Aldo Cazzullo (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
OROn April 25, women are forgotten. Not only that: the (scarce) narration on the role of women in the Italian Resistance spoke above all of strongly ideologized figures framed in party ranks. The partisans of liberal culture were mostly obscured.
Rossella Pacehistorian and general secretary of the Giacomo Matteotti Foundation, he has already dispelled many clichés on the subject in his previous volumessnatching out of the darkness figures of women who played crucial functions in organizing the struggle against Germans and fascists.
Now he has just released a new book dedicated to one of the most interesting personalities among those she rediscovered: the Piedmontese Maria Giulia Cardini, of Orta San Giuliowhich emerges surprisingly as a protagonist.
Title: Liberals have no songs. Maria Giulia Cardini, story of a partisan (Rubbettino).
Maria Giulia, called Cyclone for her rebellious character, enlisted in the Resistance constituting a liaison group between the Piedmontese armed formations, with other students and teachers of the Polytechnic of Turin, to then collaborate with the Franchi Organization of Edgardo Sogno, participate in the struggle in Val d’Ossola in the Beltrami and Di Dio Divisions, and then to come in in the Military Information Service Alta Italia, a coordination network between all the partisan gangs, becoming the main Italian referent of the Chrysler Missionorganized by the Americans precisely to create a connection between the partisans and the allied troops.
“Liberals don’t have songs. Maria Giulia Cardini, story of a partisan ”by Rossella Pace (Rubbettino).
A role of great risk, faced by Ciclone with an independent spirit and without ideological rhetoric. As she recalled in an autobiographical reflection, a Communist partisan marveled at her because the liberals did not have “a song”.
But Cardini was aware that she was struggling to build an Italy “without songs”, without myths for the masses. Or, to quote Beppe Fenoglio, to make the country “a rather small thing, but completely serious”.
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