Portelli, Biography of An Industrial Town

BIOGRAPHY OF AN
INDUSTRIAL TOWN
Terni, Italy, 1831-2014
Alessandro Portelli
Palgrave Studies in Oral History
Series editors
David P. Cline
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, USA
Natalie Fousekis
California State University
Fullerton, USA
‘A premier publisher of oral history.’ - CHOICE
The world’s leading English-language oral history book series, Palgrave
Studies in Oral History brings together engaging work from scholars,
activists, and other practitioners. Books in the series are aimed at a broad
community of readers; they employ edited oral history interviews to
explore a wide variety of topics and themes in all areas of history, placing
first-person accounts in broad historical context and engaging issues of
historical memory and narrative construction. Fresh approaches to the use
and analysis of oral history, as well as to the organization of text, are a
particular strength of the series, as are projects that use oral accounts to
illuminate human rights issues. Submissions are welcomed for projects
from any geographical region, as well as cross-cultural and comparative
work.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14606
Alessandro Portelli
Biography
of an Industrial Town
Terni, Italy, 1831–2014
Alessandro Portelli
Università di Roma
Rome
Italy
Palgrave Studies in Oral History

ISBN 978-3-319-50897-9 ISBN 978-3-319-50898-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-50898-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936933
English language rights only

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2014
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any
other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic
adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or
hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover image © Paolo Carnassale/Getty
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
FOREWORD
This book is a condensation and rewriting of two earlier books: Biografia di

una città (Biography of a Town, 1985) and Acciai speciali (Specialty Steel,
2008). They were written and published in Italy 30 years apart, but it
makes sense to put them together because they are held together by a place
—Terni, an industrial town in Central Italy—and a method, oral history.
I grew up in Terni, though I wasn’t born there; and when I moved back to
Rome I thought I’d never set foot in it again. But when I began to research
folk music and working-class stories, Terni drew me back like a magnet,
and I’ve never really left it again. I recorded the first songs and stories there
in 1969, kept it up for more than 40 years, and have not stopped yet. So,
this book is also held together by a lifetime’s relationship with a place, with
its history, and with its people.
In terms of time, this is the 200-years long story of how Italy, and Terni,
went from rural roots to postindustrial society—the short complicated life
of the industrial revolution, its beginning, its glory days, its demise. In
terms of space, this is the story of how a center—the multi-sector industrial
conglomerate, the company-town model—was created, and how it fell
apart, piece by piece. Paraphrasing Dilsey, one of William Faulkner’s great
African American characters: I’ve heard about the beginning, now I see the
end. Or at least, the beginning of an end.
The thirty years between the two books also mark changes in oral his-
tory. When Biografia di una città appeared, oral history was still considered
marginal, unreliable, and too radical; by the time Acciai Speciali came out,
oral history had refined its methodology and theory and had become (even
too) respectable. I hope this book retains at least some of the excitement of
v
vi FOREWORD
an earlier, pioneering time—which is why I retain, almost unchanged, the

original 1985 introduction.
Thanks to the long duration of the research, the interviews cover at least
a century: the oldest interviewee was born in 1886; the youngest in 1990 (I
started out interviewing people 50 years older than me, and ended up
interviewing people 50 years younger). So, on the one hand, the narrators’
memories lead us back to a long gone past—the Risorgimento, the birth
of the Italian nation, the dawn of industrialization; on the other hand, they
gaze toward a cloudy, uncertain future. We can follow this evolution, even
in translation, through the changes in language; if we pay attention to the
dates of the interviews, we can see that those made in the 1970s and 1980s
don’t sound like those of the third millennium. There is a tangible shift,
from the vernacular speech—steeped in politics, in class organization and
identity, that prevails in the first part—to the ironic, disenchanted,
depoliticized language of the younger generations, more educated but just
as angry.
Every book is made by many people. This is especially true for a book of
oral history, which is made of the voices and stories of many, many nar-
rators (230 quoted in these pages, and about 50 more for whom I didn’t
find a place). My debt to them is too huge for conventional thanks—let the
book itself be my praise for these famous women and men. But I also need
to ask their forgiveness: for using only fragments of many fascinating life
stories; for being unable to keep up all the personal relationships created at
the time of the interviews; for the loss of quality and power when their
words were transferred from the sound of the voice to the written page,
and from their varieties of Italian to an English that tries its best to sound at
least colloquial.
Many colleagues and friends made this work and this book possible.
Many of them are no more, and their absence is a painful wound. I shared
with Valentino Paparelli the early years of fieldwork in Valnerina; he and his
wife Franca De Sio gave hospitality, support, and friendship for more than
30 years. Both were there for my family and me at a difficult time; and I still
ask Franca’s help whenever I need something in Terni’s public library.
Gianfranco Canali was a friend and comrade to the fullest meaning of these
precious words; there is much of his work in these pages. He and Rosanna
Canali opened their home to me, introduced me to people, and made
contacts for me, with incredible generosity. Later, Rosanna again opened
her house to the young Circolo Gianni Bosio researchers that had come to
Terni at the time of the 2004 general strike.
FOREWORD vii
I owe Gisa Giani a wealth of material, sources, literature ideas—and an

example of personal, undaunted courage. Bruno Zenoni, Lucilla Galeazzi,
Enrico Cardinali gave me access to different social contexts, and supported
me with advice and criticism. The comrades of Radio Evelyn (the local
independent radio station), ANPI and ANPPIA (the associations of former
partisans and of victims of Fascist persecution), the CGIL and FIOM
unions (first, Marcello Ricci, Azelio Fulmini, Remo Righetti, Ivo Carducci,
Roberto Giovannelli; next, Lucia Rossi, Attilio Romanelli, Gianfranco
Fattorini, Alessandro Rampiconi, and CISL’s Faliero Chiappini) opened
doors and created contacts. So did the young people of the alternative
cooperative La Strada and the Youth Workshop (Marco Coppoli).
Alessandro Toffoli introduced me to a younger working-class generation,
very different from the workers I had met in the past. Mayor Paolo Raffaelli
understood the meaning of what I was doing and supported me all the
way. Tina Moretti Antonucci, Agostino Marcucci, Marco Fornarola, Santi
Minasi, Ulrike Viccaro, Greca Campus, like Paparelli, Canali, Cardinali and
Ricci, allowed me to use tapes and transcripts of their own interviews.
Laura Zanacchi and Antonella Fischetti transcribed most of the Acciai
Speciali interviews. I owe historians Renato Covino and Giampaolo Gallo a
wealth of advice, knowledge, critical support; my publisher Carmine
Donzelli is the one who had the idea of making Acciai speciali first and of
putting the two books together in one later. Mariella Eboli read critically a
number of versions of these texts; and Carlo Ginzburg helped me under-
stand what book I wanted to write when I first began.
While the book is rooted in the town of Terni and its surrounding hills,
the final chapters open up to the global context. This was made possible by
the help of other friends and colleagues in many parts of the world. In
India, Anita and Nitin Paranjape, from Abhyviakti media for development
cooperative in Nashik, arranged the visit and the interviews at the
ThyssenKrupp plant in Igatpuri, where Anita helped me as a brilliant and
participant interpreter. In Brazil, Karen Worcman and Rosali Henriques,
from São Paulo’s Museu da Pessoa gave me their interviews from the
ThyssenKrupp Bilstein and Ibirité plants. Paulinho Almeida from the
University of Uberlãndia (Minas Gerais) and Yara Khouri from the
Catholic University in São Paulo coordinated and carried out the Brazilian
side of the international ThyssenKrupp project I had been hoping to set up
(in South Africa, Maria Suriano and Noor Nieftagodien of Witswatersrand
University tried to interview ThyssenKrupp workers in Johannesburg, and
viii FOREWORD
were frustrated by the difficult political climate and the uneasy relationships
between university and unions).
This book is about 30% shorter than the sum of the two original texts,
but I trust that nothing of crucial importance was sacrificed. I did a tighter
editing of the interviews, cut repetitions and digressions, eliminated most
of my comments and explanations, reduced notes to the barest essential
minimum, and introduced very little new material (such as the brief report
on the 2014 steel strike). All the original recordings are available at the
Archivio Sonoro “Franco Coggiola” of the Circolo Gianni Bosio in Rome.
Woody Guthrie once wrote that the words he was using were “bor-
rowed” from the many people he met and heard in his wanderings; he was
in debt to these people, and they in turn were in debt to others, in the long
chain of memory and tradition; what we have is only the sum of what we
owe.1 This is true for every word and for every person cited in this book;
but there are people that I owe and miss most of all. This book is dedicated
to Dante Bartolini, Amerigo Matteucci, Gianfanco Canali, and Valentino
Paparelli.
Alessandro Portelli
NOTE
1. Woody Guthrie, “People I Owe”, in Born to Win, ed. Robert Shelton, New
York, Collier Books, 1968, p. 18.
CONTENTS
Part I Biography of a Town
1 Introduction: Speaking, Writing, and Remembering 3
2 The Red and the Black: Rebels, Patriots, and Outlaws 15
3 How Green Was My Valley: Feudal Landlords and

Struggling Peasants 33
4 How Steel Was Tempered: The Making of a Working

Class 51
5 Rebels: Socialists, Anarchists, and the Subversive

Tradition 91
6 The Iron Heel, or, We Didn’t Have Any Trouble:

The Coming of Fascism 113
7 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Surviving

and Resisting Fascism 151
8 Apocalypse Now: War, Hunger, and Mass Destruction 175
ix
x CONTENTS
9 Red Is the Color: The Gramsci Brigade

and the Resistance 191
10 The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: Economic

Boom and Industrial Crisis 223
11 Staying Alive: The Rise of Alternative Cultures 247
Part II Specialty Steel
12 David and Goliath: The Town, the Factory,

and the Strike 279
13 The Workers and the World: Terni Steel in the Age

of Globalization 309
14 The Empire Strikes Back: The Town, the Factory,

the Strike—Reprise 333
15 A Tale of Two Cities: Death, Survival,

and Powerlessness in the Neo-Liberal Age 347
16 Epilogue: Working-class Sublime 373
Index of Names 381
Subject Index 389
Index of Places and Notable Things 393

ABBREVIATIONS
ARCHIVES
ACLT Archivio della Camera del Lavoro di Terni (Archive of Terni Labor
Exchange)
ACP Ministero degli Interni—Affari Comunali e Provinciali (Ministry of the
Interior—Municipal and Provincial Affairs)
ACS Archivio Centrale dello Stato (Central State Archives)
AGR Ministero degli Interni—Affari Generali e Riservati (Ministry of the
Interior—General and Classified Affairs)
ANPI Archivio della Sezione di Terni dell’Associazione Nationale Partigiani
d’Italia (Archive of the Terni section of the Italian Partisans’ Association)
APC Archivio del Partito Comunista Italiano (Archive of the Italian
Communist Party)
ASCT Archivio Storico del Comune di Terni (Terni Municipal Historical Archive)
ASST Archivio Storico della Società Terni (Terni Company Historical Archive)
B Busta (folder)
CPC Casellario Politico Centrale (Central Political Records Office)
DPP Ministero degli Interni—Divisione Polizia Politica (Ministry of the
Interior—Political Police Division)
Gab. Ministero degli Interni—Gabinetto (Ministry of the Interior—Cabinet)
PS Ministero degli Interni—Direzione Generale Pubblica Sicurezza
(Ministry of the Interior—General Police Division)
SPD Segreteria Particolare del Duce (Mussolini’s Personal Secretariat)
SPEP Situazione Politica ed Economica delle Province (Report on the Political
and Economic Situation of the Provinces)
TAS Terni Archivio Storico
xi
xii ABBREVIATIONS
OTHER ABBREVIATIONS
AST Acciai Speciali Terni (Terni Specialty Steel)
CGIL Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (General Italian Labor
Federation)
CISL Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori (Italian Federation of Labor
Unions)
F Fascicolo (File)
FIM Federazione Italiana Metalmeccanici (Italian Metal Workers Federation—
affiliated to CISL)
FIOM Federazione Impiegati e Operai Metalmeccanici (Italian Federation of
Steel Industry Employees—affiliated to CGIL)
PCI Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party)
PNF Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party)
Unless otherwise noted, the quotes from the newspapers Il Messaggero

and l’Unità are taken from the local Terni edition.
THE NARRATORS
This list includes only interviewees quoted in the text. When last names are
not available, they are listed by first name; married women are listed under
the name they used in the interview. Names in quotes are pseudonyms.
The name is followed by year of birth and place of birth if other than Terni.
Next is the place(s) of work and principal professional activities in the
person’s life course (for women who also worked outside the home,
homemaking is implicit). “Unemployed” and “homemaker” do not
exclude occasional temporary, irregular, cottage work. The dates and
places (if other than Terni) of the interviews follow (the one listed first is
the one most often used).
Unless otherwise noted, all interviews were recorded by me in Terni.
Other interviewers are designated by initials: Tina Moretti Antonucci and
Settimio Bernarducci (TMA-SB); Gianfranco Canali (GFC); Enrico
Cardinali (EC); Marco Fornarola et al. (MF); Agostino Marcucci (AM);
Valentino Paparelli (VP); Marcello Ricci (MR); São Paulo’s Museo da
Pessoa (MP). When the same person was interviewed in different occasions
by different interviewers, the initials refer only to the interview they
accompany.
I don’t include the pseudonyms of the interviewees from India.
All the original recordings can be consulted at the Circolo Gianni
Bosio’s “Franco Coggiola Sound Archive,” at Rome’s House of Memory
and History.
xiii
xiv THE NARRATORS
Keji Adumno (1983), translator; 7.15.2008 Rome

«Alberto» (ca. 1962), unemployed; december, 1982 (EC)
Emanuele Albi (1979), AST, 3.18.2008
Marco Allegretti (1973), contractor firm worker; 3.18.2008
Alfonso Alongi (1975), AST-Turin office employee; 5.13.2008
Roberto “Anafreak” Anafrini (1974), AST; 5.26.2008
Agamante Androsciani (1902), Terni; exiled for anti-fascism, 1930s;
6.21.1982
Gianna Angelini [Filipponi] (1923, Germignano [Rieti]), school tea-
cher; partisan; Piediluco, 9.3.1982
Antonio Antonelli (1923), Terni steel worker, fired in 1953; building
contractor; partisan; Castiglioni 7.7.1973
Carlo Arcangeli (1922, Spoleto [Perugia]), Terni Morgnano peat mines;
railroads; Spoleto, 1.21.1981
Maria [Felcini] Arcangeli (1903, Spoleto [Perugia]), homemaker;
Spoleto, 1.211981
Ciro Argentino (1971 Naples), AST-TK Turin; FIOM union organizer;
3.11.2008, Turin
Costantino Armiento (1975, Turin), AST-TK Turin; 3.6.2008
Foscolo Armini‚ Cantamaggio organizer and performer; 5.2.1980
Claudio Aureli, Meraklon; union organizer; 9.16.2008, 11.22.2016
Aurora (ca. 1915), Alterocca printshop; 1979 (MR)
Aldo Bartocci (1909); engineer; Terni manager;10.25.1980 (GFC);
17.11.1979 (TMA-SB)
Gildo Bartoletti (1896), Terni steel worker; 2.17.1974 (VP)
Marco Bartoli (1970), AST; 3.18.2008
Dante Bartolini (1909, Castiglioni), Terni steel worker, fired in 1952;
farmer, shoemaker, barman, hog killer; poet, singer, storyteller; partisan;
Castel di Lago, 4.29.1973; 11.3.1972; 4.8.1972; Rome, 5.11.1975
Isolina Bastoni [Vecchioni] (1923), homemaker; 5.1.1979
Settimio Bernarducci (1921), Terni specialist; artist; 2.20.1980 (TMA);
1979 (MR)
“Luciano Berni” (1959), AST; 6.2.2004
Eduardo Bertolini (1964), mechanical specialist, TK Ibirité plant, Ibirité,
July 2017 [Museo da Pessoa]
«Rocco Bianchi» (unknown birth place, Abruzzi), Arsenal, fired in 1951;
1.4.1976
Spino Biancifiori (1925), Terni steel worker; Cantamaggio organizer and
performer1; 5.2.1980
THE NARRATORS xv
Guerriero Bolli (1915, Montoro),Terni office employee; local historian;

12.23.1981
Vincenza Bonanni [Vannozzi] (year and place of birth not known),
farmer; partisan; 10.13.1981 (GFC); 10.27.1981 (GFC)
Silvia Bonifazi (1965), high school student; 6.31.1982
Guido Botondi (1945), Terni steel worker; regional FIOM secretary;
3.2.1980
Gino Brunelli (1919), carpenter; 9.16.1980
Nevio Brunori (1954), AST; FIOM rank-and-file representative;
3.18.2008; 4.29.2008
Loretta Calabrini (1960), university student; 6.21.1982; 8.31.1982
Luigi Cambioli (1929), Terni executive; 5.1.1979; 4.29.1984
Gino Campanella, former Terni chief of personnel; 9.26.1979 (TMA-SB)
Greca Campus (1983), filmmaker; 6.19.2008 Rome
Calfiero Canali (1916), Terni maintenance worker, fired in 1953;
4.30.1979; 8.30.1982
Gianfranco Canali (1950), school bus driver; local working-class histo-
rian; 9.12.1979; 7.9.1980
Martina Canali (1981), social worker; 9.16.2008
Viscardo Caneschi, Cantamaggio organizer and performer; 5.2.1980
«Luigi Capello» (ca. 1895), policeman; Papigno company guard;
7.7.1973
Rita Cappanera (1963), vocational school student; 9.12.1979
Santino Cappanera (1933), Terni steel worker; 9.12.1979
Sante Carboni (1901, Ancona); Bosco; railroads; partisan; 10.18.1982
Enrico Cardinali (1957), university student; 6.24.1980; 7.9.1980;
5.4.1983
Sergio Cardinali (1965), secretary, chemical workers union; 5.9.2008
Ivo Carducci (1945, Sangemini), Terni steel worker; FIM union orga-
nizer; 5.4.1983; 7.27.1979
Mauro Carnassale (1961), Arsenal janitor; musician; 4.30.1985
Francesco Carocci (ca. 1910), farmer; Terni steel worker; partisan; tra-
ditional singer; 7.29.1973
Andrea Carsetti, AST, union activist; 11.22.2016
Isoliero Cassetti (1949), Terni steel worker; FIOM union organizer;
5.2.1980
Luigi Castelli (1948), Terni specialist; 1.9.1981
Umberto Catana (1915, Collescipoli), Terni iron carpenter; 12.29.1982
xvi THE NARRATORS
Giovanni Catoni (1908), upholsterer; Terni steel worker; 5.26.1979

(AM)
Vincenzo Ceccarelli (1939), Sit-Stampaggio; factory council member;
1.12.1983
Faliero Chiappini, (1949), secretary, Terni CISL union; 9.16.2008
Poliuto Chiappini (1911), office worker; city councilman; 6.26.1984
Chiara (1980), unemployed, 16.2000
Ilario Ciaurro (1889), painter, potter; 12.23.1981; 9.3.1982; 7.16.1979
(TMA-SB)
Claudio Cipolla (1977), AST; FIOM organizer; 2.18.2008
Gianni Colasanti (1940), Catholic priest; 4.3.1984
Diname Colesanti [Fagioletti] (1921), Fucat,1 Grüber; 4.8.1980;
2.28.1980
Antonina [Galeazzi] Colombi (1913), Centurini ; 6.26.1979
Cesare Conti (1915, Arrone), restaurant owner; 1.9.1981
Mario Conti (ca. 1925), Terni steel worker; 5.11.1979
Marco Coppoli (1967), social worker; 2.29.2008
Corrado (1965, Rome), unemployed; 5.25.1981
Faliero Corvo (1910), Terni steel worker; FIOM official; 10.28.1980
(GFC)
Taurino Costantini (1937), Polymer ; CGIL union employee; 9.16.1980;
2.5.2004 (MF)
Raul Crostella (1926), Terni steel worker; CGIL union employee
12.14.1983
Gaetano Cruciani (1891), Centurini, Arsenal, Elettrocarbonium;
9.17.1980
Augusto Cuppini (1911, Fabriano), Terni skilled steel worker; musician;
12.30.1980
Januário Cosme Damião (1950), executive, TK Ibirité plant, Ibirité, July
2017 [MP]
Daniele (1966), clothing store sales clerk; 5.2.1981
Riccardo De Cesaris (1958), university student; 8.31.1982
Enzo De Michele (ca. 1950), Terni steel worker; factory council member;
7.27.1979
Graziano De Renzo (1966), unemployed; 5.4.1983
Franca De Sio (1949), librarian; 2.29.2008
Diana (1925), homemaker; 3.24.1984, Rome
Saturno Di Giuli (1902, Piediluco), Papigno; interned for anti-fascism,
1930s; partisan; painter; 4.8.1980, 1980
THE NARRATORS xvii
Ezio Di Loreto (1928),Terni steel worker, 3.11.2008

Fabbrica Umbra Cioccolato e Affini—Terni—a chocolate factory.
«Ersilia» (ca. 1915), bar owner; 5.25.1981
Canzio Eupizi (1909, Todi), state insurance employee; 3.27.1984
Fabrizio (1964), unemployed; 5.25.1981
Mario Fagioletti (1920), Terni steel worker; 4.8.1980
Ines Faina (1922), middle school teacher; partisan; 7.7.1983
Rosetta Falchi (1912), Arsenal; 9.17.9.1980
Gianfranco Fattorini (1959), FIOM official; 2.16.2008, 4.6.2008
Amalia [Falchi] Ferri (1899), Grüber, Centurini, Arsenal; 9.17.1980
Emilio Ferri (1917), National Electricity Agency employee; director,
Center for Economic and Social Studies; 9.17.1980
Lázaro de Figueredo Júnior, engineer, TK Ibirité plant, Ibirité, July 2017
(MP)
Alfredo Filipponi (1897, Ferentillo), tramways; coal seller; jailed for
anti-fascism, 1920s-30s; partisan; 7.6.1973
Ambrogio Filipponi (1930), cooperative movement official; jailed at age
2 for his father’s anti-fascism; 5.11.1979
Mario Filipponi (1924, Piediluco), Terni steel worker; city employee;
partisan; 9.3.1982
Fabio Fiorelli (1921), Terni office employee; former vice-mayor, alder-
man; 2.26. 1984
Maurizio Fioretti(1968), electrician; musician; 7.2.2008
Pasqualino Frattaroli (ca. 1930, Marmore), farm hand; municipal
employee; 7.7.1973, Marmore
Alba Froscianti (1912, Collescipoli), owner, Froscianti Iron Foundries;
6.16.1982
Azelio Fulmini (1957), radio reporter; musician; 7.9.1980
Mario Gabrielli (1925), steel works technician; factory council member;
6.3.1980
Rosanna Gabrielli (I958), university student; 4.19.1980, Rome
Aldo Galeazzi (191O), Terni steel worker, janitor, athlete; 10.12.1979
Franco Galeazzi (I944), salesman; 3.19.3.1984
Lucilla Galeazzi (I950), musician; 6.6.1979, Rome
Laura Galli (1921), homemaker; active in Catholic charities; 1.27.1984
Alberto Galluzzi (1983), AST; 6.23.2008
Battista Garibaldi (I952), Terni steel and office worker; 5.5.1983,
4.16.2008, 11.22.2016
Guido Giacinti (1919), carpenter; Centurini; 9.16.1980
xviii THE NARRATORS
Vittorio Giantulli (I937), Terni steel works specialist; 5.3.1983

Enrico Gibellieri (1947), engineer, Centro Sviluppo Materiali; former
president, European Coal and Steel Community; 3.18.2008 Vasanello
(Viterbo)
Veniero Giontella (1930), high school teacher; 1979 (MR)
Vincenza [Fossatelli] Giontella (I907), seamstress; 1979 (MR)
Mario Giorgini (1910), Terni steel works foreman; 9.20.1979 (TMA-SB)
Roberto Giovannelli (1943), Terni steel worker; CGIL union organizer;
6.11.1982
Giuseppe Giovannetti (1899), Arsenal, Bosco; first Terni Communist
Party secretary, 1921; 4.8.1981 (GFC); 6.12.1981; 10.23.1981 (GFC);
10.23.1981 (AM)
Fosco Girardi (ca. 1950), Terni office employee; factory council member;
7.27.1979
Adelia Grimani (1905, Santa Lucia di Stroncone), homemaker; tradi-
tional singer; 6.4.1980, Santa Lucia di Stroncone (VP)
Irene Guidarelli (1896), Centurini and Grüber; 7.16.I980
Jamghili el Hassan (1976, Taza, Morocco), contractor firm worker;
2.7.2008
Ines Tanfani Inches (1898), homemaker; partisan; 2.18.1984 (GFC)
Giuseppe Laureti (1924), self-employed turner; Terni steel worker;
16.9.1980
Giovanni Lelli (1941), judge; 9.17.2000
Arnaldo Lippi (1899), Terni skilled steel worker; jailed for anti-fascism,
1922; partisan; city alderman; 12.30.I979; 1.5.1980; 9.3.1982;
11.15.1978 (AM)
Angela Locci (1904, Valenza), Centurini; 6.12.1981, Piediluco
Claudio Locci (I924, Valenza), photographer; Papigno; fired in 1948,
refugee to Czechoslovakia; partisan; 3.30.1981; 6.5.6.1981
“Luisa Longhi”, (1961), store owner; 5.2.2008
«Rita Luciani» (ca. I932), homemaker; 1979 (MR)
Maddalena (1924), Centurini; 3.24.1984, Rome
Riziero Manconi (1894), Arsenal, Siri, Nera Montoro; 7.16.1980
Luca Marcelli (1972), AST, 6.24.2008
Pietro Marcelli (1948), AST technician; 2.12.2008.
Marcello (1957), unemployed; 5.27.1981
Stefano Marchetti, (1980), university student; 7.8.2008
Roberto Mariottini (1949), Terni; 3.24.1984, Rome
Gisela Marins, cultural officer, Brazilian Embassy; 6.5, 2012 Rome
THE NARRATORS xix
Marisa (1925), textile worker; 3.24.1984, Rome

Sergio Martinelli (1947), Sit-Stampaggio; 1.13.1983
Umberto Martinelli (1913, Massa Martana [Perugia]), Polymer, Bosco,
Arsenal; 1.3.1983
Amerigo Matteucci (1919, Polino), construction worker; mayor of
Polino; traditional singer; 12.14.1974, Orte (Viterbo)
Maggiorina Mattioli (1899), seamstress; 2.28.1980
Ferruccio Mauri (I926, Narni), municipal employee; partisan; provincial
alderman; 4.8.1983
Maurizio (1959), unemployed; 6.11.1982
Walter Mazzilli (1948, Piediluco), provincial alderman; 7.7.1983
Armando Mazzocchio (I886), Terni gantry cranes supervisor; 9.25.1979
(TMA-SB)
Giovanni Mencarelli (1902), food store owner; 3.27.1984
Anita [Ceccarelli] Menichelli (1926, Greccio [Rieti]), homemaker;
1.7.1981, Rome
Luigi Menichelli (1920, Greccio [Rieti]); Terni steel worker; partisan;
1.7.1981, Rome
Arnaldo Menichetti (1911), Terni steel worker; FIOM union official;
vice-president, Terni Province government; 11.3.1980 (GFC)
Giuseppina Migliosi (1900), seamstress; Grüber, Centurini; 10.17.1980
Felice Pop Mihai (1984, Satu Mare, Romania), contract firm worker;
20.2.2008
Maurizio Millesimi (1952), municipal employee; 7.31.1982
Lidia Montecaggi (1918, Calvi), homemaker; 1979 (MR)
Riziero Montesi (1890), tenant farmer; 7.6.1973
Donatella Montini (1959, Torre Orsina), university student, 5.8.1980,
Rome; associate professor, 5.2.2008, Rome
Bruno Moscatelli (1904, Papigno), Bosco; jailed (innocent) for killing a
Fascist, 1922; 8.11.1980, Anzio (Rome)
Giovanni Nardi (1910, Campiglia [Livorno]; taylor; Terni steel worker;
7.16.I980
Francesco Nulchis, journalist; 5.8.1980 (TMA-SB)
Carlotta Orientale (I893), Centurini; provincial secretary, Unione
Sindacale Italiana, 1916; 5.20.1980, Rome
Alfio Paccara (1926), city alderman; Terni steel worker, factory council
member; 9.17.1980
Maurizio Pacini (1970), AST; 2.29.2008
xx THE NARRATORS
Alfeo Paganelli (1908), Terni steel and foundry worker; musician;

1.5.1980
Celsa Paganelli [Galeazzi] (1912), Centurini, Grüber, Arsenal, Roversi
shoe factory; 6.26.1979; 10.2.1979; 1.5.1980
Claudio Pagliaricci (1945), Sit-Stampaggio; factory council member;
1.13.1983
Andrea Pagliarola (1983), Meraklon; 7.8.2008
Gino Paiella (1914, Narni), Catholic priest, parson of Collescipoli;
12.29.1982, Collescipoli
Giampaolo Palazzesi (1943), doctor; 17.9.2000
Valentino Paparelli (1946), manager, Terni province tourist office;
2.5.2004; 2.29.2008
Emidio Pasquini (1908, Narni), artisan; 6.11.1982, Narni
Paolo Patrizi (1945), journalist; 1.26.1984, Rome
Valtero Peppoloni (1916, Moiano [Perugia]), Terni steel worker, sani-
tation worker, school janitor; 4.25.1981
Alberto Petrini (1925), Sit-Stampaggio; Terni steel worker; 10.30.1980
Settimio Piemonti (1903), Terni steel worker; 7.9.1980
Giovanni Pignalosa (1970, Naples), AST-TK Turin; 3.17.2008 Rome
Pompilio Pileri (1905, Rosciano), shepherd; traditional musician and
singer; 3.28.1976, Rome
Roberto Pinoca (1946), Terni steel worker; union representative;
9.12.1979
Maria Pitotti (1919), homemaker; farmhand; 11.4.1974, Labro (Rieti)
Trento Pitotti (1919), shoemaker; Terni steel worker; traditional singer;
12.14.1974, Orte (Viterbo); 28.6.1970, Labro (Rieti)
Sandro Porrazzini (1953), Terni steelworker; university student;
6.21.1982; 8.31.1982
Salvatore Portelli (1913, Rome); goverment employee; 8.30.1979, Gaeta
(Latina)
Antonio Proietti (1920, Piediluco), sanitation worker; partisan; 7.7.1973,
Piediluco
Francesco Proietti (1929, Spoleto [Perugia]), Terni Morgnano peat
mines; Terni steel works; 1.2.1981, Spoleto
Leonardo Pulcini (1915, Villa Pulcini [Rieti]), farmer; 6.2.1973, Villa
Pulcini
Paolo Raffaelli (1953), journalist; Mayor of Terni; 2.6.2004; 10.14.2003
Giorgio Ricci (1951), office worker; 7.4.1980; 7.9.1980
THE NARRATORS xxi
Remo Righetti (1901), Terni steel works, Centurini, Arsenal, Salit

mechanical works; jailed and exiled for anti-fascism, 1930s city alderman;
9.12.1979
Roberto Risoluti (1959), university student; 7.9.1980
«Luisa Roberti» (1897), Grüber; 1980
Attilio Romanelli (1955), FIOM official; 2.18.2008
Roberto Rondinelli (1990), student; 2.12.2008
Lucia Rossi, secretary. Terni Camera del Lavoro (Labor Exchange);
2.16,2008.
«Luigi Rossi» (1929), Polymer; 9.8.1982
Christian Rubino (1977, Turin), AST-TK Turin; 6.3.2008
Antonio Ruggeri (1938), Terni; 9.12.1979
Gianni Sabatini, (1970), AST; FIOM organizer; 18.2.2008
Ivano Sabatini (1928), disabled Terni steel worker; 1.26.1976 (VP)
Mario Sabatini (1925), Papigno; partisan; 7.7.1973, Marmore
Emanuele Salvati (1977), AST; 6.3.2008, 11.22.2016
Giovanni Salvati (1916, Stroncone), shepherd, farmer, State Archives
janitor; 7.7.1982, Collestatte
«Anna Santini» (1925), shop owner; 1979 (MR)
Gallerana Sapora (1903), Papigno, Arsenal; 1979 (MR)
Saris (1965), student; 5.25.1981
Mario Sassi (1906); city employee; musician; 1.12.1983
Ida Sbarzella (1906), Terni foundry worker; 1.30.1980 (TMA-SB)
Fabio Scipioni (1965), student; musician; 4.30.1985
Severino Severini (1915), Terni steel worker; CISL union organizer;
4.2.1984
Daniele Tacconelli (1980), AST; 7.2.2008
Fabrizio Terranova (1980), tourism and theater operator; 5.13.2008
Vittoria Terzaroli (1907), seamstress; PCI; 3,24.1984, Rome
Comunardo Tobia (1920, Papigno), Papigno; partisan; CGIL official;
12.29.1982
Alessandro Toffoli, (1979 Rome), university student; 6.19.2008
Agata Trinchi (1909), state insurance employee; 7.7.1982
Elchide Trippa (1919, Paris [France]), office worker; vernacular poet;
2.29.2.1980
Mario Tronti (1931, Rome), university professor; member of Parliament;
10.9.1980, Rome
Alvaro Valsenti (1924), Bosco; Communist Party full-time worker; local
government official; writer; 9.8.1982; 10.18.1982
xxii THE NARRATORS
Guglielmo Vannozzi (ca. 1915, Onelli [Perugia]), farmer, miner, parti-

san; 10.13.1981 (GFC), 10.27.1981 (GFC), Onelli
Alfredo Vecchioni (1919). Paganica [Rieti]), store owner; Terni steel
worker, fired in 1953; 5.1.1979
Iginio Vella (1944), Terni skilled steel worker; 4.29.1984
Mario Vella (1938), salesman; 4.29.1984
Antonio Venturi (1918), Terni steel worker; 1.26.1976 (VP)
Vero Zagaglioni (1913, Narni), Papigno, Terni steel works; jailed for
anti-fascism, 1939; partisan; 6.21.1981; 11.12.1980 (GFC)
Bruno Zenoni (1908, Marmore), barber; jailed and exiled for anti-fascism,
1930s; partisan; local government official; 6.24.1980; 6.7.1980; 3.3.1981;
13.9.1978 (AM); 21.6.1980 (AM); 26.5.1979 (AM); 24.Il.1981 (GFC)
Evelina [Collazzoni] Zenoni (1911, Marmore), farmhand, merchant;
6.24.1980
Menotti Zocchi (1931, Figline Valdarno [Arezzo]), Polymer; union
representative; 12.29.1982, Collescipoli
Leopoldo Di Girolamo (1951), doctor, mayor of Terni; 11.5.2016
NOTE
1. Fabbrica Umbra Cioccolato e Affini – Terni – a chocolate factory
PART I
Biography of a Town
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Speaking, Writing,

and Remembering
1 PROPERTY OF LANGUAGE
Enzo De Michele. I started at the steel works in June, 1972. Three days
later we held the first general assembly to discuss career progression and
working conditions, and I was amazed at the sight of those men that just a
few minutes earlier were bending their heads to their work, dirty and all,
and now they went up to the podium and stated their problems, their
hopes—whistles, jeers, but yet we spoke out.
Bruno Zenoni. I mean, workers—back then, when the workers had a

meeting—in Terni we had no intellectuals—they had a common language,
you know. Then, when intellectuals joined, perhaps you’d see them
making faces at you because some comrade may have made a mistake or
tried to use a word he doesn’t know what it means and said it wrong, then
—I’m talking about myself—a worker notices it and shuts up, he’s a vol-
unteer anyway, he steps back and shuts up. Back then, leaders didn’t rub in
your inferiority in the property of language, today it weighs upon you.
On May Day, 1973, in a tavern just outside of Terni, Amerigo Matteucci

opened the singing with a traditional stornello:
Adesso che mi trovo qui presente

Mostra’ non mi vorrei tanto ignorante
Saluto chi mi ascolta vede e sente
© The Author(s) 2017 3

A. Portelli, Biography of an Industrial Town, Palgrave Studies
in Oral History, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-50898-6_1
4 A. PORTELLI
Saluto chi ci sta sulla mia mente.

