European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

The strikes against the war had started, and we got ready for the strike of the 1st of March.

Work in the family

Before he married my mother, my father was

with a family of peasants who were working for my mother’s family, who were called “servants” at the time.

With other co-workers from Montecavolo they set up a sort of business;

they had the machinery for threshing and ploughing the land, so 4 or 5 of them got together and started this activity.

After that he always did that job, he was always a thresher:

they went out to plough, to thresh, these type of things.

When I was 10 I started to work as a seamstress, or I should say to learn how to be a seamstress.

I helped my mother out a little, because we also had about 20.000 square meters of land,

we had a cow or two for milk, in order to go to the dairy to get some cheese, butter, etc.

In the winter, since you couldn’t do much in the fields,

my father would help us more with these things, while in the summer he was always working.

Making a red flag

We went to Guardazone, which is a mountain just near San Polo.

We had lunch there, some sandwiches.

As it was close to the first of May we decided

to take a piece of paper and made a flag with the lipsticks we had.

Then we found a stick, a piece of wood, and we secured this flag to it

and there we went, climbed on a pine tree and tied it there…