European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)
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I was born in 1925, in Roncolo di Quattro Castella, in a large family of sharecroppers.
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I was the youngest in the family, coming after six brothers and a sister.
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I was born three months after my father died. My mother was left a widow with eight children.
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We have always been a very close-knit family.
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As a woman, the law didn’t allow my mother to be the head of the family.
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So she couldn’t hold parental authority over the children.
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The court appointed a guardian who had to keep control over a poor sharecropping family like ours.
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He came to our home to count how many forks and spoons we had, the furniture and everything else.
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He was to make sure that this fortune remained untouched for us children until we came of age.
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I started going to school in Roncolo.
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It only offered courses up to the third grade.
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I began to attend school with clogs on my feet, a cloth sack, two notebooks -
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one ruled and one squared – and a spelling-book
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which had been passed on by all my brothers before I got it.
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At school there was a large banner that had been badly painted, that said:
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“The Duce is always right”.
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Everything was made so that people believed in these things:
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that the Duce was not to be opposed and that he was always right in what he said.
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In the morning we were given cod-liver oil: half a spoon to the girls, a full spoon to the boys.
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This wasn’t a problem at all, since the oil was nasty and rancid,
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