(ANSA) - Rome, February 14 - President Sergio Mattarella
replied to a Slovenian complaint about Italian officials'
statements on Foibe Remembrance Day by saying he was concerned
about verbal excesses in the EU, the office of Slovenian
President Borut Pahor said Thursday.
"I share Your concerns regarding the climate that is
sometimes registered in Europe today", Mattarella wrote in his
letter to Pahor.
"I find, in fact, a raising of tones myself also, a lower
consideration for the opinions of others, verbal excesses that
should not have a place in our common European home".
On the remembrance day for the thousands of Italian victims
of Tito's partisans, Deputy Premier and Interior Minister Matteo
Salvini said the children who died in the Foibe mountain pits
and the children of Auschwitz "are the same".
Deputy Forza Italia President Antonio Tajani, the European
Parliament President, meanwhile ended a speech by saying "long
live Italian Istria and Dalmatia".
These statements spurred protests from Slovenia and Croatia.
The Foibe is the name given to the mass murder of Italian
people in Venezia Giulia, Istria and Dalmatia, mostly by
Yugoslav Partisans, during and after the Second World War.
Mattarella says concerned by EU verbal excesses
After Slovenia protested Salvini's Auschwitz comparison