European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

since there were people who were informers and would go see if they found us there.

You could sign up even if you weren’t 18 yet.

From that moment they taught us songs like “Bandiera Rossa” and other things, other songs

that people used to sing even after the war.

Clandestine communist party

The older comrades saw that I was interested in this situation, eager to learn and know what to do,

and started handing me some books.

I believe the one we remembered the most was Maxim Gorkij’s “The mother”.

I was 15or 16 years old when they started talking to us openly about the Communist Party,

which was the opposite of fascism,

and about having to get involved in the clandestine struggle, organizing people against this dictatorship,

since it really was a dictatorship then.

By the time I left San Bartolomeo I was already part of the clandestine Communist Party.

I had a cousin who had been incarcerated, his name was Nello Strozzi.

And then also my boyfriend’s brother.

Me and my boyfriend had started dating when I was eighteen,

he was of the Viani family, his name was Alfeo.

Introduction, childhood during fascism

My name is Lidia Valeriani.

I was born on the 23rd of January 1923