European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

As a woman, the law didn’t allow my mother to be the head of the family.

So she couldn’t hold parental authority over the children.

The court appointed a guardian who had to keep control over a poor sharecropping family like ours.

He came to our home to count how many forks and spoons we had, the furniture and everything else.

He was to make sure that this fortune remained untouched for us children until we came of age.

I started going to school in Roncolo.

It only offered courses up to the third grade.

I began to attend school with clogs on my feet, a cloth sack, two notebooks -

one ruled and one squared – and a spelling-book

which had been passed on by all my brothers before I got it.

At school there was a large banner that had been badly painted, that said:

“The Duce is always right”.

Everything was made so that people believed in these things:

that the Duce was not to be opposed and that he was always right in what he said.

In the morning we were given cod-liver oil: half a spoon to the girls, a full spoon to the boys.

This wasn’t a problem at all, since the oil was nasty and rancid,

but it was already a sign of the discrimination existing towards women.

We didn’t take much math, but we spent a lot of time doing gymnastics, as we had to forge our physique.

Since we didn’t have a gym, every day we spent two hours in the school courtyard doing physical education,

even in the winter when it turned cold.