European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

Women were sensational. I found myself with a pile of cases full of stuff.

Then Valenti, a guy from Arceto, came over with his cart. He was the father of the one they called “Valenti the bandit”.

He wanted to make amends for his son. He came to my house at dawn and we loaded everything.

Women had prepared things that would last. We attached many Christmas cards to them.

Each woman wanted to send out a short note to the partisans.

We wanted to show them that we were close,

so that they wouldn’t suffer so much from being away from their families.

We felt that women were silently behind us in our struggle for peace,

waiting for the war to be over, so it wasn’t hard.

We shared the tasks house by house.

It was decided we would pass the word house by house and in small groups.

We had to reach the Reggio Emilia prefecture, in corso Garibaldi,

all together at 2 pm, but each had to move alone.

This meant you had to be really committed.

It wasn’t an everyday thing for a mother living 10 km away to take her bicycle and go in front of the prefecture.

But people were really starving and tired of the war, and there had been too many people dying.

So in front of the prefecture were 2000.

2000 women.

We arrived at the prefecture and the majority of us entered the courtyard.

We had appointed three women to go talk with the podestà.