Heroic people in our area

1. ISTITUTO COMPRENSIVO DI GATTEO COMENIUS PROJECT Rediscover the real European values Heroic people in our area

2. We don’t want to talk about heroes, but about men and women like us, laborers,workers, professionals, united by one desire, freedom. Proud people who , despite the fear of consequences, rejected what seemed certain. People who fought for a better world through small and large actions. Brave women who fought alonside men , partisans who sacrificed themselves to restore dignity in a terrible moment of Italian history because of fascist dictatorship and Nazi domination. Peolple who tried to save the lives of other men destined to martyrdom or who dedicated their life to commitment in all fields: political, social, and cultural for the common good.

3. EZIO GIORGETTI THE “ SCHINDLER” OF BELLARIA On 9th April Ezio Giorgetti was remembered in Washington together with Oskar Schindler, in a ceremony organized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in honour of peolple who saved Jews from antisemitic persecutions during the second world war. On 27th January “International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust” Ezio Giorgetti was commemorated in Bellaria in the Gelso Park by planting an olive tree and the unveiling of a plaque dedicated to him.

4. Thirty-nine Jews arrived in Bellaria , in his father’s hotel , after the armistice. They’re men, women and children from Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, Poland, escaped on 11th Sept. from a Venetian concentration camp. The thirty-nine Jews that  Ezio Giorgetti  hosted in his hotel in Bellaria  They were sent by an old guest of him, Countess Clara Fieda. She organized the transfer of the group, by lorry, to Romagna.They presented a letter that qualified them as “ foreign refugees”. “I welcomed them, Ezio testified. “ Only a few days later , after trying to rent a fishing boat and getting away by sea, they declared to be Jews and put themselves in my hands”. They ask for hospitality, that means for him and his family risking their lives. He and his wife helped them even asking for support the Marshal of Carabinieri in Bellaria, Osman Carugno, the town hall clerk of San Mauro, Alfredo Giovannetti, the Bishop of Rimini and the Priest .

5. One of the survivors, Leopold Studeny, called Carugno “ our protector at all times”. Giovanetti provided blank identity cards then filled with false names and stamps. Finally they reproduced the emblem of the town of Barletta (south of Italy) which was occupied by the Allies. Those stamps were made by an engraver of Rimini. Ezio Giorgetti and his wife Libia The Priest provided mattresses, blankets, linen and toast prepared by the nuns. After two months the Nazis came to Hotel Giorgetti. The Jews moved to differet places, but the suspicions of Fascists and Nazis rose so , on the advice of the Marshall Carugno, they decided to go up the hills. Osman Carugno and Ezio Giorgetti In September 1944, after a year of the beginning of their odyssey, they were released by the Allies and transferred to Rome where they remained till 2th June 1945.

6. Giorgetti in 1964 and Carugno in 1965 have been appointed as "Righteous among the nations“, an honorific used by the State of Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination by the Nazies Their names appear  on the Wall of Honor in the Garden of Righteous in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Then they were confered with honorary citizenship of Givhat-Samuel . Ezio Giorgetti while lighting the eternal light (Jerusalem, 17° June 1964)

7. The tree and the target of Ezio Giorgetti in the Garden of Righteous in Jerusalem ( June 1964)

8. IRIS VERSARI and The Resistanceofwomen Women and mothers of Resistance She was an Italian partisan decorated with the Gold Medal of Valor.

9. In autumn 1943 Iris’s family hosted a group of partisans. The house was set on fire on January 1944 by nazifascists. Iris managed to escape while her family, parents and two of her three brothers, were arrested. Her father was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison and then interned. He died in a German concentration camp. In her early twenties Iris joined the Partisan band of Silvio Corbari, he fell in love with him and shared their clandestine life and reckless actions. The Partisan group of Corbari. Silvio Corbari and Iris Versari are standing Silvio Corbari

10. At dawn on August 18,1944, the isolated farmhouse where she and Silvio had taken temporarily refuge together with other two partisans, was surrounded by Nazifascist troops, informed by a spy. Iris , injured and unable to move, managed to kill the first soldier but , due to the impossibility of moving and being aware to become an obstacle to the escape of her companions, shot herself . Despite her sacrifice Silvio and the others were captured and killed.