[Now that I am here in your presence
I hope I don’t seem too uncouth
I greet those who listen hear and see me
I greet the one who is on my mind.]
Amerigo Matteucci was following the traditional custom of asking per-

mission to make himself heard in public by paying homage to the com-
munity and to its shared rules of poetic improvisation. We will hear more
from Matteucci in the course of this book. A construction worker and
Communist mayor of the tiny hill village of Polino, Amerigo Matteucci was
both a guardian of tradition and as modern as they come.
In Umbria, where the factory was dropped down wholesale upon a
complex rural background, the language of urban, industrial workers was
also made possible by the survival of these traditional forms. As Communist
leader Giancarlo Pajetta wrote, local Communists “also inherited the oral
tradition.” On the other hand, Raffaele Rossi, a historian and a regional
Party officer, pointed out that the Party “taught thousands of illiterate men
and women how to read newspapers and books, how to discuss them and
understand them.”2
At the end of the 1960s, the Communist Party federation of Terni
discovered that the crisis of orality and the inadequacy of the written forms
of communication were endangering class unity. “The relationship…be-
tween old Party or union leaders and young workers no longer takes place
as it did in the past, when the old would teach the young the basics of the
job and the history of the factory, of the strike, of the struggles.” Factory
papers, not written or distributed by workers, and distant from their
experience, failed to bridge this gap.3
The question, then, was not writing a better paper, but who wrote it.
Pajetta’s and Rossi’s remarks suggest that the working class was granted
only a partial access to literacy: they were taught to read, but hardly ever to
write; not to express their own culture, but to receive someone else’s. In a
dialogic improvisation of stornelli, as Amerigo Matteucci sang the praises of
learning and culture, his antagonist Dante Bartolini sang back: “I am the
teacher in the school\and I teach you the master’s words.”
1 INTRODUCTION: SPEAKING, WRITING, AND REMEMBERING 5
Discourse from below is thus relegated either to an imperfectly mastered

writing, or to an orality that is devalued in the eyes of its very bearers. The
fear of appearing “ignorant” and “uncouth” is related less to respect of
one’s equals than to one’s uncertain right to speak to one’s superiors. In his
autobiography partisan chief Alfredo Filipponi apologized: “It is written as
a worker may be able to write.” The best-known song of Dante Bartolini,
the epic poet of Resistance in Umbria, ends: “Please excuse me\I am not a
composer\A worker’s son\I can’t speak any better.” In the 1920s a report
by Terni’s Communist federation recalled the days when “workers hardly
ever joined in the debate, in their own speech, because they were awed by
lawyers, professors, teachers, doctors.”4 Even in the 1980s those who got
up to speak in general meetings risked the “jeers” of their own peers.
Proper language, then, founds the property of language. This book aims
to question both. In order to survive‚ the speech of common people and of
the non-hegemonic classes had to strengthen itself using forms and
structures more sophisticated than those as yet achieved by the appropri-
ation of writing. This is why I rely on oral sources: not because they are
more “authentic,” but because they remain a privileged form of expression
of the working class and the common people.
2 SOUNDS
Roberto Pinoca, a factory worker, was about my age, so I automatically
addressed him with the familiar “tu” form. A while into the interview, I
noticed that he was using the formal “lei” address instead. So I asked him,
“Excuse me, are you addressing me this way, or the tape recorder?” He
hesitated, “No, no…” and then, “All right—the tape recorder.”
The uses of tu and lei in this conversation suggest that even a
one-to-one interview, when recorded, becomes a form of public discourse.
This process is more complicated than it appears at first sight. Oral history
begins when the encounter of researcher and narrator generates a
two-voiced dialogue that will later be written down, interpreted, published.
From the beginning it is the result of interference. “It would be easy,”
comments German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “to claim that each
line of this book is a document. But it would be an empty word. As soon
we get a closer look, the document’s supposed ‘authority’ crumbles under
our fingers…No, sources are inherently debatable, and there is no criticism
that can sort out all of their contradictions.” And he was writing about
written sources anyway.5
6 A. PORTELLI
In one interview, Russian semiologist Jurij Lotman says, “the self is

interested in the fact that the other agent is indeed ‘other’.” Yet, Lotman’s
abstract model places both “agents” on the same plane; in actuality,
“observer” and “observed” relate to each other across all possible forms of
inequality. The “observed” protect themselves from the reifying gaze of
the “observers,” using a variety of techniques of dissimulation, silence, and
complacency. Inequality, then, results in a distortion of data, and this is the
hard political core of any field encounter. Unless we strive to turn the
interview into an exchange of gazes between different but equal subjects,
“the observed person is reduced to the status of a thing,”6 while the
observer is reduced to an annex of his tools.
The effort to be “faithful” and “authentic” has generated attempts at
exact and literal reproductions, based on criteria of objectivity and neu-
trality that are systematically frustrated by the subjective interference at the
moment of creation of the document, and by the failure of writing to fully
convey the impact of orality. In this work, such criteria have been fre-
quently bypassed: verbatim reproduction may be less faithful to the quality
and meaning of the sources than a representation that also requires—
though I never attributed to them a word they had not actually said—a
touch of “manipulation.”7 When I submitted their quotes to the narrators,
only in a couple of cases did they criticize them for not being faithful
enough; all the other remarks that were expressed (and some that weren’t)
complained instead that I had been too faithful to their spoken language.
They felt that by retaining the colloquial, vernacular, everyday speech used
in the interview I was indeed making them look “uncouth” in public.
Respecting the narrators, then, also means respecting their right to
self-representation. This right, however, must be tempered with the
researchers’ faithfulness to themselves and their task of reporting as honestly
as possible what they have seen and heard, and of interpreting it as boldly and
freely as necessary. Thus, what appears in these pages is, in the main, a close
transcription of speech, but also, often, the result of a negotiation and a
compromise on spelling, grammar, syntax, lexicon, punctuation and accent.
The awareness of the interview as public discourse, however, raises
questions of cultural status in speakers who are used to a more vernacular
form of expression. Indeed, self-denigration is inscribed in the language; as
a Fascist youth paper put it in 1943, Terni’s dialect is not as sweet as
Venice’s or as lofty as Siena’s, “it is rough, sloppy, full of phonetic alter-
ations.”8 Some speakers, however, claim it as a badge of identity:
Elchide Trippa. I say “Piedilugu” not “Piediluco”. Why, if I’d say

Pie-di-luco [people would say], have you been strolling down main street?
How come you talk so clean? “Miranna”, not “Miranda”.9
Sandro Portelli. I noticed that people try to disguise whether they’re saying
a “t” or a “d”…for instance, when they’re supposed to say “andando”
[going].
Trippa. “Antanto”. That’s right. And for me this is…this is wrong. If I was
to narrate all this nonsense in dialect, I’d do it a lot better. I’d talk a lot less
and tell a lot more.
In a poem, Dante Bartolini apologizes (in ungrammatical spelling) for

his scant education: “che poca scuola o fatto lo sapete/ecco perché mi venco a
lamentare/la colpa chi la ha la indenterete…”.10 Like many central or
southern varieties of Italian, Terni’s dialect neutralizes the contrast
between voiced and unvoiced stops after a nasal consonant, and follows all
nasals with voiced consonants. Therefore, Dante cannot hear (and there-
fore spell) the difference between standard “intenderete” and “indenter-
ete.” Sometimes, this dilemma is solved by assimilating the voiced stops to
the nasal sound (Trippa’s “Miranna” for “Miranda”). Often, however,
speakers assume that what sounds right to them (nasal + voiced conso-
nant) is automatically wrong, and reverse the vernacular rule by following
all nasals with unvoiced stops (Dante’s “venco” for “vengo”). Many
speakers, in fact, are so much aware of the difficulty that they try to blur the
distinction: either by pronouncing the same word in a number of different
ways (I have heard the word andiamo [we go] pronounced, often by the
same person in the same conversation, in a number of different ways:
antiamo, andamo, annamo, anniamo, agnamo, as though hoping that at
least one attempt may prove correct), or by trying to generate an
uncommitted, “lax, half-voiced” sound, a sort of shwa that cannot be
pinned down (or transcribed).
I dwell on these linguistic minutiae because these strategies are a con-
sequence and a sign of an uncertain cultural status. The hesitant, whis-
pered, in-between, “half-voiced” sound, and the assumption of being
always wrong are the cultural expression of an ever unfinished transitional
social mobility and change, half way between country and town, dialect
and standard language, working and middle class, oral culture and
schooling or mass media. They are paralleled by incongruities and excesses
8 A. PORTELLI
in clothing, food, furniture: the wrong make-up of many young women;

the excess sugar in the cup of coffee offered to visitors; the elaborate
chandeliers and trinkets on the large TV sets and heavy furniture of
working-class living rooms. No wonder all requests for corrections came
from more status conscious, socially mobile interviewees, or from politi-
cized working-class “aristocracy” concerned with its public image.
Transcribing, says Willa K. Baum, is a work of art, close to translation,
though with less leeway (of course, in this version of the book, I am
translating transcriptions).11 In this process the historian becomes both
the writer/écrivain of his own text and the writer/editor/scripteur of
other people’s speech. Each act of transcription, from putting in a comma
upwards, is an act of interpretation. A good translation must first of all
function in the new language; often, it must distance itself from the
original text in order to preserve its quality and meaning; a good edited
transcription, however, has less leeway in that, while it must result in
readable writing, it also needs to remind readers of its oral and dialogic
origin. The ambivalence of oral history, then, also emerges in the double
form of respect for its sources: keeping intact and/or trying to make sure
that it functions on the page as it does on the tape; respecting the letter
and/or saving quality; respecting and violating at the same time the rules
of both orality and writing, and generating a constant tension between
the two—“If you decode this work and present it exactly as it is and all,
many of those who begin to read will not read until the end” (Azelio
Fulmini).
Everyday speech is language in progress, made of false starts, paratactic
corrections, broken and run-on sentences, repetitions, excesses, digres-
sions. It can be compared to what philologists call a variorum edition: a
text that includes all its earlier versions and preliminary materials. Some
“cleaning up” may be necessary, out of respect for the rights of the readers,
the self-representation of the speakers, and the space limitations of writing
and publishing. One strategy I used has been to only use words that the
interviewees had actually said, foreground those words that express what I
felt to be the speaker’s final intention, but also retain enough traces of the
“preliminary material” to allow readers to recognize the speakers’ work
with language and individual voices. Much is lost, much is altered; I trust,
however, that enough remains to convey a sense of how these words were
created and by whom.
3 MONTAGE
Luigi Castelli. I mean, my problems with that thing [the tape recorder] are
not that I didn’t know what to say, but because of a trait of my character,
that arises perhaps from a sense of uncertainty, or perhaps, better, from the
persistence of doubt. This is why I can no longer write. The moment I
write things, I feel that I’m leaving them behind; and saying them into a
tape recorder is also a way of freezing them. For instance: I like Musil, you
know, this boundless novel that was never finished because it couldn’t be
finished. Joyce says work in progress.12 This is why at first I think of psy-
chological motivations, psychoanalytical factors, then I realize it’s bullshit.
The fact is that I have a doubt that is an existential doubt, a historical
doubt. That is, what is true today perhaps tomorrow, as experience and
sensibility grows, might be something else.
Castelli’s “existential doubt” is not unlike oral discourse: an immaterial,

ephemeral and fragile, ever-changing state of thought and language.
Collecting oral narratives turns them into permanent objects; a recorded
interview is like a still from a moving film, a portrait that remains
unchanged while the subject evolves. And this is even more true as the
interviews are republished more than 30 years after they first appeared.
Castelli’s, however, is an uncomfortable position; doubting final truths
does not exempt us from seeking some temporary ground to stand on. As
Theodore Rosengarten says, in the transformation of oral stories into lit-
erature, something is lost and something is gained. Publication seems to
put an end to the process of creation and recreation and removes the story
from the narrator; yet, the stories are saved (I might add, with post facto
knowledge, that the creation and recreation goes on anyway, and some-
times incorporates the book itself in the process).13 Oral history is a vio-
lence perpetrated on the living material, and a condition for the renewal of
its life. Ambivalence, again.
Our culture, however, has created forms of expression that are intended
precisely to distill all the richness that lies in ambivalence and ambiguity.
The linguist Dennis Tedlock speaks of “oral history as poetry,” historian
Willa Baum describes oral history as “art”;14 Luigi Castelli evokes Musil
and Joyce: and Giuseppina Migliosi, an accomplished ladies’ seamstress,
resorts to a cliché that comes to life with unexpected meaning: “Better than
a novel, this life of mine.”
10 A. PORTELLI
Oral history is a tapestry of tales, a weaving of traditionally shared forms of

expression and individual invention in performance that makes oral dis-
course akin to literary creation. Narrative locates the event in the storyteller’s
experience and always bears the signs of the narrator’s presence. “Better than
a novel, this life of mine” draws attention less to the life than to the telling.15
If we listen to these tales as creative narratives rather than flat information,
we recognize the manipulations of personal and historical time, the focused
point of view as a mark of the narrator’s own position, a sound sense of
structure, a recurrent use of symbols. To force all this into the syntax of
conventional historical discourse is to violate its form and its meaning;
rather, we must allow the novelistic element of the oral narrative to infiltrate
the historical text and—retaining as much as possible of its referential reli-
ability—contaminate it with the literary impurity of its sources.
At the beginning of one of his novels, Heinrich Böll notes that such
concepts as “sources” and narrative “fluidity” are water metaphors. The
story, then, is constructed “in the way that a child uses when playing with
puddles: channeling the water from pool to pool, collecting it into a single
basin, driving it into a gutter or a pre-existing channel…”.16 Channeling
these narrative waters requires multiple interventions, a painstaking work of
cutting and pasting, that applies to each single phrase as well as to the text
as a whole. More than a novel, then, the process resembles film; a montage
in which the narrator’s voice is used as sparely as possible. Like in a film,
not all the filmed material is included in the finished product, not all is
presented in the order in which it was filmed; but nothing is included that
was not actually filmed (I did not put a single word into the narrators’
mouths that they didn’t actually use). The implicit covenant between
narrators, historians, and readers requires that all this work of selection and
montage be carried out in good faith, attempting to represent the meaning
of the documents and allowing the narrators and the scholarly community
the possibility of verification and control.
From the moment I began to deal with oral sources, I had Joseph
Conrad in mind. Like Conrad’s narrators in Lord Jim or Heart of Darkness,
oral historians assemble stories from the stories of other narrators, who told
them the stories because they knew they would retell them. The effort to
give narrative form to a whole town, mixing individual stories and archival
documents, personal memories and emotions, with stories from newspa-
pers and mass media, is also not unlike John Dos Passos’ USA—a montage
based on an associative logic of synchronic fragments interwoven with the

voices of individuals that stand out among the urban crowd. Yet, as I
became more and more involved in this work, I ended up turning Terni
into my own personal Yoknapatawpha, not imagined like William
Faulkner’s but equally imaginative.
The practice of montage breaks individual interviews into quotes and
fragments. The speakers’ position in the context is at least partly restored
by the interplay with other quotes, essential context notes, traces of the
dialogue with the interviewer (Arnaldo Lippi’s “perhaps you know,”
Angela Locci’s “my son,” Mario Gabrielli’s anxious “you understand?”),
references to the interview’s impact upon me. Also, the synchronic, hori-
zontal structure of the text helps us realize how certain personal stories and
symbols relate to shared narrative and symbolic forms. Ultimately, the final
structure of the montage reproduces the structure of individual interviews,
at least of the ones that influenced me most. In the first place, interviews
were my first source of information; I consulted written sources only later,
and use them as support, verification, complement, but the story is told by
and through the interviews, is constructed in the same associative, elliptical,
digressive form. Like most interviews, the text also proceeds in broad
chronological units, but inside each one the narrative may move forward
and back, often hinging upon a central episode or image that conveys the
meaning of the whole.
The analogy between individual interviews and the text as a whole also
follows the generational changes in the structure of memory and narrative.
Up to the 1940s the stories are honed by the art of memory, by repetition,
selection, synthesis; from the generation of the 1940s on, there has been
less time to forget and select; the mass of details often generates a narrative
in search of a form. While older narratives avail themselves of the art of
preindustrial oral tradition, more recent memories must deal with the loss
of points of reference in the changing urban, industrial, and political
structure; their discourse becomes increasingly nervous, hesitant, tense,
made of broken, unfinished, urgent units of serial cycles that return insis-
tently upon themselves. As this work was nearing completion I realized
that the montage reflected this evolution, and became more and more
elliptical and fragmented as we reached the present time and a new gen-
eration of storytellers took over the narrative.
12 A. PORTELLI
4 MEMORY AND IMAGINATION

Mario Conti.17 If one recounts a fact differently from how it happened,
perhaps unconsciously one was actually aiming for that. It was a desire he
had, and in which he also acted, probably. If it then did not materialize as
historical fact, because it was not achieved, yet what he is saying is what he
aimed at, perhaps.
Not all that is told in this book is true, but all was truly told. The tension
between the telling of the event and the event of the telling underlines the
process of memory as an active matrix of meanings. Remembering is a way
of distancing oneself from facts as they are, a way of resisting the
omnipotence of facts. As Walter Benjamin writes, an experienced event is
confined to the sphere of experience, but a remembered event is infinite,
because it is a key to all that happened before and after.18 What drew me to
oral history is less its reliability than the frequency and rich meaning of its
inventions, errors, breakaways from the materiality of facts. This is where
narrative becomes judgment, dream, desire. Thus, what follows is less the
reconstruction of a town’s history, through the birth, the apogee, and the
crisis of the industrial revolution, than a search for the relationship of its
citizens to this history.
“What I could never swallow is September 8 [1943],” the date of Italy’s
surrender and the beginning of German occupation, “because on
September 8, we could even have plucked the Germans’ hair from their
asses…we could have done anything. Instead—‘be calm’, ‘be calm’…It was
the same with the business with Togliatti—‘be calm’, ‘be calm’…while the
guards at the army Arsenal were ready to give us all the guns…” (Settimio
Piemonti).19 What might have happened on those crucial days is as
important, from this point of view, as what actually happened. This history
of “ifs” and “buts,” this weaving of memory and desire, is rooted in
“uchronia,” a narrative “in which the author imagines…an alternative
present, a sort of parallel universe in which the different development of a
historical event has radically altered the world as we know it.”20 Over and
over, Terni’s workers claim that history took a wrong turn at crucial
moments. The past could have been different—and therefore, so can the
future.
Possible history turns into imagined history. Decades after the fact, the
tales of the partisan battle at Poggio Bustone or the killing of factory
worker Luigi Trastulli resound with the emotions of then. They break from
the actual course of events to narrate instead what ought to have happened,
and in the gap between was, might, and should is couched the narrators’
judgment on their history and their own lives. We would know much less
about the meaning of all this history if we didn’t have these precious,
creative errors of memory.
NOTES
1. Amerigo Matteucci, recorded by Alessandro Portelli, Rosciano (Terni
province), May 1, 1973. All recordings and interviews cited in this book are
deposited and owned by the Archivio Sonoro “Franco Coggiola” of
Rome’s Circolo Gianni Bosio.
2. Giuliano Pajetta, “Prefazione” (Foreword) to I comunisti umbri. Scritti e
documenti, 1944–1970, Perugia, no date, p. xiii; Raffaele Rossi, Il PCI in
una regione rossa. Intervista sui comunisti umbri, Perugia, no date, p. 115.
3. “Partito, città e fabbrica,” in G. Pajetta, I comunisti umbri, p. 481.
4. APC, 1917–1940, f. 496.
5. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, La breve estate dell’anarchia, Milan,
Feltrinelli, 1978, pp. 13–14.
6. Jurij M. Lotman, Testo e contesto. Semiotica dell’arte e della cultura, Bari,
Dedalo, 1980, p. 24.
7. This is even more applicable to a translation like the present one, in which
the ultimate choice of words is the translator’s.
8. O. Maurizi, “Per la proprietà del dire,” Gioventù ternana, II, January
1943, n. 5.
9. Piediluco and Miranda are two nearby lake and mountain resorts.
10. “You know I had little schooling, which is why I complain; you know who
is to blame…”
11. Willa K. Baum, Transcribing and Editing Oral History, Nashville, Tenn.,
American Association of State and Local History, 1977, p. 6.
12. Said in English.
13. Theodore J. Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers. The Life of Nate Shaw, New
York, Vintage, 1974, p. xxv.
14. W.K. Baum, Transcribing and Editing; Dennis Tedlock, “Learning to
Listen: Oral History as Poetry,” Boundary, II (1975), n. 3, pp. 707–726.
15. Walter Benjamin, “Di alcuni motivi in Baudelaire,” in Angelus Novus,
Turin, Einaudi, 1962, p. 91.
16. Heinrich Böll, L’onore perduto di Katharina Blum, Torino, Einaudi, 1975,
p. 4.
17. All names within quotes are pseudonyms.
18. Walter Benjamin, “The Image of Proust,” Illuminations (1961), New
York, Shocken Books, 1969, p. 202.
14 A. PORTELLI
19. Palmiro Togliatti, Communist Party secretary, was shot and critically
wounded by a young Christian Democrat activist on July 14, 1948. Many
rank and file Party activists were ready for insurrection, but they were
stopped by the leadership.
20. Pierre Versins, “Les aventures de Cora,” in Entretiens sur la
paralittérature, ed. by J. Tortel, Paris, Plon, 1970, p. 275.
CHAPTER 2
The Red and the Black: Rebels, Patriots,

and Outlaws
1 APPOINTMENT IN TERNI
Elchide Trippa. This is the true history, because it’s the history I was told,
the tradition, from my grandfather. He said that his father told him that his
grandfather was a carbonaro1 that took part in the rebellion in Naples in
1827–1831. He had to flee, sought refuge first in Apulia, and then he
crossed the border between the Kingdom of Naples and the Pope’s states,
and came here. Which, I thought it was some kind of fairy tale; but my
grandfather was perfect, sharp, a lucid memory. He knew the Divine
Comedy by heart. He told me the exact place where his father told him he
had crossed the border; after the war, I hiked up the mountain, to the Salto
del Cieco [Blind Man’s Leap], and I personally verified what my grand-
father had told me. The border, the stone that separated the Kingdom of
Naples from the Pope’s states [was still there]. So I have no reason to
doubt my grandfather’s words.
When Elchide Trippa’s ancestor arrived there in the mid–1830s Terni

was a rural, “second-class” market town, with fewer than 10,000 inhabi-
tants.2 “Our first families—the Simonettis, the Setaccis, the Manasseis—
were nothing but farmers. They may have a title of nobility, but they were
country people. There were a few mansions, I guess; but even those…they
were not elegant residences” (Ilario Ciaurro). After the withdrawal of the
French in 1815, Terni reverted to the papal government. One of its first
acts was a sfamo del popolo, a distribution of bread to “appease the hunger

16 A. PORTELLI
of the people.” In 1816 Terni was ravaged by a typhus epidemic, only

alleviated by alms from the clergy and the aristocracy.
Arnaldo Lippi. My grandmother, to get a kilo of bread—back then, they

made the rounds of patrician houses on Saturdays to receive what they
called the centesimino.3 You know that the Manasseis, the Castellis, every
Saturday gave out alms. My grandmother was a wreathmaker, that is, she
wove the flower wreaths that were sold on holidays; she sold manure from
the stables, she’d carry bundles of wood for sale. There was nothing else
back then, so they had to buy firewood from the donkeys that brought it
down from the brush. They unloaded the wood, sold it, collected the
stable refuse, paid a penny, and my grandmother made manure, and
money. Meanwhile, she wove wreaths—she was a blasphemer, an absolute
atheist. Also, they say my grandfather, my father’s father, was an anarchist.
He was a shoemaker. He could feed his children only when a horse fell and
died; he’d go with his shoemaker’s knife out to the scortico4 at Porta
Romana, and get some horse meat. That was the only meat they knew.
Around 1830 Terni was a tangle of narrow alleys, orchards, a few

palaces, many churches, unclean and unlit. In 1850 it became a district
seat; in 1853 the population had grown to 13,000. It boasted a few new
buildings; a wool mill and an iron mill stood out among a web of small
tanneries, weaving mills, flour mills.5 “My grandmother died at ninety-one,
poor woman, she’d leave the house at 5 a.m., because the lords of Terni
made her attend masses for their dead, God damn their evil souls. They
gave her five, ten pennies for each mass she went to. Every morning, that
poor woman went up to Saint Peter’s or Saint Francis’—to recite the
prayers. And then, if one of them died, they’d give you a penny or two for
each child that came to the funeral, so they could claim that there was a big
crowd, that they were important” (Aurora).
“We couldn’t help but grow up as rebels, with grandmas like these”
(Arnaldo Lippi). Located on the border between the Kingdom of Naples
and the Pope’s states, connected to Rome through the Tiber river valley
and the old Roman roads—via Flaminia, via Salaria—Terni became a
natural hotbed of liberation ferment during the Risorgimento, Italy’s
struggle for independence and reunification. In 1831 the liberals attacked
the Vatican fortress at Rieti; in 1847 a revolt broke out “against the clergy
and the aristocracy, who are the cause of famine and hunger.”6
2 THE RED AND THE BLACK: REBELS, PATRIOTS, AND OUTLAWS 17
One of the leaders was Giovanni Froscianti, a small farmer from the
nearby hamlet of Collescipoli. “He was supposed to be studying for the
priesthood, and he ran away from the convent. He never said why; I guess
he no longer believed. There was a price upon his head; he ran to the
woods. And Garibaldi came by; and he joined Garibaldi” (Alba Froscianti).
He lived in the woods, on the mountaintops, among rocks and ravines, coal
sheds and caverns, always alone, always on the run. A feared avenger, an
elusive fugitive, he ran off singlehandedly bands of armed men who pursued
him to hang him…He slept with the hero [Garibaldi] on heaps of gold after
they conquered a kingdom and fabulous beautiful cities. He died on a straw
pallet, asking for nothing for himself but a branch of the pine tree that grows
on the steep hillsides of the isle of Caprera [where Garibaldi lived and died].7
Actually, Froscianti only joined Garibaldi in Rome in 1849, when he rallied

with dozens of other men from Terni (including future Terni mayor, Pietro
Faustini) to the defense of the short-lived Roman Republic. After Rome fell
to the French and the Pope was reinstated, Garibaldi took the road to the
north and was greeted as a hero in Terni: “those few men who were still in
Terni, we would pass on the information in secret, about what we could do
to help the garibaldini.”8 In 1853 count Federico Fratini led a small group
of conspirators in a failed insurrection; he ended up in the Pope’s jails for
13 years.
One night we raised a pole at least fifteen meters tall in the middle of the
square, and placed the tricolor flag on top. The next morning everybody was
gazing at it, bewildered, and wondered what that flag meant.
Two days later, a unit of “Spaniards” [the Pope’s mercenaries] pulled the tree
down and began to search and arrest. But one night, some petty officers had a
fight with the “Italians” [the patriots] and several Spaniards who had been
found drunk in the taverns were caught and dumped into the wells.9
Arnaldo Lippi. In Terni they had the so-called carbonari, and early, vague
ideas were in the air, based on the thought of Giuseppe Mazzini.10 In fact the
last man guillotined in Terni was this guy they called Sorcino; and he killed
the priest at Montefranco. He was one of the carbonari, conspirators for
Italian unity. To the Church he may be a bandit, but he was no bandit. They
had it all arranged: as soon as they shot this priest, those who we now call
comrades, back then perhaps they called them friends, they would give them
18 A. PORTELLI
an [alibi]. This is Terni history, for I heard it from my father, who was born
in 1860, and one of those who went to jail was an uncle of his, he spent
12 years in jail. The perpetrators were Sorcino and a comrade of his; his
comrade got religion, he was guillotined [first] and Sorcino was guillotined
next. To tell it, it seems like a fairy tale.11 There were no graveyards then; you
know [people who had been executed] could not be buried in churches, so they
had to inter him at the Passeggiata, the public park. And we were not allowed
to go under those trees because they were haunted by the ghost of Sorcino.
Ilario Ciaurro. A memory. A tavern, a wine cellar across from the

Passeggiata. One night some of these petty customers, a barber, a shoe-
maker, they were talking about the ghost. “The milk lady at San Martino
saw the ghost and she rushed home and had an abortion, from the fright
she took.” And this guy, a master mason, he was bored by these tales, so he
gets up, pays, and goes up to the park.
The mason’s name was Viola, and he was Sorcino’s accomplice, just out
of jail. “So Viola, he was my father’s uncle, he says, ‘All right, I’ll go talk to
him. We knew each other well, we were conspirators together…’”
(Arnaldo Lippi). On a bend of the road, he glimpses something white,
perhaps the moonlight in the trees. “He walks on; when he comes near this
vision, this sheet stirring in the night, the ghost speaks. First he speaks of
heaven and hell. Then he says, ‘Stay away, can’t you see I’m a ghost?’ But
Viola could see the lime on his shoes: ‘Since when do ghosts work con-
struction?’ He hit him with a stick, and the ghost crumbled and begged for
mercy: ‘I do it for my children, to earn a piece of bread…’ He says, ‘How
about working, for your bread?’ Viola picks him up and takes him to the
tavern. ‘Give him a drink, he needs it. And if you’re not on the job
tomorrow morning, you’re in trouble.’ This is the story. I didn’t make it
up. I wish I had, because it’s a good one” (Ilario Ciaurro).
In 1860 the Piedmontese soldiers, the vanguard of national unification,
entered Terni, greeted by the songs of the girls from the wool mill.12
Ironically, Terni—situated in the very inland core of the peninsula—was
now a frontier town between the newly established kingdom of Italy and
Rome, still under the Pope. Cut off from its market outlets in Rome, no
longer protected by the Pope’s customs, Terni’s economy was hurt by the
change. As a frontier outpost Terni became the jumping board for sorties to
liberate Rome, which Garibaldi’s followers pursued against the will of the
Italian government. “They came to Terni from all over Italy to join. My
uncle Nicola, I’ll show you his photograph, he fought [with Garibaldi] in the
battles of Montelibretti, Monterotondo and Mentana” (Agata Trinchi).13
In June 1867 105 men started toward Rome from the Faustini country
home; some were stopped by the Italian army before they reached the
border, the rest were rounded up by the Pope’s soldiers. On October 13
Menotti, Garibaldi’s son, led a column to Montelibretti; on the 20th, the
brothers Enrico and Giovanni Cairoli started out from the Fratini home to
join a rebellion that had begun in Rome; the rebellion failed, they were
killed, and are remembered as two of the most cherished martyrs of the
Risorgimento. Two days later, Giuseppe Garibaldi gathered an army of
volunteers in Terni; in a few days they occupied Monterotondo, on the
Sabine Hills facing Rome, but were tragically defeated in a battle at
Mentana, where seventeen men from Terni also fell.14 The tradition of the
garibaldini would later be reinforced by immigrants that came from tra-
ditionally republican Romagna, to work in the factories of Terni.
Isolina Bastoni. Grandma was a Socialist, she always fought for her ideas.
She came from a peasant family, near Ravenna. The Bastonis [my father’s
family] were well to do, they had two cardinals and a bishop in the family,
and my father’s father was the only one in the family that was for Garibaldi.
He joined Garibaldi, and went away with him on the day he married my
grandmother. She was fourteen, and he was eighteen. They eloped, because
his family didn’t want him to marry her, she was a peasant, she worked in the
fields. After the wedding he gets dressed and says, “I’m going out to buy
some meat. Wait here.” Instead, he ran into Garibaldi, who was on his way to
Sicily with his band, and he up and went to Sicily. That poor woman
remained three days, locked in the house, waiting for her husband who had
gone shopping for meat. He came back after a long time. He had been in the
war. Then his family disinherited him. And they came down to Terni.
Joining Garibaldi is always remembered as a break from the family. The
Trinchi brothers “joined Garibaldi without telling their parents; they left a
letter and went” (Agata Trinchi). Giovanni Froscianti “bled” his family
fortune by giving it all for the cause. The garibaldini “were wild, irregu-
lar,” says Gino Paiella, parson of Collescipoli, they broke family ties to join
an adventurous rebel in his wanderings all over Italy. In time, however,
these stories that started with a break from the family become mythic
narratives of family pride.
“Some say that Garibaldi was joined only by people in search of
adventures…Not so, because our family was not like this, was not like this.
20 A. PORTELLI
They went because they yearned for this patriotic cause” (Agata Trinchi).
“What we boast about,” says Silvia Bonifazi, teenage descendant of
Federico Fratini, “is not his conflict with the Pope [who kept him 13 years
in jail], but his friendship and affection for Mazzini, Garibaldi, and all. His
time in prison—this great-grandfather fell ill in jail, he refused a pardon…
—we don’t talk much about that.” At the time, the followers of Garibaldi
and Mazzini were perceived as radicals, rebels, enemies of the Church and
the King. After independence and unification, their radicalism and
anti-conformism (which had been shared by most of their Terni followers)
was forgotten and the garibaldini were turned into harmless patriotic
icons. With time, the veterans of the wars of liberation and unification were
reduced to a boring, slightly ridiculous institution, paraded on public
occasions, fewer and fewer each year.
Ilario Ciaurro. I only met the very last survivors. They were a bunch of
madcaps, of Republicans. We made fun of them, I admit. There were
garibaldini who had never been with Garibaldi, but every holiday, they’d
shout: “red shirt!” In school, we had a janitor who claimed he had been [in
the battle of] Villa Glori. His name was Mancinetti, and we’d jeer at him
—“Mancine’, is it true that when the beans were all eaten you turned
around and walked home?”
“They didn’t understand a thing, politically. Only thing, they wore the
red shirt, they were garibaldini, and this was all. My grandfather had one,
full of holes that I think he made to pretend they were from bullets”
(Giuseppe Giovannetti). But they were also the ancestors of future rebels:
Giuseppe Giovannetti, the grandson of a garibaldino, was a founder of
Terni’s Communist Party.
2 NO PRIESTS AND NO CROSSES

Arnaldo Lippi. We were part of the Pope’s state. My father, the worst
insult you could tell him, was if you called him papalino [a subject of the
Pope]. He was born in 1860, March 13, after the regnicoli [the Italian
Kingdom dwellers] had come. A Republican, yet he’d rather be called the
subject of a king than the Pope’s. Consequently, growing up in this kind of
environment, I could only grow up a rebel. Partly by instinct—because my
family was poor. My father, for instance, five children. I, son of a
40-year-old woman: my mother died after she made me, trying to get an
abortion. I wouldn’t call it anarchism. Rather a sense of independence that

had no real sense of direction…
In 1889 Terni had its first (short-lived) working-class paper. It was called Il
Banderaro, the flag bearer, in memory of the revolt of 1564, when the
bourgeoisie and the people invaded the homes of the aristocracy and killed
a few, in protest against the abolition of the banderari, the representatives
of the non-aristocratic classes. The memory of merciless repression oper-
ated by the Pope’s envoy, Monte dei Valenti, lives on: “How many he
killed, nobody knows, guilty or not. He exposed the skulls of the beheaded
on the City Hall gate, as a warning” (Guerriero Bolli). “Terni’s banderari,”
wrote the paper named after them, “are the sons of the same people who
rise again today in the spirit of modern life, with only one thought in mind:
to restore and reaffirm the strength of the working classes.”15
Ilario Ciaurro. I went to the church of San Giovanni before they tore it
down. And I saw those ancient gurneys, hearses, a whole lot of trash. And I
picked up a pace [a “peace maker”], one of those crosses they gave to the
condemned to kiss before they executed them. “Put it down, put it down,
it’s stained with blood!” It was a beautiful piece: bronze, silver. And the
workers [that were demolishing] the church, the masons—“Put it down
put it down, it’s stained with blood.”
After Italian unification and independence, the anti-Church resentment

of the popular classes was echoed by the lay liberalism of the elite.
Anticlerical organizations ran for office on platforms of “Anticlericalism and
change”; public religious functions outside churches were forbidden.16
“The garibaldini ran all the taverns, they sold the wine. Actions against the
Church went on as long as these old people lived. The Republicans were
hard drinkers, often drunk; but they fought the Church hardest of all”
(Giuseppe Giovannetti). Throughout the last decades of the century there
were attempts against Church institutions; a priest was attacked for not
ringing the bells on September 20, the Republican holiday that commem-
orated the liberation of Rome from the Pope’s domain. Gianni Colasanti, a
Catholic priest, sums it up: “In the late years of the nineteenth century the
Church had an underground existence in Terni, like the catacombs. The
Church was afraid to appear in public, so all its life was carried on inside the
church, without preaching. This left the Christian people somewhat lacking
in religious culture; it was more a ritual religion than one that engaged the
22 A. PORTELLI
cultural, the theological, the social arenas.” Yet, the Church retained a hold
on education and on assistance to the sick and the poor. Il Messaggero, a
(then) liberal Rome-based daily, wrote in its local page that priests “with
admirable patience, are slowly trying to regain lost ground even in this
town,” taking advantage of poverty and the lack of public charities.17
“You might see some rare priests slinking close to the walls, lest someone
dropped stuff on their heads. Worse still, people didn’t go to church any-
more. So they invited famous preachers to town. People went, heard the
sermon, appreciated the eloquence, but wouldn’t go to church. So they
resorted to less noble expedients. Virgin Mary appeared on top of a walnut
tree. Everybody went, they watched it, drank a quart of wine, went
home, and never went to Mass. Then, the blinking Madonna, the icon that’s
in the cathedral. People went to look at it, I remember, with smoked pieces
of glass to check if she really blinked. They staged rituals, processions, I saw
them myself, before 1900. And people would say, ‘Get them lousy priests
off of me, get them lousy priests off my back.’” (Ilario Ciaurro). “Once
they had the nerve to stage a procession, with the school children all in a
row. They started from the Cathedral and came up to the square then to
Corso Tacito.18 So five or six comrades bought a bunch of candies and stuff,
and went up on the rooftops. When the children marched by—they saw
candy maybe once a year, if ever—[they dropped them]. It was a shambles,
kids climbing on top of each other…That was the end of public processions”
(Riziero Manconi). Only on rare occasions—the death of one of the foun-
ders of the steel works, or the killing of King Umberto I by anarchist
Gaetano Bresci19—did the authorities allow public celebrations.
Workers, however, remained ambivalent toward religion. In 1914, the
syndicalist paper La Sommossa [The Revolt] complained: “Too many
mothers, wives of comrades of ours, without their men’s consent, send
their children to church, to communion, to confirmation…” Vanda, a
textile worker, replied: “You anticlericalists don’t allow your wives to go to
church and beat them if they do, but it never occurs to you to discuss your
ideas with them.”20
Angela Locci. I was the godmother of the [red] flag. They dressed me in
red, with a bow, and set out sandwiches, donuts, wine. They put me on top
of a table, I made a little speech, and I was the flag’s godmother. I said, “I
love the flag as I love my mother; I love the flag and I love Socialism like a
mother loves her children.” And they all embraced me, and all. I mean, I
was a child.
As late as 1951, Lucilla Galeazzi, a steel worker’s daughter and one of

Italy’s finest folk singers, was “baptized” with a bottle of wine and a red
flag in the Communist Party local. Yet, her brother Franco Galeazzi recalls:
“We were Communists because we were instinctively opposed to the
arrogant, oppressive behavior of certain dominant classes; but our culture
was Catholic, in our family we didn’t question the sacraments as some
bourgeois families did. I remember that they made us take the first com-
munion, and we would make the rounds of churches for seven weeks
afterwards.” “The few times you saw men inside a church were baptisms,
confirmations. Because you do baptize your children, confirmation was a
grand feast. The confirmand was driven to the cathedral in a carriage. And
nobody would do without this because it was a matter of status” (Guerriero
Bolli). “I was the chaplain of the steel works and the Papigno [chemical
works] from 1966 to 1976. All workers valued their children’s sacramental
lives. When I made the rounds of the factory for the Easter blessings, I
never found one who was not nice to me—they’d call me from the top of a
gantry crane, say, ‘Don’t leave me out!’ I wondered how much of this was
just ritual, or a sense of the sacred? I believe that deep in their souls there
was a sense of mystery, of the divine, even though perhaps faint, vague”
(Gianni Colasanti).21
To counter the appeal of the Church’s pomp and ritual, “the sugges-
tions of the supernatural and of mystic choreography,” the workers’
movements created their own rituals. The cultural class struggle was waged
over the rites of passage of the life cycle (baptizing, naming, funerals) and
of the year’s cycle of festivities. The working-class calendar was marked by
such secular dates as the anniversaries of the Perugia insurrection against
the Pope’s government (June 20, 1859), Garibaldi’s battle at Mentana
(November 3, 1867), the liberation of Rome (September 20, 1870), the
founding of the Roman Republic (April 30, 1849) and, after 1885, May
Day. The struggle over rituals and dates often took tangible and dramatic
forms. In 1902 the striking farm workers and tenants in nearby Narni
demanded “the right to celebrate May Day.”22 Arnaldo Lippi remembered
when the workers of the Grüber wool mill asked the manager to give them
a day off on November 2—day of remembrance of the dead—rather than
November 1, All Saints’ Day. The manager refused.
Arnaldo Lippi. They said: “Look, we have no saints among us, but we do
have our dead. And we want to commemorate them.” As he said this, my
father was in tears, for in 1903 my mother had died. So they told him:
24 A. PORTELLI
“Tomorrow morning [All Saints’ Day] we’re all coming to the factory gates
to work.” The factory whistle doesn’t blow, the workers—mostly women—
mass at the gates and find them locked. The next day, November 2, nobody
goes to work. The gates open; nobody goes in. Next day, the boss declares a
lockout. And it lasted, this lockout, for months. People went hungry.
“[Romeo] Magrelli, [Arturo] Luna [socialist activists] when they died [in
the 1930s] were buried with nothing but a brick on the grave. Instead of a
cross. When Luna died, his comrades were arrested, for being at the funeral”
(Bruno Zenoni). In 1946, on Anarchist Federation stationery, Remo
Borzacchini wrote his final will: “In case of my demise I do not want the
priest to interfere with my funeral because I want my comrades to perform all
that the anarchist feeling requires on such occasions…No priests and no
crosses.”23 Borzacchini insisted that “This will be read to my family so that
they respect my desires.” Indeed, the struggle over ritual also divided fam-
ilies: “My uncle was a follower of Mazzini, he refused priests and all. But, his
children, in secret, his wife baptized them” (Emidio Pasquini). “I could tell
you that when my mother died in 1954, we asked both the Socialist local and
the priest, because she was a believer. The priest refused and left, we had a lay
funeral. It was the priest’s decision, not ours” (Comunardo Tobia).
Workers often refused to name their children after Catholic saints. They
chose names like Acciaro (steel) or Diname, to express professional pride;
Calfiero and Bakunin (after anarchist heroes of the 1800s), Comunardo (after
the revolutionary Paris Commune), Solidea (sole idea), Pensiero (thought),
Libero (free), Germinal (from an Emile Zola novel), Menotti (after a
Risorgimento martyr), even Dinamite, to represent their radical heritage.
Patriotism generated names like Trento (a town retrieved by Italy after
World War I), Vittoria, Guerriero (warrior: “I was born in 1915; only those
born in 1915 were named Guerriero,” Guerriero Bolli). A proletarian is
someone who owns nothing but his children; naming them was the only
possible act of creative individuation by people who never possessed the fruits
of their labor. They etched in their children’s names a dream of beauty, poetry,
humor (Dazio and Consumo [Tax and Duty]; Finimola [vernacular for let’s
put an end to this], for late female daughters of large families), or simply
lofty-sounding echoes of literary derivation (Agamante, Alfeo, Orneore).
Comunardo Tobia. I am the youngest of seven children. [Their names] are

a history in themselves: Ribelle (rebel); Veraspiritanova (true new spirit);
Libero Avanti (free, forward); Pensiero (thought); Ideale; Vero (true); and
Comunardo. My brother was baptized under the red flag in 1904; the local
secretary welcomed this child to life in the presence of the flag, with a
bottle of wine, what they had. Of course, with the rise of Fascism this
family was victimized. My oldest brother’s name was changed by the
authorities, from Ribelle to Renzo. I was called up several times to change
my name; I’d just say, “Go ahead, change it yourselves.” But there was a
tax [on name changes] so I said, “I don’t have the money.” So I held on to
it until the end.
The anarchist Remo Borzacchini named his son Baconin, after the
founder of Anarchism. When the boy became a famous racing car driver,
the name became an embarrassment. In 1930, under Fascism, after he won
a race in the presence of the royal family, “they baptized him and named
him Mario Umberto Borzacchini,” after Prince Umberto di Savoia and
Queen Maria José.24 By then, the conflict between the Italian state born of
the anticlerical Risorgimento and the Church had been resolved by the
1929 pact between Fascism and the Vatican; laicism and anticlericalism
were no longer the doctrines of the state. When even the Communists
voted for the inclusion of the pact in the democratic Constitution of 1948,
anticlericalism also lost the official sanction of the workers’ political rep-
resentatives. Yet, it left a trace in the culture of the people.
Alberto Petrini. One day I was at home, I was reading an article in l’Unità
[the Communist Party daily] that was a bit difficult—for me, at least. It was
after lunch, I heard the bell ring. I was getting dressed, so my mother
opened the door. I was still thinking about the article, trying to re-read it.
And my mother—“What a lovely day, what a lovely day, aren’t you going
out? Such a lovely day…” She said it over and over, I got suspicious. After a
while, the bell rings again. This time I got up and opened the door. It was
the priest, all decked up [for the Easter house blessing]. I say, “What do
you want?” “Well, the lady…” She had told him I wouldn’t be home.
“Here there is no lady, only the lord. And the lord is me: in heaven, on
earth and everywhere. Remember my name and don’t you dare ring at this
door again.” He blushed and left and never came back. He had the nerve
to ask my mother, “Madam, is that how you raised your sons?” And she
says, “Well, I raised them right, they’re not criminals or anything, they’re
workers.” And she never went to church again, after he insulted her sons.
Some say we ought to put an end to these attitudes. Forget it. Dialogue
with Catholics, me?25 Let others do it, I never will.
26 A. PORTELLI
Father Gino Paiella. All right, I’ll tell you the story of this man, Tamburo,
who lived across the street from the church. He and his wife, you could see
them from here, they were at it all the time fighting, cursing, and all. He
used to come to the village to get the dishwashing water for his pigs, and
would stop a while for a game of cards. I used to walk him home, as a
friend. So he falls ill, with a cancer in his stomach. The secretary of Catholic
Action from Terni calls me and says, he already refused [the last rites from]
three priests. “Please, go to him and try.” I had this little broken down
jalopy, perhaps you remember it, soon as I came up the lane to his door I
got off and stood at his bedroom door. He says: “Are you here as a friend
or as a priest?” I say, “Look, when I used to watch you play cards, I was
there as a friend, and as a friend I come now.” “Well, come in.”
When his wife saw that he was dozing, she told him, “Tambu’, now that
Don Gino is here, why don’t we get him to put us right?” Because they
weren’t even married in church. He gets real mad, and I say, “Take it easy,
I only came to see you as a friend. Come on, Nina, forget it.” Then I says,
“I’m going home. If you like, I can come back tomorrow and we talk.”
The next day, on purpose, I didn’t go but sent my secretary. Soon as he
sees her, “Wasn’t that rascal Don Gino supposed to come? How come he
didn’t?” When I heard about it I said, “Thank you Lord, he is caught. It’s
done.” After a few nights, I go, and he says, “Don Gino, I can’t take it
anymore. Put me right with God.” I look at him—I was checking how far
gone he was, too. And I say, “Listen, this is not what I’m here for. So far,
I’m here as a friend. If you wish, I can come back tomorrow morning and
we’ll take care of it all.” And I remember, I can still hear his words
sounding in my ear: “Remember, if I die in this state, it’s your fault.”
He didn’t sleep for the pains, and for waiting for me; and I didn’t sleep
because I couldn’t wait for the dawn to run to him. At 6 o’clock sharp, there I
was. I gave him confession, I gave her confession, I gave both communion, I
anointed him with consecrated oil, and he lay down like an angel. “You made
my peace with God, I’m so happy…” It was such a scene…But there have
been many. In forty-three years as a priest and a parson, there were many.
Thank God, I was able to accompany them to the doors of eternity—all.
3 EITHER A PRIEST OR AN OUTLAW

