Italian women honored for risking their lives with the WWII partisan Resistance
To celebrate Liberation Day, the National Association of Italian Partisans commissioned portraits of six living women of the Resistance
BOLOGNA, Italy — Flora Monti was just 14 years old when, in July 1944, she joined Bologna’s partisan Resistance movement as its youngest member. Her job was to shuttle messages between battalions, hiding tiny pieces of paper folded up and tucked into her thick braid.
At times she was stopped and searched, her clothes turned inside out, but the Germans never found the messages woven into her hair.
“I never knew what was written on those papers,” she explained. “If they tortured me, if they took me…”
Her voice trailed off, the implication clear: if she didn’t know, she couldn’t give anything away. That happened to a friend of hers, Giovanna, who was arrested and executed for delivering messages.
“So many young people died” in the Resistance, Monti said. Still, she and her friends participated enthusiastically.
Monti, 86, was one of six living women of the Resistance who were honored this week with portraits commissioned by the National Association of Italian Partisans (ANPI) to commemorate Liberation Day on April 25. That’s the day Italy was liberated from the Germans, who invaded in 1943 after Prime Minister Benito Mussolini was deposed.
In response to the German occupation, partisan Resistance movements quickly broke out across the northern part of the country. At its peak, the Resistance boasted an estimated 200,000 participants nationwide — about 35,000 of whom were women.
One of the largest Resistance groups formed in the north-central city of Bologna, where 12,200 men and 2,200 women joined the effort. The city has one of the largest Liberation Day celebrations in the country, featuring four days of ceremonies, processions and street parties.
On Tuesday, the city unveiled the ANPI-commissioned portraits by artist Antonella Cinelli featuring Monti and 11 other local Partisans: six men and six women. The portraits were paired with the first 12 articles of the Italian Constitution, and were accompanied by biographical information and details about the subjects’ best and worst memories during the war. The memories ranged from sad to harrowing to bittersweet.
Isora Tartari, 93, remembered escaping a group of Nazi soldiers the night before the Liberation. Running through dark fields, she knew that if caught she would be gang-raped; it had just happened to her cousin.
Tartari didn’t have a “best” memory of the war she could share, but others recounted the joy of bringing good news to family members of the partisan fighters. Germana Masi, 94, said her best memory was learning after the war that the partisans her family had helped were still alive; one of them later became her husband.
Another woman, Virginia Manaresi, 93, joined the Resistance when she was 19 but was caught and imprisoned at a camp in Bolzano. She remembered feeling guilty because she was able to convince someone to sneak her a hard-boiled egg — but then worried she had taken it from someone who needed it more.
The women were all teenagers when they joined the Resistance. At the portraits’ unveiling, Monti urged today’s young people not to become complacent.
“You’re still young,” she told reporters. “Make sure there isn’t another dictatorship. We brought you to this point; now it’s up to you young people.”
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