The European Union is like a bridge.

A bridge that starts from a past of terrifying and fratricidal wars that have plagued our continent and whose last direct witnesses are passing away.

No film, no documentary, no book can never have the same effect as the direct experience of those who have really experienced such tragic and shocking experiences, with the not distant risk that similar brutality is repeated in the future.

In the same way, and with due proportions, young people of the Erasmus generation today take for granted the fact that they can freely cross the European countries without borders, without controls at the customs and using the same currency.

On the other hand, I remember well of a family holiday by car with my parents at the end of the 70s, when we moved from Italy to France, then to Germany and Austria, and then returned home.

In fifteen days, therefore, we passed four customs checks and changed three different currencies: in the end we no longer understood how much it really costed a lunch or an item for sale!

The loss of memory of the past prevents us from perceiving the value of what we have in the present: peace, freedom to travel, living, studying and working wherever we want in Europe, having the same coin, and much more.

The European Union, as I said, is like a bridge that with so much effort and precious social achievements has brought us from a past that we are forgetting towards a future that we still can not see.

We can not see it because the bridge was half built and had to undergo the full wave of the biggest global economic crisis after the great depression and the full waves of terrorism and of immigration without control.

The bridge today certainly needs urgent restructuring and must be completed so that it can lead us towards a better future.

But destroying it – as some would want – would mean throwing away over 60 years of enormous efforts and agreements that previously seemed impossible and the conquest of those great economic, political and social goals that today seem taken for granted to all of us.

If we let the bridge be pulled down or further weakened, these goals will no longer be granted.