“They used to say, a farm boy, a village boy, if he wanted to get ahead in
society had to grow up to become either a priest or a carabiniere.26 I would
add: or an outlaw. That was a way out of poverty” (Guerriero Bolli). “This
guy, Lelletto, he was a bounty killer, back then. He would kill for the
highest payer. But in the end the bosses killed him, back then. They got
him—my grandfather, may he rest in peace, was with him—they got him
drunk, stabbed him seventeen times and dumped him down the creek at
Cospea. The bosses killed him, the lords of those times” (Umberto
Catana). “My father-in-law used to tell me about this outlaw, in the plains
toward Viterbo, which are more fertile, so to speak, with outlaws. This
young man came up and he wanted to join the gang. He says, ‘Try me, see
if I can do things, try me.’ At some point, the mother of this apprentice
outlaw came up, brought him his dinner, and turned around to go home.
He turned to the [chief] outlaw and said, ‘Come see.’ He picks up his rifle,
shoots his mother and kills her. So the outlaw says, ‘OK, you can join me,
because you’re a man I can [rely on].’” (Guerriero Bolli).
“If you cross Castagna and don’t get skinned/Either Martorello dozed
or Monicantonio was asleep” (Settimio Piemonti). Castagna, a mysterious
place of witches and crimes, hangout of the mythic Sorcino, is a mountain
pass on the road to Spoleto and Romagna, the main road for migrants and
traders to and from Terni. Outlaws roosted on all the roads round the
town. Between Piedimoggio and Marmore, on the opposite side of the
Nera river valley, “between the river and the wood” (Anita Menichelli),
outlaws ambushed the travelers that rode their mules from Rieti. Gangs
roamed between Terni and Viterbo, on the shepherds’ trails from the hills
of Sabina to the plains of Latium: “Gasperone27 had taken to the woods;
he followed the shepherds, and lived off them: ‘We’re outlaws, give us your
cheese,’ ‘Give us a lamb.’ And they had to give them cheese or a lamb, and
if they complained they were in trouble. The outlaws lasted until 1917,
1918, or so” (Giovanni Salvati). The most famous highwaymen—Luciano
Cocchi and Angelo Sebastiani (a.k.a. Longhi) —haunted Castagna, but
lived right in town, in the shadow of the steelworks.
Diname Colesanti. I knew them well: Longhi and Cocchi. They killed,
they robbed, they stole from travelers. People disappeared. Once, they
killed twelve friars in a convent. They made one of them, the prior, hold
the basin that caught the blood, like when they kill hogs. They told him
they wouldn’t kill him, but instead in the end they slaughtered him, too,
and stole everything.
28 A. PORTELLI
Settimio Piemonti. At the time of the [1907] lockout, my father had a

vegetable garden, he rented a piece of land. When Sunday came around,
eight or ten friends would work together, hoeing Piemonti’s garden a week
and someone else’s the next. And one day, he joined them, too: Cocchi.
They kept asking him, so he told them about the time he killed the
romagnoli. The romagnoli brought wine [from Romagna] and brought
back oil. The highwaymen were waiting, because they knew they had been
paid but hadn’t spent the money yet. So they followed them, and killed
them. But all they got was small change. He said, “That’s the only thing I’ll
repent of until I die.”
Diname Colesanti. Grandma said that once a rich man who had gone to
the fair in Terni went through Castagna, and he had a wallet full of money.
He was riding grandma’s father’s cart. Along the way, they stopped by this
trattoria, where everybody stopped. And it was the den of all these out-
laws. Travelers would stop there, eat, and then [the outlaws] disembow-
eled them. They’d put them in the oven, the victims. So this man eats,
drinks, and gets ready to pay—a wallet full of money. He climbed the cart,
and two bandits jumped him and cut his head off—with an ax. They say
that the head kept bouncing, on the floor, like a fawn. And then, suddenly,
rain, thunder, lightning. A terror. So they swore they would no longer cut
people’s heads off.
Luisa Roberti. 28 Longhi always said: “I, what I’ve done, I don’t repent of
anything, killing those twelve friars, nothing. I am only sorry for that little
schoolteacher, her father and mother.” He said, “I came in through the
chimney…” The mother, holding the bag with the money, says, “Here is
the money, kill me and my husband, spare our daughter.” Instead, he
unbars the door, lets all the rest of the gang in, they had covered their
faces with sour-cherry juice, they were masked. They laid [the girl] down
on the ground; what they did…And then they killed her. And then he
killed the husband, and [the mother]. He said, “I’ve repented, it’s always
on my mind, all the time.” He said this all the time.
Diname Colesanti. [Cocchi] was old, I remember him as an old man, with
a beard this long, the eyes dilated. He was a fright, I mean. He wasn’t ugly,
though. A bit bent; skin as white as milk. You know what he did? He killed
vipers, cut them open from head to tail, then with his knife he cut off all the
fat. He smeared snake fat all over himself. He never caught pneumonia.
Mario Fagioletti. Longhi was an artist. He was an umbrella maker, a

shoemaker, a mattress maker. I remember that I was five years old or so. He
was a blacksmith, he had one of those forges you work with bellows. Behind
his door, there must have been fifty rifles, the kind you still see sometimes,
with bell-shaped barrels. Blunderbusses, like the outlaws used. He fixed
them. He was a man of all trades; he learned in jail. [Cocchi] kept a snake in
his garden, a big snake this long. The snake ate bugs and parasites. He kept it
in a hut, fed it, and when he called it, it went. He walked around at night,
after twilight, you’d see him walk this way, always carrying a stick, a juniper
stick. He hits you with that, you’re a goner, I mean.
Stories of buried treasures flourish around the memory of outlaws and

highwaymen. For a long time, treasure hunters dug around the former
wilderness near the steelworks; others believed that gold was hidden in the
walls of the old town.
Giuseppe Laureti. I own a storage space that is old and ancient; it used to
be a tavern, it still has the grotto and the chimney. That is where the
outlaws’d take their loot. At night, in there, they’d off someone; in the
morning, the owner would come to the door—“fresh meat!” So one day I
got a notion: I got a pickax and started tearing down the wall. Soon as I
remove a stone, I see a niche—hooks, timbers…I say, “There may be pots
of gold or something in here, I might get lucky.” But it had already been
stolen. You know the […] family, they’re big shots. They got rich by
banditry. But there’s a curse on them, though. They own land, they own
palaces; their ancestors killed, and they inherited this fortune. And yet, it’s
three sisters; two are already dead, and the only one that’s left will leave
everything to the Church.
NOTES
1. A nineteenth century conspirator for Italian independence. Carbonaro
means coalman, because they called their secret cells “coal cellars.”
2. Luigi Bifani Sconocchia, “Terni nel 1831,” Terni. Rassegna del Comune,
III, January–June, 1961, no. 1–3, pp. 25–30.
3. A penny.
4. The “skinning” place.
5. Renato Covino and Giampaolo Gallo, “Appunti per una mostra sulla storia di
Terni fra ‘800 e ‘900,” Indagini, XVII, June 1982, pp. 14–18; Arrigo
Bortolotti, L’economia di Terni dal 1700 ai giorni nostri, Terni, Thyrus, 1960.
30 A. PORTELLI
6. Elia Rossi Passavanti, Sommario della storia di Terni dalle origini all’Impero
Fascista, Roma, Damasso, 1938, p. 439.
7. Italo Ciaurro, L’Umbria nel Risorgimento, Firenze, Cappelli, 1963, p. 175.
8. Il Messaggero, January 28, 1927, interview with Fortunato Sapora
(b. 1827), one of the town’s oldest citizens.
9. ibid.
10. On Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872), the leading ideologue of the Italian
Risorgimento see Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini, Yale University Press, 1996.
11. “It is known through the memory of the heirs that Don Filippo Cattani,
from Montefranco, ordained on January 26, 1848, was smothered to death
by creditors in Terni”: letter by Don Vincenzo Alimenti, parson of
Montefranco, April 14, 1981. According to Don Alimenti, people in
Montefranco connect this event to the outlaw Sorcino, but there is no
documentary evidence. Arnaldo Lippi may be collating this episode with
the killing of another priest in Terni in 1886, supposedly by Republicans
(anonymous letter to the prefect of Perugia, ACS, ACP, m1901, b. 174, f.
15846). Rome was finally taken by the Italian soldiers in 1870.
12. Augusto Mezzetti, I miei ricordi delle campagne del 1866–67, Terni,
Tipografia Cooperativa, 1901, p. 11.
13. In 1867 Garibaldi marched a column from Terni toward Rome. After
defeating the Pope’s soldiers at Montelibretti and occupying the key
stronghold of Monterotondo, they were routed by better-armed French
troops sent in defense of the Pope.
14. Andrea Giardi, “Il movimento garibaldino a Terni dalla Repubblica
Romana a Mentana,” in VV. AA., Garibaldi e il movimento garibaldino a
Terni, published by the City of Terni, 1982. I grew up in the Collescipoli
parish and went to school in Terni from the first to thirteenth grades. Not
once was this history ever mentioned.
15. Il Banderaro, September 22, 1889. On the 1564 rebellion see Gianfranco
Canali and Gisa Giani, “Evoluzione e involuzione delle prime forme di
democrazia municipale a Terni,” Indagini. XX, March 1983, pp. 33–40.
16. Francesco Alunni Pierucci, Il socialismo in Umbria: testimonianze e ricordi:
1860–1920, Perugia, Giostrelli, 1960, p. 73.
17. Il Messaggero, October 9, 1891; L’Unione Liberale, March 31–April 1,
1881.
18. The new Main Street, inaugurated in 1870, joining the main city square to
the new railroad station.
19. Gaetano Bresci, an anarchist, had migrated from Tuscany to work in the
textile mills of Paterson, New Jersey. He went back to Italy in 1900 and on
July 29 killed King Umberto I, as a revenge for the massacre perpetrated in
Milan by the army on the striking workers in 1899. He died in jail in 1901.
20. A. Tiberi, “’Emancipazione della donna in famiglia,” La Sommossa, June

26, 1914; reply by Vanda, a worker from the Centurini textile mill, July 19,
1914; La Turbina, May 25, 1901.
21. Pope John Paul II visited the Terni steel mills in 1981. Don Colasanti
recalls that the expected tension between the Pope and the left-wing
workers did not materialize.
22. F. Bogliari, Il movimento contadino in Umbria, Milan 1979, pp. 201–202.
23. ANPI, papers of Giuseppe Domiziani, 1946.
24. Remo Tomassini, Borzacchini. L’uomo, il pilota, il suo tempo, Terni,
CESTRES (Centro Ricerche Storiche Economiche e Sociali), 1983, pp. 17,
47. The boulevard that leads to the city stadium is today named Mario
Umberto Borzacchini. I asked the authorities to restore his real name, but
got no answer.
25. “Dialogue with the Catholics” was the official Communist party line at the
time of the interview.
26. A militarized police corps.
27. Antonio Gasbarrone (1793–1880), a famous outlaw from Lazio.
28. A pseudonym. The narrator asked not to use her name because she had
sworn to the outlaws that she would never reveal what she knew of them.
CHAPTER 3
How Green Was My Valley: Feudal

Landlords and Struggling Peasants
1 MEMORIES OF FEUDALISM
Guerriero Bolli. The Patrizi family, Patrizi-Montoro. They were the old
feudal landlords of Montoro. And there’s a whole mythology about these
noble folks, these aristocrats. You know that Napoleon abolished fiefdoms,
and when Pope Pius VII came back from exile in 1816 he [confirmed the
abolition]; however, the head of the Patrizi family was a great woman, I’d
say a great businessman, Porzia Patrizi. She started buying up all she could
so that though they were no longer the feudal lords, yet they actually
owned everything.
Montoro, at the mouth of the Nera river valley as it opens on the Latium
plains toward Rome, is a rural village about ten miles from Terni. As late as
1946 a writer for the Communist daily l’Unità reported: “Montoro has the
peculiarity of belonging to a sole owner. ‘Who owns those woods and the
pheasants that circle over them?’ ‘It’s Marquis Patrizi’s hunting reserve.’
‘And the fields nearby?’ ‘Patrizi.’ ‘And these other fields, to our right?’
‘Patrizi’… I’m thirsty, drink at a fountain, and ask a man, ‘This is public
property, I hope.’ ‘No, that, too, belongs to Patrizi.’”1
“He had an estate of several thousand hectares. They owned fifty farm
houses, a huge estate, very modern. Not anymore; nowadays, there are no
hands left to work it. Yes, they made some changes, they planted dozens of
hectares of vineyards, they sell wine, which is not bad either. But the
splendor is gone” (Guerriero Bolli). They had a paternalistic relationship
with the people who lived and worked on their land (some families for a

34 A. PORTELLI
hundred years). “There was no resentment or hatred. Well, there may have
been some. Once in a while, someone would leave turds on their
doorstep. But mainly they helped people” (Bolli). In the early 1900s,
renters and sharecroppers signed a lease that granted the Patrizi family the
right to evict them at will, at any time of the year, with no warning or
recourse to the magistrates.2
Guerriero Bolli. Every morning, the foreman made the rounds and called
the workers—“All right, come to the works.” Often, he would skip a door.
He’d go by but didn’t call them. And they would miss [the day’s pay]. And
you know, a day goes by, another goes by, and you’re not called, what does
it mean? What’s going on? And the wife would ask, “How come they’re
not calling you? Have you done something wrong? Did you talk back, did
you say bad things about the priest? Did you forget to take your hat off to
the nuns? Did you talk about the foreman?” It was a sort of slavery, in
practice. All this ends when the [factories] come. The Terni company has
redeemed these lands.3
In the late 1800s, some urban families managed to buy land and made
changes in crops: less cereal, more vineyards and olive trees. But the
relationship between landholders and sharecroppers remained the same. In
Umbria rural property has historically been polarized between very small
parcels and huge landed estates. Mezzadria, a form of sharecropping,
prevailed, with the partial exception of the areas near Terni, where small
independent farms prevailed until they were swallowed by industrialization.
Thus, the image of the feudal landlord remains the dominant icon in the
memories of the rural past. At the opposite end of the valley, the stories of
Baron Paolo Franchetti, landholder and owner of a tobacco plant, enter
folklore and oral tradition.
Francesco Carocci. Baron Franchetti, peace be to his soul, owned seven

sheep; and kept a shepherd. He told his watchman that every time the
shepherd took the sheep on Baron Franchetti’s land, he should fine him for
trespassing. For fun, to have a laugh at the expense of the poor. The
shepherd goes, the watchman fines him, he pays and asks for a receipt.
[The Baron] says, “Fine him again, see what he does.” And [the shepherd]
pays the fine and asks for a receipt. It happens seven or eight times, always
the same. One morning, Baron Franchetti was in bed, and they call him:
“Sir, the shepherd is loading the sheep on a truck.” So he goes, says, “How
3 HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY: FEUDAL LANDLORDS … 35
dare you load my sheep?” “I’m loading them” he says, “because they are
mine, not yours.” “What do you mean, yours?” He says: “Look, every time
I trespassed you fined me, see the receipts. Can the sheep be yours? They’re
mine!” They went to court, everyone knew the sheep belonged to the
Baron; but by law the Baron lost the suit because the shepherd had the
receipts, showed them to the judge, and Baron Franchetti lost the suit.
“The tenants of Baron Franchetti, a.k.a. Mustafà, live in mere tukuls,”4

writes l’Unità in 1947. Avanguardia, a Socialist youth paper, writes:
“Hired like slaves in nearby Marche, [seasonal workers and croppers]
realize as soon as they arrive that they have been deceived: crumbling
houses, without windows, without any civilized facility… At the end of the
season, each tenant finds himself in debt and the kind Baron provides
rotten corn at usury rates.”5 “They thought we were animals that only
existed to fatten the master’s wallet. There was no distinction there, if you
were a woman, whether you were pregnant or not pregnant, married or
not married. The treatment was like beasts, because you existed only to
produce,” says Liliana Cervelli, a forewoman in Baron Franchetti’s tobacco
plant: “You were a tool in the hands of this master and for those who kept
their eyes upon you for him.”6
Maria Pitotti. We used to sing: “We’re the tobacco workers\We work

harder and harder\The Baron doesn’t pay\Down with the Baron!” I was
seventeen; before the war. We worked the tobacco fields with the August and
July sun over our heads, and the tobacco stalks set out to dry. No [drinking]
water, they brought barrels—it wasn’t water, it was shit, full of worms,
and all. And we put our mouth to them because we were dying of thirst.
All the men, the engineers, the foremen told us, “Don’t drink it, it will
kill you!” It was a job you had to keep your eyes open: if we put bad leaves in
the good bunches we didn’t get paid, see? And if you made more, he paid you
more, if you made less he’d kick you out. The forewoman, soon as we made a
little noise, came to the door, said, “Be quiet, don’t speak, do your work, else
the Baron comes and raises Cain.” Later, we went on strike, it was during the
war. All quiet and at attention; the engineer goes by: “What’s the matter?
What’s going on?” “We want more than twenty lire; we want eighty.”
Francesco Carocci. Once, the workers in Baron Franchetti’s tobacco plant

went on strike, because they weren’t paid enough. So, some struck, and
some didn’t. On payday, the ones who had struck found a raise, the ones who
36 A. PORTELLI
hadn’t didn’t. So, they went up to Baron Franchetti: “Why didn’t we get the
raise?” “Because you didn’t need it; the ones who needed it joined the strike.
You have enough, you didn’t strike, and I’m not giving you any raise.”7
The next time, Carocci says, they too joined the strike: another joke on
poor people that turns against the master. Others, however, give the story a
different ending: “Afterwards, of course, he did pay them. Indeed, maybe
he even gave them a bonus” (Saturno Di Giuli).
2 FATHERS AND MASTERS

Pompilio Pileri. [My father] liked to play cards, he spent all his time in the
tavern. He played night and day; morra,8 cards. In the morning, he’d
shoulder his ax and say, “I’m going to work.” Instead, you’d run into
someone in the square, and they’d tell you, “Francesco is in the tavern
playing cards.” Poor mom, she’d pick up the ax and carried him home
—“All right, France’, come, let’s go home.” “At my convenience!” He’d
come home around ten or eleven, rotten drunk. He’d sing, he’d swear,
he’d stay up all night rutting around the fireplace. After he’d sobered up
some, he’d come to bed.
Giovanni Salvati. The head of the family and nothing else. No one was
supposed to say a word. Like Mussolini: [they said that] Mussolini was
always right; so was the family head. Our family, grandpa was boss. He was
sharp, too, because you had to be sharp to run a farm like that. He’d say,
“You mind the sheep,” and to the sheep you’d go, you couldn’t go to the
goats. We had seventy, eighty hectares of land: olive trees, vineyards,
woods, chestnuts, pastures. We had sheep, goats, and horses. We raised
mules for the army. [We had been on that land] since the time of Italian
unification. Grandpa, who was the founder, Salvati Francesco, born in
1818; then his son Domenico, in 1840; then Domenico’s sons, Giosuè in
1870, Ferdinando, my father, in 1874, and Francesco in 1878. My father
married in 1900, and had ten children. My own family, seven children;
[living with us] we had two unmarried sisters; two brothers, and it makes
eleven. Beside his children and wife, they had: five shepherds; the goat
keeper, because there’s a difference between tending sheep and the art of
goat raising; and a horse wrangler. The household, we were twenty-eight
people sitting down at dinner, at breakfast, and lunch. It was all a big
family. They were called garzoni, farm boys. They slept there, big rooms
forty square meters wide, beds all over the place. The shepherds slept with
the sheep. When it rained they opened the umbrella and slept [in the
open], like horses. If it didn’t rain, they’d take a sack of straw, laid it on the
ground with a blanket on top, and that was the shepherd’s bed. After 1918
they built [moveable] huts, you picked them up like gurneys and carried
them to where you slept. It was to protect the animals, because there were
wolves around and the shepherd had to be near.
“My first [child], the doctor came, at home, because he was born big, five
kilos. So the doctor came, but when he came I had already done. Before I
made him, I had a fit of convulsions, and then after I made him I opened
my eyes and saw the doctor come in with irons this long, I had another fit.
For two days, I had fits; I swallowed a piece of my tongue, I lost all my
teeth, everything. And I never had them put back. I was eighteen” (Maria
Arcangeli). In Giuseppe Salvati’s family, six out of ten children died before
the age of six. “All had ten or twelve children; six families, seventy children.
Some had twelve, some fourteen. A family was unlucky if they only made
seven” (Giuseppe Salvati). Farming requires hands, and there were never
enough: “Among our peasantry, the bastarderia9 was where they went to
get children. If they didn’t have any of their own, or even if they did, they
get a little bastard child, but the bastard would have the same rights as the
rest of the family, or the regular children” (Guerriero Bolli).
Giovanni Salvati. In the 1700s they established a bastarderia in Narni,

because at Civita Castellana they had found heaps of children’s bones.10
Families paid cart drivers to take children to the bastarderia in Rome, and
when they got to Civita Castellana they’d dump them by the roadside. These
bones were found, and the Bishop of Narni said, “let’s make a bastarderia
in Narni.” It’s still remembered, from mother to daughter, since 1738.11
Most marriages, up to the 1930s, were arranged by the parents. “How
about marrying our daughter to your son?” “All right.” They had a big
meal. “You two are engaged.” And if they didn’t like it, they had to take it.
They’d put them out of the house. Terni back then was not like today; you
couldn’t get a job anywhere. And during Fascism, if you didn’t have your
work papers you couldn’t work. So you had to shut up. Whether you liked
it or not. It began to change with the passing of the old family chiefs. When
grandpa died, he left three sons. Three brothers, out of sixty hectares, each
gets twenty; then, out of twenty hectares, we were three brothers and a
sister, four parts… and so, house divided, house finished.
38 A. PORTELLI
3 TO FEED LAMBS TO THE BOSSES

Dante Bartolini. See what the old folks tell you, my son? We tell the things
that we lived, the model of the hardships we went through and a memory
that never ends. And from this we learn, positively. Sometimes there are
comrades that when you ask them about these things, they say, “forget it,
this is philosophy!” What do you mean, philosophy? Is the truth philoso-
phy? Philosophy is the priest that tells you, “This is it, this is God”; and
then, “there’s Paradise.” That is philosophy that moves you and you think
you’re going to heaven and instead you go under the earth. And when
you’re in there, bye bye, it’s all over; because we’ve seen that of all of the
ancestors, not one has returned. They could have sent us at least a message,
I don’t know, through the air, through the spirit, some clue to tell us,
“Look, this is a good place” or “It’s bad.” What can I say. They suffered,
they died, their suffering is over, they’re in there, they’ve turned into water,
ashes, and earth. We are earthworms. She made us and to her we return.
An 1868 report of the landholders association reads: “Peasants are obsti-
nate in the use of old tools, because they believe that the old ones are
better than the new… They evaluate the advice of educated persons with
the only criterion of their own and of their fathers’ experience; they are
persuaded that there is no better way, and that it is useless to expect a
higher yield from the land, and therefore they resist changing their prac-
tices and adopting new methods that they do not understand.”12
Francesco Carocci. For a long time, I’ve been searching for the spirits; I
never found them. My father told me he never ran into them, and
grandfather told me he never ran into them. So, where are these spirits? I
called them so many times, those from my family. I asked them, “Why
don’t you let me see you at least one time, just so I know it’s true?” I went
into the woods in the middle of the night, I called, on my own land, that
my father used to work … “Dad, why don’t you let me see you?” He never
came. Either they don’t let him, or he doesn’t exist.
Modernizing landholders saw rural culture only as irrationally clinging

to tradition. Yet, their own documents sometimes contradict this prejudice.
For instance: “The contadini yearn for education and send their children to
school.”13 Rather than top-down “progress,” rural folks sought emanci-
pation in knowledge, in Bartolini and Carocci’s peasant materialism, or in a
literacy that could enable them to verify the masters’ accounts.
Amerigo Matteucci. My father was a tenant for Schiavelli, a landlord out

there. I remember, he complained that in twenty years he had never squared
accounts with the master. They’d sell a calf, the master got the money.
They’d sell lambs, the master got the money. And in the end, when time
came for reckoning, you always ended up owning him. Because nobody
taught anything, ninety per cent were illiterate and the one who was not
illiterate had to shut up anyway, else he’d kick you out. “You don’t know
how to make accounts? Ask the priest to do it for you.” But the priest and the
boss were thick as thieves, so asking the priest was worse than taking the
master’s word. So you had to take it. You’d ask them to take you on as a
tenant—“How many sons are you?” “Four, five.” “How many work?”
“Three.” “But they work the land, not…” “Yes, they work the land.” If you
said, “No, one goes to school,” they didn’t like it; they mustn’t go to school.
The four-year-old tends the turkeys; the six-year-old tends the hogs; the
eight-year-old tends the cows. All you did was work, you weren’t supposed
to go to school. Because they knew that if one was educated, he would get to
where we are today, more or less.
Pompilio Pileri, a frail, blue-eyed shepherd, organetto player and poet,

sang: “I leave Polino14 in the morning\And go for breakfast at Terra Piana.\I
ate a hundred oxen and a cow\Seven muttons with the wool still on\For
lunch I ate a little salad\That would have fed four oxen for a week\I drank a
cellarful of wine\One hundred and fifty Roman barrels.\Still my belly wasn’t
full\It rang hollow like a crack pot bell\I ate three hundred crusts of bread\If
he hadn’t run away I’d have eaten the innkeeper\The keeper for fear ran
away\And I was left the master of the inn.” Some have read this traditional
verse as a sexual metaphor,15 but the look on Pompilio’s face as he sang it
made it clear that to him it was a painful, literal epic of hunger. The province
of Perugia, which included Terni, was the hardest hit by pellagra in Italy,
“the starvation disease.”16 In 1889 it affected 18.29% of the population.17
Riziero Montesi. When we went home at lunch time, all you got was a slice
of bread so thin you could see all the way to Rome through it. For dinner,
polenta.18 In the morning you got flat bread and grass, at noon another slice
of bread, and polenta at night. This, for five or six months in the winter. It
began in November, all the way to March, always flat bread and polenta.
One who worked on the land, he might get twenty work days in a month,
you made twenty lire. We were five siblings, mom and dad, grandpa and
grandma. We had bellies like barrels. Clothes, shoes, and all. Light, a mere
oil or gasoline lamp. Later, we got acetylene, we could see a little better.
40 A. PORTELLI
In bed, the mattress was filled with corn husks, which we saved at the
huskings. Today, we live [much better]. Thanks to our tough struggles.
As a youth, Pompilio Pileri would walk other people’s sheep from

Valnerina to the plains of Latium. There he learned to sing a stornello, a verse
that said: “Dormo fra le pecore e li cani\pe’ fa’ magna’ l’agnelli a li romani.” [I
sleep among the sheep and the dogs, to feed lamb to the city folks in Rome.]
When he took it back to Valnerina, farm hands and tenants changed it to “I
sleep among the sheep and the dogs\to feed lamb to the landlord.” And when
the tenants and farm hands became factory workers, the traditional verse
absorbed the union spirit, and became “I sleep among the sheep and the dogs
\to feed lambs to the bosses.” By changing only one word, this “simple” verse
narrates the history of the transition from sheep to agriculture to steel.
Pasquale Frattaroli. What was my experience? I, at age six, I mean, I’d

walk to school, barefoot, I wore wooden clogs, carrying a can with embers
in my hands, for I was freezing. I didn’t knock with my hands, I knocked
with my wooden clogs, at the school gate. ‘Cause I was cold; I was cold, I
was hungry, I was everything. Half naked, long hair, because we couldn’t
afford to have it cut. They said that things were good under Fascism; yet—I
suffered, from morning to night, I mean. Often I’d get wet in the morning,
following the sheep, following the cows; I’d lay my jacket on the ground
under my feet to keep the thorns from hurting me, and go. This is how I
lived, until I was twenty and was drafted.
Verses from another poem that Pompilio Pileri learned in his travels and
loves to sing: “The hunger we suffered drives us on\No pen can describe it
\Only mine that’s rough and broken\Can tell the hunger we’re still suffering\
…\Empty bellies think about full ones\But full bellies don’t think about them
\If they tell you that they care\Don’t you believe them—they never do.”
Pasquale Frattaroli. Well, nowadays we live better; it’s improved, in many

ways. It was achieved with struggles, with strikes. We must look forward,
not at what takes us back. Those times, they must be forgotten, that’s all.
4 THE STRIKE AND THE EXODUS

An exchange of improvised stornelli:
Se avessi conosciuto lo padrone

ti giuro mi sarei fatto frate.
(Amerigo Matteucci)
[Had I known what the boss was like
I swear I’d rather gone to be a friar]
Io invece avrebbe preso lo bastone
E tante ne darei di bastonate.
(Dante Bartolini)
[I instead would have taken a big stick
And whip and whip him again and again]
On March 25, 1902, 7,000 farm workers “poured into Narni, to the
amazement of the townspeople at such a new and wonderful sight.” It was
the first great rural struggle in Umbria. Many years later, Paolo, one of the
strikers, remembered: “The prefect came, the police on horseback to scare
us off, but we blocked the streets, it was like a fortress. Everybody was on
strike, with the animals, the farm workers and the Socialists, all except the
landlords.” It was a long, tough struggle; the workers finally won when
they stopped taking care of the animals, a desperate but successful form of
struggle. It was a short-lived victory anyway: the landholders refused to
abide by the contracts, got court injunctions, fired all their tenants and
sharecroppers, and conditions soon reverted to what they were before.19
The contadini struck again in Sangemini,20 in 1913, with Socialist
leadership. It was a long strike, and the owners again refused to negotiate. At
a strike meeting, Pietro Farini, leader of Terni’s Socialist federation, sug-
gested they should gather the cattle to the town square and stop feeding
them. “The reply was a deafening scream followed by a ghastly silence…
Despair swam in their eyes,” he wrote in his autobiography: “I heard no voice
but it was clear that they were in infinite pain.” “Let me ask you a question.
How can a contadino strike? A tenant that only owns five or six cows: if he
strikes, they die. So forget about it, the strike is the end of everything” (Cesare
Conti). Yet, they understood that it was their only weapon, and gathered in
the village square with their families and animals, “as if to watch over them.”
“At sunrise,” Farini writes, “the animals, that were used to being fed,
began to bellow, and the bellows swelled all through the morning, all
through the day, the night, the following morning, like the wave of a
stormy sea, resounding inside the houses, on the rocks, in the valleys. No
one ate. I walked among those workers of the land who seemed in stupor, I
encouraged them, I assured them that victory was near. They gazed at me
wide-eyed, as if my words were incomprehensible. But even in the masters’
homes, nobody ate!”
42 A. PORTELLI
At last, the landholders gave in. “Screaming incomprehensible words of

joy, the contadini hugged one another, men, women, children, and all of a
sudden I saw them leave the square and come back with bundles of grass,
bundles of hay, and throw them to their animals, addressing them by the
dearest names.”21
In the early 1900s incipient industrialization changed social relations in
the countryside. Industrial organizers and socialists from Terni—Pietro
Farini, Francesco Paoloni, Tito Oro Nobili—led the struggle on the land.
“The industrial workers who live in the villages, an hour or two’s walk from
Terni,” writes historian Gino Galli, “who often come from a rural back-
ground, carry to the backward and exploited countryside the [industrial
workers’] sense of rebellion.”22 A French company opened a chemical
plant at Nera Montoro, in Marquis Patrizi’s dominion; factories opened in
nearby Narni Scalo and, across the Nera river, Orte became a major rail-
road junction.
Guerriero Bolli. That was the end of subjection to Patrizi. Rural strikes
began in Montoro, in 1911; people getting railroad jobs. It was the first
getaway from the land, and a few people from Montoro began to break the
spell. No longer a farm hand for the marquis, but a worker for the state
railroad. Later, when Terni [acquired the Nera Montoro plant], they no
longer minded. “Now I work in Terni, I work for the railroad; what do I
care if I don’t salute the nuns, or if I don’t salute the overseer.”
In Valnerina, on the other side of the basin-shaped Terni valley, the steel
works, the Papigno chemical plant, the textile plants rise along the Nera river
and in the steep, narrow gorge that connects the periphery of the town to the
near countryside. “I remember the old men from Valnerina who told me
how they used to walk miles to work. Later, they organized a mule cart that
went down the road, along the valley. The men from the hill villages walked
down to meet the cart and ride to work in Terni. They’d come home at
night, sleep a few hours, and then again start out carrying the lunch bucket,
or the handkerchief filled with food that their wives had fixed” (Ambrogio
Filipponi). “Back then, workers were only concerned about the trip down,
because they had to get to the factory gate on time. The trip back—there
were a lot of taverns, you’d stop, talk a while, drink a glass. Forty percent of
the workers from Stroncone came home drunk. You know who didn’t?
Those whose wives had sharp nails. There were two types of rural wives:
those who were beaten [by their husbands], and those who, when their
husband came home drunk, beat him” (Giovanni Salvati). “The prevalent
figure in this kind of village [Ferentillo, in the Valnerina] was one that has
unusual characteristics that do not exist in many other parts of Italy. That is:
the factory worker, of a technologically advanced factory, who, however, is
not an urban person, a town dweller. He’s a rural factory worker. My
memories are of these workers who left in the morning, on the bus, around
six a.m., and then the other shifts. And then they returned [after work] to
this sort of country idyll” (Mario Tronti).
“Valnerina men assimilated the requirements, the characteristics of
Terni’s working class; they assimilated the political knowledge of the
working class, and brought it back to the country, to the villages”
(Ambrogio Filipponi). Not all, however: “We have three or four guys, here
[in Arrone, in Valnerina] who work at Polymer [chemical plant], at the
Arsenal, and they’re still rubes, yokels—they say things will come along on
their own, the Lord makes the grapes, makes the apples, makes the
pomegranates… I told them, look, this is not a natural situation, where
peaches grow ripe [by themselves]; unless we mature our problems our-
selves, we won’t get anywhere. What you need, is to untangle your mind”
(Antonio Antonelli). “Their mentality remained very, very rural; more, a
country mentality, because though they don’t live the social condition of
the contadino they still have the contadino mentality. They are very much
tied to their place of origin, to the village; the workers I remember couldn’t
wait to get out of the factory, get back to the village, to the village square,
to the usual occupations, to working their little old parcel of land, raising a
hog, raising chickens” (Mario Tronti).
“In 1956, the olive trees froze. We cut them down, and came away. We
had to leave everything to keep from starving. Agriculture was abandoned;
it was abandoned because they made us abandon it. How can you work the
land, nowadays?” What with the cost of hired help and fertilizers, the low
market prices (“people no longer want olive oil, they use oilseed”),
you never break even: “So, what have you done all this work for? You
might as well just kill the olive trees and forget it. The most disliked group
of people in Italy are the contadini. The assholes, the fools” (Cesare Conti).
“It makes no sense for country people to leave the land to go and die at
the Polymer [chemical plant]” (Antonio Antonelli). While commuting, as
Mario Tronti points out, helps preserve the social cohesion and some of the
life style of the rural villages, exodus from the land is perceived with a great
deal of ambivalence: it is a form of emancipation from poverty and servitude;
but it is also a surrender, that implies a loss of resources and knowledge.
44 A. PORTELLI
Amerigo Matteucci. There are few left on the land, nowadays; they all
rushed to be factory workers, because workers have always been a little
more respected and achieved certain goals in life—not too prosperous, let’s
be frank, but at least they developed some strength to defend themselves.
We have believed in the union; the union is strong, it’s a giant, it strides
forward, and all. But on the other side, we caused a great harm: instead of
abandoning the land, we should have fought on the land. And this was a
huge mistake.
5 GARDENS BY THE FACTORY WALLS

Luisa Roberti. When we had that hailstorm, grains as big as three hundred
grams—we had the season standing,23 such a lovely season; and we were
left with nothing. There was nothing left on the trees, not a leaf, nothing
nowhere. In 1907 people got killed. It was about one p.m.; it was dark, like
midnight. What a fright! The first wave; the next wave, worser still. Yeah,
the cyclone of 1907, I remember; October. We were ready to harvest the
grapes, and were left with nothing, all cleaned up in the middle of winter.
When the country’s largest steel factory was dropped wholesale onto
Terni in 1885, Terni was still a mainly a small semi-rural place that, outside
of a few minor early industrial sites, served mainly as a market place for the
surrounding agricultural economy. In the old historical center of town, “all
the people were cart drivers, it was all horse stables. Here where we stand
there was a dairy stable, with cows. In the mornings, we’d go ‘Can I have a
glass of milk?’ We were kids” (Giuseppe Laureti). Cattle and horse fairs
were held on Terni’s patron saint’s day, Saint Valentine, in February, and
in December: “It was famous for horses and mules, because we sold the
mules to Sicily to work in the sulfur mines; cattle, they came from
Romagna [for it]. On that day all the folks in Terni got together”
(Giovanni Salvati). Landowners and many tenants and sharecroppers lived
in town, and commuted to the fields each day. “From Garibaldi Gate to
Valnerina Gate, along Viale Brin,24 it was all mud; shepherds would stand
here, with milk, sheep, goats” (Angela Locci). The 1907 cyclone took
place, and is recalled, a few yards from the factory wall.
Valtéro Peppoloni. My dad, peace to his soul, through one of his sisters
who was in domestic service in Terni, came to Terni in 1928. He did it for
my sake: he said, in Terni there’s work, when he grows up we’ll find him a
job. So we came to Terni; we came down in November, in April 1929 he
died. So we were left, three children, my sisters were in service, mother

