ROME, May 23 (Xinhua) -- In the main hall of a secondary school in Rome on Wednesday, over 250 pupils sat with their teachers, as various speakers followed one another on the stage.
They came from seven different schools of the capital, and this was no ordinary class for them.
On this date, every year, Italy marks the anniversary of the murder of major anti-mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone, slain by the mob in Sicily's capital Palermo in 1992.
From the southeast suburbs of Rome, where the high school lies, Palermo and its decades-long struggle against "Cosa Nostra" (as the Sicilian mafia is called) might seem very far.
It was not so, and the activists of Anti-Mafia Popular Academy (AP) and daSud (From South) associations, who organized the commemorative event here, were proof of that.
Most of them grew up in southern regions where Italy's three major mafias -- Cosa Nostra, Naples-based Camorra, and 'Ndrangheta in the Calabria region -- have their strongholds.
Many remembered judge Falcone's killing clearly, and that event marked their life, and motivated their civic action.
"I was 15, and getting out of a cinema, when my father came and told me Falcone had been murdered with a bomb attack," Danilo Chirico, daSud president, told Xinhua.
That moment changed his "perception of the world", he said. Years later, it would bring him to put his efforts into fighting mafia at social and cultural level, first in his hometown in Calabria, and then in Rome where he now lives.
"For my generation, Falcone's death was a watershed, and the unprecedented reaction of the people in Sicily at that time was a lesson: we learnt we could refuse things as they were," Chirico stressed.
Hundreds of grass-roots groups against mafia have been created across Italy, in the 26 years passed since Falcone's killing.
Yet, the work carried out by Anti-Mafia Popular Academy and daSud in Rome -- since they started their activities here in 2009 -- took on a special meaning.
They were among the first to raise an alarm on the presence of organized crime in the Italian capital, at a time when nobody really wanted to hear their warning.
Yet, they kept working with schools, organized public debates, always finding new tools -- such as multimedia projects, graphic novels, and radio broadcasts -- to capture the attention of younger generations and raise their awareness.
"What students here appreciate more is the moment of brain-storming," Calabrian Pasquale Grosso, managing an anti-mafia web radio project promoted by daSud, told Xinhua.
"They are now training for live broadcast, which would start in September; yet, the radio most of all gives them a space where they can discuss anti-mafia issues previously addressed in classroom."
The activists with Anti-Mafia Popular Academy and daSud were used to send people a simple message: where the mafia rules, citizens' rights are denied.
And the more a territory is impoverished, the higher is the risk, because mafia businesses -- although criminal -- can provide jobs, money, and a sort of "welfare" to people in need.
Not by chance, therefore, the initiative held at the secondary school "IIS Enzo Ferrari" was focused on citizens' rights and the Italian constitution.
Students were called on the stage to have their say, and show their works on the subject. They listened to the speakers -- two councillors, one journalist, and a female partisan who fought against the Fascist regime, among others -- explaining that the first step to grow resistant to criminal pressure was to speak out, because "silence is mafia".
"We wanted to concentrate on the fundamental rights enshrined in our Constitution, seventy years after it entered into force," the two organizing groups said in a statement.
They meant it as a symbolic action, as a way for students and citizens "to repossess an area that is at great risk of criminal and mafia presence."
