The facts investigated in the work by Mattia Brighi and Alberto Gagliardo, “Anatomy of a massacre”, which will be presented today at 5pm in the Aula Magna of the Malatestiana, still stir up burning feelings of conflict. The reference is to the night of 8 May 1945 when 17 republican fascists segregated at the Rocca were killed by an armed group. The two authors will dialogue with Francesco Filippi.
Mattia Brighi (photo on the right), why investigate these two particular episodes?
“Because regarding the murder of Iolanda Gridelli and the massacre of the Rocca, apart from some local and partial research, there is a historiographical void and to date popular and fictionalized narratives have taken over. In most of the occasions in which touched by territorial research were taken from memories of the families of the victims or from the association of the fallen of the Italian Social Republic. Therefore partisan memories which, for personal or ideological reasons, only show a vision of the facts”.
The massacre occurred on May 8, 1945, which coincides with the capitulation of Nazi Germany. A date chosen symbolically for a showdown?
“We don’t know. What we can say is that it happened at the Rocca, a place that saw a lot of blood flow after 25 July 1943 and immediately after the war. Before the anti-fascists and the partisans, after the veterans of the RSI and the fascists returning from northern Italy.
Who were the 17 men killed in the cell where they were locked up?
“They were fascists who returned to their homes after the fall of the RSI, almost all of them coming from northern Italy where they had followed the fleeing Germans with the advance of the front. They were people of different backgrounds and from different origins, half of them were from Cesena We have tried to reconstruct the biography of all of them as well as investigating the identity of the various people involved in various capacities in this story, including Iolanda Gridelli, the young woman killed at the Rocca in the afternoon of the same day in the presence of a large crowd. accuses him of being a fascist spy.”
Why do you claim that they were killed by “a group of armed individuals” and not by partisans?
“Because this is not established. The trial documents do not identify the culprits. What we can say is that the action that led to the massacre is very similar to the June 1944 undertaking carried out by the partisans to free the prisoners of the fascist regime In May 1945, Cesena was under the jurisdiction of the Allied military government and immediately the Polish police arrested Fabio Ricci, a former partisan commander, at the time commissioner for the purge, who in this capacity had decision-making power over prisons. He was detained in Forlì for a few days and then released. No documentation has emerged regarding his imprisonment.”
How did you go about the sources?
“The first part of the text reconstructs those events in detail, drawing on various and largely unpublished documentation. Procedural and otherwise. The second part, however, retraces the ways in which the memory of that 8 May was transmitted and has sedimented, producing distortions sometimes even with explicit revisionist outcomes”.
Are you aware of the further opposition that your book will stimulate?
“Discussion is the salt of democratic life and scientific research. However, it must be carried out in an argumentative form and on the basis of documents treated with honesty and rigor. Unfortunately, every year these two episodes are exploited by the nostalgic right. But there cannot be a shared memory, since two opposing visions of the world were opposed. History serves to contextualise, critically analyze and understand complex and painful facts, not to justify”.