[and I] worked a little piece of land; we had a cow, [we sold] milk… When
it was my turn, milk always curdled because I put water in it, from the
creek. My sister, she didn’t. But I—how else would I get a couple of coins
for a movie, for a game of cards?
We worked on shares with this landlady; out of three fruit trees, “Two
are mine—she’d say—and one half and half.” So one night, I’ll never forget
it, the apricots were ripe, beautiful, this big, so I got up in the middle of a
night, with a friend of mine, and we picked that tree clean. And we sold
them to the ice cream man in Via Garibaldi. I gave my mother some of the
money and kept the rest for myself. The landlady, screams to high heavens,
when she realized her tree was empty! Not the one on shares: hers. Her
apricots were the best. Like everything else.
For a long time, gardens and orchards remained an integral part of

working-class homes. They supplement family income, preserve the link
with rural roots, offer meaningful use of time to the unemployed and the
old. “My grandmother still works the land. She has rented a garden, every
day, without fail, she works the land. If one took that activity from her, it
would kill her” (Loretta Calabrini).
Calfiero Canali. I learned to raise a garden after the war. I learned from
my father-in-law. When I was building this house—we built it ourselves,
more or less—I worked at the steel mill; and meanwhile I raised a garden.
We were building the house, we needed money, and the garden sure
helped, it helped a lot. Often when I came out the night shift at six a.m. I’d
work on the house; and often, when I came out at night, I’d go water the
garden. The garden is near the street and sometimes I was ashamed; when
people walked by, I’d stop working, lest they’d say, “Look at him, he works
at the steel mill, he’s building the house, and works the garden, too!” But I
wasn’t doing it for pleasure, I was doing it for need.
From the beginning of industrialization, tensions arose between the

town workers who lived only on their wages (and perhaps a small garden),
and rural commuters who supplemented their wages with the land they
owned. In 1899, the unions asked the companies to hire no more conta-
dini and, in case of need, to “discharge those who own land rather than the
poorer workers.” Under Fascism, the local authorities insisted that conta-
dini and small farmers be the first to be fired. After World War II, Terni,
46 A. PORTELLI
the unions and the Communist Party all agreed that “self-sufficient”
workers who owned some supplementary source of income, ought to be
laid off first.25
Rural workers were accused of ingratiating themselves to management
with gifts of farm produce (“They knocked with their feet, we used to say:
their hands were busy holding hams and all,” Calfiero Canali). “They’d tell
us: why don’t you stay in your village? Why don’t you go mind the sheep,
work the land, mind the cows? Why are you coming to [take our jobs]? It
was always like that: they say, you’re in competition with me, and I can’t
raise a grievance to the company because they have you outside the door
[waiting to take my place]” (Luigi Menichelli).
Rural commuters were accused of not working hard enough—on
weekends, “they worked the field; on Mondays, they were tired” (Vittorio
Giantulli) and “came to work to rest” (Faliero Corvo)—and of working
too hard: “We worked with a different rhythm. I was a motorman, so they
called me ‘trolley eater’, because I worked… I mean, I worked. They said
we worked too hard” (Carlo Arcangeli).
Yet, when there’s a strike, “you can hold out longer if you have some
extra income” (Amerigo Matteucci). In fact, the country is even inscribed
in the identity of the urban workers. It is part of their family history (“My
father was a factory worker; he was from a rural background: sharecrop-
pers. From Collescipoli,” Alfio Paccara), and a cultural and leisure-time
resource: working-class rituals in Terni are filled with country walks and
trips, picnics, hunting. The memory of rural culture generates a different
sense of time, a different attitude toward work, a refusal to separate work
from socialization and to submit to the abstract discipline of the factory, a
tacit yet deep feeling that the factory is ultimately unnatural. And minute,
daily practices of opposition and resistance.
In the factory, workers “have roasts, they roast lambs this big, casks of
wine… The reduction furnace, on holiday eves, New Year’s Eve, at night,
there was always someone who cooked, we ate lambs whole, pork chops.
Young men that, if you see them eat, it’s a fright. You don’t eat outside as
much as you eat inside” (Carlo Arcangeli). “Drinking—wine and water,
huge. They could drink a flask of wine for breakfast, and not get drunk. Or a
flask of water, in two slugs. It was a habit, everybody did it” (Santino
Cappanera). “Workers, especially those who work in the heat, next to the
furnaces, and may have a casting, or a piece to be heated, and they stand by
for ten or fifteen hours waiting for the piece to heat, or for the fusion. So they
sit down by the furnace and, it’s so warm, they fall asleep” (Aldo Galeazzi).
Bruno Zenoni. How come the partisan struggle grew on the mountains of
Valnerina? In my opinion, it’s due to an objective fact—the tram.26 The
tram was a gathering place and a vehicle for all the anti-Fascist activities
during [Fascism]. In the factory, the Valnerina workers were scattered, but
on the tram they were all together: workers from the steel mill; Bosco’s
[mechanical plant]; the Arsenal; Centurini’s [textile mill] and other plants
in Terni. It was easy to send a password from Terni to Piediluco, all the way
to Ferentillo. During the partisan struggle [the tram] was used to move
weapons; during the air raids, it facilitated the evacuation of Terni, because
it was near enough to keep coming to work. And the workers who evac-
uated there, many of them knew the valley, they already had a political
consciousness because they had been factory workers for over half a cen-
tury, and they had stayed in touch with the mountain, they knew the land.
Plus, many had been coming to Valnerina to hunt, and this, I think, also
helped create a relationship.
“The creation of a large industrial enterprise whose characteristics were

unrelated to the local environment facilitated the permanence of old rural
structures.” The factory is “the result of decisions taken outside Umbria,
and did not significantly change the surrounding economic and social
structure.”27 There was no time for the growth of a local entrepreneurial
bourgeoisie; “pure” workers (who only lived on factory wages, especially
immigrants from other parts of Italy) remained, in a way, outsiders to the
rest of the region. On the other hand, industrialization was so fast that
there was no time for the erosion of rural culture and society that usually
accompanies a gradual and autochthonous industrial development. Most
established narratives foreground the contrast and conflict between
rural and industrial cultures, and ignore their mutual exchange and
cross-fertilization. Union and Party policies historically favored homo-
geneity over difference, and failed to recognize the myriad ways in which
individuals handle cultural ambivalence and change. During the 1907
lockout, workers attacked the farmers’ market in protest at the high price
of food; but many of them survived the lockout thanks to the rural families
who took in their children or gave them work on the land. Throughout
their history, Terni’s industrial workers used the memory of the rural world
as a means of survival and as a way of distancing themselves from the
pervasive hegemony of the industrial and capitalistic view of the world.
48 A. PORTELLI
NOTES
1. L’Unità, August 18, 1946.
2. Gino Galli, “Lo sciopero dei contadini di Narni (marzo–aprile 1902),”
Cronache Umbre, II, March–April, 1959, no. 2, pp. 63–77.
3. I italicize Terni when it refers to the company, to distinguish it from Terni,
the town whose name it bears.
4. The huts of Ethiopian peasants, a memory from Italy’s recent colonial past.
5. L’Unità, November 22, 1947; Avanguardia, August 20, 1945.
6. Quoted in L. Capitani et al., Condizione operaia e condizione femminile in
Umbria. Il caso delle tabacchine, dissertation, School of Social Service,
University of Perugia, 1979–1980.
7. For strikes of Baron Franchetti’s women tobacco workers, l’Unità, August
20 and September 9 and 13, 1947; Unità Sindacale, October 5, 1947.
8. A folk game in which two players show their right fist with some fingers
opened while shouting a number rhythmically; the player who calls a
number that corresponds to the sum of open fingers of both players scores a
point. The stake is usually wine.
9. “The bastard store”: a folk name for an orphans’ and abandoned children’s
home.
10. Narni is seven miles from Terni; Civita Castellana is halfway between Terni
and Rome.
11. For the case of a “bastardello” who ended up marrying the daughter of the
farm owner, see Pietro Farini (Terni’s Socialist secretary, 1902–1914), In
marcia coi lavoratori, unpublished autobiography, APC, 1917–1940, f.
1537, pp. 180–182.
12. “Resoconto annuale del Comizio agrario circondariale di Terni” and
“Concorso per la compilazione di un compendio di agricoltura pratica
popolare pel circondario di Terni,” 1868, in Telesforo Nanni, ed., Mondo
agricolo e modernizzazione nella conca ternana, Quaderni di Indagini, 1,
1980, pp. 27–29.
13. In 1868 the rate of illiteracy in Umbria was 66.5% among men and 81.5%
among women; in 1911 it was still 40.7 and 55.7: Francesco Bogliari, Il
movimento contadino in Umbria dal 900 al fascismo, Milan, Franco Angeli,
1979, p. 39. Contadino is anyone who lives and works on the land, whether
as a farm hand, tenant, sharecropper, or small farmer.
14. A mountain village in the Valnerina (the north side of the Nera valley).
15. Emilio Sereni, “Note sui canti tradizionali del popolo umbro,” Cronache
Umbre, II, March–April 1959, no. 2, pp. 19–51. The variant he reports says
“I was left the master of the daughter.”
16. Sara Ogan Gunning, “I Hate the Capitalist System,” in the CD Girl of
Constant Sorrow, Folk Legacy, CD-26.
17. Bogliari, Il movimento contadino, pp. 38–39; Luigi Bellini, “Appunti per
una storia della agricoltura umbra negli ultimi cento anni”, Rivista di storia
dell’’agricoltura, a. VII (1967), no. 1, pp. 12–36.
18. Cornmeal boiled into a porridge, then baked, fried, or grilled. A diet almost
exclusively based on polenta was a major cause for the prevalence of
pellagra.
19. La Turbina, March 29, 1902; G. Galli, “Lo sciopero dei contadini di
Narni”; F. Bogliari, Il movimento contadino in Umbria, p. 60. Paolo’s
interview is in Daniela Margheriti and Carla Pernazza, Questo è lo streppo che
m’ha lasciato nonno mia, unpublished manuscript, Amelia (Terni), 1982.
20. A small town and resort five miles from Terni.
21. P. Farini, In marcia coi lavoratori, pp. 180–182.
22. G. Galli, “Lo sciopero dei contadini di Narni.”
23. Produce ready for picking.
24. The avenue that goes from the steelworks to the center of town.
25. La Turbina, January 7, 14, 21, 1899; January 6, 1900; March 14, 1903;
ACS, PS, DPP, b. 81: ACS, PS, AGR, 1929, b. 74b.
26. A tramline running at the bottom of the Valnerina gorge to the steel works
was inaugurated in the early 1920s.
27. Emilio Secci, “L’IRI, la ‘Terni’ e l’industria regionale,” Cronache Umbre, I,
November–December, 1958, pp. 11–22; Renato Covino, “Storia del
movimento operaio, storia locale e storia nazionale,” Annali della Facoltà di
Scienze Politiche dell’Università di Perugia, xiii (1973–1976), pp. 87–140.
CHAPTER 4
How Steel Was Tempered: The Making

of a Working Class
1 THE GREAT HAMMER

Umberto Martinelli. This young man came to Terni to work, from Massa
Martana.1 He had been born in [18]64, and worked at the furnaces. He
told [folks at home], he said, “Look, out where I work, iron drips.” “What
do you mean, drips? Is it wet?” “No,” he said, “it melts like wax, they
destroy it!” He told his mother that iron dripped like wax. And they didn’t
believe him.
Arnaldo Lippi. After unification, we become part of the kingdom of Italy.2

The military noticed that Terni had a strategic position far from the bor-
ders; and this is where they established the Arsenal, where they established
the steel mill. The choice was made by the [Navy] Minister, the admiral
[Benedetto] Brin, because Terni’s distance from the frontiers made it easier
to protect. So, this is where they began to build the first warships of the
Italian Navy. In fact, here steel was used only to make ironclads and can-
nons, weapons of destruction, not to create wealth. Only to destroy.
Terni’s industrialization was prepared for by the coming of the railroad, the
creation of a technical school, the building of a canal for hydraulic power. In
the 1870s Terni also possessed a wool mill and iron foundry; in 1872 the
Belgian entrepreneur Cassian Bon created the Lucovich Iron and Steel
company, which would later be absorbed into the Terni steel company.
However, the coming of a major factory to Terni had less to do with this local
background than with other strategic considerations. Terni was close to a

52 A. PORTELLI
source of hydraulic power in the Nera and Velino river basins; it was easy to
protect in case of war, because it was far from the borders and the sea; it was
close to Rome, but not so close that it would engender a dangerous
working-class concentration in the capital. Thus, in 1878, the army estab-
lished in Terni its weapon factory (Fabbrica d’Armi, hereafter, Arsenal). The
Società Altiforni, Fonderia e Acciaierie di Terni [Terni Company for Blast
Furnaces, Foundries and Steel Mills; hereafter Terni], known originally by the
acronym SAFFAT and later simply as Terni, was funded on March 10, 1884,
to produce “steel with the most advanced techniques used in major industrial
nations, and… build armor plate for the Royal Navy’s ironclad ships.”3
Laura Galli. Cassian Bon4 was the creator of Terni’s industrial sector. My
grandfather, Leopoldo Fabbretti, was one of his first technical aides in the
steel mill; in my family I heard many stories about his creativity in every
field. It was under his aegis that Terni changed from a village to a town.
I heard from my family that all the linden trees in Terni were planted by
him; he created a splendid garden in his villa, where he lived. He was
deeply Catholic; he had a delightful wife, highly cultured and gracious. She
was active in charity work, so necessary then, when there was no organized
public social welfare. He was ahead of his time, he taught his young factory
hands the love of sports, and he founded a sports club.
In May 1886 the first steel rail rolled out of Terni’s mill; in October, the
first plate ingot was cast. In March 1887 the blessing of the Bishop, in the
presence of the assembled workers and “the Olympus of female high life,”5
hailed the departure of the first finished plates destined for the royal ship
“Ruggiero di Lauria.” The former rural hamlet was turning into “the
Italian Manchester” or, as Mussolini put it later, “the dynamic city.”6
“I remember a Terni full of sounds, the singing of factory whistles at
night, the pounding of the great drop hammer that rocked the pallet we
slept on, and the multiple hammers and pile drivers ramming from the hills
into the town” (Ilario Ciaurro). Yet, in 1915 a labor union paper claimed
that “Terni, in spite of all its factories and great mills, is essentially a par-
asitical town” that depends on the state and on the arms industry.7 In fact,
Terni’s economic feasibility was problematic from the very beginning.
Dependent on state contracts, it needed the state’s intervention and pro-
tectionist policies to survive the banking crisis of 1893. New technologies
soon made the assets that had led to the choice of Terni as a location
irrelevant: closeness to energy sources was no longer significant after new
4 HOW STEEL WAS TEMPERED: THE MAKING OF A WORKING CLASS 53
technologies made it possible to transfer energy away from its sources;

distance from the sea and the borders would be meaningless in the age of
aerial warfare (Terni was heavily bombarded in 1943–1944), and indeed it
turned into a liability because it made access to raw materials and trans-
portation of products harder. The state had guaranteed that Terni would
have exclusive access to the iron ore from Elba and to a cast iron foundry to
be built in the port town of Civitavecchia; neither promise materialized.
The unfinished road and the missing railroad that were supposed to con-
nect Terni to Civitavecchia were still an issue in 2005.
In the early decades the workers and the company struggled over wages
and working conditions, but joined in the demand for government con-
tracts that generated profits and jobs. Strikes often ended in compromises
even “at the expense of a few humiliations”; company executives “en-
couraged the workers’ agitation”: “If you join us in asking the government
for measures, we will be heard.” In 1903 the local Socialist-led union
opposed the Socialist Party’s campaign for cuts in military expenditures.
Whenever the government announced the building a new warship, the
company would complain that there wasn’t enough work and lay off a
number of workers: “Then, when the contract was signed they whipped
them back to work, hurry hurry hurry” (Faliero Corvo). The preindustrial
merchant and artisan classes felt crushed by the “octopus” of the company
stores and by the arrival of a new, foreign proletariat that upset the old way
of life. The local elites failed to take advantage of the new opportunities,
and wavered between pride in Terni’s new prominence, servility toward the
new power, and grumbling at the way the new bosses treated the town “as
an insignificant attachment to the factory.”8
When the founder Vincenzo Stefano Breda died in 1903, the town, the
factory, and the Church celebrated a splendid funeral. Though he was on the
other side, workers respected him and shared his vision of progress. The
Socialist La Turbina eulogized: “To write the biography of Vincenzo Breda
is to describe the ways of capitalism, its boldness and its exploitation of
workers, its amazing productivity and its appropriation of science.”
However, a week later the company asked the workers to “freely contribute”
money for a monument to Breda, and La Turbina protested that this
humiliated the workers by “forcing them to choose between self-respect and
their daily bread.” The money was raised, but the monument was never
built; for years, the workers would demand its restitution, in vain.9
Meanwhile, progress went on. The Alterocca printing house, which
would become Italy’s top supplier of illustrated postcards, was inaugurated
in 1877; the Centurini jute mill in 1884; the Bosco mechanical plant in
54 A. PORTELLI
1890; in 1896 the Collestatte and Papigno chemical fertilizer plants began
operations. In 1903 Cassian Bon inaugurated the Cervara power plant,
which supplied electricity to all of central Italy. Telephone services began in
1887; public street lighting in 1885. Working-class newspapers changed
names: rather than with the town’s past (Il Banderaro) or progressive
ideologies (Il Radicale, Il Veritiero), they identified with the new industrial
culture: Il Maglio [The Drop Hammer], La Biella [The Piston], La
Turbina. New life styles and styles of consumption took hold.
Comunardo Tobia. My father came to Terni to work as an assistant in a

tailor shop. Tailors were the prime Socialist families in Terni at the
beginning of the century. Terni had developed a working class: workers
had become civilized, they wanted good clothes. In Papigno, there was a
sophistication we can’t even imagine today: imagine that in such a small
village we had three tailors!
After a few flush years during World War I, Terni became profitable only
in the 1920s, when it gained control of the chemical plants at Papigno and
Nera Montoro, of nearby lignite mines and, most of all, of the production
of electricity. Terni the company became a multi-sector conglomerate that
turned Terni the city into a company town of sorts, but remained
state-dependent and, after 1933, state-controlled. Profits came mainly
from electricity; the steelworks were actually losing money, but, to prevent
social unrest caused by unemployment, the Fascist regime would encour-
age the company to keep it going and compensate the losses with the
profits it made from other sectors. Thus, Terni’s history hinges on the
contradiction between the company’s use of the factory and its workers as
pawns in their dealings with the state, and the cult of steel and industrial
technology that shapes the town’s and its workers’ identity and pride.
The town, the factory, and the working class merged in an identity of
steel that survived generations, crises, and wars. “We pound the new ideas
and the newfound truths with the iron Hammer of our united wills,” wrote
a textile worker, under the pseudonym “Comrade Sonia.” Working-class
poets sang the praises of the Great Drop Hammer, the symbol of progress,
the heart of “this town all made of steel” (the garibaldino poet Nicola
Antonelli) that “molds the arms for Italy’s prowess” (Emilio Secci, steel
worker).10 Working-class pride claimed that the hammer’s operators were
so accurate they could crush a walnut open with it. Today, the great
12,000 lb press that replaced the Great Drop Hammer in 1936 stands as a
monument in front of the railroad station, Terni’s welcome to its visitors,

“the testimony of a century of work that, from father to son and from son
to son is carried out in this town, with and for the steel mills. This factory,
we built it with our own hands, rivet by rivet, rail by rail” (Settimio
Bernarducci).
“How shall I tell you—I truly feel that I’m an operaia, a factory worker.
Maybe because I’m from Terni, and my mother’s father already was one,
they always taught me that the factory was a place where you can get
satisfaction,” says Luisa Vernaccioni, a Fiat worker in Turin.11 “I’ve been
retired for 11 years and once in a while I get the itch to go back and see the
workers that I trained. You feel an affection that you can’t describe, it’s in
your flesh and bones. I spent 44 years beneath that roof” (Faliero Corvo).
“My grandfather was a contadino. On holidays, he came to Collescipoli
with his friends, got drunk and went home. We were always poor wretches.
Then, he went to work in the steel mill in 1911. After he retired, I started.
He was a wood carpenter, I worked in iron carpentry, now my son is at the
penstocks—which they’ll kick him out soon, because they’re about to
close” (Umberto Catana). “My father worked there for forty-eight years.
My grandfather, he started when they began to build the factory, in 1884.
When I retired, after twenty-five years of work, all I got was a pension of
two hundred thousand lire” (Ida Sbarzella). “My father was a mason at the
Martin open-air furnace; he died at fifty-seven, he had azotaemia, he
caught all kind of illnesses inside the factory. My grandfather died in it, my
father died in it. As for me, I hope I don’t” (Antonio Ruggeri).
2 THE “SKYSCRAPER”
“Papigno peaches were something special, those big yellow peaches. We
had an orchard, beneath the [Marmore] waterfalls [overlooking the
Papigno chemical plant].12 Then the peaches disappeared, because of the
fumes and dust of the calcium cyanamide. It burned everything. It burned
the brush, everything” (Bruno Moscatelli).
On July 12, 1887, the King visited the steel mills. He helped with the
casting and operated the teeming stop at the Martin furnace: “If there is
danger,” he told the operator, “we’ll run it together.” He donated to the
workers’ housing fund, awarded distinctions to the company officers,
promised new contracts. However, as Il Messaggero wrote—echoing the
resentment of the disempowered local elites, but also denouncing the
industry’s environmental impact—the King was shown “a tinsel town”; the
56 A. PORTELLI
real Terni was “a filthy array of impassable alleys; of stinking disease-ridden

houses; of slums unworthy of a town that has made such strides in
industrial life.” L’Unione Liberale, owned by the local manufacturers
association, wrote: “If you come to Terni, you run away fast as you can lest
you be smothered to death by the nauseating smells of the gases and fumes
that stink to high heavens… the Nera’s water is dirty and stinking from the
drainage of Madam the Steel Mill… After the factory opened, the swallows
disappeared.” “The alleys around Piazza Clai, Via dell’Ospedale, Via
Carrara—people rented even the cupboards” (Arnaldo Lippi). The pop-
ulation doubled from 15,783 in 1881 to 30,641 in 1901.13
Lucilla Galeazzi. Well, my family’s history. This family that came from
Romagna was a family, at least from what my mother tells me, that owned
land, they also owned a flour mill. Then, I don’t know what happened,
they sought work and came to Terni. This is what my grandmother told
me: the men riding the cart with the furniture, the women on the train. But
then, because to enter Terni you had to pay a duty, at the town gates, you
couldn’t enter unless you paid the duty, so these women came to Terni and
took all their property with them, and all they owned was some chickens
and stuff. So they pulled the chicken’s necks, hid them beneath their skirts,
and rode the train.
And my grandfather, my grandmother’s father, he worked at Terni and
his wife was still back in Romagna and lived on the money he sent home.
After a while, my grandmother got jealous, this husband was in Terni, he
sent money but kept telling her, “don’t come, I don’t have a place to live,
I’m sleeping in a house with other workers, where would you stay?” So one
day she showed up, followed by all the children, because each time he went
home he made a baby. And they moved to Sant’Agnese, which is the
neighborhood where my father and my mother were born, where all my
family has always lived, which is a typical Terni working-class neighbor-
hood. At first they rented; then, with the help of my father’s brother, my
father, my aunt, my grandparents who gave some money, they bought a
piece of land and built a house. They built the house with their own hands,
they sure couldn’t afford to hire labor. So by day they worked in the factory
and at night they worked on the house.
Practically the entire family lived in it. The house was built according to
the typical rural standards: so, a big kitchen, no hall, the rooms abutting on
one another, the outside toilet—“toilet” means a water closet and a sink at
most, no such thing as a shower, a bath tub. You bathed in the kitchen. This
was how they lived, a big extended family, who all wanted to live together.
Then the house had the same life as the family, because it was destroyed [by
the air raids] in the war, they built it back, then it crumbled again.
Calfiero Canali. The first two rooms, my father had a contractor build
them; then we built the rest ourselves. I was a child, I was going to school,
it must have been in 1928, 1929. So my poor father had made a cart with
four wheels; I’d take it down to the creek and load sand, stones to make the
foundations, or sand to make cement blocks. And with the help of other
children, of my friends, we’d hoist it up. My father had made a mold to
make cement blocks; in the morning, before he went to the factory, he
made the mixture for the concrete, and then I’d go and make all these
blocks. I dumped the sand into the mold, to save sand I’d put in a big
stone, and beat it with a piece of wood, smooth it, then open the mold, line
them up, and make another. All the time I made cement blocks.
The municipality had invested all its funds on infrastructure for the
factory, and had no money for public housing. As late as 1914, 96% of new
housing in Terni was built by the workers with their own money and
hands.14 In 1888 the Società Valnerina built what remains to this day
another symbol of working-class Terni: the Palazzone—the “Big
Building,” to some even “the skyscraper,” a five-story, square block of flats
around a central courtyard. It was later bought by Terni; it housed over
600 people and is partly in use to this day. “The Palazzone has been the
best thing in my life, because it’s where I courted, I had fun, I played
music… There was such a brotherhood, those hundred families… Today,
it’s a catacomb” (Augusto Cuppini). “The apartments opened directly into
the kitchen, which was lit only by skylight over the door. Inside [the
kitchen], sometimes with no partition, was the lavatory, the toilet bowl.”
The rooms were large but not enough for the big families of the time;
water was only available from a tap in the courtyard. Rents were twenty to
twenty-five percent of a factory wage. Companies always made a profit
from their housing projects.15
Agamante Androsciani. I lived in Via Sant’Andrea, near Piazza Clai: “Terni

vecchiu.”16 My house, one room and a kitchen, five people slept in it. Women
would fetch water from public fountains; we had our own toilet, which was
quite a luxury. Because, toilets, there used to be one for a whole building.
So, you had to do at night, or otherwise get in line, like that. In fact, in my
58 A. PORTELLI
street, a young lady fell into the cesspit—it was covered with wooden boards,
and with all the shit, and urine, and all, they rotted, she fell, the fire brigade
had to come pull her out. The plumbing was what it was—you could hear rats
scream, you had to make sure they didn’t come into the house. I mean, the
smoke, the stink, a shambles: rats, lice, everything. A hell of a life.
“And yet, people lived, they survived, I don’t know how they did it.
Terni vecchiu was a shambles, a ghetto” (Giovanni Mencarelli). One of the
horrors the King didn’t see on his visit was the hospital. In 1886 an epi-
demic of smallpox killed more people in the hospital than outside. In 1887
cholera killed five people. A 1910 report states that “all that concerns
hygiene in the town of Terni conspires to favor tuberculosis”: that year TB
and meningitis caused twenty percent of the deaths. A typhoid epidemic
killed forty-five people in 1918.17 “The family next door, two children died
from TB, TB was rampant then. We were somewhat better off, because
mother worked at the Grüber wool mill, dad worked at the steel mill, both
my brothers had jobs. We lived a little better, because we worked. If you
worked, you lived” (Antonina Colombi).
3 THE STEELWORKS WITH THEIR ASSES BARE

“You know that ditty that says, here comes Grüber’s [wool mill] carrying a
parasol, Centurini’s [jute mill] with a shirt on, the steelworks with their
asses bare. Along Viale Brin, the steel workers, they were a shame to see.
After work, we worked twelve hours back then, they’d come out and eat
their slop out on the street, the dust” (Arnaldo Lippi). “The portapran-
zare, the lunch carriers, they’d carry a basket, filled it with ten, twelve lunch
pails, hoist it on their heads and go” (Gildo Bartoletti). “Dad was a pipe
maker, foreman at the blast furnace. They worked next to the fire; and they
cast the molds for the pipes with this black earth. I carried him his lunch
every day, from our house in Sant’Agnese, and when he came out to get it
he was black as an African” (Celsa Paganelli). “The only times you could
see these workers a little cleaner, was perhaps on Sundays in the square,
wearing deep blue, the overalls that today people wear at work. Imagine
the pipe makers in the blast furnaces, back then they put dung, too, in the
pipes’ cores. Here’s how in Terni is born, and we earn, the name, deserved
or not, of being revolutionaries” (Arnaldo Lippi).
March 1891: a worker named Manni addresses a rally of unemployed
workers. “Comrades! For eight months I have been pining in poverty and
need, and I can’t give my poor children a bite of bread. I’m ashamed to say,
dear comrades, that at some times I had to stretch my hand and beg for a
coin.” The first to lose their jobs were the laborers who had dug the
foundations and worked on the construction of the plant; next, each
economic downturn resulted in new waves of firings. Population fluctuated
along with company profits: during the crisis of 1893, Terni lost 7,000
inhabitants, but growth resumed soon after. The local press began to
report work casualties. The first to die, before construction was even fin-
ished, may have been Angelo Marcomeni, a 40-year-old immigrant from
Viterbo, killed by a landslide during the digging of the foundations. Then,
Bernardino Zanetti, seventeen, crushed by a rail wagon; Giovanni
Vicentini, from Trieste, run over by a locomotive in the factory’s forecourt;
Giovanni Alpini, crushed by the fall of a crane; In 1897, there were twelve
serious accidents in a month, mostly at the rolling mill; a company report
listed 42 Terni workers killed in accidents or “for surgical causes.”18
Settimio Piemonti. My father worked on the overhead crane. In 1905 he

had an accident and was paid off and fired. Back then they didn’t have
ladders to go up; all they had was cramps on the pillars, that you grabbed as
you climbed up; maybe he lost his hold and fell. He couldn’t work for
another two years, because his head… there was something wrong with it.
Later, he got a job at Bosco’s. And he had another accident and lost the
sight of one eye. Back then, if you had an accident they’d give you a
pittance and [let you go]. Then the war came, he got a job at the Arsenal
until the end of the war. In May 1919 he died.
“This guy who died in the steel works, he had nine children, one is still
living. He was crushed between a pillar and an overhead crane. He was
doing maintenance, they didn’t realize that he was up there—back then
they weren’t as careful as they are today” (Gildo Bartoletti).
His name was Vincenzo Lollo, killed on December 17, 1913. The
sottoprefetto19 of Terni wrote that “when somebody died at work there was
a habit of stopping work for a few hours, so that the mass of the workers, or
their majority, could attend the funeral.” There were too many deaths, and
too many funerals, however, too many lost hours of production, so the
company suggested that, instead of stopping work, workers devolve the
pay for those hours to the families of the victims—at no cost to the
company. This, the sottoprefetto noted, was done after the deaths of Natale
Filati, Augusto Cannafoglio, and Tobia Rinaldi. After Lollo’s death, the
60 A. PORTELLI
authorities expected that “all would go on quietly, as in the case of the

earlier deadly accident, the day before.”
Two deaths in two days, however, are too much. The Camera del
Lavoro, which had never accepted the company compensation plan, held a
rally at the gates, and sent activists out to shut down all the stores in town.
The textile workers from Centurini’s and Grüber’s walked out, throwing
stones and calling for the steel workers to strike. “They are women, easily
excited,” wrote the sottoprefetto. What he did not know was that three of
Vincenzo Lollo’s daughters worked in the jute mill. “They were the first,
the women from Centurini’s, to walk out, because their comrades’ father
was killed” (Gildo Bartoletti). The company finally allowed the workers to
attend the funeral. “The next morning,” Bartoletti remembers, “when we
went to work all our check medals were nailed down so we couldn’t get in.
And so, two hundred men, all fired.”20
“The bulloneria [nuts and bolts shop] was one of the worst places”
(Raul Crostella). “It was a department where the workers were all young
boys. The foreman called it the scum of the factory” (Settimio Piemonti);
others called it “a boys’ hell” (Settimio Bernarducci). As late as 1946,
l’Unità described “18- or 19-year-old boys, with prematurely old faces,
lean, hardly bigger than a normal 8- or 9-year-old boy,” underpaid and
required to buy their own overalls and soap.21 “All the children either went
through the bulloneria, or picked carbonella. Picking carbonella meant you
rutted with your hands in the coal dust, in the ashes [of the factory slag
pile], to retrieve still usable pieces of coal and take them home to burn
again for heating. These were the children’s jobs” (Alfio Paccara).
Remo Righetti. My father, a turner, got pleurisy, bronchitis, then TB. He

died, and so began the hard story of my life. Because at the age of twelve, just
out of grade school, I was supposed to go on to the technical school, instead I
had to give up school, go to work at Centurini’s. A terrible toil, I worked there
a year and a half and in that time I caught rheumatic pains in my knees and I
still bear the consequences. My sister went to work at Centurini’s, another at
Grüber’s, and I had to leave school, which I loved and was so good at.
A 1914 report stated that the Terni steel plant is endowed with “in-
dustrially elegant buildings, well-lit, with crystal-clear atmosphere”:
workers “live in a much healthier environment in their eight or ten hours in
the plant than the rest of the day outside.”22 This might be true, given the
housing conditions of the time. It is harder, however, to accept the
company’s claim that workers’ lung diseases were due to the dust they
breathed on the unpaved city streets rather than to conditions in the plant.
Aldo Bartocci, an engineer and a former deputy manager at the steel plant,
admitted: “We had workers in the factory who had silicosis, who had
tuberculosis. These were people who died young, with silica dust in their
lungs. The company had a refractory waste plant; the plant closed—no
more silicosis.”
The first to strike23 in Terni, in 1884 and again a year later, were the
women of the Grüber wool mill. In 1893 Centurini’s mill women struck
and were charged by the mounted police; their struggles culminated in a
great strike in 1901. Isolated, local conflicts at the steel mills and at the
Carburo fertilizer plant at Nera Montoro led to a strike at the steel works in
1905, at Nera Montoro in 1908, and to the protracted Terni lockout of
1907. Between 1884 and 1913 more working days were lost to industrial
conflict at Grüber’s and Centurini’s than at the steel and chemical plants.
The women were less formally politicized and unionized, but much more
indomitable than the men.24
In the 1930s, with Fascism firmly in power and Terni integrated within
the system of state-controlled industries, chairman Arturo Bocciardo
warned that a manager’s task is not to “level” but to “differentiate.” This
was nothing new: already by 1907, the 416 workers of the Carburo
chemical plant were ranked in no less than 20 job descriptions and 17 pay
levels. By 1931, aside from unskilled laborers and cast iron smelters, in the
whole steel mill there were not ten workers classified in the same exact
trade or specialty. Piece rates, wage differentials, and political discrimina-
tion accentuated the divisions among the workers; yet, this fragmentation
also generated minute, individual forms of resistance.25
Bruno Zenoni. I started at the steel works in 1922, first thing you know I
caught silicosis. At fourteen and a half. I got sick after nine days. My first
payday, I was sick in bed, they brought my pay to me at home. I cried so
much, I didn’t want to go to work anymore, because it was so little, so little
money. And so, still a child, I organized one of the earliest strikes. We were
making bricks for the Martin furnace; we made two hundred pieces and got
6.20 lire, the older ones eight or nine. So, in my little mind, I thought: if I
make the same number of pieces, why am I not paid the same? So I told the
others, there were four of us: “Come on, let’s stop making bricks.” We
began to make less and less; so they pulled us out of there and put us to
piling bricks, sweeping floors. And then, one of us who was about sixteen,
62 A. PORTELLI
seventeen, and was already a Fascist—“Look, I’m going back to making

bricks because I make more money, I learn a trade.” He broke the soli-
darity of the strike.
“I worked on maintenance [in the 1960s]; when a machine broke

down, I fixed it, but I also knew how to stop it. When piece rates are so low
[sabotage] is an elementary form of self-defense” (Ivo Carducci). Mario
Giorgini remembers that in the 1930s, when work and heat became
unbearable, the boys in the nuts and bolts shop would cause a furnace brick
or two to break, and enjoyed a bit of time off while it was being replaced. “I
worked at the machine shop a few days, each worker at their own machine,
and we’d keep one eye on our work, and the other on the foreman at his
desk. As soon as he looked away, you’d stop; when he turned around,
you’d start again. It was a way of getting a little rest” (Santino
Capppanera).
What was mainly at stake was time. In 1888 and 1890 the steel mill, the
Arsenal, and Centurini’s struck over the employers’ request for longer
working hours. Workers invented many ways of controlling time: quick
naps “stolen” during protracted production processes; simulated accidents,
self-harm; and practical jokes: “An overly meticulous worker, you know,
who is always cleaning his tools, you’d smear a little grease and dirty them
up; a shirker, there are lots of ways of making extra work for him” (Santino
Cappanera).
Gildo Bartoletti. It was 1915, there was talk of war already. I was working
on the 76 shrapnel shells; and we were on piece rate, the harder I worked
the more money I made. We had two hours’ rest at midnight. A week on
the day shift, a week at night. When we were on day shift, we’d start at six
a.m. and get off at six p.m. And when we came home from work, tired, you
don’t feel like going out, do you? Work and home, that was all. Many don’t
believe how hard it was to get the eight-hour day. We’ve been shot at,
we’ve been harassed in every way. We at the steel works, we were the
worst, because you spent twelve hours in there, if you slept a couple of
hours, the guard came and hit you on the sole of your feet with his stick
and wake you up. So one time I got a sack of lead dust and placed it on top
of the door. Here comes the chief inspector, our shop engineer. Imagine
that—all the lead dust down on his starched white collar. Of course, there
were spies everywhere. A week later, he calls me to the office, says, “Who
did it?” “How would I know?” But he made me pay for it.
4 WORK IS WORK
On Mayday eve, 1903, Pietro Farini arrived in Terni to serve as secretary of
the Socialist local and editor of La Turbina. His comrades took him to a
tavern owned by a former steel worker.
It was full of people talking and arguing. The loudest voice was that of an old
man who described some job he’d done, and many were listening respect-
fully… I realized immediately that I was looking at one of those workers who
are true masters of their art. And so he was, but he was no exception. His
deep knowledge of his subject, the ease with which he talked, made his
language warm, fluent. I was reminded of Benvenuto Cellini’s description of
[the creation of] his Orpheus in his memoirs.26
“To say that someone was intelligent, in Terni, they said—of course, he’s from
the technical school!” (Fabio Fiorelli). The technical school was established as
early as the 1870s; the Industrial School was created in 1909, on land given by
Terni and money provided by Carburo and the workers’ donations. Its mission
was “the material and moral education of minors, so as to form capable and
honest workers.”27 The spread of technical and industrial cultures was com-
plemented by the workers’ professional pride and self-taught skills. Sante
Carboni, a highly skilled plotter, recalled his co-workers’ amazement at an
especially delicate piece of work he had done: “It was precision work. And they
were stunned: ‘How did you do it?’ I always worked at jobs where you had to
study. A plotter, you have to know about drawing, you have to know certain
trigonometry problems. For instance, I had devised a formula for the division
of the circle that I never saw in any manual, and yet, I’d found it.” Alvaro
Valsenti started as Carboni’s apprentice: “You had a notebook with all your
notes in it,” he reminds him, “and I transcribed it, then I passed it on to another
worker after I was fired. One would start with the manual, that was the
beginning. Then, with practice, you understood.”
Fabio Fiorelli: I mean, in the square people would talk about what was
going on in the steel works—look, my grandfather, he owned the biggest
tavern in Terni; it was a beautiful place, I spent my childhood among these
people who all the stories they told were about the factory. In town, for
years and years, until recently, we knew every detail about what manage-
ment did, when a piece of work was completed and everybody gathered
around to look at it… I mean, the pride in our work—more than respect, it
was awe, it was over-identification, incarnation, with work. It was a way of
being masters of our work.
64 A. PORTELLI
“What I know, I learned with my eyes and ears. Nobody taught me.”28 “In
the old days, maintenance workers had an apprentice who carried their
tools, and when they had a job to do they’d send the boy off on some
errand, because they didn’t want the boy to see how they worked, didn’t
want to teach him the trade” (Guido Botondi). “Well, some would help
you, but mostly you had to steal with your eyes, with your wits. Because
the prevalent mentality was that the trade was their property, it was sacred,
so if you wanted to learn you had to learn by yourself—that is, in some
cases, to steal it” (Alfio Paccara).
Learning the trade “a rubeccio” [by stealth] made work skills even more
precious—more so in that the learning was visual rather than verbal.
Whenever I asked a worker to describe what it was exactly that they did at
work, I was answered not with words, but with gestures (“You have to
describe it with gestures, because with words you never get it right,” Raul
Crostella)—or with mere repletion and tautology: “I was just a boy. We
worked; we w-o-r-k-e-d” (Francesco Proietti). What was the work like at
the Arsenal? “Well—normal.” What do you mean by “normal”? “Well,
gosh, all had to do their share of production” (Gino Brunelli). Work is not
something you can describe; it’s just something you do.
This internalization of work as a given crosses generational and political
boundaries. “When I work, I work,” was the answer Elchide Trippa’s
father—a committed Fascist—gave to those who criticized his excessive
zeal. Fifty years later Corrado, a 17-year-old ultra soccer fan, says the same
about his own father: “He takes his works seriously—normally.” Work
pride and political identity went together: “I could never stand the boss, I
lost a number of jobs for this, but I never shirked. I had many bosses; yet,
as far as work was concerned, they all respected me. I always wanted to be
right in front of the boss” (Valtero Peppoloni); “In the early 1970s, when
the plant careers were unified,29 many said it was a scandal that most of the
workers who moved up the ladder were Communists: ‘They’re on the
bosses’ side now…’ Actually, the fact was that they had had to make up for
political discrimination with their intelligence, their dedication, their skills”
(Luigi Castelli). “Working-class creativity was never used individually but
collectively, to improve working conditions” (Ivo Carducci). Valtero
Peppoloni proudly recalled a labor-saving system he devised for the Martin
furnace. Yet, creativity was not exclusive to skilled workers: Alfredo
Vecchioni remembered a laborer who was too short to reach the furnace
mouth with his shovel and invented a springboard that bounced him up
just enough to enable him to do his work.
“I was always part of highly skilled teams of workers, where your

knowledge of the trade was appreciated. Elsewhere, where skills were not
as necessary, perhaps they appreciated physical strength more; certainly,
they admired the person that was physically strong, who didn’t get tired”
(Santino Cappanera). Claudio Locci, one of the Communist militants who
were incriminated for their actions in the armed struggle of the Resistance
and sought refuge in then Communist Czechoslovakia, went to work in a
factory there in the early 1950s: “I was a udernik, a Stakhanovite, one of
the best workers. Not just me, you know: all the Italians, especially the
political exiles, we were all uderniks or Stakhanovites. Udernik, you
increase production by strength. Stakhanovite, is who produces more with
less strength, that is, with ideas. You understand? And I was able to make
an improvement, because I had been a fitter here, at the Papigno plant.”
While they resented political authority, workers respected authority
founded on knowledge and skill. Many narrators tell that their first
anti-Fascist feelings arose from the realization that workplace hierarchy was
political rather than technical, meant for repression and surveillance rather
than for production.30 Likewise, Valtero Peppoloni renounced Fascism
when, fighting on the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War, he realized that
promotions and medals were granted to officers who did not deserve them.
His rebel spirit caused him to lose a series of jobs after clashing with
foremen and employers; but he always insisted on being the best at
whatever work he did, whether a janitor (“the best kept, the
best-organized school, was me”), an usher at City Hall (always at war with
absentee employees), a street cleaner—the best garbage man in town.
Valtero Peppoloni. I used to work as a trash-can cleaner, the filthiest job in

