Mass Tomorrow, Friday 3 May at 11 am, the unveiling ceremony of a commemorative plaque of Professor Manara Valgimigli will be held. The plaque will be placed in the niche on the external facade of the Liceo Pellegrino Rossi, the institute in which Valgimigli was an emeritus teacher of Greek and Latin from 1913 to 1916. The event, which was born from a proposal by Franco Frediani, was made possible thanks to sharing of the project by the president of the Province Gianni Lorenzetti and the school director Alessandra Paoli, as well as the decisive contribution of Fernando Bianchi of Mbn Marmi, who donated the marble and created the characters of the epigraph, and of the architect Anna Della Tommasina who he drafted the project free of charge as requested by the Superintendency of Fine Arts. In the main hall of the high school, in the presence of the agreed authorities and the students of the 5th classes A, B and C, Professor Gennaro di Leo will give a short report on the figure of the illustrious philologist who the city of Massa had already honored with the naming of a street in the Romagnano area. The unveiling of the plaque will follow.
Manara Valgimigli was born in San Piero in Bagno (then the province of Florence and today of Forlì-Cesena) on 9 July 1876. In November 1894 he enrolled in the faculty of literature at the Royal University of Bologna and those years were marked by the teaching of Giosuè Carducci, of whom he was a student and with whom he graduated in Italian literature on 16 November 1898. A few days later, a telegram from Giovanni Pascoli informed him that in Messina, in the gymnasium of the Real Convitto Dante Alighieri, they were looking for a teacher. Thus began his long career as a “school teacher” and his closest association with the poet from Romagna. His commitment as an administrator as councilor for public education in the municipal council dates back to the Massa period, a position he held until 1918. In August 1939, he suffered the loss of his wife Emilia, which was followed, in December 1940, by that very painful of her daughter Erse. On 23 April 1944, surprised by some German soldiers in the home of a partisan’s family, he was arrested on charges of conspiracy and transferred to the Baldenich prison in Belluno, where he remained in solitary confinement for a month. He died in 1965.l
