Bianca Guidetti Serra The advocate of the weak

The Turin childhood of Bianca Guidetti Serra

Born in 1919, mother seamstress, father lawyer. No noble echo in the double surname: following a Piedmontese custom, great-grandfather Guidetti, who had received an inheritance from a childless friend, a certain Serra, had added the surname to his. She and her sister Carla have a happy childhood until 1938, when the parent dies of a heart attack. Bianca, who attended the classic, enrolled in the maturity as a privatist and on that occasion he meets Alberto Salmoni, a charming boy with whom he immediately sets up an understanding, which will become love. He, of Jewish origin, introduces her to her friends: Luciana Nissim, Franco Momigliano, Vanda Maestro. And Primo Levi, who will be Alberto’s fellow student at the Faculty of Chemistry. From that period, there are still some beautiful photos depicting the company in the mountains. Bianca is a sportswoman: she loves trekking, swimming, fencing.

The impact of fascism on political consciousness

These are the years of fascism and the racial laws of 1938 represent the first impact with politics. “I was struck by the indifference of the people in the face of such a profound injustice,” he says in autobiography, written with Santina Mobiglia (Einaudi, 2009). In the same year a royal decree prohibits public and private employers from hiring more than 10 percent of women. For Bianca, enrolled in Law, it is a trauma. As the war approaches, she finds a job as a social worker for the Industrial Union and walks through the doors of the factory.

“It meant a broadening of my vision of society, the impact with the condition of the workers.” The degree arrives in July 1943, then with the armistice also Bianca, who in the meantime has approached the communists, goes to the mountains and with the nom de guerre of Nerina shuttles as a partisan relay between Turin and the Val di Susa, where Alberto joined a group of which he is also part Paolo Gobetti. In that period a lasting friendship was born with Ada Gobetti, Piero’s widow and the boy’s mother: who later became deputy mayor of Turin officiates the civil wedding between Bianca and Alberto in May 1945. Unlike Salmoni, who escapes deportation, Primo, Vanda and Luciana are stopped by the Germans. It is to Bianca that Primo writes from Auschwitz, to let his mother know that he is still alive. He and Luciana will go back, Vanda will not.

She did not feel like a passionate

In 1947 Bianca passed the examination as a solicitor and began practicing with a Turin lawyer. “I immediately understood that I had to go on my own: with a male lawyer I would always be the “young lady of the firm”” remember. In 1951 his living room became his office. At the first criminal trial, in Pinerolo, Bianca defends three workers who had made a picket during a strike and were accused of private violence. As soon as she tries to speak, the Public Prosecutor blocks her to ask for her professional card. It was in that period that some colleagues jokingly attributed the nickname “Bianca la rossa”, which the publisher Einaudi will choose as the title for her autobiography.

«My mother never liked it, she never felt like a passionate person» says her son Fabrizio Salmoni. But his commitment to workers conditions the judgment of others. In 1958 he defended the union in the case against the Textile Finance Group for equal pay for men and women. He also obtains that the bachelorette clause, imposed in the contracts of female workers, is declared illegitimate. These are tiring but exciting years. Bianca travels to Spain and Latin America dealing with human rights. Meanwhile, in 1951 she and Alberto adopt a baby boy of a few months, Fabrizio. “My mother was a Communist and they didn’t want to entrust me to her,” he says. «Ada Gobetti unlocked the situation. Since her studio was joined to the house, she was always very present and affectionate with me ». The events in Budapest, in 1956, marked his exit from the PCI. Communism, he says, “for me was equality between people and the universality of rights.” But the reality is quite different and for Bianca it is a profound disappointment. In the early 1960s, participates in the foundation ofNational Association of adoptive and foster families (Anfaa), who fights for the rights of abandoned minors in orphanages. The 1967 law lowers the age of adoptive parents from 50 to 35 and allows adoption for the first time even in the presence of natural children. In parallel, it works against the horrors of disabled children in institutions.

The trial of the Cavallero Band

Bianca is in the meantime involved in a process of great sensation, that of Cavallero band, coming from the working class and aspiring revolutionaries, who committed 23 robberies with five deaths. Guidetti Serra accepts the position of defender of one of the accused, Adriano Rovoletto. With 1968, with the student occupations of the universities and the workers’ struggles, the issues that will then lead to new laws come to the fore, such as the reform of family law (in 1975) and of military life (conscientious objection) . Meanwhile Bianca as a criminal lawyer he defends Adriano Sofri, Marco Pannella and Pio Baldelli, the director of Lotta Continua who had published articles in defense of Giuseppe Pinelli.

Protagonist of the Eternit case

Meanwhile, marriage is in crisis. “She and my father Alberto loved each other so much and separated peacefully” says Fabrizio. «Alberto after the Resistance had left his political commitment, while Bianca did not. Our home was a seaport: resistant people came from all over the world … Maybe he aspired to a more peaceful life“. At the end of the sixties, he met the journalist Pier Luigi Gandini. “He He was his partner until he passed away in the nineties.” Participation in major trials will mark Guidetti Serra’s entire professional range: first the proceedings against the Red Brigades, then that relating to the filing that Fiat had exercised on 350 thousand employees for twenty years, collecting details on their political ideas and private life . In defense of the workers, Bianca convinces the union to take a civil action. Nobody pays – amnesty and statute of limitations save the defendants – but the process remains exemplary. Alongside the union he was also in the Eternit trialthe factory of the death of Casale Monferrato, where still today people continue to die from mesothelioma. Guidetti Serra from deputy becomes the first signatory of the bill to ban asbestos, approved in 1992, after his resignation from Parliament. Her ethical vision remained solid until the end, when the evils of her age forced her to give up the profession.

An archive of stories and memories

From the mass of procedural documents, the lawyer drew inspiration for her books. One recently re-released

Bianca Guidetti Serra used to keep correspondence, documents, procedural documents relating to her business. Since 2014, his professional archive has been kept at the Piero Gobetti Center, which he helped found. He drew from the collected material to write books, articles, contributions. The publishing house E / 0 published at the beginning of 2022 Stories of justice, injustice and jail, which Bianca wrote in 1994 and which contains a selection of memories from the period from 1944 to 1992. It starts with the story of Emanuele Artom, a Jewish partisan killed by the Italian SS, followed by the story of the Cavallero Band, with whose members he remained in occasional contact even after their sentence, documenting their thoughts and reactions to prison. The essay is also interesting Women, political violence, weapons: a judicial experience that analyzes female participation in armed gangs. Finally, her no of her on life imprisonment, which she has always opposed as an inhuman punishment.

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