Terni. You know what it’s like, to scrape garbage cans in the month of July
or August? You open them, and scrape them with a knife. You need a
stomach stronger than tempered steel, to endure that kind of work. And
from forty cans a day they were cleaning before I arrived, between me and
another fool like myself, we raised production up to sixty-five cans a day.
And they were clean, neat.
One day, in the middle of the summer. It was so hot—you’d open a
can… my God! I was wearing a T-shirt, damp with sweat, so I took it off.
Then I took off my undershirt, too. And kept working. The foreman
happened to pass by, and started screaming at me: “Indecency! You’re a
public servant, a city employee,” so on and so forth… in the middle of the
street. I had the scraping knife in my hand, sharp as a razor. And I told him,
66 A. PORTELLI
“Get away from me, or I’ll cut your throat.” I had sweat dripping all over
my body. Even my pants were wet, everything. And that was the end of
[that job].31
5 BECAUSE WE ARE MILL WOMEN

“All right: I was thirteen, fourteen; the first time I went to work at
[Centurini’s] I thought I was going crazy. You walk in, all those turbines,
above and below, the turbines that run the machines: the noise, my son,
the noise! Well, many fainted, the first days, because they couldn’t stand
the air” (Angela Locci). “Working at Centurini’s meant being subjected to
exhausting work, young boys that were used to carry those big spools from
spinning to weaving. We children pushed the carts, carrying bobbins from
spinning to weaving, a terrible toil” (Remo Righetti). “I worked at the
weave mill: all you did was set the shuttle, but it wasn’t heavy, I mean.
Soon as you’d set a bobbin you had to set another one, you had to be
quick, always in a rush. I was sorry, me, for the women at the spinning mill:
poor wretches, they sure earned what little money they made, with that big
pocket in the front of their aprons, the reels, and setting the spindles. They
had to be careful, so many hurt themselves, [the machine] took their
fingers off” (Amalia Ferri).
Centurini’s jute mill was established in 1884. It employed about a
thousand workers, mainly women and children (men worked as foremen,
guards, and at the few skilled jobs). “Mother, she worked at Centurini’s.
She lived very far, she got up every morning at four a.m.—work started at
six, she worked twelve hours, from six to six” (Maggiorina Mattioli).
“When the whistle blows\Yet before day break\You can hear us all around
\Coming through the streets of Terni,” said the song of the centurinare, as
the jute mill workers were called. “The air didn’t suit me, the jute dust, I
couldn’t eat or anything. It was dirty, [at lunch break] we would come out
and eat on the ground, like gypsies; on the creek bank, laying a newspaper
on the ground” (Amalia Ferri). TB was rampant from the very beginning;
workers were docked for health services, but the therapies were iodine,
purgatives, wool undershirts. The only latrine was open to the street and
accessible to (male) company guards.32
“It wasn’t a job; it was forced labor. When Mr. Chiappero, the engineer,
was in charge, he was a dictator. He’d ambush you, he’d climb the roof [to
check on shirkers]. And you saw him coming, tall, in his overalls; he’d fire
you, he’d fine you, because perhaps you were eating a bite of bread…
Anyway, he too is dead, though” (Angela Locci). “After the first two
weeks, I was paid ten lire. I’ll never forget it. I said, ‘Virgin Mary, how little
I earned!’ And, my dad, he was a foreman, he said, ‘Well, you only did
three pieces…’ I didn’t understand, imagine, I was so young, I didn’t know
anything” (Amalia Ferri).
Celsa Paganelli. Back then [in 1936] autarky33 was on, they made jute
with broom stalks, and they kept breaking. I remember a girl, she wore
wooden clogs and an apron to work in winter, she was stringing the broom
stalks to prepare them for weaving. Water all over the floor, in winter. She
got sick in her bones, TB, and died. Such a lovely girl, she was. At first, I
started working at the looms. Then they put me to picking up the cloth
from the sewing machines. What a toil! You could never keep up, because
the machine was electric and it sewed fast, it sewed and sewed. And you,
quick, quick, you had to fold them, tuck them in, pile them up, ten, twenty
—the dust, in the summer, heat beating down on you from above, jute
sticking on your sweat, it was hard labor, hard labor. Weaving, too, God
help us and save us! If the warp was bad, it kept breaking, you didn’t make
any money. And so I remember, she’s dead now, a lovely girl she was. Her
warp wouldn’t hold; she went up to the warp master—the language she
used! Because she had learned them in the mill. Hearing all those cuss
words, I almost fainted. I said to myself, “For the Virgin’s sake, why? Such
a pretty girl…” Because they couldn’t take it, they were tired, tired.
“I remember this commendatore34 Centurini, Alessandro Centurini: he

had an attitude that was… the master, he was the master. Almost an
emblematic figure. He gave orders, abruptly: ‘Tomorrow morning, twenty
workers are laid off’” (Ilario Ciaurro). When his workers were on strike,
the owner, Alessandro Centurini alternated cavalry charges with the pro-
mise of “a good old spaghetti dinner.” When the city government com-
plained about working conditions, he replied that he had started the mill
out of altruistic feelings and kept it open at the cost of “huge sacrifices.”
He campaigned for the Senate with the vernacular slogan, “Volete li
quadrini? Votate Cindurini” [You want money? Vote for Centurini], and
celebrated his election by giving his workers a day off. The women left the
factory singing hymns in praise of the master (“the procession of the
needy,” commented the Socialist-feminist organizer, Maria Goia). On the
eve of World War I, he came down from his carriage in the street to scold a
worker who had failed to salute him.35
68 A. PORTELLI
Gianni Colasanti. I remember, from my mother’s stories, this almost

feudal relationship, back [in the 1950s] with the masters, you know; and
with the bosses, the male foremen. There was a huge gulf between these
women and their bosses; an attitude of awe made of fear, and also of
respect for their skill, for their knowledge. They repeated their words like
mythological sayings, with an attitude sometimes of anger and sometimes
of awe toward these big personalities who could even afford a life style
unlike that of the poor working women. The other aspect I remember, the
reverence, often, toward the maestra—a sort of forewoman. I remember
that when I had my first communion, at home, the fact that the maestra
came was to my mother something that sort of gave our first communion a
touch of refinement, of elegance. I mean, that kind of attitude.
The other concentration of female work force, the Grüber wool mill,
employed about 500 workers around 1910. It had a relatively better image:
as the song said, “Centurini[’s workers] wear rags, Grüber’s carry para-
sols.” “Grüber’s was more elegant, that is, cleaner; the pay, too, was dif-
ferent. The work was not as heavy” (Amalia Ferri). Yet, Grüber’s workers
were disciplined in almost military fashion, the water was undrinkable,
shifts could be up to twelve hours. Here, too, paternalism was the norm: on
the occasion of the head manager’s wedding banquet, the workers joined
in “spontaneous and affectionate ovations.” Grüber’s closed in 1929.36
Giuseppina Migliosi. Me, it didn’t suit me, either. Because all the doors were
padded and shut, not a breath of air must blow, because when they opened
the door, all it took was a puff of air and the threads would tear. Often, to get
a breath of air, one would go to the rest room—so-called. Well, it wasn’t a
toilet, come on! You’d go in, exchange a few words with some other woman.
And [the foreman] came by, once, twice, then he knocked on the door,
hard: saying, “come out!” After my first baby, I had to quit. I wanted to
resist, I said, “I want to go back,” because I liked it; instead… So, I knew
how to make pants, I worked [as a seamstress]. I always worked.
The contradiction between “it didn’t suit me” (“non è che stavo bene”) and
“I liked it” (“me piaceva”) is mediated by the usual working-class formula: “I
always worked.” And work is work, period: you take pride in it, complain
about it, and take it as it is. “Yeah, I always worked. Since a child, I always
worked. I worked at Centurini’s, at Grüber’s, all over. [After I got married],
nothing, only work. Always, we worked at home: you work harder at home
than at the mill. [On Sundays] you had to prepare the washing, we washed,
we did the house chores.” What was the best time of your life? “That I worked
always. I worked, in each and every way. And still, I’m old, and I’m still
working” (Irene Guidarelli). Another Centurini mill song celebrated the joys
of industrial work: “We make the sacks with the jute thread, and the machine
helps us and keeps us gay. When Centurini’s whistle blows, you forget your
worries, the countryside is happy and happy is the town.”37
Amalia Ferri. I’d get up at four thirty a.m., and when I heard the alarm, I’d
say, goodness gracious, why didn’t the clock break? My husband, poor man,
he’d get up, too—but, well, he didn’t do any work outside the factory. He
worked on the gantry crane, sitting down, [all he did was] turn a crank. So it
wasn’t such hard work. Dangerous, yes. But us women: I had to work,
because he didn’t earn much. And I had two little girls, my mother minded
them. They were small. I had to make things, back then you knitted, you
made everything. Me, I never went to sleep before midnight, one a.m.;
because I had to prepare the next day’s meal. Listen, I worked my soul off.
But now I’m living like a lady, I don’t do anything anymore.
“I was ashamed of working [at Centurini’s]. When young men came

courting, they said, ‘you stink of jute, you stink…’ It was humiliating”
(Giuseppina Migliosi). “What bundles of blooms, what miracles of flow-
ers,” wrote Furio Miselli, Terni’s major vernacular poet, celebrating the
beauty of Centurini’s women: “they come in all shapes, they come in all
colors.” The union paper, La Turbina, also used the same flower meta-
phor, but in the opposite sense: “When they start work, the girls are like
flowers, but gradually lose shape, color, voice, health.”38
Giuseppina Migliosi. I wasn’t married yet, so I’d go out with young ladies
like me. [Young men] came courting us—we’d share a laugh, exchanged a
few words. Because back then, talking to a boy—my brothers, they were
too strict, also the younger ones, you know. Only those few minutes, half
an hour, that I lingered out there… But see, I worked so much, I can say
that I had more fun I who worked so much than one who lived like a lady.
In women’s narratives, the family’s “strictness” (“severità”) is the other

side of working-class “seriousness” (“serietà”). Giuseppina Migliosi was
surrounded by “strict” authority figures—foreman, brothers, parents; yet,
she says she, too, was “strict” when she educated her daughter, and so is
her daughter with her own children.
70 A. PORTELLI
Gaetano Cruciani. The women? Ehhh! It was all a riot, then. It was like, I
mean, libertines, you understand? Because in there, it’s a fact, they made
love, and they did other things—understand? In other words, sexuality was
developed—why, because it’s a consequence of being at work. When you’re
a home person, who lives at home, you don’t have a chance to develop your
intelligence, I mean, and your personal culture. As those women did.
“Sometimes, to say that a woman is cheap, they say: ‘Of course, she
worked at Centurini’s.’” (Celsa Paganelli). “As if the exploitation to which
we are subjected by the philanthropic Senator [Centurini] were not
enough,” a mill woman writes, “they heap upon us the vilest insults and
often attempt to take advantage of our physical weakness with behavior
that would make a hangman blush.” “Morning till night, tic-tac, until
Saturday we have to work,” sang the centurinare, celebrating their pride
and independence, “but when you see us on Sunday, when we are all
dressed up, you might think we’re ladies… We are pretty and pleasant, we
want respect and we get it. Some people get ideas, because we are mill
women, but if we make love, it’s only for fun.”39
Antonina Colombi. At Grüber’s, there was this guy, the boss. He had them
all under his heel. I remember my poor mother, she told him—excuse my
words, now: “You—with me—no way. You’ll have to manage by yourself.”
“Well, hyena”—they called her hyena, my mother, she worked so many
years at Grüber’s, she was a real plodder, she knew about wool, she knew
about spinning, she knew everything to a tee. So, this boss put her to work
on a warp that kept tearing up, and she wasn’t making any money. And he
kept telling her, “Bust, hyena.” She said, “Doesn’t matter. I’ll bust, but
you’ll get no satisfaction off me.” She was tough. These other girls, she
said, they’d do anything for a kiss, for a caress.
“It’s a proven fact,” wrote La Turbina, “that the female organism, in

hard and exhausting manual work, wears out, damaging the family and the
race.” Woman, the Socialist paper goes on, is “man’s most unwitting
enemy” because she “may compete” with him on the labor market. These
women’s unruly riots and disorderly walkouts are described as “nothing
but the noisome caprice of a few girls” who irritate people with too many
strikes instead of “keeping a more serious demeanor.” When they win, as in
1901, they are invited to organize under the leadership of brothers and
fathers. When they lose, “they are women, weak is the body and weak and
uncultivated the intellect.”40 Vanda, a Centurini worker and organizer,

writes: “Women workers are not even allowed to be responsible for their
own organization. Seeing a woman walk into the Camera del Lavoro41 is a
sight out of this world. Fiancés and brothers don’t allow them to even
collect union dues, because then they would have to come to the Camera
del Lavoro a couple of times every two weeks… Well, who do you think
these brothers and fiancés are? Socialists, unionists, anarchists.”42
“We struck every week. And they were tough. We walked out [even if
we disagreed], because if we didn’t they’d beat us up; they’d hurl those
iron spools at you if you didn’t strike. That racket, all those shouts and
screaming, I didn’t like them. I never did” (Angela Ferri). Angela Locci
remembered the “bossy” women that came down from Papigno on the
tram and filled the streets with their screams and their fights. “At
Centurini’s,” Celsa Paganelli recalled, “it was a riot all the time. They were
always fighting.” Her mother had a fight with a co-worker for breaking her
mirror, and when the other girl threatened to whip her, “Grandma hid a
kitchen knife beneath her apron and confronted her, she says: ‘You see this
[knife]? You touch my daughter, I’ll cut your head off.’”
Angela Locci. We sang, “We’re from Centurini’s, make way for us, we’re
revolutionaries and we want respect.” Over any trifle—strike. Well, we
were so tired, it was a relief. When they had these strikes, I wouldn’t go out
there and throw bobbins, raise Cain, because my dad said, “Don’t go,
because you never can tell what they’ll cook up.” The men kept telling us:
“We’re Socialists, we; throwing spools? It’s not done, otherwise, what
doctrine would it be?” “You make all this row over a five cents they make
you pay toward your pensions…” They were taking a cent out of our pay,
for pensions. “Are you gonna be like your old men you see sitting outside
the gate with hat in hand, waiting for you to pass by on payday and give
them a cent, five cents?” You see, they were right. A lot of those ignorant
women, they said, “Eh, they’re docking us a cent, [the unions] are going
along with the boss…” And they kept throwing stuff. There were seven,
eight hundred of us, not all brains were the same. And, when they got mad,
they were mean, those women. They threw bobbins, they chanted, they
stopped [work]: they were mean, sometimes, they sure were.43
Angela Locci, a political activist, discriminates between Socialist “doc-

trine” and “ignorant women.” In fact, it was a conflict between two rea-
sons, only one of which was recognized by male authority in the unions
72 A. PORTELLI
and in the family. Paying a penny now toward a pension in the future
seemed to make little sense for women whose family and work lives were
different from those of male factory workers. Unlike the steel workers, the
women at Grüber’s and Centurini’s did not expect to spend all their lives in
the mill until retirement age. Their life stories always include a few years at
Centurini’s, a few at Grüber’s, a few at home, pregnancies and births,
cottage work seamstressing at home, and then back to the factory, perhaps
at the Arsenal. Even when they worked in the mill, a part of them remained
outside the gates: children, house work, the many tasks of care. Double
exploitation means double toil, but also a multiplicity of points of view, a
wider range of identity options. Thus, mill women were often out of tune
with the labor movement’s long-term struggles and visions; but they were
much less possessed by the industrial work ethic, much more able to
estrange the factory and its rationality.
Thus, the loss of the memory of some of these women is a sad loss for
working-class history. I am thinking of Sara Tabarrini, leader of the 1901
textile strike, founder of one of Italy’s earliest factory committees; or
Felicita De Nicolò, who came from the 1901 strike to become
vice-secretary of the Camera del Lavoro.44 Or, Carlotta Orientale, who
served as secretary of the Camera del Lavoro in 1916–1917.
“She was a tall woman, with a big shock of hair, a beautiful woman”
(Angela Locci); “She was an agitator, she spoke at rallies, she roused the
women, she led the toughest union struggles” (Remo Righetti); “She had
such fine feelings, she was a poem indeed” (Gaetano Cruciani); “She was a
good comrade, always ready for action; Carlotta was a fighter, never backed
off from a brawl” (Giovanni Giovannetti); “She was a spinner; she ran
everything, she told us all what we were supposed to do” (Irene Guidarelli).
“In public opinion,” police records say, “she is not much esteemed because
of her loose moral conduct; she is lively, proud, with little schooling and
scant culture, as she only has a fourth-grade education.” Yet, when she was
arrested and tried in 1916, “she delivered a splendid self-defense.”45
Carlotta Orientale was born in 1893, the daughter of an Arsenal worker
from Piedmont (“a good worker, my father was”). She went to work at
Centurini’s in 1909; in 1916, when the secretary of the Camera del Lavoro
was drafted, she replaced him. She later migrated to Milan, went into exile
in Paris during Fascism, always keeping in touch with anarchist and syn-
dicalist groups.
I met her in Rome, shortly before she died, in an old people’s nursing
home. She was 85, and ill. Doctors and staff were surprised when I asked
for her: they had no idea that Carlotta had anything to say. I sat by her bed
for half a day, but there was hardly anything left of her memory of struggle.
Even more than memory, what she seemed to lack was energy to speak
about it. She was only able to recollect two episodes, merged into each
other: the national working-class rebellion, known as the Red Week of
1919 (the police record says: “At the head of her workmates, she was guilty
of violent attacks on the public force, of insults and of three distinct crimes
of personal violence”); and her arrest in 1916 during a protest against
“easy” exemptions from military service during World War I. I wish I could
convey in English the eloquence of her deep Terni vernacular speech,
unchanged over her travels and years.
Carlotta Orientale. I worked at the mill. Centurini’s. I remember that they

threw me to the ground, they pushed me into the dust. Then I remember
that they kept me in jail for a day. The [Arsenal] workers were waiting at
the gate for the wool-mill workers to walk out, which was still working. So
the police commissioner came up, he wanted to throw me inside, and I told
him: “Don’t touch me with your filthy hands. I’m coming by myself.”
6 THE GREAT LOCKOUT

Arnaldo Lippi. And so we reach the early 1900s, with the great steelworks
lockout. The workers become protagonists. It’s the revolutionary era in
Terni, the dawn rising from the republican strife. And so were born the first
rebellions, and the protests, too: “With Spadoni’s whiskers/We’ll make
ropes/To hang these rascals.”46 When the great lockout was on. For three
months, people starved.
Until 1905 there were no by-laws or rules to regulate work and industrial
relations in the steel works: management did what they wanted. In 1905
the workers asked the company to agree with their representatives on a set
of regulations to define rights, duties and procedures. After a long strike,
the company agreed to submit a proposal by March 1907. But when the
deadline came the company presented a project that the local correspon-
dent for Il Messaggero described as “worthy of the mind of Torquemada”47
and refused to discuss it with the workers. It was a long list of “minute and
inflexible rules,” each violation punishable by immediate dismissal. The
company retained the right to fire workers who had work accidents; and
only recognized severance pay to workers with more than 12 years’
74 A. PORTELLI
seniority and aged over sixty who did not leave work voluntarily (at the
time, the work force included men as old as seventy-seven, who could not
afford to retire).48
The workers responded by obstructionism and “work to rule.” The
company announced that all those who did not sign the new regulations
within a week would be fired, and proceeded immediately to fire
twenty-four activists, including Costantino Fusacchia, a leading Republican
and a leader of the metal workers’ league. Nobody signed, and mass dis-
missals emptied the factory; work stopped, the furnaces were turned off.
A general meeting called for a general strike, which was postponed pending
an (unsuccessful) mediation by the Republican mayor, Vittorio Faustini.
When the radical syndicalist Teodoro Monacelli was replaced at the head of
the Camera del Lavoro by the more moderate Republican Fusacchia and
the Socialist Pietro Farini, the strike was called off.49
The company’s arrogance contrasted with the workers’ lingering
paternalistic illusions. “These tranquil, polite, relatively educated workers,
speak with one voice: the rules were supposed to be drafted in love and
harmony.” In a meeting, a worker demanded the restitution of the money
the workers had “donated” for Breda’s monument. The workers marched
by the residence of the head manager Amilcare Spadoni, who watched
them “livid” from his window. “He could have been the idol,” writes the
new Socialist secretary Pietro Farini, “he could have improved the condi-
tions of the working class in the company’s interest, he could have avoided
conflict and attrition; and yet, month after month, year after year, he has
widened the breach between the proletariat and the company.”50
Terni’s 3,500 workers and their families made up more than half of
Terni’s population. And Terni began to brace itself for the long battle to
come. Mass meetings were held each day, delegations traveled all over the
country seeking solidarity and help, people donated to a resistance fund.
“We ought to remember that, while these early, tough struggles begin,
Terni’s people had to migrate, because they were targeted by reaction. You
go to San Paolo in Turin,51 and you find the tradition of the ternani who
left because of the lockout. You find, in Genoa, descendants of ternani; in
Spezia, and Piombino: a tradition of ternani, that destitution forced to
emigrate” (Arnaldo Lippi). By early May 815 workers had left town, and
more followed, while others were blacklisted, or submitted and went back
to work empty handed.52 Those who stayed resorted to what the rural
surroundings could provide: “Dad said, ‘I’ll go to work night and day,’ he
went out to help on the farms, hoeing, accepting all kinds of work, and he
supported us that way. Like dogs” (Amalia Ferri). The unions organized
another strategy that would be used again by striking farm workers in
Parma in 1909 and textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912.
Amalia Ferri. Well, now, when I was a child, they had, what they called,
the lockout, see? And we children, the Camera del Lavoro rounded us up
and sent us to Forlì [in Romagna]. Us. Because we were allowed to choose
where we wanted to go; and as my father, they’re from Romagna, they sent
us to Forlì. On the train. All on the train, just like when you go on holiday
camp to the sea. I remember it well, we left, and because we were so many
children we consoled one another.
The first group of children left on May 12; by the end of the month the
number of serratini (children of the lockout) had risen to 370. The chil-
dren marched to the station accompanied by flags, brass bands, and
cheering crowds on Main Street. “The women, the women who were the
bravest of all, the most revolutionary—they sang, as they walked with these
children: ‘We are the children of the serrati\The locked-out workers of
Terni\We are small and innocent\We want freedom’” (Arnaldo Lippi).
Meanwhile Terni filled with soldiers, billeted in the factories, in the City
Hall, in churches; from the nearby hill of Colle dell’Oro, cannons were
leveled at the town.53 Terni offered some changes, but held on to the
condition that each worker must sign the rules individually or be fired. Prime
Minister Giovanni Giolitti offered to arbitrate, but Farini persuaded the
workers to refuse (“Who was Giolitti? The head of the government, that is,
of the national bourgeoisie… His arbitration could not mean the triumph of
the proletarians,” he wrote in his memoirs). However, the wearisome search
for mediation, the out-migration of many young and active workers, and the
slackening of national solidarity began to take their toll. Mass meetings went
deserted; on May 18, Il Messaggero, who had supported the workers, edi-
torialized that the struggle continued “merely for a petty point of pride.”54
Suddenly, new protagonists revamped the battle.
Gaetano Cruciani. Out there, on the station boulevard, that’s where the
Terni foundry was. They had billeted a company of soldiers in there,
understand? And so one night, around nine, ten p.m., the women of
Centurini’s, together with the wives of the locked-out men, and with us—
we [children] brought up the rear; there were no grown-up men—and these
women sang the anthem of the serrati. What the words said, it’s impossible
76 A. PORTELLI
to remember: that they had been humiliated, they had been fired, you know.
And while these women sang, halfway on the boulevard, when they were
halfway through the song, suddenly the [foundry] windows broke open. It
was night, the soldiers were in bed; and they all went to the windows and sat
on the sills, and applauded. The soldiers. They applauded the women. The
next day, my dear, they were gone. They took them away.
On May 20 “the gray uniformity of the conflict is… suddenly inter-

rupted… by a lively demonstration of women.” Carrying sticks and cans of
ashes, the working-class women from Borgo Bovio gathered at the factory
gates and “furiously whipped” the scabs as they came out. The police
scattered them, but the next day they came back, and were joined by the
women of another proletarian neighborhood, Sant’Agnese. They stopped
the trams that brought the scabs to work, pulled them out and whipped
them. The cavalry charged them, many were arrested.55
Ilario Ciaurro. Sure, I remember—I remember the marches, the pro-
tests, I, too, ended up underneath the hoofs of the carabinieri’s horses, I was
always mixed up in troubles, anyway. If there was a march, if there was a fight
to get involved in, maybe throw a stone—I didn’t do it, but I was always in…
and so I was beaten, dragged… Nothing dramatic, what is normal in
working places. Once, they took me to jail, too. They let me go, I was a child.
“The world turned upside down,” “Women and children order the
general strike,” the newspapers wrote: “Belligerent viragos” blocked
Centurini’s, invaded Grüber’s, picketed the Arsenal, stopped building sites,
raided the open-air market and overturned the stalls. “Always followed by a
screaming mob of women and children,” they ordered all shops to close.
“Today we’re taking over!,” they shouted, “and it’s absolutely true.”
Reinforcements were called in, Terni was in a state of siege.56
Avanti!, the Socialist newspaper, condemned the movement as a mere
“pochade” of “disheveled women” and “screaming brats,” spies and
provocateurs. The Camera del Lavoro called it a “degeneration.” La
Sommossa reported: “When we say to keep calm, the women reply: we’ve
been calm too long. Let’s leave the men at home. We’ll come out our-
selves.”57 While Fusacchia held a meeting against the general strike,
Caterina Bellini—who the day before had driven the scabs from the
foundry area—addressed a rally in the main square.
Unsupported, the movement dwindled. “The feminist movement…
aborts,” jeers Il Messaggero: “Women’s rule is over: thank God.”58 “The
sun after the storm,” writes Avanti! Now that the peace and quiet of the
lockout was restored, the Socialist paper could afford a bit of sympathy:
“One of the speakers, a huge colossus of a woman with spiky black hair and
eyes like burning coals, told us yesterday that she hadn’t set foot at home in
two days. This humble person, who perhaps had never appeared in public,
had turned into a character from a Victor Hugo novel. We have followed
them, these women of the people, in their actions and, though it was sad to
see such waste of energy, we lived an hour of revolutionary romanticism,
re-read a page of instinctive rebellion that encourages us to look to the
future with the enchantment of the great day to come.”59
“We all remember the fleeting moment of the triumph of the mob,”
Costantino Fusacchia wrote later.60 But the sudden irruption of the
non-authorized subjects, disheveled women and screaming brats, was the
turning point. The day after their rebellion, Terni’s board—“convened
urgently in view of the late deplorable riots”—agreed to give up the
request for individual signatures—a result that months of mediations and
negotiations had failed to achieve. But at this point workers insisted that
the regulations to be radically changed, and that the dismissed workers be
taken back.61
On May 31 the company’s resistance suffered another blow. A group of
serratini arrived in Rome, greeted by a parade of 2000 people. As the
children marched along the streets of Rome, they were attacked and beaten
by the police. The next day’s banner headlines denounced police brutality
on children.62 The company was under pressure from the Navy, which
announced that it would sue if Terni, due to the lockout, failed to deliver
standing orders; the workers, too, were at the end of their tether. As Farini
remembered, “The city government, the bourgeois press, and the priests
above all, circulated false news, especially among the women. They claimed
that the town was tired of the lockout… and therefore it was necessary to
accept some kind of arbitration.” Rumors went around of arrests, of the
closing of the factories, of bad things happening to the children who had
left town; landlords threatened mass evictions.63 Workers applauded the
paternalistic founder, Cassian Bon (“an old-fashioned industrialist, who
always treated workers like his own children,” writes Avanti! ) as he offered
to mediate—until they realized that he was a major stockholder of the
utility company that was cutting off their electricity.
When an agreement was finally reached, after more than three months
of negotiation, many of the workers’ demands were met. Terni, however,
refused to take back Fusacchia and the other activists who had been fired at
78 A. PORTELLI
the beginning of the controversy. Blood would be shed over this, as we will
see later; but for the moment it seemed an acceptable compromise.64
“All battles have their victims,” commented Fusacchia. At the final rally
he told the workers: “Go back to work victorious. You have earned the
gratitude of the organization.” He even warned these workers, who had
resisted for months through hunger and cold, not to “waste in wine and
revelry” the wage raise they won. Overall, however, as Farini wrote later,
the agreement “gave the workers an uneasy peace.” Many workers felt the
same. The night the agreement was signed, anarchists paraded through
town shouting “down with the Pyrrhic victory,” pulling a wagon lit by a
symbolic “flask” (in Italian, fiasco, failure).65 Some of the new-won rights
remained only on paper; in 1912 Terni’s workers had to strike again for the
demands they had supposedly won in 1907. The controversy between
“principles” and “realism” would divide Terni’s workers and their orga-
nizations for years. It is echoed in the words of Arnaldo Lippi (a
Republican at the time), in which “we” and “us” seem to refer both to the
strike leaders and to the anarchist and syndicalist opposition, as though the
internally divided narrator identified at the same time with both sides:
Arnaldo Lippi. After the lockout, there came the great rift between the
anarchists and us—I say us to mean those who were on the union’s side of
the barricade—because they accused the committee of capitulating after
three months of struggle. And work resumed. Now, with hindsight, it
seems to me that we made a mistake, by making these accusations. You
know—as I also have learned—that the core of union struggle is com-
promise. All contracts, all agreements, this is the union’s function: hence
the break with Sorel’s school of thought.66 This conflict was not a defeat,
but it surely wasn’t a victory. It was the first great effort, the demonstration
of a working class that arose against exploitation.
7 TERNI VECCHIU
Remo Righetti. Terni was a small town of about 30–35,000 workers—I
mean, 35,000 inhabitants. Very tight, shut inside the walls. Back then, we
still had the town gates, that the toll keepers would close at night: where
you have all those arches, those towers, those were the gates of Terni.
Outside the walls, the beginnings of [neighborhoods like] Borgo Bovio,
San Valentino. The rest, nothing; there was nothing.
Terni lies in the middle of a circular valley surrounded by mountains (called

conca, basin). In the early 1900s it was still encircled by its medieval walls.
It retained the structure of a Roman army encampment (castrum): two
main streets—Via Roma , known popularly as Corso Vecchio [Old Main
Street], and Via Garibaldi—crossed the town east to west and north to
south, and met in the middle to form the public square, then named after
King Victor Emmanuel, later Piazza del Popolo [the People’s Square].
But the town was beginning to change. When the railroad reached
Terni in 1870, a boulevard (named Corso Tacito but still known, a century
and a half later, as “la strada nôa” [the new street]) broke through the
walls to connect the station with the city center through a new square also
called Piazza Tacito (after the Roman historian erroneously supposed to
have been born in Terni). The “new street” is as straight and wide as the
“old main street” is winding and narrow. Together with the Piazza Tacito,
it would quickly become the space in which the bourgeoisie and the middle
class began to reconstruct the town in their own image “by driving out the
old inhabitants, expropriating cheaply the old ‘unhealthy’ houses and
making huge profits out of the areas on which the new buildings would
rise.”67 Where Corso Tacito reaches Piazza del Popolo the bourgeois cafés
and the gentlemen’s clubs rubbed shoulders with the gathering places of
the folks from the poverty alleys of San Valentino or Piazza Clai. This point
became, and still to a large extent remains, a hinge between the old and the
new urban spaces, a physical and symbolic frontier between cultures and
classes. “That spot, it was a neuralgic point, it was a dividing line between
the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—indeed, that’s where on Carnival we
waged the merancolata” (Arnaldo Lippi): a ritual battle fought between
bands of children from both sides by throwing merancole—“a green citrus
fruit, an orange grafted on a lemon, slightly acid tasting. It’s real hard,
when it hits you on the head it’s like a stone” (Elchide Trippa).
Arnaldo Lippi. I mean, class against class. At the assigned hour, the first
hostilities began. Don’t forget that that is where they had the Gentlemen’s
Club—called Circolo dei Signori. And here is the working class on one
side, by the Conti clothing store [on Piazza del Popolo], and [on Corso
Tacito] the bourgeoisie from Pazzaglia’s café. To humiliate the poor the
bourgeoisie would throw from the windows flowers, carnations, a few
gianduiotti68, a piece of candy or two, and the poor folks would brawl in
the middle of the street because that was the only chocolate, the only candy
they ever got. It was an insult to poverty. And it turned into an open fight,
80 A. PORTELLI
merancole on this side and that side. Back then, Terni, in the orchards in
the back of the houses, they all had the merancola tree. It was a sharp,
sharp confrontation: on this side, you saw us; or the other side, them… It
was the spot of the merancolata.
Trees grew in the backyards of the old main street; the new industrial
town was still steeped in its rural roots and its old and new traditions. Terni
vecchiu resented the changes wrought by modernization: “Terni of ours,
where have you gone? Terni of mine, you’re no longer yourself,” lamented
Furio Miselli, Terni’s great vernacular poet. In another sonnet, he
denounced the outsiders who had “slunk into town like thieves, in the
middle of the night, greasy, ragged, on broken and muddy shoes”; and
once they had wiggled their way into a good job, still they complained that
“Terni’s a village mean, uncouth, the air stings, the water is bad.” The
conclusion was a classic love-it-or-leave-it: “Who asked you here anyway?
You don’t like this place? Then get away!”
As a reaction to the encroachments of the industrial culture brought in
from outside, the older local elites and middle classes tried to revamp and
reinvent Terni’s preindustrial identity. In 1896 Miselli and a group of friends
resurrected the rural May fertility rite and created the modern urban
Cantamaggio (May Singing). “In the rural suburbs, lovers’d go serenading;
they’d take along some minstrel, with a guitar or an organetto,69 and they
made the round of the rural houses. After a while, the owners began to give
[the musicians] flasks of wine, and gifts of cheese, a few eggs” (Viscardo
Caneschi) to be consumed in a big final dinner. On the eve of Mayday, “we’d
start out, one leading, carrying a green branch, another with a small accordion,
singing all those old songs—‘Venimo a canta’ maggio quella nova/Buttate giù
quella coppia d’òva.’ To make a rhyme”’70 (Foscolo Armini).
“When Miselli brought the Cantamaggio back to town he did it to
remind all ternani of what we used to be, that is, contadini” (Spiro
Biancifiori). However, the new form of the ritual was very different. Rather
than the traditional rural or semi-rural culture, it represented that of “the
citified peasant, the artisan, and also the petty bourgeois, or even the small
landowner, clinging to their cultural roots” threatened by industrialization
and immigration. It no longer consisted of spontaneous groups making the
rounds of farmhouses singing folk songs for eggs and cheese, but of a
parade of decked floats accompanied by new songs in pop style.71
On the erudite side, Miselli’s poetry and the reinvention of the
Cantamaggio were echoed by archeological findings: the 1907 discovery of
three Roman tombs (one of which was—wrongly—identified with that of

the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus) reinforced local humanists’ dubi-
ous claim to Terni’s ancient and classical heritage. The “new” street and
the “new” square, as well as—later—the elite classical school would all be
named “Cornelio Tacito.”72
“In Narni, they say that Terni has three things: Viparo,73 steel, and
ignorance. The ternano’s ignorance consists in using the [informal] tu
form. But this is an inner transport, an impulse toward brotherhood,
congeniality” (Guerriero Bolli). The myth of Terni vecchiu was a nostalgic
relic; yet it also served as a corrective toward the rising hegemony of
industrial work ethics. This attitude is embodied in such folk characters as
the unforgettable “Mimminu”: “He was one of those street people, I
remember he used to lie down on the steps of the church of San
Giovannino, the one they tore down to make the new Post Office, and
folks would give him some chore just to justify feeding him a bowl of soup
or something,” Elchide Trippa recalls. An oft-told anecdote tells that one
day a merchant asked him to go on a errand: “Well, he says, I haven’t eaten
yet. They gave him a bowl of soup; he ate the soup, and lay down as long as
he was tall on the church steps. The man says, ‘Well? What about [the
errand]?’ And Mimminu: ‘Well, now I’ve already eaten…’” “Your home
was the street and the square,” sang Furio Miselli, “You slept alla Stelletta
[“under the stars”]; you died as you lived, better on the floor in your own
home than in a bed that’s not your own.”74
“And in the first place,” wrote L’Unione Liberale, at the dawn of
industrialization, “one must harshly reproach and fight to the bitter end
the evil madness for revelry and debauchery that raises its flag among the
workers… so that all the money earned with the sweat of the brow… is
wasted on holidays in gluttony, vice and drunkenness… And when
morality is learned in taverns and dives, between a game of morra and a
turn of briscola75… it is no wonder that the moral standards of modern
workers are not on a par with the lofty aspirations of this class.”76
Giuseppe Laureti. Back then, around here, it was like a family. I was born
here in 1924, and here I was… pastured, you know. My father had a
workshop here, and this was the old part of town: a milk shop, a couple of
playgrounds, and the hospital next door. Out here, it was all cart drivers,
coach drivers, they worked around the station. Evenings, we’d all go sit
outside in the street, it was full of taverns, lowdown dives.
82 A. PORTELLI
A frequent theme in the memories of Terni vecchiu is the turning of

working tools into weapons: kitchen knives, short-handled rakes for sifting
refuse, all kinds of blades, spools, bobbins, shoemakers’ skivers, seam-
stresses’ scissors… Browsing at random through a season of Il Messaggero
—April to August, 1909—one finds at least forty fights and brawls serious
enough to make the paper. Old Terni was indeed “a family,” and, like
many families, turbulent and quarrelsome.
Giuseppe Laureti. Every evening, they’d sit outdoors around here, Piazza
Clai, Via dell’Ospedale: all the people, on chairs—no cars drove by, it
wasn’t like today. And one would tell a story, another would tell another,
then somebody got drunk, there’d be a fight, and they’d all join in. There
was this old ternano, you know, ugly as sin. And a knife grinder [kept
making fun of him]; and this man kept saying, “Watch out, or I’ll give you
a taste of my knife!” One night, he stabbed him, he pulled all his guts out.
They fell out, to the ground. Down came his wife with a capestiu—what
they called the capestiu, a wooden tub they put the wash in—she gathered
his guts in it, picked him up, the hospital was right there, they pushed them
back in. He lived another 30 years.
Laureti’s account is surprisingly accurate. He was born in 1924 and told

