European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

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.

They kept telling me to come back the following month.

But every morning for the following forty days, I turned up at the employment agency before they opened.

I guess I wore them out, because one morning they finally told me to come inside.

They were going to let me work at the Reggiane.

The Reggiane mechanical plant was

the most important weapon factory in the whole region.

Quite frankly, I was a catholic and went to church. For me it was all about this, work and church.