European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

I’m not saying this for myself: as soon as the war was over that was it, both for me and my sister.

Even my husband was a partisan, but he joined the Resistance in his village.

He was with Casoli, the one from Berzana.

When the war was over he went back home too,

actually he was already there, doing whatever they could as partisans, running away when they had to.

In order to carry important documents, however, you really needed people who were willing to run.

We didn’t even have bicycles,

so we would just walk along the road every time we had to bring people to the mountains, depending on where we picked them up.

The Day of Liberation in Reggio Emilia

On the 25th of April we came down from Baiso and stopped to eat at Grandi’s house.

Grandi, a lawyer, was our great accomplice in Viano.

He had prepared a wonderful lunch for our whole “Gufo Nero” unit and also for the English who were with us.

We were a very large group of people.

Before we finished eating they asked me to go find out if we could move forward.

You could still hear many shots, the Germans and the fascists were still around armed and were trying to resist.

We were quite worried. We had lunch there, then I left.

That’s why I’m not in the picture the boys took when they arrived in Scandiano.

I was walking ahead in order to see if there were any dangers and eventually go back to inform the others.

But there were no problems at all, so I went on and they did the same, all the way down.

When we made it to Reggio it was early evening.