this story in 1980; it was reported, with only minor variations, in Il
Messaggero in 1907.77 It must have been told and retold endlessly over
those 70 years in the neighborhood where Laureti still lived and worked.
Often, on the other hand, violence had a political and a class origin. A plant
overseer, Tranquillo Spadoni, “was shot in the thing, the testicles; they left
him on a wheelchair for the rest of his life. It was done by one of our
[anarchist] comrades, who later spent 18 years in jail” (Gaetano
Cruciani).78 “It was the anarchists, the Gazzoni brothers, they were from
Romagna.79 One made an attempt on Campi [Terni chief of personnel],
because he was going to fire them, something like that. The next day, the
other brother, over at the steel works, shot Tranquilli, the engineer, the
company’s deputy chief of staff” (Agamante Androsciani).
A thick judicial folder in Terni’s state archives tells the story in detail.80
In 1912 one of the brothers, Fortunato Gazzoni, had been fired after a
quarrel with the overseer Tranquillo Spadoni and the personnel manager
Antonio Campi. The next day his brother Giuseppe resigned from work in
protest. Both went back to Romagna, where they told their relatives that
they were in touch with a secret anarchist sect called “Mano Nera” [Black
Hand] and wrested some money from them. A month later, they were back
in Terni, where Giuseppe shot Campi and, ten days later, Fortunato left
Tranquillo Spadoni an invalid.
The double wounding grew out of the places where the old and new
proletariat met and mixed: Piazza Valnerina, where the modern boulevard
from the steel works brushes by Terni vecchiu; the shadow of Centurini’s
jute mill; the railroad station, the foundry works, a tavern, a barbershop, a
hotel of ill-repute, a rural eatery, and so on.
It looked like a personal revenge, but there was more to it: as the King’s
Attorney wrote, “There can be no doubt… about the motivation,
grounded in proletarian hatred.” It went back, in fact, to the unfinished
business of the 1907 lockout: as Gaetano Cruciani remembered, Fortunato
Gazzoni “was upset that the twenty-four [lockout leaders] hadn’t been
re-hired.” When he confronted chief of personnel Campi, Fortunato
appealed to the factory by-laws that were part of the post-lockout agree-
ment; Campi, as the King’s Attorney reported, reacted by “throwing the
rule book to the floor,” shouting, “We are the masters and we know the
rules.’” “They are the masters,” Fortunato wrote from jail to another
brother: “They thought they could get away with anything… they abuse
us, they ruin the workers and laugh with hearts of stone.”
Shortly afterwards, “a worker stabbed Allegretti; he was a small-time
boss of a work team. And word got around: ‘Allegre’, Campi Tranquillo?”
(Agamante Androsciani). It was a word play on the names of the other
victims—Campi [you live], Tranquillo [at ease], Allegretti [happy]. Bosses
and managers must not have lived very tranquilly, locked inside the narrow
city walls, at close quarters with an unruly working-class population.
Most middle-class or management interviewees insist on the mutual
affection between themselves and the workers—a feeling that is not echoed
in workers’ narratives. Indeed, personal class violence was the other side of
paternalism. It may have been gratifying to see one’s underlings take off
their hats to salute you as you take your stroll in the public square, or to
receive mass demonstrations of workers’ gratitude under your windows, as
Amilcare Spadoni did after the defeat of a strike in 1914. But from one’s
windows one may also witness the protest of locked-out workers in 1907
(as Spadoni did), or a workers’ protest parade in 1932. Managers may be
confronted in their own offices by angry workers (a partisan, just off the
mountains, in 1945: “give me back my job or I’ll turn you inside out like a
sock”) or even at home (give me back my job or “I’ll break your arms and
legs,” in 1953). Perhaps l’Unità had a point when it wrote in 1948 that the
84 A. PORTELLI
company was moving its head offices to Rome in order “to avoid contacts
with the workers.”81
Isolated in its mountain basin, distant from other industrial and
working-class realities, Terni developed a sort of ternano “exceptionalism”
that mixes working-class and industrial pride with nostalgia for the old
times when conflicts were dealt with—be it by “the usual spaghetti dinner”
or by an aptly delivered stab of the knife—always within “the family.” And,
of course, the family was the problem.
Giuseppina Migliosi. Back then—imagine! Our stroll, my girlfriends’ and

mine, guess what it was. You dressed up as for a ball, and all we did was take
a little walk down by the railroad, because we were watched. “Look, you
must be back by six, you must be home.” You had fun when you watched
the train roll by; or when somebody courted you. A few times I did go
dancing on Carnival—in secret. Always hiding, always in secret. One time—
Cesira and I. We went to a dance, we didn’t look at the watch, we didn’t
have one anyway. So, it turned dark outside, inside the lights were on, we
didn’t realize what time it was. And we were enjoying ourselves so much.
Suddenly, here comes Cesira’s father. Well, he grabbed his daughter by her
hair and dragged her outside. With me following them. Each step they
took, a punch with his fist. So strict—irascible. We suffered for this—my
folks were strict—my father would look at me in the face and I’d turn red all
over. “You’ve been dancing.” Cesira’s father was too, too strict. He pun-
ished them, he locked [his daughters] in a room, for days, he locked them
in. Me, my brothers maybe slapped me once or twice, and that was all.
In 1916 La Sommossa denounced that “lately Terni seems to have been

turned into a racetrack,” where “automobiles and motorcycles rush at
dizzying speed, to the grave danger of pedestrians.”82 However, the lure of
progress attracted radicals of all hues: in the Italian tradition, positivism and
Socialism were often considered to be the same thing, so that technical and
social progress were long perceived as one, indivisible process. A certain
Pietrino, an anarchist, was remembered both for his fights with the police
and because “he was a genius as a motorist, he owned one of Terni’s first
automobiles” (Riziero Manconi); Terni’s first sports hero was another car
racer from an anarchist background—Baconin Borzacchini, named after
the founder of international anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin. The only local
enterprises that made a name outside Terni’s city limits came from a
Socialist-positivistic environment: the Alterocca printshop, one of Italy’s
main producers of picture postcards, named after its Socialist founder; the
Viparo medicinal herb liquor, invented by Socialist pharmacist Metello
Morganti. Pazzaglia’s café and confectionery opened in 1913 and went on
to become a supplier to the royal house and an exclusive upper-class resort
where workers wouldn’t set foot until the fall of Fascism and the monarchy;
however, the founder’s name, Spartaco Pazzaglia, suggests that he, too,
came from a radical family background.83
“The day shall come, though maybe faraway, when we, too, will have
the right to enjoy the real meaning of life. Because, now, we only know it
[by peeping] through the windows of the clubs and palaces of the mighty,
or by reading the stories in [the magazine] Amore Illustrato.” Thus wrote
in 1908 Dante Buttarelli, a Carburo worker. Soon, working-class papers
began to carry the announcements of film shows in town: adventurous and
exotic titles that bespoke evasion, dissatisfaction, desire. “To the movies,
I’d go—every Sunday. It was cheap. [The theaters] were small—well, that
way you saw things real well. That was the only satisfaction we got. What
else did we have? Nothing. At the Verdi [municipal theater] they staged
operas, but who could go? The rich; not us” (Amalia Ferri). Actually,
opera was also part of the workers’ culture at the time: it is no coincidence
that the anthem of the locked-out children was sung to the air of the
chorale from Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucco.
NOTES
1. Then a rural village in Central Umbria.
2. Italy was reunited under King Victor Emmanuel II in 1861; Rome was
liberated in 1870 and became the country’s capital.
3. Franco Bonelli, Lo sviluppo di una grande impresa. La Terni dal 1884 al
1962, Turin, Einaudi, 1975, pp. 3, 12 ff.; Giampaolo Gallo, Illustrissimo
Signor Direttore. Grande industria e società a Terni fra Ottocento e
Novecento, Foligno, Editoriale Umbra, 1983; Luigi Campofregoso, Sulla
straordinaria importanza militare e industriale della val ternana, Terni,
1872.
4. Lièges, Belgium, 1842-Terni, 1923; Maurice Cloes, Un benemerito
industriale da Liegi a Terni: Cassian Bon, Rome, privately printed, 1983.
5. In English in the original.
6. L’Unione Liberale, April 23, 1887. The label “Italian Manchester” was
coined by Gioacchino Pepoli, governor of Terni in the early 1870s; Benito
Mussolini defined Terni as “the dynamic city” after a 1923 visit.
7. La Sommossa, January 22, 1915.
86 A. PORTELLI
8. La Turbina, July 20, 1901; Maurizio Antonioli and Bruno Bezza, La Fiom
dalle origini al fascismo 1901–1924, Bari, De Donato, 1978, pp. 34–35;
Giampaolo Gallo, Illustrissimo Signor Direttore, p. 47.
9. La Turbina, January 10 and 17, 1903; Vincenzo Stefano Breda (1825–
1903), a former garibaldino and member of Parliament, had promoted the
creation of the Terni company and chaired it until his death.
10. Quoted in Gino Papuli, Il grande Maglio di Terni. Storia e leggenda, Terni,
Nobili, 1981 pp. 109 ff.
11. Interview in Orsa Minore, 0, Summer 1981, pp. 16–17.
12. Created by the Romans in 271 BC to divert the waters of the Velino river
from the malarial swamps on the Rieti plains, with its 165 ms the Marmore
waterfalls, less than three miles from the Terni steel works, are the world’s
tallest man-made falls, a symbol of Terni, and (when the water isn’t
diverted into the Galleto power plant) a major tourist attraction.
13. Il Messaggero, July 14, 1887; L’Unione Liberale, July 2–3 and 9–10, 1887;
G. Papuli, Il grande Maglio, pp. 97–103; Renato Covino, Giampaolo Gallo
and Luigi Tittarelli, “Immigrazione e industrializzazione: il caso di Terni,
1821–1921,” in SIDES (Società Italiana di Demografia Storica), La popo-
lazione italiana nell’Ottocento, Bologna, Clueb, 1985, pp. 409–430.
14. Torquato Secci, “Il problema della casa cent’anni fa,” Indagini, V,
September 1979, pp. 21–23; L. Pagliani et al., Le acciaierie di Terni nei
riguardi igienici e sanitari, Terni, Tipografia-Litografia delle Acciaierie,
1914, no page numbers.
15. Giampaolo Gallo, “Itinerario archeologico industriale a Terni,” Indagini,
XIV, September 1981, pp. 9–18; AST, ASST, b. 97.
16. “Old Terni.” As opposed to most place names in Italy, Terni’s grammatical
gender is masculine, thus “Terni vecchio” (in dialect, “vecchiu”), not
“vecchia.”
17. AST, ASCT, b. 705; L’Unione Liberale, November 27–28, 1886; Giacomo
Trottarelli and Saverio Tini, Considerazioni sulla purezza dell’aria di Terni
città eminentemente industriale, Terni, L’Economica, 1913; A. Varrica
Sgrò, “Terni negli anni difficili del primo dopoguerra,” Indagini, XIV,
September 1981, pp. 33–38; La Sommossa, March 24, 1917.
18. L’Unione Liberale, March 20–21, 1891; R. Covino et al., “Immigrazione e
industrializzazione: il caso di Terni”; F. Bonelli, Lo sviluppo di una grande
impresa, p. 41. On work casualties, L’Unione Liberale, October 18–19,
1884; February 19–20, 1887; September 11–12, 1891; La Turbina,
October 26, 1901; Avanti!, August 22, 1897; Trottarelli and Tini,
Considerazioni.
19. Deputy prefect (Terni belonged at the time to the prefecture of Perugia).
The prefect is the local representative of the central government.
20. ACS, PS, AGR, 1913, b. 23, December 28, 1913 ff.
21. L’Unità, May 28, 1946.

22. L. Pagliani et al., Le acciaierie di Terni, no page numbers.
23. “Sciopero” means any suspension of work, whether a brief walkout or an
all-out, protracted strike.
24. Valerio Castronovo, L’industria italiana dall’Ottocento a oggi, Milan,
Mondadori, 1980, p. 127; Giuliano Procacci, La lotta di classe in Italia agli
inizi del secolo XX, Rome, Editori Riuniti, 1972, p. 121.
25. Bocciardo is quoted in G. Gallo, Illustrissimo Signor Direttore,
pp. 145–146.
26. Pietro Farini, In marcia coi lavoratori, unpublished autobiography, APC,
1917–1940, f. 1537, pp. 110–111.
27. Latina Gens, IX (1931), special issue on Terni, ed. by Tarquinio Locchi
and Italo Ciaurro; Manuali per il territorio, ed. by the Public Relations
Department of Terni Company, vol. 3/4, 1980, p. 525.
28. Francesco Butera, Lavoro umano e prodotto tecnico: una ricerca alle
acciaierie di Terni, Einaudi, Torino, 1979, p. 235, quoting a Terni steel
worker.
29. It was called inquadramento unico: the ranking of blue- and white-collar
workers in a unified career ladder.
30. F. Butera, Lavoro umano e progresso tecnico, p. 214 ff.
31. See Alessandro Portelli, “The Best Garbage Man in Town,” in The Death of
Luigi Trastulli and other Stories. Form and Meaning in Oral History,
Albany, NY, Suny Press, 1991, pp. 117–36.
32. Avanti!, June 23, 1898; La Sommossa, May 3, 1914. The song was col-
lected by Valentino Paparelli, from the singing of former jute worker Lina
Begliomini, in Terni, December 30, 1972.
33. The Fascist policy of economic self-sufficiency, after Italy was sanctioned by
the League of Nations for the invasion of Ethiopia.
34. Commendatore is a title of honor conferred by the state to distinguished
citizens.
35. La Turbina, June 28, 1901; Alessandro Centurini, letter to the Mayor,
AST, ASCT, b. 847, 1896; Maria Goia, “La processione della miseria,” La
Turbina, January 21, 1905; La Sommossa, May 22, 1914.
36. Manuali per il territorio, vol. 4, pp. 633–635; on health conditions at
Grüber’s, La Turbina, April 29 and May 11, 1899; February 9 and 19,
1902. On the wedding banquet, L’Unione Liberale, March 29–30, 1901.
37. Collected by Valentino Paparelli, from the singing of Lina Begliomini,
Terni, December 30, 1973.
38. Furio Miselli, Le più belle poesie in dialetto ternano, Terni, Thyrus, 1939,
p. 152; La Turbina, June 28, 1901.
39. La Sommossa, April 30, 1941; “Semo de Centurini,” collected by Valentino
Paparelli, from the singing of Lina Begliomini, Terni, December 30, 1973:
88 A. PORTELLI
now in V. Paparelli, L’Umbria Cantata, Rome, Squilibri, p. 199 (CD 3,

no. 22). See Maria Rosaria Porcaro, “Una lettera, una canzone, una storia.
Le operaie di Centurini,” Storia dell’Umbria del Risorgimento alla
Liberazione, III, June 1980.
40. La Turbina, June 17, 1899, September 21, 1901, March 4, 1899.
41. Labor Exchange: the structure that coordinated all the different unions in a
given area or town.
42. La Sommossa, June 14, 1914.
43. She may be referring to a protest against compulsory enrolment in the
Cassa Nazionale di Previdenza (National Welfare Fund): see La Sommossa,
May 15, June 2 and 30, 1917.
44. Stefano Merli, Proletariato di fabbrica e capitalismo industriale, Firenze, La
Nuova Italia, 1972, pp. 525–526 and 824; La Turbina, June 6, 1901.
45. ACS, CPC, f. 81720, Orientale Carlotta; La Sommossa, July 29, 1916.
46. Amilcare Spadoni was head manager of the steel works in the early 1900s.
For variants of the song in oral tradition, Giampaolo Gallo, “Illustrissimo
signor Direttore,” p. 189.
47. Tomás de Torquemada (1421–1498) was the first Chief Inquisitor of the
Spanish Inquisition.
48. Il Messaggero, April 17, 1907.
49. Avanti!, April 5 and 13, 1907; L’Unione Liberale, April 6, 13, 27, 1907.
50. Il Messaggero, April 15 and 16, 1907; Avanti!, April 4, 1907.
51. A working-class district in Turin, a ship-building and a steel-making town
in Liguria and Tuscany.
52. Il Messaggero, April 21, 1907; Avanti!, April 14, 18, 19, and May 8, 1907.
53. Avanti!, April 4 and 12, 1907.
54. Pietro Farini, In marcia coi lavoratori, p. 142; Il Messaggero, May 18,
1907.
55. Il Messaggero, May 22, 1907.
57. La Sommossa, May 20, 1907; Avanti!, May 22 and 23, 1907.
58. Il Messaggero, May 24 and 25, 1907.
59. Avanti!, May 25, 1907.
60. Costantino Fusacchia, “La vittoria degli operai della Terni,” La Turbina,
July 2, 1907.
62. Il Messaggero, June 1, 1907.
63. Farini, In marcia coi lavoratori, p. 144; AS, ASST, b. 303.
64. Avanti!, June 7 and 13, 1907.
65. Fusacchia, “La vittoria degli operai della Terni”; Avanti!, July 3, 1907.
66. Georges Sorel (1847–1922) was the main theorist of “revolutionary
syndicalism.”
67. Manuali per il territorio, 3/4, p. 321; Massimo Coppo, “Il Piano regola-
tore di Terni,” Urbanistica, xxxiv, September 1961, pp. 69–77.
68. Hazelnut chocolate candy.
69. A small diatonic accordion, much used in contemporary folk music, where
it replaced the bagpipes.
70. “We come to sing the new May season\Drop us a couple of eggs [in our
basket].”
71. Furio Miselli, “San Francesco,” in Miselli, Le più belle poesie in dialetto
ternano, p. 164; Valentino Paparelli, “Dal rito contadino alla festa urbana,”
in Il Cantamaggio a Terni, Terni Province Administration, Terni, 1982.
72. F. Miselli, “A certi che dicono male de Terni,” in Le più belle poesie, p. 39;
Gisa Giani, Un enigma storico-archeologico: le tombe dei Tacito a Terni,
Terni, privately printed, 1982. The tombs were identified as those of the
emperors Marcus Claudius Tacitus (275–276) and Florianus Tacitus (276)
—not the historian Cornelius Tacitus (55–120)—on the basis of late six-
teenth century documents.
73. A digestive herb liquor patented in Terni in 1913 by the pharmacist
Metello Morganti, and still popular.
74. F. Miselli, “A Mimminu,” in Le più belle poesie, p. 69.
75. Briscola is a card game that can be played by two individuals or two pairs.
On morra, see Chapter 2, note 2. Morra games often ended in brawls, and
were forbidden by the police.
76. L’Unione Liberale, January 23, 1881.
77. Il Messaggero, October 2, 1907.
78. Cruciani was misled by homonymy: the victim was not the director
Amilcare Spadoni, but the foreman Tranquillo Spadoni.
79. Romagnoli were supposed to be handy with a knife.
80. ASST, AST, b. 133. All quotes are from this source.
81. L’Unità, February 11, 1948.
82. La Sommossa, May 20, 1916.
83. On Virgilio Alterocca, Michele Giorgini, “Virgilio Alterocca,” in the cat-
alog of the exhibition Alterocca tra poesia e industria, Terni, 1884; a 1948
article in the Communist paper l’Unità states that Pazzaglia’s origins go
back to a café opened by the anarchist Fabio Pazzaglia in 1884: “Disco
rosso per Alemagna e Motta nella città del panettone Pazzaglia,” l’Unità,
December 28, 1948.
CHAPTER 5
Rebels: Socialists, Anarchists,

and the Subversive Tradition
1 ROOTS
Gaetano Cruciani. It began with my father. Dad was one of the first
members of the Socialist party, when the pharmacist [Luigi] Riccardi
founded the Terni chapter. Dad took the number one Socialist Party card,
when it was So-cial-ist, for real. It was a time of serfdom. Some people eked
out with a slice of bread with tomatoes, or onions, or maybe cheese when
they were lucky. And us, you see, enthusiastic, young. We were, I mean,
genuine; not opportunists, not opportunists, I mean, who were in it with
the idea of becoming members of parliament. We had a faith, I mean,
indestructible. But our people do not jump blindly into things; so we were
seen as the incendiaries, the hot heads. The older people, with a family to
support, and a lack of culture, you see, they suffered, but they thought we
were a will-o’-the-wisp sort of thing, they thought that a movement so …
eclatant,1 so ready to act, it was not possible.
In 1877, a group of anarchists, including Carlo Cafiero and Errico

Malatesta, inspired by the thought of Mikhail Bakunin, attempted to create
a revolutionary focus in the mountains of Matese, in Campania. The group
included two members from Terni, Antonio Starnari and Carlo Pallotta.
A chapter of the Internationale had been active in Terni since 1874. “They
were internationalists, they made no distinction between Marxists,
Bakunians, and all” (Arnaldo Lippi). The chapter was dissolved in 1877,
after the failure of Malatesta’s attempt. In 1886 the prefect of Perugia
reported that “Most of the Socialist Party consists of out-of-towners that

92 A. PORTELLI
came to work in Terni’s industrial plants… They are roaming molecules

that have not yet found the center of energy capable of aggregating
them.”2 However, only two years later, L’Unione Liberale complained:
“We have wee twelve-year-old Anarchists, who look down their noses at
you, with their pretty rag cap, a rich blazing red tie, a handkerchief the
color of blood lined in black; we have Republicans as fiery as they are small,
togged up according to ritual, all pretty and cute; we have ruffled-haired
Socialists, unwashed, sulky, sad, gloomy!”3
On May 5, 1889 the old garibaldino Pietro Faustini led a commemoration
of the centennial of the French revolution; the participants carried an
Italian flag “furled in such a way that only the red showed,” and shouted “long
live the [Paris] Commune.” Mounted police and infantry units attacked them,
and the marchers reacted by throwing stones, goading the horses to scare
them, inviting the soldiers to join the protest. The police searched Pietro
Faustini’s house for weapons and incendiary literature. “They claim that he’s
hiding\ swords, bombs, guns and bayonets,” wrote Miselli, in a rare radical
mood, so “they search his house\ to stop the revolution.” Government
inspectors reported that many marchers were “visibly possessed by wine” and
there was “not one educated person” among them: “Workers are generally
peaceful,” but local and outside agitators “spread Republican and Socialist
agitation… With such a large population of workers, Terni is not adequately
policed.”4
Remo Righetti. First of all, as far as the history of the workers’ movement in
Terni is concerned, it is important to know how the working class was
formed. I come from a family that came to Terni in 1896. A wave of ro-
magnoli that came to Terni to work, some in the factory, others as artisans,
like [Alfredo] Urbinati, a tailor, Briganti, a tailor, my father, a turner, and all,
such a big group that we created a colony of romagnoli and an association
that met together, debated—most of them were of socialist tendencies, and
some were anarchists. They were part of the working-class movement.
In 1890 Terni celebrated its first May Day. The town was patrolled by
guards and military police “awaiting the revolution,” which they prevented
by arresting all known subversives. In this way, L’Unione Liberale
approved, “proprietors and capitalists will again be able to look at this
valley with trust.” At the end of the year, a democratic alliance won the
municipal elections; in the space of one month the new administration was
dissolved by the central government “for reasons of public order.” An
alliance of Republicans and Socialists would win again in 1903.5
5 REBELS: SOCIALISTS, ANARCHISTS, AND THE SUBVERSIVE TRADITION 93
At the origins of the working-class and democratic movement in Terni

are the Republicans, rooted in the radical tradition of the Risorgimento, of
Garibaldi and Mazzini. “The one who gave Terni light and truth, was
Pietro Faustini” (Arnaldo Lippi). Even a moderate Republican like
Costantino Fusacchia, addressing the first congress of the Metal and
Mechanical Workers’ Union, said that “the emancipation of the workers
must be accomplished by the workers themselves, as Marx said.”6
However, after taking over the municipal administration, the Republicans
broke the alliance with the Socialists and turned gradually into a center of
power based on the Faustini dynasty, which the Socialists claimed was
plagued by authoritarianism and corruption. “Republicans, back then, they
were all beginning to turn into [political] pimps” (Giuseppe Giovannetti).
Avanti! denounced the “foul coalition” between bourgeois Republicans,
conservative Catholics, monarchists, and industrial interests. “The battle
was between Socialists and Republicans; and when we young Socialists
disrupted a Republican rally, all applauded us, ‘long live youth’”
(Agamante Androsciani).7 Arnaldo Lippi’s father—“though he was illit-
erate, because his father put him early to work as a splicer in the textile
mills”—broke from the Faustini Republicans in the name of a libertarian
vision of social change: “To them the only difference between monarchy
and republic was a change in the logo of the salt and tobacco monopoly.8
Other than that, they have no vision of a transformation of society.”
The first local Socialist Party was founded in 1891. Its leaders were
doctors and pharmacists, imbued with a progressive, anticlerical and pos-
itivistic view of science and social change. The first secretary was Alessandro
Fabbri, a doctor (he later went on to Faustini’s side); he was replaced in
1895 by the pharmacist Luigi Riccardi, and then in 1902 by the charis-
matic Pietro Farini, also a pharmacist.
“It was in our blood; from the moment our mothers gave birth, we
came out Socialist” (Bruno Moscatelli). “I was a child, sitting on [my
father’s] knees, and he’d sing me the Workers’ Anthem” (Bruno Zenoni).
“I was only fifteen, when the war came, and I went to work at the army
Arsenal. It’s where I learned my job, where I learned the turner’s trade. At
the time, I was already involved in political life. Why? Because I remem-
bered my Socialist father; because I was sad, I was against society, because I
had to quit school. And then, the war, you know, there was a feeling of
rebellion against this society that was capitalistic, that was not for the
defense of the workers. At fifteen, I joined the Socialist youth organiza-
tion” (Remo Righetti).
94 A. PORTELLI
“Terni’s social environment,” a worker told Farini soon after his arrival
in Terni, “is a mixture of disparate elements: from the honest worker to the
bawdy-house customer. A low atmosphere of poverty, of ignorance, of fear
of new ideas. You will find poor guys who joined the First International
and tomorrow, at the next election, will vote for whoever Doctor Fabbri
tells them to; scrarecrow anarchists, ineffectual, stupid, noisy, soap bubbles
that will fade in the shadows soon as some real danger arises;
parochial-minded Republicans, followers of Faustini, enemies of the class
struggle.”9
Socialists created the first cooperative (“La Previdente,” founded in
1896, in competition with company stores) and the Camera del Lavoro
(Labor Exchange, founded in 1896, outlawed in 1898, reestablished in
1901). The first Socialist mayor, Tito Oro Nobili, was elected in 1920, on
the eve of the advent of Fascism. While it enjoyed the sympathies of the
majority of workers, the party was plagued by splits and factionalism,
quarrels with Masons and with anarcho-syndicalists, the rivalry between
Farini and Nobili. The Camera del Lavoro also went through ideological
and personal conflicts, and played only a marginal role during the lockout;
from 3,000 members in 1901, it went down to 1,000 in 1910. And there
was a distance between the mainly middle-class, professional leadership of
doctors (Fabbri), lawyers (Nobili), pharmacists (Riccardi, Romagnoli,
Morganti, Farini) and the rough passions of the rank-and-file working class.
“In Piediluco, we had our own Socialist local, and comrades would drive
from Terni on coaches, bearing flags, it was a feast, we sang ‘Bandiera Rossa’
[The Red Flag]. We had a children’s local—what they called the pioneers.
All organized, all lined up, a tailor made us a red flag embroidered with the
hammer and sickle. Ten,nine years old. We held meetings. We said, like, ‘If
we come across the pharmacist’s son, we’ll beat him up’” (Vero Zagaglioni).
“My older brother, he was a socialist. I, a boy who wanted an education, I
read all the books the Republicans had, and then I had a sister who had
married an anarchist, so I read all his library as well. And then, my socialist
brother, I read that. So I formed my own concept: a bit of Mazzini, a bit of
socialism, a bit of this and a bit of that. I went along with my brother, so I
joined the socialists. They seemed more serious. The anarchists were very
serious, fine people, strong and intelligent: it was they and the republicans
who kept the Church in check” (Giuseppe Giovannetti).
Riziero Manconi. The real discordance between Bakunin, and Marx, is

this. They were friends and foes. But why foes? We must eradicate this
social system, because it is a system of exploitation. After we eradicate the

system, what do we do? Marx said: we’ll take up the reins of government,
until the people are mature for self-government. And Bakunin said—
Bakunin you’ve heard about him, haven’t you? Of course! He said: no,
because when you’ve taken the reins of government, will you help the
people to reach maturity for self-government? Will you be able to step
down from your seats and mix with the little people? Bakunin said: if a
mother has a child who must learn to walk, and holds him in her arms all
the time lest he fall, the child will never learn to walk. In order to walk, he
must fall. The same with the people, they must work for themselves; to
learn, they must make mistakes.
In 1913 the police reported that Furio Pace, the syndacalist-leaning

secretary of the Camera del Lavoro, was planning to blow up the power
plants in order to trigger off “a general anarcho-syndicalist movement of all
of Terni’s proletariat, led by women and children, who are the most
dangerous.”10 In June 1914, after a police massacre of demonstrators in
Ancona (a harbor on the Adriatic Sea and a hotbed of anarchism), all of
Italy was shaken by an anti-militarist and anti-monarchic rebellion fueled
by the railroad workers. Terni, on the Rome–Ancona line, was a hub of the
rebellion that went down in history as the “Red Week.”
Arnaldo Lippi. The Red Week, Terni showed its mettle. The protagonists
were the women, especially those from Centurini’s. Carlotta [Orientale], you
know? You know what they did? Back then they wore aprons; they filled their
aprons with ashes; the mounted police came and they [threw ashes into the
horses’ eyes]. And the children, the kids, they raised Cain as usual. We were
Terni’s street urchins, we broke into the station, we tore up the rails, over-
turned the freight wagons, so no trains could come through with ammuni-
tion or soldiers. This was the work of the women, more than the men.11
Gaetano Cruciani. As the anarchist, libertarian movement grew, you

know, there were the hotheads who wanted to go boom, boom, boom, all
they did was [talk about] shooting right and left … I wasn’t a rabble
rouser, a cheap revolutionary; I was sensible. I was always an organizer, I
had a head on my shoulders, and was always respected. You can’t always
stay out of danger; but when I took a decision, it was well-thought out.
I always said: individualistic anarchism, that is harmful. Our task as anar-
chists, in order to get results, is to lead the workers and be with them.
96 A. PORTELLI
The political police file on Gaetano Cruciani reads: “He is very

influential in the Party because he is daring and extremely violent, so
imbued with his fanatical beliefs that he is able to perpetrate the boldest
and most ferocious outrages… He is arrogant, violent, careless, unedu-
cated…a slack worker.”12
Gaetano Cruciani. We must reach [the people] and educate them, so that
they become aware of what are, you know, their rights, their position in
society. Then, you make them active, positive. But if you talk about our
movement, about, you know, its turbulent moments—the Bonnot gang in
Paris13—they all say anarchism means confusion. They don’t say what we
say: anarchism is government. I mean, you know, for society to be orga-
nized, accurately, with methods of common sense, not egotism. I am a lover
of astronomy and I know the meaning of culture and science. When you
have a bit of intellectual uplift, you want to teach those around you, those
who have faith in you. I wasn’t going to start shooting without a reason.
During World War I, the labor movement in Terni was divided between
the Socialist Camera del Lavoro and the Syndicalist one. Cruciani
remembered fights and blows between them; others remembered unity: “I
don’t remember that there was a war between the two Camere del Lavoro.
You’d go to either one, no problem” (Remo Righetti). “When there was a
strike, if it was called by the Anarchists, we joined, too; if it was called by us,
they did the same. Anarchists were a little bolder, that we must admit”
(Giuseppe Giovannetti). “Anarchists, one by one, each one was a person.
We Communists are a little too aligned” (Alvaro Valsenti). “Anarchists
used to do what Communists and Socialists are doing now. The anarchists
have never disappeared; they’re always among us” (Gildo Bartoletti).
Giovanni Nardi. [Anarchist leader Errico] Malatesta came to Terni, I’m

talking about many years ago, and I was told that he came to the old fair
grounds and gave a lecture. They told me, [the crowd was so thick that] had
you thrown a fistful of rice in the air, not one grain would have touched the
ground. He spoke, he made a speech, he said: “Dear workers, you have too
many flags. Of too many colors. There is only one flag, the workers’ flag, and
it’s all we need.” These were the words that I was told, that Malatesta said
many years ago. Malatesta was a spellbinder. Those people, they could speak
for hours without an outline, a piece of paper, anything; back then, they
spoke without any support, and their arguments were sound, were new.
2 FIRES ON THE MOUNTAINS

Vincenza Giontella. I remember, when it broke out, the war. Among the
people, there was despair, because, well, war is what it is. In fact, we began…
to lose many soldiers, because all the time, one died here, one died there…
Terni’s population increased by over 10,000 units during the war years
1914–1918. The work force at the Arsenal went from 1,000 to over 6,000.
The war years were an explosive blend of euphoria and despair: war jobs
put money into the economy, women and rural people entered the work
force and earned wages; but provisions were scarce and poor, the local
government was corrupt and dominated by the merchant class.14
Galerana Sapora. What did we eat? We couldn’t find anything, my son.

We searched creek banks for nettles to eat, understand? Merchants hoarded
food. People eked by on small jobs, hoeing vegetable gardens along the
streets; and the best of it all is that, sometimes, we’d steal. I mean, children,
we all did. We’d steal from those who had the victuals. Hunger rang
hollow; down at the [Carburo] plant, they didn’t give you any food, they
gave you a soup that was too disgusting to eat.
The municipal health officer wrote: it would not be “advisable… in a

working-class center like Terni, to divulge the ingredients [of the flour
used for bread] and their proportion.” “Life in Terni gets harder by the
day,” wrote La Sommossa: “the price of victuals keeps rising, daily wages are
not enough for basic needs.”15
Galerana Sapora. Well, when people were hungry, they knew there was
food somewhere, they’d go get it, of course. Once we all went down to the
barracks, the Brignone barracks, I also went. They tore up everything, we
tore up everything. We took it all. They pushed us, they beat us, because
we were violent, us women. But we were right. They’re feeding the men,
they’re not giving us women anything. I took biscuits, rice, a bit of lard…
The others, though, were quicker: they took hams, oil, you have no idea
how much they took.
“Some had husbands in the war, some had sons; these women up and
went, and they were many, many” (Adelia Grimani). “They put us
[women] to work unloading cyanamide wagons; so, our hands were all
burned. From pulling carbide from barrels. There were a few men, too, but
they were old” (Galerana Sapora). At the Arsenal, Carlotta Orientale
98 A. PORTELLI
wrote, women worked “day and night, in 12-hour shifts, doing unhealthy
manual work that even men couldn’t stand.”16
“The war,” Farini wrote, “is destroying the working-class family”
because it pitted men and women against each other for jobs. But it also
opened the way for new women’s rights, “freedom, emancipation, the
right to make of themselves what they will, to love freely.” Even the Red
Cross ladies were a novelty that would “destroy many prejudices, such as
modesty, honor, virginity.” “Among the workers,” Farini wrote, “there
was a multitude of war dodgers and women … On Sundays, the revelers
filled the taverns around Terni. On the Alps, people died; here, they made
merry. When soldiers came home on furlough from the battlefield, they
cursed their fate. Why go to their death, while here they were having a
good time?” The Centurini and Grüber workers, however, resented the
temporary workers who made better pay and did not join in strikes. When
the temporary war workers were let go at the end of the war, the old
centurinare mocked them, singing “Farewell to white shoes, lace stockings,
embroidered shirts\ Farewell to pink powder” (Adelia Grimani).17
The Arsenal “was hiring all of Italy’s dodgers, and there were as many at
the steelworks. The cow gave milk, and they lapped it up” (Arnaldo Lippi).
Riccardo Sacconi, the secretary of the syndicalist Camera del Lavoro,
complained: “So-called revolutionary Terni is betraying the proletarian
cause; it seems to me that a part of the proletariat has taken [the wartime
anti-strike laws] too literally, and, filled with unwarranted fear, they are
completely submitted to the masters’ will.” The working class was already on
the defensive after a series of failed strikes before the war; the wartime
climate of “persecution” and the drastic change in class composition further
sapped its fighting spirit. The exception, as usual, was the centurinare.18
Before the war there had been fights and conflicts between pro- and
anti-war factions. However, the protest rally Farini called on the day Italy
entered the war was almost empty. The only meaningful sign of opposition
to the war came on May Day, 1917, when Farini invited the rural popu-
lation to light bonfires “to salute their sons who are in the war, and call for
an end to the massacre.” “At the end of a beautiful day,” he wrote, “at
dusk, in the valley, on the hills, on the mountainsides, we saw the fires rise,
dozens, hundreds, thousands, from the tower of Narni toward Rome, from
the tower of Stroncone toward the Abruzzi, on the mountains of Somma
and Giuncano on the road to the north where machine guns were sowing
death among Italy’s sons… Terni seemed enfolded in a huge fire… a sea of
lights out of which [the people] voiced their sharp call for peace.”19
Mario Sassi. One afternoon, in November of 1918, we were at home, we

heard a lot of noise. We heard people running, excited, and all. I went out,
I went beneath the archway of City Hall, there was a crowd of people
pressing, pushing at the gate, shouting, screaming, long live Italy, we won.
I went closer and I saw a small wooden frame, with an iron mesh over it,
and inside a piece of paper with [General Armando] Diaz’s telegram:
“Today November 2, the Italian navy landed in Trieste. The tricolor flag
waves [in Trento] over the castle of Buoconsiglio.” All in tears. All of Terni
was out, with flags, at night. Undescribable.
3 COST OF LIVING
Gildo Bartoletti. When I came back from the war, on August 19, 1919, I
wrote to Madam the Steel Mill: “I ask to be allowed to be part of your
personnel, in the function that you will deem best. Considering the I have
been through the Turkish–Italian and the Austrian–Italian wars.”20 They
wrote back that it wasn’t them who sent me to war. What kind of respect
for veterans is that? And yet, the cannons with which I fought, they had
been forged at Terni and finished at La Spezia.
Vicker-Terni, a Terni subsidiary and a major naval industry concern in La

