European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

Paterlini came to us saying “we must find something to blow up the bridge”, so that the trucks couldn’t get through.

We went there with Carretti and met with a guy working for Edison, the local electric company:

they had a cave so they also had TNT, mines, gunpowder…

We prepared the holes and then blew up a large arch of a very big bridge in Cinque Cerri.

Then we left for the mountains. From that day I was in battle.

We went to the headquarters in Lama Golese, on the Cusna mountain.

Pasquale Marconi was there, a teacher from Castelnovo Monti, who was a Christian Democrat,  a catholic anyway.

Then there were Eros, Miro, a Jewish doctor who was from Jugoslavia.

We spent a few days there.

It was a sort of recruitment, but we didn’t have enough weapons;

we were waiting for Allied air drops that didn’t take place,

so they sent four of us back to Ligonchio.

We went to Ligonchio and there really was a crowd of partisans there.

Unfortunately, not all of them were armed.

More partisans came, who wanted to fight, to enrol.

More than weapons dropped from the sky or taken during attacks to the German garrisons.

I was luckier than others, since I was given an English machine gun, a Sten gun, which was quite short.

You could disassemble it in three pieces and hide it, and put it together quickly.

And I also had a 9 mm Beretta and four hand grenades.

I stayed there with the First Battalion