European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

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 -

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,