European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

They wouldn’t teach us embroidering: that was something for the children of the wealthy.

We simply learned to darn clothes, to put patches on the knees

or on the bottom of the trousers, and so on.

Family, social and political context

My name is Giacomina Castagnetti.

I always accept when I’m asked to talk about my life.

Not because I think it's very important, or interesting, or even unique, but because I’ve lived

I was born in 1925, in Roncolo di Quattro Castella, in a large family of sharecroppers.

I was the youngest in the family, coming after six brothers and a sister.

I was born three months after my father died. My mother was left a widow with eight children.

We have always been a very close-knit family.

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 -