European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

I was born in Reggio Emilia, in the hamlet of Villa Cella, on the 23rd of September 1923.

My father was a cobbler, just like his father.

My mother was a housewife and at times a day-labourer.

I had an older brother, who was born in 1915.

He was also a cobbler.

My sister Margherita worked as a day-labourer or in the rice-fields.

Another sister was a dress-maker.

My father was an antifascist,

although he wasn’t really organized in the antifascist movement.

Nobody in my family was a fascist,

but they weren’t organized, apart from me. I was in “Azione Cattolica” (Catholic Action).

When I was twelve, Don Luca Pallai, who was Villa Cella’s parish priest and later also joined the Resistance,

kept pressing my parents to send me to study to become a priest.

I believed in God and lived by the church.

I was the only one of our family who went to church.

I finished elementary school

and went to work when I was twelve.

However, when I was just a little older than 14,

my father and the bailiff had a small dispute, so I got fired and was left unemployed.

I went to the employment agency to get a job at the Reggiane mechanical plant.