I got involved with the Resistance because of the things that happened after so many years of war. To be precise it was 8th September 1943 when the armistice was announced; we were all at the house in Fiorano, it was 8th September and there was a big town fete there in the afternoon, and people put their radios on the windowsills and everyone was happy and we all went out dancing.

[...] well, the Resistance was seen…, after the war as something fantastic. In the early years, for quite a few years, the Resistance was a party.

[...] what I want to remember today as I did before is what the mountain folk and the kind Tuscans were like where we were based. They took us in as guests, and they helped us both with provisions and also with finding places to sleep and so on. They also showed us where the best paths were to run away from the Germans when they came past.

[...] then here at the old schools there was a captain from San Marco who was collaborating with the Germans and so…, he was a nasty piece of work was this captain: when his sister and his mother went to visit him, he’d make them spend the night in prison. An excise officer from Maranello and a Partisan wanted to knock him off. One of them hid in a ditch, the other one pretended to be a farmer pruning a grapevine up a ladder.

[...] then afterwards there was the 25th July and so everyone was happy because the Duce had been ousted and us little girls, because I was a girl at the time, we also took part because the regime was a bit too much for us to take too.

The first attack that we carried out, or at least that I carried out, with the other Partisans that were around at the time was at Muraglione di Levizzano up there near Roteglia after Castellarano. At Muraglione there were the Germans coming down with their trucks, where Fontana died, poor old Giorgio.

Before going up to the mountains, I was a soldier, in Yugoslavia, in Gorizia, in Triest, in Croatia. I came home for a number of reasons after 8th September, as is known. In my family, my uncles were anti-fascists, and they were in charge of a group of anti-fascists.

[…]The idea that motivated us at that time was a purely patriotic one; that is, the sense of national humiliation which others felt in the opposite way, which led them to make the opposite choice. But we felt this when we saw the Italian Army fall apart, when we saw the occupation of the German Army. It made it necessary for us to take up a position of rebellion against this occupation […].

At the time I was still very young, I was working in the dairy at Monte Gibbio. The fascists, the Germans used to come past every day to get cheese and butter, while in the evening the partisans would come along.

The Italian Resistance has never been granted a sincere institutional legitimacy, nor has it been fully recognised as one of the founding ‘legends’ of the Italian republic. Its memory has and still does fuel numerous identity crises, attempts to regain a sense of history, as well as future-building projects. Some of the reasons behind this ‘restless memory’ can be traced back to the Resistance itself: a movement founded after the fall of the fascist regime and only in one part of the country, and thus unable to fully make its mark on a nation which had spent 20 years under a dictatorship.