Spezia, the northern hub of the Italian Navy, delivered about 25% of the
heavy artillery used by the Italian armed forces during the war; the Terni
steel plant supplied about 90% of the parts for the assemblage of pieces of
artillery, and thousands of tons of ship armor and cannon shells.21 Born as a
military industry with military strategies in mind, Terni would be plagued
from now by the difficulty of adapting to a peacetime economy.
Arnaldo Lippi. When the war was over and we went back to the factories,
what did we find? What were we going to make in Terni—cannons? Steel
plates? What could we do? There was nothing. In 1921, thanks to the
workers’ struggles, we enforced the transformation of certain lines of
production. And here came the new lines: sheet iron, tinplate, this kind of
stuff. But it wasn’t enough for 13,000 men who had been working for war.
Giuseppe Giovannetti. The steel mill had cut the work force. Bosco’s was
closed, the Arsenal was no longer making weapons… What was I to do?
With three or four other comrades, we’d go over to the foundry over at
Porta Sant’Angelo, at four a.m., and made bricks; we’d work until nine,
100 A. PORTELLI
then we’d go home. We burned our hands good, you know—for next to
nothing.
The high wartime profits improved Terni’s financial situation, but

encouraged the company to postpone the renewal of the plant to face the
postwar economy. Terni was thus pushed to the margin of the Italian steel
industry. The company’s choice was to differentiate: it entered the chemical
sector by buying Carburo and Nera Montoro and, most importantly, it
took control of the water in the Velino and Nera river basins that were the
main sources of hydroelectric power and supplies of electricity to all of
Central Italy. In the new multi-sector conglomerate, electricity was the key
division. The chemical plants served to absorb seasonal power surpluses,
the steel mill absorbed the excess work force and prevented social tensions,
always in exchange for government contracts. Thus, while Terni retained
the self-image and the social composition of a steel town, steel was rela-
tively marginal to the company’s economic strategy. The town’s future
history and identity would hinge upon this contradiction.22
Giuseppe Giovannetti. In those times, there was talk of revolution. We

were armed, all parties were armed—maybe not the Republicans. Other
than that, they all had the ammunition. It was hidden out of town, but—
revolution, we debated, we talked, we discussed, we hoped it would hap-
pen, there was so much hunger. Well, you know, we went through very
serious times. Poverty, no need to talk about it. And this made a man a
little rebellious, because youth—“wait, wait…” and at the end… it all came
about, the occupation of the factories, and all. Because people were
starving.
Arnaldo Lippi. So here it is that in 1919, 1920, 1921, government existed

only to repress the yearnings that arose from the anguish of the battlefields,
from hunger, from poverty. We lived, when we returned, in hope of finding
a job—which wasn’t there. You’d been in the war—for what? All the
promises they’d made—land reform, the land to those who work it, the
house to those who live in it, and all you got was the King’s Guard that
shot you, and put you in jail, and in there they’d beat you up like a drum.
You were a subversive! So Bolshevism was beginning to come into fashion
because four years earlier a new road had been opened [in Russia]. This was
the great beacon for youths like us. A yearning for justice, for making our
exploiters pay at last.
In the postwar years, statistics showed that a married worker with three
children needed, to survive, 300 work days at an average pay of 17.50 lire a
day. The construction workers of the Pallotta firm, a local government
contractor. made more than the average, but earned only 11.50 a day—when
there was work.23 On July 5, a workers’ committee called for a 50% cut in the
price of food and a price cap on all other goods. The proclamation marked the
beginning of a general strike against the cost of living. The Socialists did not
approve, but the majority of the workers participated. “I don’t know whether
it was a mistake—I didn’t want to get involved, because it’s a delicate matter.
But of course, the people who mobilize because they have no bread to bring
home, they’re not interested in subtleties” (Arnaldo Lippi).
Giuseppe Giovannetti. One time they looted the stores and took all they
could get. I remember that on Main Street, most of the merchants handed
their store keys to us, to our Socialist Party, because they were afraid. It was
a shambles, believe me, it was no joke. I and other comrades, we were
standing guard at the food market in Piazza Corona, we felt like so many
policemen, understand? We were young, we didn’t know. And the women
came down—I remember, a shoe store, the best shoes in town, on Main
Street, they took almost all the shoes in the store.
“The strike,” La Sommossa wrote, “was supposed to cut the claws of the
rich merchants; instead, it damaged the small fry who in the space of a few
days lost the small resources out of which they made a living.”24
Giovanni Mencarelli. I had a salt and tobacco store; and it was fully
stocked. So there was, there was this general strike, you know, and they cut
prices 50%. Which it was a Sunday morning, I had opened the store. There
come the guys from the Camera del Lavoro: “You must close.” The line
outside was this thick, because everything was closed, I was open and we
were selling. I had to close. I grabbed a knife, this big—if it hadn’t been for
my father, who held me back—“What are you doing?!”… So, that was it.
I closed. The next day I was robbed, they took everything. It was the fault
of the Camera del Lavoro, yeah, it was them: because the people had
nothing to eat, because everything was closed. And the stores were all at
the disposal of the Camera del Lavoro. Later, merchants, wholesalers, they
did sell what they had—at 50% rebate, like us. Us—we were ruined. One of
our neighbors was a man who’d lost an arm at Bosco’s—a work accident.
And with the [compensation] money he had opened a little store. Him,
102 A. PORTELLI
what happened to him, this 50% came, he went bust. But, he got his
revenge, because first thing he did, later, he joined the Fascists.
4 A CUP OF COFFEE
Agamante Androsciani. It happened in July. People wore boater hats,
white shoes. I was there. We had been on strike for three or four days; the
speakers from the anarcho-syndicalist Camera del Lavoro were calling for
an all-out strike; those of the CGIL25 were for going back to work. Fact is,
we had struck and had gained nothing. The square was divided—Socialists
on one side, anarchists on the other.
“Right now I couldn’t tell you whether it was a union or a political strike”
(Remo Righetti). “It was to get those veterans back into the steelworks, at
their old jobs” (Gildo Bartoletti). Officially, it was a political strike, in
solidarity with the rebellion of the soldiers who were embarking in Ancona
for an expedition to Albania. Actually, those who were there remember
joining the rally for a variety of motives: often, the distinction between
“economic” and “political” strikes was only written in the minds of the
organizers and the police. Yet, the split among the people in Piazza del
Popolo hinged precisely on this distinction. When Farini announced that
he had “no mandate to participate in a political strike,” many left, while
quarrels and arguments broke out among those who stayed. It was the
evening of June 28, 1920.26
“The rally was over, and those squabbles, those insults, began. I said,
let’s leave, or else” (Remo Righetti). “So then the anarchists—‘We want
revolution!’ There was a group of anarchists, six or seven, one even carried
a gun. They began to have words with the socialists. Then one said: ‘You
want revolution? Follow me!’” (Gildo Bartoletti). “Suddenly, the crowd
began to stream toward the opening of Corso Tacito,” a police report
narrates: it’s the famous boundary where the new Terni of the bourgeoisie
meets the old subversive Terni of the alleys and the square. On the corner,
facing the Pazzaglia coffee house, above Pietro Farini’s pharmacy, stands,
its windows very low upon the square, the Circolo dei Signori—the
Gentlemen’s Club. “Some citizens appeared on the Club’s balcony;
someone from the group of protesters fired a pistol shot at Mr. Parisi, who
stood at a window, and made a hole in his suit.”27
Looking down at the square from the Gentlemen’s Club balcony was not
an innocent act. The strikers had requested all public places and businesses,
including social clubs, to close; by appearing on the balcony, the “gentle-

men” were telling the workers that they ignored their demands. And the
provocation was made worse by a symbolic gesture: “They came to the bal-
cony to insult us, with cups in hands. With cups of coffee” (Arnaldo Lippi).
“Nobody in my neighborhood drank coffee,” recalled Riziero Montesi, who
was at the rally that day: the cultural and economic conflict between bourgeois
coffee and working-class wine, the coffee house and the tavern, would con-
tinue for several decades. Gino Meschiari, a Socialist member of Parliament,
explained in a speech on the House floor that the tragedy that followed might
have been avoided “if only that club member had not shown himself at the
window, or, as he appeared there, had not been sipping coffee.”28
Agamante Androsciani. On the windows that look down on the square,

there was a monarchist club; and we down below were arguing among
ourselves. These people were sipping coffee; they sipped coffee, and
laughed. They laughed because we quarreled among ourselves—they were
right. So a comrade says, “Look! We’re fighting among ourselves while
they’re laughing at us! Let’s go!” And it happened. A big landowner was
walking our way, and they hit him with a stick; he was bleeding.
Gaetano Cruciani. It happened because there was a gun shot, and we

think it may have been one of ours that fired it. So, you understand, as soon
as the lieutenant of the carabinieri heard this shot, he immediately ordered
the soldiers to fire. And they started shooting.
“Only a few seconds after the gun shot, the only gun shot that was fired—
Meschiari said in Parliament—fifty carabinieri, divided in two teams of
twenty-five men each, rushed toward the opening of [Corso] Cornelio
Tacito… There was no warning of any kind, there was no injunction, the
crowd was in no way forewarned. Shooting from the hip, the fifty carabinieri
opened a cross fire at the level of people’s heads, and laid many on the
ground.” “I was talking to the daughters of the café owner, I was a young
man then, and I heard this volley, and I saw all the people running, I didn’t
know what was the matter. Suddenly, I feel my leg going… I fell on the
ground, all right. A pistol shot. The ball remained inside” (Gildo Bartoletti).
“This kid, he had climbed up on the eaves [on the roof of the Post Office
overlooking the square]. He was standing up there, above all the people; a
rifle shot, they took him down. Five were killed. And Farini—the police said
they hadn’t fired—he picked up two and a half kilos of shell cases and took
104 A. PORTELLI
them to Rome, to Parliament. He said, ‘Who fired these? Is it the people

who are armed with this kind of weapons? Of course not!’” (Riziero
Montesi). “In the massacre, that I was at, died Olmi, died Eleodori, died
Lillo’s son, 12-years-old, a machine-gun bullet lifted his head and struck him
dead. If you take a walk out to the cemetery, where the old graves are, the
first row, Olmi’s tomb is there. The marble has turned black, there are a
couple of flower pots, I’ve been there recently. Olmi, Eleodori, Taddei.
Taddei was a sanitation worker. Olmi worked at the furnace, he died by my
side. He stayed forty-eight days next to me [in the hospital], because he was
hit in the spine. Five dead and 150 wounded. It was no joke” (Gildo
Bartoletti).
Bartoletti was crippled for life, in spite of the fact that, as he tells it, he was
rushed to the hospital in Rome on Baconin Borzacchini’s mythic race car.
Luigi Frascarelli, 14 years old, Angelo Eleodori, construction worker, 25,
and Lelio Palla, coalman, 32, were killed on the spot. Isidoro Taddei, factory
worker, 35, was not at the rally but happened to be crossing the square at the
wrong time; he died two days later. Francesco Olmi, steel worker, 38, died
on August 16 in the hospital. Il Messaggero published a list of 17 wounded
(incomplete: Bartoletti, for one, is not in it).29
Agamante Androsciani. The next day, there was the funeral. People had
come from all over, with music bands, with flags, a multitude of people.
A woman fainted, the crowd was pressed so thick together. And while they
held the commemoration, a boy—brrrm, he swept [a piece of wood] on a
store’s corrugated iron shutter. [People thought it was a gun shot] and
pandemonium broke out, people running all over, broken bicycles, the
horses fell to the ground in front of the hearses. And Farini [and others]
from the balcony of City Hall kept saying, calm, calm, calm, it’s nothing.
But by then the crowd had stampeded.
Gaetano Cruciani. The people were tense from the start, you understand,
frightened by that massacre, they heard a noise—pulling down the shutter,
that noise [sounded like a shot], it frightened everybody. There was a rush,
the wreaths, the garlands, you understand, all thrown up, the hearse was
left there by itself and slowly, slowly, it started toward the cemetery.
5 RED GUARDS
Arnaldo Lippi. They denied you everything. The occupation of the fac-
tories was a necessity.
At the beginning of September 1920, after the owners rejected the unions’
demand for better wages, the workers occupied almost all of Italy’s
mechanical, steel and iron factories. The sit-in lasted almost 3 weeks.
Workers’ Councils ran the factories and kept production going as best they
could. What had started as an economic controversy took on clear revo-
lutionary implications. When the reformist wing of the unions accepted a
compromise, workers left the factories with a feeling of defeat, even though
many of their economic demands had been met. “The great scare” for the
ruling class was over. Two years later, the Fascists marched on Rome.30
Remo Righetti. The great decision had been taken by the Confederation of
Labor. We occupied both the steelworks and the foundry; Grüber’s,
Centurini’s—well, the women did the same as the men—Papigno, Nera
Montoro, all occupied. I was working at the steel mill, the nuts and bolts
workshop. It was kind of the red section, there were many of us from that
workshop that were the first to line up to occupy the plant. In fact a worker
from the nuts and bolts workshop, Alfredo Zamberlan, who was an ardent
socialist, he and I were the ones that had brought the socialist flag to the
factory, a couple of days before. We hid it beneath the cot in the infirmary;
and we raised it on the flagpole, on the clock tower by the main gate, this
flag, the red flag, we raised it, Zamberlan and I, by night, at midnight.
Bruno Moscatelli. Terni was what it was: the workers’ movement was
a-boil, and when the occupation of the factories came, I was eighteen, I
was working at Bosco’s. The order came to strike, to occupy the factories,
we were already inside, and we stayed, we didn’t leave. Some of the
younger ones went out, in and out. But the mass stayed in. And, it was all
set, the machine guns over the workshops, in case we were attacked… We
too, though we were only boys, yet, at that age, I, too, had a gun.
Remo Righetti. The occupation, work went on, not 100%, but it did go
on. There was a part of the workers who stayed in the factory by day and
went home at night. Others stood guard at night, by the gates. The
director’s office was occupied, and we actually ran the factory, there was a
management group designated by the workers, by the Camera del Lavoro.
For a month, they ran the plant. We worked some—reduced, of course;
people were more inclined to patrol, to spend the night, to guard the walls.
But the police never came; government orders. Inside the plant, there was
a certain amount of weapons; but, I don’t think it would have been enough
106 A. PORTELLI
to face the police, had they come. We ought to have wrested the weapons
from the police, if we were really going to go on to the insurrection.
Because in a way this was the idea—“let’s make the revolution.” But the
leaders of the Confederation had different ideas in mind, they had no
intention at all to make a revolution.
Agamante Androsciani. Nothing, nothing had changed; it was the same.

We did our twelve-hour shift; after the twelve hours, we took turns
guarding the plant. We had surrounded it with trestles; all the material that
had come down from the front, all that war material that was to be smelted.
There were comrades with water hoses, in case the police came. And all the
workers went to work—those who were hunters, with their hunting guns
on their shoulders. We worked for twenty days.
Settimio Piemonti. I remember that we only made half the production.

When we reached half, that was it. We stopped and waited for quitting
time. Then one day I run into a guy and he says, “Do you have a hunting
license?” “Yes, I do.” “We need you to go and guard the powder ware-
house”—the powder store inside the steel plant. So, that night I go to the
powder store; there must have been a dozen grown-up men, and the rest of
us were boys. We boys always had the worst shift, from one to four. Well,
the third night, I walk by a field and I see a peach tree—there must have
been fifty, beautiful peaches. When the time came that I had to stand
guard, the others were drunk, they had eaten rabbit… I get away, go by
that tree, pick all the peaches, and went home. And I never went back.
Gaetano Cruciani. When we occupied the factories, we kept on working.

Not as scabs; to set an example, you know, of how a factory could be run,
jointly by all. At Elettrocarbonium [a chemical plant near Narni] I was in
charge; all the members of the factory committee were comrades of ours.
We got rid of the manager—he was a good man, he knew us and he
encouraged us, he was on our side. And we took over; we had a meeting,
you know—this is history, understand, it’s history. In the meeting, we said:
we must set an example of how to run things, collectively. And we told the
office workers, the ones with the white collars, white cuffs, who were our
enemies: “How do you see it?” “We agree.” And they joined us. We ran
things in perfect order.
So, we began to work. The workers of Sismic, a company from Perugia,
supplied us with electrodes for the ovens. The administration was run by
competent people, the staff from before, overseers, section bosses, and all.
They carried out their task without discipline. This is what I said:
“Discipline must disappear because all must do as we tell them. We give
suggestions, that we think are valid, that we can prove to anyone.” And
they were persuaded.
“Last September,” Cruciani’s police file reads, “he promoted the

occupation of the Elettrocarbonium plant, where he bossed over every-
thing, lording it over the workers and management. For the sake of peace
and for fear of further agitation, management does not dare discipline him
in any way.”31 “Daddy told me about it,” recalled Gino Paiella, a local
priest: “and he was angry when he talked about it. He, he never struck.
And he told me that the managers delivered the keys and said, ‘Go ahead,
run things yourself, if you are able.’ So they were all happy, except after ten
days no more orders were coming in, nobody was getting paid, so they had
to call the managers back in.”
Gaetano Cruciani. The moment came, you see, when we began to work.
We didn’t have any tar. We had anthracite, which we grounded to dust; but
there was no tar and we didn’t know where to find it. We didn’t know what
to do. So we went as a committee up to Narni, held a rally, we said: “We have
no money, we’ve got to keep the plant running, help us.” They collected a
lot of money. We paid all the wages and then we left on a truck to go to
Rome to get tar from the gas works in Rome. We found the gates locked:
someone had ratted. So we broke in, clandestinely, and got in touch with the
workers’ committee [of the gas works]. The committee went straight up to
the head office, said, “Open the gates, give them the tar. They pay and
you’ve got to give it to them, or else, you know, there’s going to be a fight.”
So we get the tar, we do the work; pay the wages; they thought we were only
rabble rousers, charlatans, agitators; that kind of thing, destroyers. Instead
we showed them that our activity was an example. Because at the steelworks
they carried guns and did nothing, while us [we worked hard].
The prefect called, you see, that he was sending the police, to clear the
plant; and they were on the station sidewalk, all aligned, a company of
soldiers. And I told him, “Sir, do send the soldiers; we’re here, working.
We do not act to destroy, but to show you how we mean to run things.”
We were all wrapped in dynamite; we had set mines to all the machines. He
said, “I’m sending the soldiers.” “Do send them—I said—we have set
mines to all the machines. We will sacrifice ourselves; but it will be a shock,
108 A. PORTELLI
a huge thing. Because we’re not kidding.” And they knew it was true. So
he pulled the soldiers back.
After it was over, we were summoned, to the Prefecture; and the head
manager came down from Rome. So the prefect asked to go over and check
everything; with the office workers who had stayed, he went over the books.
It was all in order. Then the section boss made the rounds of the plant with
me, and he told the prefect: “I admit that I was prejudiced, that I thought I
was dealing with agitators. But the administration was correct. I was
impressed, and I was amazed, in fact, that production was not only increased,
but also qualitatively improved.” He said, “Cruciani, I respect you as a serious
person. However, we are on two opposite sides. The first to be fired is you.”
“Holding the factories almost a month and leaving them like that,
without any gains, was a bad defeat for the working class” (Remo Righetti).
“The Socialist Party, they didn’t have the guts to seize power. Power ought
to have been in the hands of the Socialists” (Gildo Bartoletti). “My father
always talked about how the leaders who were in the occupation com-
mittee, later all got promotions in the factory” (Bruno Zenoni). “We were
fighters, we weren’t armed with the politics of knowledge. We wanted a
fight, and we would have accepted it. Which instead the Party knew we
couldn’t carry it out because we were a minority, and it would have been a
useless sacrifice” (Arnaldo Lippi).
The memory of critical events like the occupation of the factories, and all
the militant phase of 1919–1920, is shaped by “uchronia”: a vision of how
history “might have been,” of history as a sequence of roads not taken, of
revolutionary opportunities missed because of the incompetence, weakness
or treason of the leaders—blended, however, with a self-image of workers
as sheer rebellious emotion, as opposed to the conscious rationality of
leaders and organizations. From this mix of emotions and beliefs rises the
dream of endowing the rank-and-file’s subversive impulse with a rationality
of its own, with the vision of another possible order from which dream and
desire would not be excluded.32
6 PULLING A TOOTH
Giuseppe Giovannetti. I didn’t go to the [1921 Socialist Party] congress in
Livorno.33 Because, honestly, I couldn’t afford it. [Pietro] Farini went, and
he reported on what transpired at the congress. I was a member of the
Communist fraction, led by [Amedeo] Bordiga, a great mind, the best of
us all. Bordiga had been preparing to break away from the Socialists for a
year already. I was young, and the time came I reported about the situation
in Terni and asked him: send me someone, because here we’ve got all these
lawyers—Tito Oro Nobili, Farini…— I can keep talking and talking but we
need other voices. Two weeks later, I get a telegram: the Party has put you
in charge of leading the break.
So I says, what can I do? I remember I had a bad toothache. So, to make
a long story short, I went to see Morganti—have you met Morganti, the
creator of the Viparo medicinal drink? He was a sympathizer, a doctor and
all. I said, “I can’t do this…” I was young, I was trying to get him to lead,
because he was a doctor, and a pretty good speaker. He says, “Come on,
Giovanne’, everybody’s already heard me, I always say the same things…
Go to a doctor, have that tooth pulled out, lest it rots all the rest.”
Whenever he told this story, Giovanni Giovannetti, the founder of
Terni’s Communist Party, always mentioned his toothache: a metaphor for
a painful but necessary separation of the “healthy” youth from a “corrupt”
old body.
Giuseppe Giovannetti. So that night we had a meeting, and everybody

spoke and made their point. Farini, he was a true Socialist; Tito Oro Nobili
—much less. Manlio Orsini, who wrote for the paper; Urbinati, the sec-
retary of Socialist local. When my turn came, I was in charge of repre-
senting the Communists, and I unloaded all that I had to say. I talked at
length, and then I wound it up. They all talked about “the Russians, the
Russians…” So I said, “the Russians don’t expect us to wear fur hats like
them or anything; they’re asking us to struggle and to defend the values of
the proletariat,” and so on. At the end, I said: “Well, those who are of a
mind of the rising political order, of the Communist Party, follow me.”
Almost everybody came, only seven or eight Socialists stayed behind, and
we went to the new local that was ready in via del Pozzo. When we started
out, we had perhaps two hundred affiliates. We gave out two hundred and
fifty cards or so. We had good comrades, mostly young. Only a few older
ones—a baker, Rosi, ever heard of Rosi? A good comrade. But most of us
were young, because we were going into a new struggle that we were even
a little scared of.
110 A. PORTELLI
NOTES
1. French: dazzling.
2. Ugo Bistoni, Origini del movimento operaio nel Perugino, Perugia, Edizioni
Guerra 1982; Pier Carlo Masini, Storia degli anarchici italiani, Milan,
Rizzoli, 1974, p. 111; ACS, Rapporti dei prefetti, 1882, b. 12.
3. L’Unione Liberale, June 23, 1891.
4. Relazione dell’ispettore generale F. Bertarelli, ACS, Archivio Crispi, f. 337;
Furio Miselli, “La pirquisizione a casa de Faustini” in Miselli, Le più belle
poesie in dialetto ternano, Terni, Thyrus, 1939,p. 84.
5. Il Messaggero, May 3, 1890; L’Unione Liberale, May 11–12, 1891; Storia
retrospettiva dell’ Amministrazione Comunale di Terni dal 1860 al 1890,
supplement to L’Avvenire di Terni e dell’ Umbria, 1890.
6. Maurizio Antonioli and Bruno Bezza, La Fiom dalle origini al fascismo,
Bari, Laterza, 1978, p. 182.
7. Avanti!, July 1, 1913; La Turbina, January 17, 914. A police report on an
anti-Republican demonstration is in ACS, PS, 1913, b. 23.
8. That is, merely replacing the King’s image with republican symbols on
public signs and institutions.
9. Pietro Farini, In marcia coi lavoratori, unpublished autobiography, APC,
1917–1940, f. 1537, p. 150.
10. ACS, PS, AGR, 1914, b. 23.
11. See La Sommossa, June 14, 1914. On the “Red Week,” Luigi Lotti, La
settimana rossa, Florence, Le Monnier, 1965.
12. ACS, CPC, f. 1549.
13. The Bonnot Gang was an underground anarchist group that carried out a
number of armed actions in Paris in 1911–1912.
14. Renato Covino and Giampaolo Gallo, “La forza lavoro della Fabbrica
d’Armi di Terni durante la prima guerra mondiale,” in Giuliano Procacci,
ed., Stato e classe operaia in Italia, Milano, Angeli, 1983; Renato Covino,
Giampaolo Gallo and Luigi Tittarelli, “Immigrazione e industrializzazione:
il caso di Terni, 1821–1921,” in SIDES (Società Italiana di Demografia
Storica), La popolazione italiana nell’Ottocento, Bologna, Clueb, 1985,
pp. 409–430. On corruption, ACS, ACP, 1922–1924, b. 1866.
15. ACS, ACP, 1922–1924, b. 1866; La Sommossa, July 3, 1915.
16. La Sommossa, November 23, 1918.
17. P. Farini, In marcia coi lavoratori, p. 196.
18. La Sommossa, November 13, 1915 and September 23, 1916. On the failed
pre-war strikes, La Sommossa, January 17, 1914; La Turbina, November
28, 1914. On wartime strikes at Centurini’s, La Sommossa, July 29, 1916.
19. P. Farini, In marcia coi lavoratori, pp. 194, 201–202.
20. The 1912 Italian invasion and conquest of Lybia and Word War I.
21. Massimo Ilardi,”Ristrutturazione aziendale e classe operaia durante il fa–

scismo,” Il movimento di liberazione in Italia, CXII, July–September 1973,
pp. 37–49.
22. Franco Bonelli, Lo sviluppo di una grande impresa in Italia, Turin, Einaudi,
1975, pp. 115–123.
23. La Sommossa, November 8, 1919.
24. La Sommossa, August 2, 1919.
25. Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro: the Socialist union central.
27. Ibid.
28. See Indagini, VIII, April 1980, pp. 28–32, for excerpts from the parlia-
mentary debate.
30. Gianni Bosio, La grande paura. Settembre 1920. L’occupazione delle fab-
briche nei verbali inediti delle riunioni degli Stati generali del movimento
operaio, Roma, Samonà e Savelli, 1970.
31. ACS, CPC, f. 1549.
32. Alessando Portelli, “Uchronic Dreams: working-class memory and possible
worlds,” in Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson, eds., The Myths We Live
By, London and New York, Routledge, 1990, pp. 143–60.
33. At the 1921 Socialist Party congress in Livorno, the Communist fraction
seceded and founded the Communist Party of Italy, later Italian
Communist Party.
CHAPTER 6
The Iron Heel, or, We Didn’t Have Any

Trouble: The Coming of Fascism
1 THE BARBARIC INVASION

Antonina Colombi. So, the rich kids made this fascio, you know. We’re
friends, we hang out together—in villages and small towns, even if they
came from rich families, we’d hang out together. All of a sudden, at
midnight, they start beating us up, for no reason. What’s the matter with
you? Nothing, the fascio is born.1 The rich against the poor.
Bruno Moscatelli. [In Papigno] they didn’t exist. They popped up all of a
sudden. The one who attacked me, we used to work together at Bosco’s,
we rode to work together, we were together all the time. From night to
day, he played this trick on me.
Fascists always seem to spring out of some dark night of the irrational—“at
midnight,” “from night to day”—as if, in the red bulwark of Terni, they
could exist only as a maddened rootless variant. To some extent, this is a
self-absolutory image; but it is also a fact that, until 1921, Fascists in Terni
had “poor visibility.”2 They became suddenly visible on April 26, 1921,
when Alfredo Misuri held the first Fascist rally in town and stormed into
Terni at the head of the Disperatissima, the notorious Fascist paramilitary
action squad from Perugia.
“They rode in on trucks, down at Borgo Bovio. There was a tavern…
there were a bunch of people in it: ‘Here comes Disperatissima!’ We ran
and scattered in all directions, and they started shooting, and wounded
two” (Settimio Piemonti). The Fascists set fire to the Camera del Lavoro,
114 A. PORTELLI
the Socialist local, a cooperative, and rallied, “with brass band and flags,” at
the steelworks’ gates. The company officials invited workers to join the
rally, but few did. The next day, “with a brutal and patriotic action,”
Disperatissima raided the Valnerina. Their aim, Misuri wrote, was to
“conquer strongholds believed to be inviolable, by rushing in among
infernal noises and concerts of truck exhausts, shootings in the air, choirs of
eja and alalà.”3
Dante Bartolini. And we sure got a taste of it. They looted, they forced
women to drink castor oil, they gave them enemas, forgive my language,
they gave them iodine clysters; in Terni, in the square, a woman, they
burned her bowels. We had a cooperative, council homes; they set fire to
everything. The proletarian league, the veterans from 1915–1918, they
burned everything here in Arrone.
Vero Zagaglioni. The first time they came to Piediluco, they broke up the
cooperatives, the stores, like this man Giacinto Cartoni, they set fire to his
barbershop, they set fire to the Proietti brothers’ café and their motorboat.
They shouted, “Shut all the windows!” Right over my house, an old
woman who was trying to close her window, they shot her, they hit her
under the eye. And all her children on their knees in front of the Fascist
chiefs, begging them to leave their father alone, because they were taking
him away.
Bruno Zenoni. I was in the fifth grade, us kids from Marmore went to
school at Papigno. And while we were in school a little girl who had gone
to the toilet came back in tears, accompanied by the janitor: “The Fascists
are burning Papigno!” All the pupils ran down to the yard—back then in
the fifth grade we were already 12, 13 years old, so in the confusion the
older ones, we jumped over the gates and started home. In Papigno, we
saw the Communist local in flames; then, when we got to Marmore, it was
burning there, too. They had done the same at the cooperative. And we
saw a group of Fascists coming down, dragging Giuseppe Fossatelli, a
cousin of mine, with blood all over him, he wore white trousers, he was
nineteen at the time, they had stabbed him in several places because they
wanted him to show them where they kept the Party’s flag. The incident, I
was a child, made a deep impression on me.
6 THE IRON HEEL, OR, WE DIDN’T HAVE ANY TROUBLE … 115
2 “I NEVER BOOED HIM AGAIN”

Mario Sassi. After 1918, here comes 1921. And meanwhile we heard that
the Fascists were beginning to operate, especially in the north. Let me state
first that my father was a Republican, a follower of Mazzini—of Faustini.
Nationalist. Reason why, when Fascism came, he joined Fascism, all right?
We young ones, too, were awaiting the moment where we could start a fascio
in Terni. In 1920, in September, the grown-ups founded a fascio; we pleaded
with our adult friends and on February 15, 1921, twenty-two young men,
we founded the student vanguard of the fighting fasci. I was fifteen.
“You know that the chieftain in Terni was the Marquis [Mariano]
Cittadini, the big landholder; Faustini, the landholders, who were still
powerful” (Arnaldo Lippi). “The landholders, since they [striking farm
workers in 1920] kept harassing them, stealing stuff, imposing special
treatment for tenants and all, so they thought Fascism would restore order”
(Mario Sassi). “Now, just think of the contadini, all the promises they’d been
made, there was no family that didn’t have one or two [war] dead, and many
more maimed; you couldn’t find work, no matter how hard you tried…
Afterwards, they began to get work, because the [Fascist] squad in Perugia,
other squads [recruited them] and all those people who were starving to
death joined easily. And they became goons (Arnaldo Lippi)
Bruno Zenoni. [The Fascists of Marmore] were working people. How

come? Let me tell you. I don’t know if you know what a so-called notable
is. A notable can be a poor chap who thinks he’s a notable; or it can be the
prince, the baron, the rich merchant. Marmore is a hamlet, we didn’t even
have a priest, in Marmore, there were no rich, there was nothing. All there
was, was an overseer at the Papigno plant—and he was Marmore’s notable.
There was one who had joined [Gabriele] D’Annunzio at Fiume,4 and one
who had been a volunteer and had lost a leg in the war. These two, and the
Papigno overseer, were the ones who brought the Fascist squads to
Marmore. They were the founders.
Fascist sources give three versions of the founding of Fascism in Terni:

by the landholder Marquis Cittadini in 1921; by a group of army officers in
1919; by a group of young professionals and white-collar workers led by
the brothers Giacomo and Oscar Lufrani.5 Each of the three narratives
identifies one of the constituent elements of the Fascist regime: the landed
feudal aristocracy; the nationalist middle class; the war veterans. The real
116 A. PORTELLI
and supposed mistreatment of war veterans and the real and supposed
hostility of Socialists toward them has often been credited as the cause of
many veterans’ sympathy toward Fascism. Elia Rossi Passavanti, a veteran,
awarded two gold medals in the war, became Terni’s first podestà.6
A narrator who asked me not to use his name recalled: “It was unac-
ceptable that those who came back from the war, like an uncle of mine who
won a silver medal and two bronze medals, who had fought [in the battles]
of Caporetto and Isonzo, it was unacceptable that as they came home they’d
be spat upon.7 And my uncle, for one, he was an ardito,8 he was one of those
who went out, with a knife in their teeth and grenades in hand, to storm the
enemy, that drank cognac to raise their courage. And these people reacted by
taking up arms: this is how the Fascist action squads began. Just as it hap-
pened to Passavanti; Passavanti was Terni’s first Fascist federale.”9
“We would make the rounds of the homes of the wealthy, with a stub
book, and we got offers for the fascio, for which we gave regular receipts”
(Mario Sassi). According to a report of the deputy prefect, the young
Fascists of Terni “are almost all students, from distinguished families.” A
song that the Arditi del Popolo, a revolutionary self-defense organization,
sang to the tune of the fascist anthem “Giovinezza,” said: “You are the son
of a bourgeois \ Your dad is a rich man \ You’re protected by the King’s
Guard \ You and the vile things you do.”10
Mario Sassi. So, most of us came from Republican families. When

Mussolini made the famous statement that Fascism tended toward
republicanism, we were thrilled. When in 1922 Mussolini went back on the
Republican premise, we gave up our party cards. However, Mussolini, for
some reason, cared a lot about Terni’s fascio, and a couple of days later he
sent us a war hero, Cesare Rossi,11 who called a meeting at Le Grazie, in
the woods, by night, by torchlight. It was a scene from Trovatore, from
Ballo in Maschera, I mean. And he told us, “Boys, you don’t understand
that Mussolini made that statement for tactical, political reasons. Now we
have to take over the government. Then, we’ll talk about the monarchy, in
due time.” And we joined again.
In 1920 farm workers struck at Collescipoli, then a separate township a

couple of miles from Terni. In response, the landholders formed an “orga-
nization for order… in reaction to [the farm workers’] league violence” and
in opposition to “the majority of the population, made up of workers from
Terni’s factories, who harbor subversive attitudes” and to contadini who saw
the Socialist administration as a guarantee of their rights and interests. In July

1921 the Collescipoli Fascists, carrying tricolor flags, shouting “out with the
Socialists, from now on the people are in charge,” marched to City Hall and
threw the mayor out: it was the first Fascist aggression on a Socialist
administration. At the head of the parade was Giuseppe Salvati, “the biggest
landowner in Collescipoli” (Umberto Catana), known as Pignattino, from
the vernacular pignatta, meaning a blow, a punch. “Pignattino was one of
those who couldn’t abide strikes; he didn’t take any nonsense” (Father Gino
Paiella). From this moment on, Collescipoli, the historic Garibaldino hub,
became “the stronghold of Fascism in Terni.” In 1927, a Fascist parade was
headed by a grandson of the garibaldino hero Giovanni Froscianti.
“Pignattino’s squad” would be at the core of the most violent Fascist actions
against the opposition, as well as of the regime’s infighting.
Mario Sassi. So here comes the big meeting in Perugia—October 22, 1922.
Six days before the March on Rome.12 We go to Perugia and Oscar Lufrani
and other big Fascist bosses told us, “When we see Mussolini, we’ll boo
him.” We stayed there, slept in the open, walked a long way because the
trains were stopped, so we finally get to Perugia exhausted, worn out,
starving. They took us to Piazza d’Armi; after four or five hours, here comes
Mussolini. We stand at attention, wait for him to pass by. Mussolini, when he
rolls by, standing in the car, he looks at us with those eyes of fire. We,
standing at attention, we saluted him. He goes on. I say to Lufrani, “Weren’t
we supposed to boo him?” “We’ll boo him later.” I didn’t boo him anymore.
No steel workers had attended Luigi Misuri’s first Fascist rally in Terni.
The Fascists gained, however, a foothold in the working class at the Arsenal.
After the war, the state was planning to turn it over to a Socialist cooperative
formed mainly by temporary wartime workers. The tenured workers,
however, opposed this solution lest they lose their privileged status as state
employees with a guaranteed job for life (the authorities were also worried
that a Socialist cooperative could “gain control of hundreds of thousands of
rifles… enough to start a rebellion all over Italy”). The Fascists stopped the
transfer to the cooperative and—although working conditions worsened,
many jobs were lost, and union rights abolished—the Arsenal’s tenured
workers became Terni’s first nucleus of working-class Fascism.13
At the steelworks the company was trying to wrest new government
contracts and to get out of paying taxes over war profits by pressuring the
government with the threat of unemployment and social unrest. Thus,
118 A. PORTELLI
when the workers struck in June 1922 Terni responded by claiming there
were not enough orders to keep the plant working and proclaimed a
lockout. “They locked the steel plant for three months; and, imagine,
factory workers came begging to our door, because they had nothing to
feed their family on. My mother would give them money, sometimes
clothes, too, because these people were in need” (Agata Trinchi). “The
workers are united,” the deputy prefect wrote; but there were undercur-
rents of opposition to the strike committee, which was “accused of having
provoked management’s resentment, and thus the lockout, by striking.”
Thus, while the fascist landholder Cittadini earned the sobriquet of “father
of the workers” by giving out alms to the locked-out men, “the local
fascio… takes advantage of this resentment… to attract the dissident
workers into its own orbit.” While the lockout was on, Terni donated
26,000 lire to the Fascist labor organizations.14
Fascists from all over central Italy prepared to storm Terni and—the
deputy prefect writes—“force a solution of the problem at the steelworks…
and intimidate the local [Socialist] administration… The concentration is
apparently supported by the management of the steelworks, in the belief
that they can thus subtract the mass of workers from Socialist and
Communist influence.” The Fascists, “by a show of force and the threat of
occupying the plants, would pretend they were forcing the company to
come to more acceptable terms, thus taking all the credit for the solution of
the controversy.”15
On September 1 the announced Fascist rally took place: as many as
3,500 Fascists convened in Terni; they laid waste to cooperatives and
workers’ leagues, whipped and wounded Tito Oro Nobili, invaded the
nearby villages forcing the Socialist administrations to resign. A few days
later, Terni was granted a discount on its war profit taxes.16
The lockout dragged on until the end of September, when it ended with
the announced pantomime of the Fascist “military” occupation. Fascio
secretary Roberto Orlandi reminisced later: “With sixteen armed squa-
dristi17 bearing muskets and other implements, I forced my way into the
steel plant.” “The Fascists, I remember, they occupied the plant. Well, I
was young, I went, yes, I did. I was a child. We were kicked in the butt by
the adults every time we tried to climb on the trucks” (Mario Sassi).
Actually, the Fascists only penetrated as far as the porter’s lodge; the head
manager received their representatives in his office, and after the meeting
announced that the lockout was over.18 “I can tell that that morning when
my mother heard the factory whistle blow she wept for joy, because the
workers were going back to work” (Agata Trinchi). The real winner was
the company. The Fascist official Count Fabio Carafa D’Andria suspected
that “Terni only pretended to give in, in order to have a free hand after
they had humored us by signing the agreement”; worker Settimio Piemonti
echoed: “The Fascists got the plant to reopen, and they gave us this pretty
present, that by contract we used to have a right to five paid days off a year,
and with the new contract the Fascists cut it down to one.”
Mario Sassi. I didn’t go to Rome. I took part in the March on Rome

inasmuch as we older youth vanguard members were given a rifle and sent to
occupy Terni’s prefecture, the station, City Hall, and all. It was a peaceful
thing, because, you understand, I don’t know whether we would have had a
chance had the King [proclaimed] a state of siege. The army would have
scattered the Fascist squads. So the March on Rome was a formal thing, a
spectacle. Which doesn’t mean that the Fascists weren’t ready to fight. In
Terni, Orlandi, the secretary, remained, in charge of public order; and he set
us loose on the town, with our rifles. I went, with two others, to the deputy
prefecture, two others went to City Hall, and we occupied it. But, under-
stand, it was already over; we had already seized power. So, [the deputy
prefect and the others] picked up their chairs, said goodbye, and left.
3 THE RED FORTRESS

Agamante Androsciani. Nobody remembers Giovanni Manni. Who died.
Giovanni Manni was a young Communist. And he quarreled with a Fascist
—whether about politics, whether about love… and they had a fight, three
against one; and he was stabbed. Back then, there were no buses; they put
him on a hansom, took him to the hospital, when he got there he had lost
almost all his blood, he was either dead on arrival or he died right after. The
day after, there was supposed to be a general strike [to protest and attend
the funeral]. I was living near the old hospital; around one, two a.m., on a
summer evening, here comes a squad of carabinieri. I hide, the carabinieri
March by, a squad ahead, the hearse in between, and another squad
behind. They buried him at night. The strike was called off.19
After the massacre of June 20, 1920, Pietro Farini said, in Parliament:
“If the carabinieri and the police come against us bearing arms, we will
defend ourselves.”20 Yet, a few months later the Fascists tried to set fire to
his house: “They didn’t have the guts to assault Farini’s house, because we,
120 A. PORTELLI
Arditi del Popolo,21 young people from Sant’Agnese, all the working-class
neighborhoods, were there, with guns, with stones, with sticks”
(Agamante Androsciani). The Fascists, however, succeeded in destroying
Farini’s pharmacy (the fire “lasted from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., among mad
chanting and dancing”)22; his house was eventually burned after the March
on Rome. “One day, we came out of the palazzone on Viale Brin, we saw
the Fascists who were dumping all his possessions out of the window; his
books, mattresses, armchairs, which they burned, and in fact after that poor
Farini went [in exile] to Russia” (Angela Locci).
Gaetano Cruciani. When the Fascists attacked the [syndicalist] Camera

del Lavoro, the Camera was mined, understand. Out in the cellar we kept
airplane bombs from the iron works—unloaded, but they were ready to be
loaded, with gunpowder, with dynamite; and magnets, air force magnets,
to set it off. My windows were opposite those of the Camera del Lavoro;
we had laid wires from window to window, because the street was narrow;
and we had a plug that went all the way to the cellar. They came to my
house, which they made a mess in my house, I was there, I could hear the
screams, my family screaming, because the Disperatissima had come from
Perugia, to raid the Camera del Lavoro and Cruciani’s house—and it didn’t
work. The magnet—the dampness in the cellar, who knows—didn’t work.
They devastated the house, and my family ran away and I was left alone,
like that, cranking, cranking—and it didn’t go off. So, it was the defeat,
understand? And I had to run. I went to the station, and got on a train.
Between 1921 and 1922 Tito Oro Nobili, former Socialist mayor and
member of Parliament, was assaulted at least fifteen times. He was scalded
with cigarette stubs, whipped and left for dead; his house was raided, furniture
and books burned. One night, a squadrista reminisced, “we whipped a certain
Pino Pennacchi from Valenza, another subversive in Via Tre Colonne,
another one in Via Garibaldi, and the anarchist photographer Guglielmo…
we only hit him once because he took to his heels and ran. It must be noted
that we were all from out of Terni and could not be recognized.”23
Aldo Galeazzi. My cousin [Vincenzo Galeazzi] was a member of the Arditi

del Popolo, he was eighteen, 19 years old. Behind our house we had a small
vegetable garden, that my father tended. One day, he’s hoeing the garden,
and the hoe wouldn’t dig. He pulls, and up comes a sack filled with guns,
guns this big. So he says, these must have been hidden by Vincenzino. He
calls him, says, how come you’re hiding your stuff here? He says, well, you
know, it’s just temporary… And took them away.
Arnaldo Lippi. We patrolled the station, over here by the sports field,
where the poorest proletariat lived, where we could have fought back best,
where if they came in they wouldn’t get out. Some of us, who’d been in the
war, were bolder, more determined, I mean, we cared less about life,
because we had been taught that way, and we would seek them out where
they lived. When we caught them alone we paid them off, too. I told the
[X]: “Kneel down and kiss the ground.” This, I did. Of course, I fought
tooth and nail. I was young, full of spunk, and I had been in the war, and
the war hadn’t taught me to be good and holy. It taught me to shoot, I
mean. It taught me to kill.
“[Communist Party secretary Amedeo] Bordiga told us not to trust [the

