Dino Grassi will be remembered on Friday 24 May at 5pm in Sarzana, one year after his death, on the initiative of the Municipality of Sarzana and the Mediterranean Cultural Association. Speakers will include Cristina Ponzanelli, mayor of Sarzana, Egidio Banti, local history scholar, Andrea Ranieri, essayist, and Giorgio Pagano. At 5 pm, the photographic exhibition “Men and ships” will be inaugurated in the atrium of Palazzo Civico; at 5.30 pm, Grassi’s book “Io sono unlavoro. Memoir of a shipwright who became a trade unionist”, curated – like the exhibition – by Giorgio Pagano.
Dino Grassi (1926-2023) was a worker at the Muggiano shipyard in La Spezia, secretary of the Internal Commission for over ten years. He was then regional councilor of the PCI from 1970 to 1980. In that phase he continued to be a worker. Born in Massa, he moved first to Pozzuolo, then to San Terenzo. After his marriage he always lived in Sarzana, where he was a municipal councilor and councilor from 1980 to 1985.
“Grassi’s political history takes shape within his experience as a worker – states Andrea Ranieri –, his communism was born precisely together with his consciousness as a producer, of an expert worker who together with many others, different from him but equal because engaged in a common project, contribute to making the world better and richer. For him, being a good communist meant first of all being a good worker. And even when he is elected by the PCI to the regional council he will not stop being a worker, because there were the roots of his knowledge and of the contribution that he could give as a politician and administrator to the lives of others”.
Egidio Banti met Dino Grassi as a journalist, when he was a regional councilor: “The personal dignity he showed and the sense of respect with which he was surrounded by everyone were striking. Through him it was possible to understand how important the role that the men of the Resistance had achieved in their respective local communities had been, beyond individual political faiths”.
“What is most striking about Grassi’s life – claims Giorgio Pagano – is the working-class lifestyle, which has a strong moral connotation: correctness, loyalty, sobriety, capacity for civil self-education, personal disinterest, fight against injustice”.
The exhibition “Men and ships” – explains Pagano – follows the narrative thread of “Memory”: Dino’s childhood and youth, the first fascinating encounter with ships and workers, marriage and family life, the struggles in the factory, the changes and transformations of the construction site, up to the commitment in the Region.
“The title ‘Men and ships’ – he continues – was one of the two titles proposed by Dino for the ‘Memoria’. ‘I am a worker’ was the answer Dino gave when asked for his identity. ‘Men and ships’ were the two great passions of his life: his class, others, the oppressed throughout the world, and the products of work, in which he and his companions realized themselves as people”.
