, their sense of duty but above all their humanity, many have managed to reach the ground alive".
The Galileo 2000 Prize, awarded by a scientific committee chaired by its founder, the lawyer Alfonso De Virgilis, and composed among others by the actress Irene Papas, the pianist Irina Strozzi descendant of the Mona Lisa, boasts in its twenty-year palmares leading figures of the economic, political, cultural and scientific world also awarded the Nobel Prize
