The day everything changed (Piemme “Il battello a vapore”, 2024) by Laura Pezzino, a professional journalist making her debut in children’s literature, tells the story of a young girl today, who ties in with that of a Resistance relay team.
Blades of light straight into your eyes. Still half asleep, Cora enjoyed the warmth of the rays that filtered through the shutters, once a beautiful emerald green.
Cora, eleven years old, and her mother Tilda, had arrived the evening before, coming from the city, to Brisca, a small village in the Tuscan-Romagna Apennines, where her maternal grandmother Irma Calisi lived, recently admitted to a retirement home, because non-autonomous and suffering from Parkinson’s. There were some important matters that Tilda had to attend to. The little girl immediately liked her room, which received the sun from early in the morning. She had renamed it the Green Room, where there was a bed, a desk, a straw chair, a dark wooden dresser, an ancient water basin. Cora, a lover of reading, was exactly how she had imagined the room in which she would write her first novel. Below the apartment was her grandmother’s bar, which she had met only once, as a child. He remembered a lady with a face full of wrinkles, very long white hair, a pair of heavy trousers rolled up at the bottom. It would have been an unforgettable summer for the little girl, who would have known events that occurred during the Second World War, where her grandmother had played a crucial but dangerous role.
Irma, like many other girls and adults, belonging to every social class, had felt the duty to do something, to not stand by and watch but participate in the Resistance. The relay accompanied the brigades along safe streets seeking information on the movements of the Nazi-fascist enemy. On foot or by bicycle, the courageous women took responsibility for ensuring connections between the various formations, allowing the transmission of orders, directives, news and the distribution of food, medicines, weapons and ammunition. Unfortunately, some of them paid with their lives for their commitment during the war of liberation. Without the relays, the partisan war would have been impossible.
Finally, allow me to add a few words about the places in which this story is set. Brisca, officially, does not exist but to create it I was inspired by a delightful village located on the Apennines between Romagna and Tuscany called Brisighella. My parents took me there when I was little, and I returned specifically to do research for this book. About twenty kilometers from Brisighella, in October 1944, there really was a battle, known as the Battle of Purocielo, during which many partisans died at the hands of the Nazi-fascists.
This is what the author reveals in a final note of the book.
A volume dedicated to the younger generations written with the laudable intention of making known how grateful we should be to those who fought, demonstrating dedication and courage, to offer democracy and freedom.
“There is nothing better than a day in June for the beginning of a story.”
