Although in a less emphatic way than in the recent past, even in the analyzes that followed the vote at the end of May, the “cross-shield effect” was used to interpret the election results. In fact, there are those who argue that the symbol of Christian Democracy, the crusader shield, represents a glue for several thousand voters, who are ready to reiterate their consent to the political group that adopts it, regardless of the ‘spatial’ location that that particular party occupies within the political arena. May that beactually confirmed, it is difficult to say, but the fact of finding on the ballot paper, practically in every election, the mark that has characterized the history of a party that has not been active for over twenty years should make us reflect. Leaving aside any dispute over the real or presumed inheritance in the action of some factions of the political class, it is beyond doubt that the crusader shield – as well as, for example, the hammer and sickle for the communist experience, the red carnation for the socialist one and the flame for that missina – and one of the main symbols of political communication of the last century. But its survival of the party that has adopted it as an emblem since its constitution confirms the perspective according to which the crusader shield can be considered a symbol closely linked to a concept,In this sense, it is therefore useful to read the recent work by Girolamo Rossi “The Crusader Shield. A medieval symbol in the political communication of the twentieth century “ (Armando publisher) which consists, as the author explains, in a historical overview of the circumstances and reasons that led to the adoption of the crusader shield as a symbol by the Popular Party in 1919 and of the Christian Democrats in 1943. The reconstruction conducted by Rossi is interesting because – despite the almost total lack of first-hand documents revealing the contents of the debate around the choice of the party emblem – it manages to frame the basic trends that led to adoption of the crusader shield and which are all consumed before 1946. Indeed, the analysisends precisely in the year in which there were consultations for the referendum on the form of the State and the composition of the Constituent Assembly, demonstrating the fact that, writes the author in the introduction, this moment considered by many to be the beginning of the crusader shield as a political symbol, in reality it is the point of arrival of a much longer path, born in medieval times. Therefore, the book not only explores some typical elements of political heraldry, but recalls the beginnings of the public activity of the Popular Party which defines the choice of its symbol almost ten months after its constitution, in the imminence of the political elections, to distinguish with a single coat of arms all the territorial lists. And probably pretty obviousthat one of the main reasons for the debate was the secular approach that the People’s Party intended to adopt and which pushed Don Sturzo, on the one hand, to choose an evocative symbol that clearly identified the party and, on the other, to consider indispensable, on the programmatic level, characteristics that could guarantee him a non-confessional structure. This concern is never completely suppressed and perhaps becomes even more crucial in 1944 when the heirs of the experience of the People’s Party reorganized after the fascist regime and, despite changing the name of their political formation (even with the consent of the same Sturzo), retain the crusader shield symbol as their distinctive emblem. This highlightsonce again – underlines Rossi – the ability of this mark to maintain its charge of meaning over time, so distinct as to make it reappear among different partisan formations and, at the beginning of the republican season, capable of being perceived still appropriate and functional to the new context political and institutional. In conclusion,the genesis and the adoption of the crusader shield as an emblem of a political formation demonstrate the importance of the symbolic impact in the public sphere, all the more so if, as Rossi argues, having chosen the crusader shield means “having adopted a Guelph symbol as synthesis of all the experience and the whole political program of the party ». And so, after the war, if the crusader shield imposes itself as a “metatemporal element”, the word libertas lends itself to being used as a temporal and actualization element of the political proposal. However, over the decades, even the slogan “libertas” has freed itself from contingency and is, so to speak, relativized, probably because the reasons that had supported its adoption in the horizontal band of the crusader shield.