11. Her body together with those of her companions was demonstratively hung to the streetlamp in the main square of Forlì.

12. Over one quarter of the participants in the Italian Resistance during World War II were women. Between 1943 and 1945, some 50,000 Italian women engaged in resistance activitiesas military commanders and combattants,saboteurs and couriers, nurses, organizers, demonstrators, and political leaders. They played a vital role with their participation in the movement to overthrow the Fascist regime, expel the occupying Germans, and rebuild a progressive and democratic Italy. But they also began to articulate their own visions for Italy’s future and for trasforming women’s role in that new society

13. Nineteen Italian Partisan women were decorated with the gold medal for bravery , including fifteen in memory

14. The Vocational School in Cesena named to Iris Versari

15. RIMINI’S THREE MARTYRS Mario Capelli, Luigi Nicolò, Adelio Pagliarani The three young partisans were hanged on August 16, 1944 in the main square of Rimini, after whom it was named in 1946. They are the symbol of the Resistance and the deads in the battle for Liberation in the Province of Rimini. Mario Capelli Luigi Nicolò Adelio Pagliarani

16. The three had been members of Italy’s partisan army, and had been caught after sabotaging an harvesting machinery . The Nazis in 1944 had an extensive distribution program to take advantage of Italian food and labour to the war effort. They were imprisoned and savagely beaten during their detention but they didn’t reveal the names of their companions. On the 16th of August 1944 the three were executed by hanging in Rimini’s main square, then known as Piazza Julius Ceasar (the presumed site of Caesar’s famous alea iacta est – the dice is thrown – speech). 

17. The scaffold of the fork was still standing amid the rubble when a month later, on September 21 Allied troops entered the city and liberated it from the Nazifascists .

18. Rimini Three Marthyrs Square The place where the execution took place is signaled on the ground from the idealized projection of the beam which the nooses were hung, while a bronze plaque is placed on the facing wall of the building

19. ALDO SPALLICCI “the dad of Romagna”

20. Aldo Spallicci, born in Santa Croce in Bertinoro, in 1886 was a doctor, a surgeon, a politician, a soldier and a member of the Italian Parliament. In August 1914 the First World War broke out and Italy chose a neutral position but Spallicci took part in the defence of France and when Italy entered the war he joined the Army as a volunteer. Medical Officer Spallicci in 1916 first world war Because of his opposition to Fascism he was arrested twice and imprisoned. Then he was obliged to move to Milan where he opened a surgery and lived poorly. He was one of the leaders of the republican movement in Romagna and in !945 he enrolled in the Republican Party and became member of Parliament in the first Government after the war.

21. In addition to his job as a doctor he carried on an intense work of dissemination of an administrative autonomy of Romagna. He had always been in favour of regionalization. He took action in defence of natural heritage (wildlife, botanical and landscape) of his homeland even with proposals and parliamentary questions Because of his political battles in favour of the territory he was called “ E ba dla Rumagna” ( The father of Romagna) He devoted himself to an intense literary and historical studies of Romagna The Romagnolo dialect had never had a uniform handwriting due to all its local variations. He was the first writer who developed a unified writing system in Romagnolo dialect. When he wrote his poems ( 1909- 1973) dialect was considered the language of “the poor and ignorant”, unable to express feelings. “This is my choice” Spallicci said. “I decided to sing in my mother dialect because I find myself closer to the soul of things, to the heart of man, to God”

22. The soul of Romagna continues to live in “ La Piè”, the magazine he founded in 1920 to keep alive memories, testimonies, customs of many generations of Romagna people. The name given to the magazine “Pie” known as Piadina, underlines the ability of this flatbread to identify and unify the land of Romagna under one emblem.

23. Poems in Romagnolo dialect

24. Our gratitude goes to all of them . Respecting their memory means to state the meaning of values that never die.