On the night of 8 May 1945, in Cesena, liberated six months earlier, seventeen republican fascists returning from northern Italy they were killed in the cell where they were locked up by a group of armed individuals. The massacre had been preceded, in the afternoon of that same day, by another dramatic bloody event: the murder, in the presence of a large crowd, of a young woman accused of being a fascist spy, Iolanda Gridelli.
The entire story is traced in the book “Anatomy of a massacre” by Mattia Brighi and Alberto Gagliardo which will be presented on Thursday 16 May, at 5pm, in the Aula Magna of the Malatestiana Library The event, open to all citizens and with free entry, will be moderated by Francesco Filippi who will dialogue with the authors.
The first part of the text reconstructs those events in detail, drawing on various and largely unpublished documentation. The second part, however, retraces the ways in which the memory of that May 8th was transmitted and sedimented, producing distortions that were deposited in public discourse, sometimes even with explicit revisionist results.
Mattia Brighi, works at the Municipality of Cesena. Independent historical researcher, since 2014 he has collaborated with the Historical Institute of the Resistance and the Contemporary Age of Forlì-Cesena, of whose scientific committee he is a member. His fields of interest are anti-fascism, the Resistance, the agricultural landscape, and on these themes he has published several articles in collective volumes, magazines and periodicals. In 2015 he published “Memories of a community. Bagnile 1900-1945” (with Mara Valdinosi), and in 2017 “Ernesto Barbieri and Oddino Montanari. Two lives for an ideal: international anti-fascism and resistance in Romagna”.
Alberto Gagliardo, taught literature in scientific high schools. After about ten years in the province of Varese, he has lived in Cesena since 1998 and since 2016 has been seconded to the Institutes of History of the Resistance and the Contemporary Age of Forlì-Cesena and Rimini. In addition to being the editor of several books, he is the author of studies and articles on literature, cinema, history, published in magazines and/or in volumes. His last two monographs are: “Social history of Rita Pavone. Biography of the country that we have been and that we have become” (Rome, 2020) and “Looking for a place in the world. Lives of Jewish survivors in transit. Tradate 1945-1948” (Milan-Udine).