Arditi del Popolo], because it was a movement where anyone could join,
they were armed, it could jeopardize [our cause]” (Giuseppe Giovannetti).
“Yet all of us young Communists, full of enthusiasm—almost all the young
people [were in it]; the older guys wouldn’t stick their necks out”
(Agamante Androsciani). On July 18 Carlo Farini, Pietro’s son, addressed
a rally of 700 Arditi; the membership fluctuated between 300 and 500
throughout the summer of 1921. A week later, twelve Arditi del Popolo,
including Arnaldo Lippi and Vincenzo Galeazzi, were arrested as they
boarded a train to go to a demonstration in Rome. On August 8, Fascists
with guns attacked an Arditi rally. On August 3, 1922, the Fascist Carlo
Galassi was wounded (“he was the one who organized the Fascist squads in
our area and led them to the destruction of the Communist locals in
Piediluco, Marmore, and Papigno,” Bruno Zenoni); for this, the anarchist
Stefano Peri and the communists Giovanni Battista Perona and Primo
Nocchi were sentenced to 11 and 17 years.24
“Now, to live in those times, let me tell you, it took guts. These Arditi del
Popolo, that no one ever recognized, they were the first who read correctly
the reactionary turn that our country was taking. They were the initiators of a
new thing, that the older folks didn’t see” (Arnaldo Lippi). “We had made up
our minds, I mean, to do away with the Fascists. So we organized this way.
Thirty or forty of us would raid the fascio local in Corso Tacito. Then, about
fifteen Arditi in each street; two or three Arditi at the gate of each Fascist
chieftain’s house, with knives, so that if they ran home you’d catch’em there
and that’d be it. The idea was to start it with a blackout in Terni. So this
122 A. PORTELLI
comrade, an anarchist, [Filippo] Raffaelli, was in charge of [sabotaging] the

wires that illuminated Terni, the electricity” (Agamante Androsciani) “It’s
easy. You take an iron chain, with a piece of rope; you tie a stone, a good
thrower—workers are strong, they can do it—when it lands between the
wires, the arc starts, it heats up. Instead, he got killed: [the chain] got caught
somewhere, he climbed the trestle to retrieve it, and when he reached to pick
it up, it arced. And we failed” (Arnaldo Lippi).
On top of a rock overlooking the Carburo plant, painted gray by its
fumes, Papigno was “a red fortress that the Fascists could never enter”
(Bruno Moscatelli). The most dramatic moment of mass resistance to
Fascism took place there, on May 15, 1921.
Galerana Sapora. They came running—“Look, run, get away, the Fascists
are coming. Here come the Fascists, they’re laying waste to Papigno!”
They passed beneath our house, by the garden. And then the papignesi
came to the rescue, there were four or five of them with their hunting rifles,
aiming down from the balcony. They had loaded their rifles with nails.
They opened fire—and several fell.
“When they reached the square, in Papigno, the people were ready for
them; and from the roofs they shot those famous cartridges loaded with
nails, not with lead. To wound, not to kill” (Comunardo Tobia). “Many
were wounded; and, they didn’t know where to hide, they scattered in the
bushes, they ran down the hill, we caught them later” (Bruno Moscatelli).
“All I remember,” a squadrista reminisced, “is the four subversives that
ambushed us, and my [wounded] brother trying to soothe my tears”.25
In response, as the deputy prefect reported, “the Fascists of Terni and
Umbria decreed the destruction of Papigno, with a solemn oath sworn by over
1,000 Fascists.” In September, when the Fascists gathered in Terni to suppos-
edly end the lockout at the steelworks, they returned to Papigno en masse. At
first they were pushed back by the population, with some help from the police;
but eventually 400 squadristi broke through the lines into the village square.26
Galerana Sapora. May they burn, how many they were! Who knew who
they were? They all wore the skull and crossbones on their pants; armed,
muzzled, you didn’t know the faces—for goodness sake! They went into
the Communist local; the mayor was there. They grabbed all the books,
everything, threw it all out. Then they set fire. Me, I was walking down the
street, I was with [my son], he was small, he wore a red overcoat. Here
comes one, carrying a big knife. “What is this child wearing!” “A red coat.”
He says, “Don’t you know it’s forbidden?” “What if it’s the only one I
have?” “Still he mustn’t wear it.” They caught an old man, they slapped
him black and blue. And he, not a sound. And then they set fire to Papigno
—no end to what they did! We hid beneath the railroad bridge; we made
our beds in there, with boards, in the tunnel. And some Fascists had a heart
—but others, my son… They told us, “poor mothers” And others: “Out,
out, come out!” They chased us out of the tunnel.
The Papigno fascio became “one of the thorniest in the province.” “On
October 19, 1922, we picked up from their homes the subversives Osvaldo
Tobia and Levante Sabatini… and gave them castor oil.”27 On one of these
occasions, the Fascists found their own martyr, Arnaldo Colarieti. “It was
on October 23, 1922, one night, I was on my way home,” recalls Bruno
Moscatelli. According to his version, he was stopped and searched by a
group of Fascists; he resisted, and the Fascists started shooting—hitting
each other as they fired from both sides of the street, and Colarieti was
killed by this “friendly” fire. It is a fact that the bullet that killed Colarieti
was of a different caliber from the gun found on Moscatelli; but the
rhetoric of the “martyr” was already afoot, and the court did not have the
courage to acquit him. He was found guilty of excessive self-defense, and
pardoned after thirteen months in jail.28
“In 1921, I was drafted. I came home toward the end of 1924. And the
Party was almost clandestine; by then, we could only trust people we knew,
organize underground almost” (Remo Righetti). “When I came home
from jail, nobody would speak to us, they were afraid; fear had drawn away
those who used to be with us” (Arnaldo Lippi). On furlough in 1922,
Remo Righetti found the Party office invaded by Fascists “who bragged
about their prowess with truncheons and table legs in hand.”29 Many
activists had emigrated, to Rome or abroad; a generation of Communists
was drafted away into years of military service. However, as a squadrista
reminisced, “in Papigno not all was over after the March on Rome, we had
to keep fighting for several months.”
Bruno Moscatelli. [When I was released from jail], Papigno was changed.
Turncoats… even the Communist secretary, I feel sorry for him, not
everyone has it in him to be a hero. Before, it was different. Before, summer
evenings, in Papigno, all the people went outside, to those alleys where the
café was, laughing, joking. And they talked about politics, they talked.
124 A. PORTELLI
[After], they were all shut in. Many left; and there was no talk of
Communism any longer. Some kept it up, but more and more were just
shut in. It’s been so long ago.
4 A PROVINCIAL BELLE ÉPOQUE

“Who has forgotten how gloomy and empty [Piazza Tacito] was only a few
years ago, when it abutted on unkempt fields, abandoned to children’s
play, and the eye gazed on a scenery of cheap houses? In two years, all has
changed. The majestic bulk of the Government Palace and the harmonious
mass of the new Bank of Italy building now fill the square’s architectural
frame.”30
Terni became a provincial seat in 1927. The Fascist solemnity of the new
public buildings inaugurated its new rank. New neighborhoods (Battisti,
Città Giardino) housed the new influx of white-collar civil servants. In
1934, in Piazza Tacito—by then, the official center of town—rose the
symbol of the new modern and Fascist Terni: a monumental fountain, a
round structure adorned by mosaics by the well-known artist Corrado
Cagli, with water spouting from a tall, thin antenna in the middle. The
structure of the town was rearranged to adapt to the influx of government
workers and the growth of the professional classes: “The spontaneous
growth of industrial Terni [was] rationalized” without “intruding on the
town’s classical structure.”31 The lower classes were pushed into semi-rural
working-class “villages” in the suburbs, away from the “new” Main Street
where working-class families were ashamed to be seen (“My father would
never walk on the strada nova, never ever. Sometimes we’d pass it on
Sunday mornings, when we went to the movies; and we asked my mother,
‘Mom, will you take us to the square? Can we go by the square?’” Aurora).
Terni vecchiu remained as poor as ever, “with one faucet [in each apart-
ment], one toilet for a whole building” (Agamante Androsciani).
Meanwhile, the new middle class introduced new lifestyles and modes of
consumption.
Guerriero Bolli. There were a few things in Terni that were special.
A furniture store like Zingarini’s, they didn’t even have one like it in Rome.
Very tasteful. An excellent bookstore, Alterocca’s, it was amazing that
there could be such a bookstore in Terni. Wide, beautiful, kept very well.
Scattaglia’s—an elegant women’s fashions store: they’d go to Paris, buy the
new patterns, and bring them back. Terni was an elegant town. All of it—
[not only] the bourgeoisie, workers had style, too.
“Terni back then was an affluent town, I mean, even some workers wore
tailcoats” (Canzio Eupizi). “We rotated our work clothes. The women
washed our overalls, and you wore them on Sundays. Then you wore them
to work all week” (Agamante Androsciani). Maggiorina Mattioli, a
seamstress, recalled: “Of course working women could not afford the
luxury of buying a new coat every year. Well, [they bought] one dress in
summer, one dress in winter.
Guerriero Bolli. And then, there was Pazzaglia’s. Pazzaglia’s was a beau-
tiful thing. Pazzaglia’s had started from scratch, but had become supplier
to the royal house, officiale di bocca32 at court: when chiefs of state
came, say, they were in charge of things. Pazzaglia’s café was beautiful. Its
rooms were beautiful, with windows that passersby could look into.
It was all decorated in deco style, by [architect Cesare] Bazzani. On the
lunettes above the doors it had golden images of spider webs, butterflies,
flowers. When you were in there, you felt like you were in Vienna, in
Rome, in a capital city, not in Terni. Then, there was the great Pazzaglia’s
confectionery. They had brought in master confectioners from Hungary,
from Budapest, from Vienna, from Paris. And Terni still has a tradition,
because they taught others. So people came here from Rome; in Rome
they ate buns, croissants, here instead they ate éclairs, choux, Saint Honorés.
They made Easter eggs that were four feet tall, the Queen would buy them
and give them to the old folks’ home. This was modern Terni, a town that
could afford these things, because Pazzaglia’s could only thrive in an
affluent environment, where you had workers who made good wages,
they’d go, spend, fifty cents a cake, you’d get a beautiful cake.
“They were all Fascists—how could we go in there? Number one, we

didn’t because, of course, we never had enough money” (Agamante
Androsciani). “Nowadays, workers, clerks, hang out there; back then, at
Pazzaglia’s, it was the cream of Terni, the fops in white gaiters” (Valtero
Peppoloni). “Even after [World] War [II], I had to make an effort to go to
Pazzaglia’s, because to me it was a rich folks place” (Alvaro Valsenti).
Laura Galli. Let me tell you. I was born in 1921, so I was born and bred in
those times. So, this was my childhood: carefree, because I wasn’t interested
126 A. PORTELLI
in politics, I lived the life that we young people lived. And undoubtedly we
young people were very well looked after. Aside from the ridiculous stuff that
came later, with military formation, uniforms, yet, it was a good way of
keeping the young busy. In those times there was no drug problem, because
young people were busy at all levels, in sports, in cultural competitions. So,
for what was done for the young, I think we had a happy childhood.
Veniero Giontella. I remember some of my earliest school memories.

I remember the authority of those teachers; I remember those strict
teachers, those rules—you were not allowed to speak, you addressed
teachers with absolute respect, absolute discipline. You had to sit in a
certain way, you couldn’t lean on your elbow on the desk, you couldn’t
turn around, maybe it was for the protection of the race, they were worried
about scoliosis, I’m sure, they wanted to correct the spine of future soldiers.
Laura Galli. The first duty with which we were imbued was studying; and I
was, if I say so myself, pretty good in school. To give you an idea of how life
was, I’ll tell you that, at the end of a school year, I told my father, “I had
good grades, what [reward] will you give me?” My father would answer,
“Reward, my daughter? It was your duty!” No frivolity was allowed. Once
for my birthday I asked my father for a perfume. He pushed his glasses down
his nose and said, “My daughter, you ought to have the perfume of youth!
Wash, wash more often!” I’m talking about my family, my environment; but
in school I would see children from working-class families, who had a truly
healthy attitude. And then, we had sports. My father insisted for me to
practice sports. I was his first child. He had been hoping for a boy, so he
trained me for sports, for courage. He would take me hunting with him, and
when I turned eighteen he got me a hunting gun permit. I was a member of
the sports team; I did track and field, the relay race, javelin throw.
I competed in national games, and I kept my school’s name high.
“And they sat you always in the last row, I mean it bothered you to see
the other girls, that maybe they had a ham sandwich [for a snack], and the
teacher always called on them—say hello to madam your mother for me,
madam here, madam there—and us, she’d summon our parents when I got
in trouble, when I got mad and beat those other girls up” (Aurora).
“When I took a snack to school, my mother always gave some very modest
thing, bread and jam; she never gave me something that a child of more
modest or poorer conditions could not have. Because I had been told that
even though nature, or the Lord if you believe, may have given you some
privilege, you must also respect those who have less” (Laura Galli). “In
school, you saw those children eat their bread, butter and jam, and to us it
seemed something out of this world. So much that often we’d steal it from
them” (Alvaro Valsenti).
Agata Trinchi. We led the life of young ladies from good families, as they
used to say back then. We stayed home, we were educated because [dad]
made me learn the piano, we read a lot, dad taught us music. We went out
often, dad let us go to the theater, to the opera, by ourselves; he’d take us
to the movies, then we discussed them. We saw [Vittorio] De Sica,
entertaining films, but very well made. Dad liked De Sica a lot; he loved the
theater, too.33
“In those times in Terni we had a cultural life that we can’t even imagine
today. Two seasons, fall and spring, at the theater, amazing, simply amazing.
The theater was always full. We young students had to queue up to get seats
in the gallery; Ruggero Ruggeri came twice a year; [Ermete] Zacconi; I saw
all of [Luigi] Pirandello’s plays, with Marta Abba; Emma Gramatica, Memo
Benassi” (Canzio Eupizi).34 “At the end of September, soon as the Venice
Film Festival closed, all the films came—to Terni first, and then to Rome.
I saw the early René Clair, À nous la liberté. Then we had the little neigh-
borhood cinemas, where they showed old movies, that I hadn’t seen because
I hadn’t been born yet—The tragedy of the mine, Pabst; or Rotaie [Mario
Camerini, 1930]. So in Terni I had seen everything” (Guerriero Bolli).35
Canzio Eupizi. Yes, Terni 1927, Terni provincial seat, Terni that keeps
changing with the arrival of government employees, so an affluent time,
Terni company grows under the leadership of Senator [Arturo]
Bocciardo,36 there was a new power plant at Galleto, all of Terni was a
construction site… After dinner, we would gather at Pazzaglia’s, and dis-
cuss theater, literature, it was a very pleasant feeling of togetherness, of
refinement, that doesn’t exist anymore. From May to September, an
open-air orchestra played at the Café Umbria, in Piazza Tacito; when
winter came, they moved to Pazzaglia’s.
Vincenza Giontella. And, life was simpler. Aside from Fascism, yet, we
were much more carefree, much more cheerful. Sometimes, on Carnival,
we made our own masks, then we’d go to big party on Sunday, at the
128 A. PORTELLI
Politeama [theater]. And we were masked, we went together, teams of

boys and girls. Or we could go to the Drago club—all you had to do is take
off your mask and be recognized, and you could go to the Cooperative
club, or to the Republican club near the Cathedral. That’s how we lived—a
little in terror because of this Fascism, because… my brother was whipped
by the Fascists, by the Disperatissima, because he hadn’t shown his papers
quick enough.
“The Corridoni cinema was on the new Main Street, it was a nice
theater, it cost one lira. The Venezia was cheaper; then Lux and Radium.
Moderno. When you didn’t have money, you’d go to the railroad workers’
cinema. When they showed the epics, that lasted four or five hours, you
took it in in two or three nights, like a serial. But, later, mostly American
movies” (Aurora). “I was an apprentice at the Lux cinema; the owner gave
us two lire a week, and then at one point he stopped paying me. So I, for
spite, they were showing a Harold Lloyd movie, I threw all the gates open:
some gave me ten cents, some gave me peanuts, I let them all in. I filled the
place” (Valtero Peppoloni). “Let me tell you something. Got married in
1927. I was a skilled worker already, so I rented a little place, I had no
debts, I had saved up 3,000 lire to buy the bedroom furniture… But, what
was the matter? That my wife and I, when we reached the tenth, the
twelfth of the month, we didn’t have money to go to the movies. Now,
we’re retired, we have enough money, even if we wanted to buy a suit on
the spot. But so many times we didn’t have the money to go to the
movies” (Remo Righetti).
“If you think of city employees, of merchants’ sons—it’s not that there
was discrimination toward the working class, but you could feel some bar-
riers. They were tangible; to me, they felt like chains” (Ferruccio Mauri). In
1927, a Grüber worker, Valentina Parisella, 17 years old, living in Borgo
Bovio, was featured on the local page of Il Messaggero: “Slender, provoca-
tive, hot-blooded; her eyes are fiery black, her speech is glib; her look and
manners are infinitely above her social position.” Valentina owed her fame to
the fact that she had bobbed her hair and, in order to avoid her family’s
punishment, she claimed that the deed had been perpetrated by certain
ghosts who had entered her room at night.37 The ghosts that haunt working
girls’ bedrooms are the avatars of the visions that the Carburo worker
Buttarelli had glimpsed through the windows of the rich and on the pages of
fashion magazines. By now, the rich were no longer hiding: they were on
display through the windows at Pazzaglia’s. Still too far, and yet so near.
Emilio Ferri. The big deal was when you had a friend, an acquaintance,
that gave you a ride to Piediluco, or to Narni, for a cup of coffee. Big
adventure. These were the important things. The discovery of the woman,
in the brothel, because there was no other way… If you were seventeen
and had friends who were eighteen, you were allowed to peek from the
threshold; then, this world opened, and it amazed you, it… bewildered
you, too… and then there was the problem of not being seen. The adult,
the adult who tried to go in on the sly, before it became a habit; or the old
man who went in on the sly precisely because he was old.
Guerriero Bolli. When the new shift came, at Terni’s best brothel, every
fifteen days—the fortnight, they called them. The owner of the place—
Giacinta—went to the station in an open carriage, picked up these girls that
arrived holding their police permit, loaded them onto her carriage, and
then—all of them, maybe smoking cigarettes or something—she paraded
them through town, took the longest route, on to Pazzaglia’s for ice
cream, for coffee… They would lick their ice cream with style, elegantly;
and then she locked them in because she wanted no problems with the
police. A glimpse of Terni’s belle époque, between 1925 and 1935.
Enrico Ferri. Beside the one in Piazza dell’Olmo, the other was in Via
dell’Ospedale, the third was behind the Corso Vecchio. There was only
one that was more… more expensive. But you know, kids, you’d go once
or twice and then they didn’t want you in there anymore. Because it had
style, it was ambitious. And inside it was dismal. At the entrance, a sort of
rococo canopy, where sat an elderly lady, with a lot of make-up on; and a
small room where the girls who weren’t working sat, trying to attract the
clients, up and down the stairs, dressed, so to speak, with some cleavage or
slit, or with some transparence that was… remarkable. They were so
obliging, these girls, when they had a young, or a very young [client]; they
tried to be kind of motherly, in that moment… Sure, the impact was
powerful; because it was extremely difficult to go with a girl. The biggest
adventure you bragged about all over town, was when you got on the bike
and rode her to the railroad crossing on Via Battisti, she wearing some sort
of veil or a scarf to try to hide her face… It was a serious problem. On the
other hand, forget about sex education, because we were at the level of the
most absolute ignorance. It was an ignorance that was handed down by
your parents; in school, it was a taboo. By the time you were sixteen,
seventeen, that you went out at night with your friends, the greatest
130 A. PORTELLI
satisfaction was when you could say I spoke to this one, I spoke to that
one… And you made a big deal of it. On the other hand, girls had to
protect themselves, because this kind of business might ruin them for
future marriage. Virginity was an absolute.
5 A LOVE STORY
Maggiorina Mattioli. Well, at nineteen I got engaged. To a man who
caused me so much suffering, God only knows.38 He kept me in sacrifice
for seventeen years. Imagine, seventeen years. I was a child, and then I was
old. Because at thirty-six a woman is old if she’s not married. How much I
suffered God only knows. Look, now I have a great sorrow because I lost
my brother; but I never thought of killing myself. Instead, for him, I did.
How many times I tried! Once—“let’s put an end to this!”—I ran from my
little room, back then we lived near San Lorenzo, the second floor, it was
high, you know. We had a beautiful house: ten rooms, a beautiful house.
My brother was hunted by the police; we had to sell it to pay his living
expenses in internment. He spent six years there. My father always said,
they make us pay for it, but it was them who put him in jail.39
I remember one night the police came to arrest him—“Where can I
hide?” Under my bed. I went to his room, tried to tidy up—“Where do I
put his shoes? Virgin Mary, what if they find his shoes?” He was in his
pajamas, hiding under my bed. They didn’t find him in his room; so they
came to my room. Dad tried to stop them. “Make the young lady get out
of bed.” “I’m not getting out of bed. What kind of manners are these?”
They came in, he was under the bed, they saw him; and they took him away
—no, that night he got away. Yes. He ran off, across the fields, poor child,
in his slippers, he got all wet, a mess. How many times did he jump the
windows! He was quick, you know. He was a kid, he’d come home, he’d
bring the anti-Fascist papers. He was born that way. And me, courting with
that Fascist! Look, I, the daughter of anti-Fascists, I detested them, I fell in
love with a Fascist. I loved him so much. Seventeen years. A lifetime. I was
a child, then I was old. At thirty-six, we broke up.
Portelli. We have this idea about the Fascists, all brutes… If you loved
him, he couldn’t have been like that.
Mattioli. Well, he was very intelligent; he was elegant. I loved him, only
him; and after I never wanted anyone else. See what a fool I’ve been.
Now I see it; because I am alone. I saw him, the first time I saw him, I felt a
blow. Really. He was young, he was very young when he joined the fascio.
Well, at first he didn’t tell me; and then he told me. “You’re a dirty
scoundrel; why are you a Fascist? I hate Fascists, you know that, don’t you?
You’re all pigs”—forgive the word, a bit vulgar. That’s how I call them. So
often I provoked him. At nineteen, you don’t understand much. Mother
wouldn’t talk to him; she was against it. I was whipped so many times!
Daddy did it. When we broke up, he told me, “For you and your father, all
my understanding and respect; your mother and your brother, I hate
them.” “Well, did it take you seventeen years to tell me that because of
them you don’t want me anymore? Why didn’t you say that before?”
“Because I loved you.” “And now you don’t love me anymore?” “I do, but
I couldn’t marry a Communist’s sister.” “You’re a scoundrel,” I told him,
“you knew that my brother was a Communist; why did you lead me on?
You could have left me sooner. We’ve broken up so many times…” These
were the last words we said to each other. After seventeen years, imagine.
We’d quarrel, stay mad for a while, and then he came back, all kindness,
“We’re getting married soon, I bought the bedroom furniture.” So we
took up again, and a month or two went by. “So, when are we getting
married?” “Well, you know, I must think of my career…” “You’re a rascal,
you’re making a fool of me, I’m getting tired…” Anyway, seventeen years,
some in peace and some in quarrels, I was sacrificed with him.
Portelli. You mentioned a friend who was the prettiest girl in Terni.
How did one get this title?
Mattioli. They took a vote; the queen. I got elected too, one time. At
dances, they had ballots and voted for the belle of the ball, she was the
queen. The ballroom owner sold the ballots; young men bought them, the
more money they had the more ballots they bought. Then, say you liked
that young lady? You’d give all your ballots to her. Once [X] won, one or
two cards more than me. They had made a pantomime: she was beautiful.
She had a beautiful little face. She was the image of the sun, they had put a
star on her head, all her hair let down, a bit of make-up, the lights. With all
the light, she was beautiful, you know. After, when she came down, what a
disappointment! Because she had no figure, you know. I was slender but—
if I say so myself, I had a beautiful body. When I walked by Pazzaglia’s
—“Here come the best legs in Terni!” “But she’s beautiful all over! Look
at her body!” I may be wrong, it may be the fashion—you don’t see many
132 A. PORTELLI
nowadays, with a body that’s really well made. Perhaps it’s because they no
longer wear bras… While back then we wore girdles, we wore bras. Well,
they were a little more well made, that’s all.
Portelli. May I ask, an engaged couple, what did they do?
Mattioli. What they all do… The first time he gave me a little kiss, it was
after some time, you know—I almost fainted. I was sewing, he called me down
the stairs, he whistled, you know. I go down, and there, by ourselves, on the
stairs—and he gave me that kiss. Virgin Mary. I almost fainted. I turned red,
green, I don’t know what. “What’s the matter?” “Nothing.” “What do you
mean nothing, you’re shaking all over, what has he done to you?” “Well, yes,
he gave me a kiss.” “And for a little kiss you’re turning like this?” “Oh well,
what do I know…” I was nineteen; at nineteen, nowadays, they’ve already
made children. And I instead almost fainted. What a fool. Now I see it.
Portelli. You brother was in internment when you broke up?
Mattioli. Yes, he was in internment. But when he came back [after the
war] he whipped him so bad—he broke his stick on him. They had made a
circle around him—“Good, whip him, dirty scoundrel, he sent him all
those years in internment and he deceived his sister…” And my brother
came home, and he had blood all over his pants, he said “This is his blood;
if you cry, I’ll do the same to you.” “No,” I said, “I’m glad, bravo.” I
hugged him, I kissed him. “Well done, my darling, you did right.”
Portelli. Did your brother ever talk politics with you, of what he was
doing?
Mattioli. Rarely. But I remember that once a big Party man came; it
was Easter Monday, I remember. So we invited him to the house, put him
up a night or two. Then somebody ratted to the police, because he was
bringing a whole bunch of leaflets. He left some with us and took the rest
to Rosina [another Party sympathizer]. And my father took him to the coal
man, what was his name, [Alfredo] Filipponi.40 The next day, here come
the police to the house.
[My fiancé] kept telling me, “Tell your brother to stay away from those
friends. If he doesn’t want to go to jail he must come with me.” One day
they arrested him; they took them away; first he was taken to the island of
Ponza, then Tremiti, interned. There were so many people at the station.
I had my leg in a cast, I could hardly walk; my mother also came, to see him
off, to say goodbye. And he had the guts to shout, “Be proud of us!” And a
Fascist, “He ought to be slapped!” And I, “Why don’t you? You have no
shame,” I told him.
Portelli. All considered, were most people anti-Fascist?

Mattioli. Well, some did it out of fear; especially those who worked at
the Arsenal, they were public employees, they all carried the Fascist card,
else they’d have lost their jobs. Many, were Fascists indeed. The
anti-Fascists were more numerous, but when [the Fascists] paraded, there
were a lot of them. And I was courting with that man. “Damn them,” he
said, “I can’t go on anymore”: they had walked so much, in that parade,
“and with this uniform, that makes you sweat…” “Well, why do you go?” I
said. “Get away, I don’t want you anymore. You’re disgusting, when you
wear this uniform.” Then we got back together. But why did we quarrel?
Did I already say that? Always over politics. Well, my story… but I cried so
much, I was so sorry. I loved him so much. I did try to get engaged
[again]; but after a couple of days I’d drop them because I didn’t love
them. Now I know that it was a mistake. And I was wrong, so wrong.
6 ARTISTS AND ARTISANS

“Some say that Paris and London \ are the world’s most beautiful cities,”
wrote Furio Miselli in 1934, but how can they compete with Terni’s typical
ciriola and oju de broccu,41 with Terni’s majestic Marmore waterfall, and,
most of all, with “a Steel Works and a Power Plant \ That is able to lift half a
continent?”42 The poem was a declaration of peace between the anti-
modern attitude that had inspired Miselli’s reinvention of Cantamaggio
forty years before, and the industrial culture that was by then an inextricable
part of Terni’s identity. It was, however, a fragile compromise. In most of
Miselli’s dialect poetry and in that of the branchittu [little gang] of local
poets gathered around him, in vernacular periodicals like Lo Sborbottu [the
mumble], in the imagery of the Cantamaggio floats, Terni was still the same
Terni vecchiu where, as the Fascist periodical Acciaio wrote, “everything
that happens seems to take on a hue of fatalistic inevitability that leaves you
perhaps with a bit of melancholic but serene feeling.” Their language
seemed frozen in time: “it shows no trace of the linguistic contributions
brought by the massive immigration” that followed industrialization.43
The poetry of the branchittu harked back to the anticlerical
Republicanism rooted in the memory of the Risorgimento and filtered by
nineteenth century melodrama. Miselli took part in the local opera seasons
as a tenor and a choir teacher; some of the branchittu poets came from
families of garibaldini. These attitudes were soon co-opted and neutralized
by Fascism; but they are perhaps at the root of Antonelli’s attempt to sing
134 A. PORTELLI
in (mediocre) Italian verse the glories of the steelworks and the Great
Mallet, or the epic poem Assueride, written by the worker-poet Emilio
Secci in praise of industry, modernity, and Fascism. The opposition
between nostalgic poems in dialect and industrial epics in Italian is a sign of
the gap that remained between preindustrial and industrial Terni. A rare
exception is this poem written in dialect in 1983 by the Cantamaggio
musician Spino Biancifiori:
It’s a 100-years long love song
Made of days all of one color
Scorched in three shifts among furnaces and ladles
For a bread stained with blood and sweat.
It’s a 100-years old but is green at heart
This song that in Terni doesn’t taste of sorrow
And writes with its wounds on a ribbon of steel
The lines of a sacred working-man’s poem.44
“A throng of elegant ladies in shining toilettes and a chattering bevy of

pretty young ladies had gathered in the beautiful halls of the aristocratic
[Union] Club, where dancing went on with tireless frenzy until 5 in the
morning.” It was Carnival, 1925. The music was provided by the
“Interamna Six Jazz Band.”45 “Sometimes you played music for a family
party; mothers would sit around, then at midnight there was dinner for all.
Some brought a cake, something or other. Maybe they killed a lamb. The
songs were those of the time—ballroom dancing. From America, there was
the Charleston. In 1924, 1925, 1926. I was just a boy” (Augusto Cuppini).
Like Cuppini, many of the dance musicians came from the factory.
Aldo Galeazzi. Dad worked almost 40 years at the steelworks. He had an

overseer who was a famous guitar player. So he bought [my brother] a
guitar, and me a mandolin. But that guy thought you could knock music
into people’s head with fists. “Keep time! Keep time!”—and down with his
knuckles on my head. I can still feel them—sharp, not hard, but they hurt.
I was fourteen, fifteen. “Go make bricks,” he told me, “and forget about
music!” One day I lost my patience, picked up this big mandolin, bang! On
the wall. I splintered it to pieces. And never played again.
Alfeo Paganelli. Only those who have a passion for music can play; you
don’t play because you must, as a chore. If you want to be somebody, you
must sacrifice your youth, because you must study, study a lot. I learned to
read music, I did. [A local musician] taught me to recognize the values of
the notes, and then I taught myself. I learned the guitar by myself; I studied
classical music, because I wanted to learn everything. So I learned real well,
and we started a quartet. One night we were called to Papigno for a sere-
nade: believe it or not, we did the Prelude to the third act of La Traviata; a
serenade called “Serenata lombarda”; and then we played a medley from
Rigoletto. [I also played in] the orchestra at what they called the Teatro
Littorio. They played for dances and for operettas. I played tenor banjo; and
when we played operettas, I played classical guitar. Evenings, for dances, we
played jazz; we played “In the Mood,” that was rock and roll, it sounded
good; we played “Stardust,” “The Man I Love.” But we didn’t improvise.
Back then we didn’t have this form of expression, you see; there was a great
fusion of harmony, with people who really knew how to square music, there
was fusion, there was everything. Improvisation has come after the war.46
Galeazzi’s overseer’s cum music-teacher’s contrast between music and

such an unskilled activity as making bricks evokes the connection between
artistic expression and professional skills in Terni’s working-class culture.
The continuum from crafts to trades to arts was mediated, as Paganelli
suggests, by a shared belief in work ethics, in “study” and “sacrifice,” as
well as manual dexterity, whether with tools or with instruments. Augusto
Cuppini, a fixer, claimed that he could “draw a gnat’s eye” (a metaphor for
high precision work: “in Terni,” he explained, “they say: I can make you a
gnat’s eye? It means you can do anything”). Ilario Ciaurro, a leading figure
in the scuola ternana [Terni school] of painting, started out as a lathe
turner, draftsman, potter.
Ilario Ciaurro. What they called a painter in Terni was a house painter,
one of those who went around with ladder and pail, and whitewashed
walls. They called that a painter. Though sometimes they might paint a few
puttos, little angel faces, or they might launch into more elaborate deco-
rations. Some workers’ homes had the ambition of having a painted ceiling,
a rosette… Those painters were good teachers, but didn’t leave any traces.
Out of their apprentices, came the new Terni, a new flourishing of interest
in the things of art. Painters were self-made, as they do wherever there is a
flourishing, an interest, exhibitions. Journals, illustrated press… That cre-
ated an interest among the lower strata, so to speak.47
136 A. PORTELLI
I didn’t come from house painters; I came from the steelworks. I was a
factory worker, a turner. Well, all of us, we were all factory workers. And so
were the sculptors, the musicians. Some went farther—in Terni we had
[Giulio] Briccialdi, a flutist who toured all the courts of Europe; and
[Alessandro] Casagrande, who was a scholar.48 I taught drawing at the
technical school, but I always retained a tendency to manual skills. What
you could do halfway between a lathe turner and a poet was to be a potter;
and what satisfied both the drive to paint and manual dexterity was pottery.
Before World War I, I turned to ceramics. I didn’t want to paint ceramics; I
wanted to be a potter, to make pots, that is. And I became artistic director
to a firm that made jugs, pots, to learn the trade.
Many craftsmen and artists were also sportsmen: here, too, the link
between physicality and skill applied. Ciaurro was a gymnast; Cuppini was
an athlete and sports organizer; Saturno Di Giuli painted postcards, played
the flute in the Piediluco marching band (until, in internment, he broke it
in half rather than having to play the fascist song Giovinezza), painted
landscapes and raised a garden (“I painted a few pictures, more than a
thousand, gave them away to friends, relatives… Now, I’d rather struggle
with the garden, plant peas, see them grow; I plant beans, I plant tomatoes,
I build hothouses, all by myself”).
This mix of talents and attitudes produced the only artist from Terni
who gained national and international renown: the prize-winning shoe-
maker, marching band musician, and naïf painter Orneore Metelli (1872–
1938). In his paintings, Terni is still semi-rural and preindustrial, but it is
framed and crushed by the strange geometrical world of industrial land-
scape and pseudo-classical Fascist architecture that had grown around and
upon it. “The straight streets and the travertine marbles of the Terni of [the
architect Cesare] Bazzani49 and the leaders of industry have never
appeared so uninhabitable, so estranged, as in Metelli’s precipitous per-
spectives.”50 In Metelli’s famous “Mussolini’s Visit to Terni,” the Duce
and his retinue crawl by like an army of ants, dwarfed by the emptiness of
an oversized Corso Tacito, separated from the crowd by two lines of
guards. In “The Market at the Fair,” peddlers and acrobats are tiny figures
overshadowed by two huge carabinieri standing in a clearing in front of a
Fascist building. The distance between the regime and the people is
embodied directly, if perhaps unwittingly, in Metelli’s “highly personal
sense of perspective,” in which “the vanishing point shifts according to the
importance and meaning of the object.”51 As in the traditional grammar of
folk cultures, a technical “error” becomes functional to the implicit rep-

resentation of social hierarchies and power relationships.
7 OF CHURCH AND STATE

Poliuto Chiappini. The bishops, the Church, as we all know, they always
seek the middle of the road. We were anti-Fascists in words only, because
we knew that Azione Cattolica52 had been infiltrated by Fascists, and we
didn’t talk to them. The old people, who I talked with, in the evenings,
until one, two a.m. walking up and down Viale delle Rimembranze, all we
did was talk; pass the time, because, that’s all we did.
“There is a famous photograph, where you see Terni’s Fascist action

squads entering Rome, along with Don Celestino, a priest from Terni, who
was chaplain to Terni’s legion” (Mario Sassi). One year before the March
on Rome, the new bishop, Cesare Boccoleri, had made his solemn entrance
in Terni, greeted by a huge crowd; ten days after the Fascist seizure of
power, Terni greeted enthusiastically the statue of the Pilgrim Madonna on
her way to the Holy House of Loreto.
Boccoleri was “respected, appreciated for his culture; everyone in Terni
remembers meeting him, speaking to him at least once” (Father Gianni
Colasanti). With his arrival, the Church retrieved its public presence; all the
official photographs of the time feature the inseparable triad of religious,
civil and military authorities; Boccoleri’s public statements sounded “rather
consonant with the boisterous tones of Fascist rhetoric.”53 Yet, the rela-
tionship between the regime and the Church was an uneasy one. As the
statue was carried by, a few Fascists from a Masonic background “booed,
and posted bills against the Madonna. The first time Boccoleri came to the
square in Terni, he was booed and jeered” (Poliuto Chiappini). “Young
Fascists often threw stones at Boccoleri, because he was brazen, he said that
violence was inhuman, and once in a while there was a raid [against him]”
(Mario Sassi).
Totalitarian Fascism and autocratic Church could not easily abide the
existence of another power. Most of all, the education of the new gener-
ations was a hotly contested ground. “In 1931, [the regime] attempted to
dissolve the Catholic organizations. I was whipped [for] wearing the badge
of the Azione Cattolica; they whipped me and slapped me—and they were
138 A. PORTELLI
my friends! Down at the Cathedral we had our little theater and other
things; they confiscated everything, even the tricolor flag, they took it
away, they did. They took everything. Bishop Boccoleri, he went out in the
street to defend the members, he picked up a chair and bashed it on the
heads of the most turbulent” (Poliuto Chiappini).
Although the Church had drawn politically close to the regime after the
Concordat of 1929, the Oratory—the Parish playground and church
school—was perceived as one of the few spaces that were beyond the
regime’s control. “At the age of ten I joined the oratory. In afterthought, I
can say that in the Catholic organizations one lived in an atmosphere
different from Fascism. It was all about prayer, religious instruction. The
passage to democracy was not traumatic for many Catholics because their
background was not assimilated [to the regime]” (Luigi Cambioli). The
anti-Communism was the same, yet many anti-Fascist and non-religious
families chose to send their children to the oratory: “We spent a lot of time
at the oratory at Sant’Agnese; especially those who played football, like me.
Our parents let us go, it was safe, it was protected, ‘There, they are safe.’ So
we had these contacts with the Church. And today, we have this resent-
ment, we saw how the Church supported Fascism; all the time, talk against
Bolshevism” (Alvaro Valsenti).
Guerriero Bolli. Have you heard about Don Peppino? One of the finest
personages in Terni. He taught all the children in Terni, all the Catholic
groups came from Don Peppino. His father worked at the Arsenal. When
they destroyed the San Gabriele dell’Addolorata association, which he had
founded, Don Peppino resented it, but he had to accept it. But he didn’t
let it go at that. He turned it into a ceremony that was to remain deep in
the heart of us Catholics. He celebrated Mass, with the association’s flag on
display, then he took it down, kissed it, had everybody kiss it, then laid it in
a case and put it away, he preserved it the way one preserves something
because, say, the barbarians are coming. A catacumbal ceremony, a secret
ritual. And this flag was brought back in 1943. I mean, Don Peppino was a
truly great man, he is remembered by all, also by the anti-Fascists, because
he sensed that Mussolini was not a harbinger of the time of Elijah, when
the wolves would lie down with the lambs. It was only the time of sly
consent, of crafty quiescence, of waiting for things to change and mean-
while adapting and getting by.
8 HEGEMONY AND CONFLICT

“Luigi Cappelli.”54 Me, nobody forced me to join the [Fascist] Party.
Everybody was joining, I joined, too. No one can say that I went to his
house to harass him, to whip him, to feed him castor oil—or even to tell
him “join the Party.” In good faith. To me, Fascism brought neither good
nor bad. I remember that when they went to Africa, [the Fascists] wanted
to beat me up, because they had built the empire, and I hadn’t. Then they
came back, they beat me again, because I was a Fascist and they were not.
“At home I had neither Fascism nor anti-Fascism; I led the life of a boy
in a family that just gets by, that doesn’t think about these matters”
(Ferruccio Mauri). “My father told me: do what they want so that I don’t
get in trouble; we were a family of eight and he was the only one who had a
job” (Guido Giacinti). “There was neither Fascist madness nor anti-Fascist
madness. We lived under that regime, we had been born under that
regime, we felt realized, in some way, under that regime because the
regime was all we knew” (Settimio Bernarducci). “My husband was young,
they persuaded him to wear the black shirt. And he wore the black shirt.
Other than that, that he hurt anybody, I don’t know, he didn’t do anyone
wrong” (Giuseppina Migliosi).
“Luigi Capello’s” story is a small compendium of the narrative motifs
that justify having been a Fascist; “everybody did it,” “I didn’t hurt any-
body,” “I was faithful to my beliefs”—as opposed to opportunistic turn-
coats: “This [guy] who had shaken hands with Mussolini and didn’t wash it
for a week, he bragged all the time that he had had the honor of shaking
the Duce’s hand. After the war, he became a Socialist assessor” (Mario
Sassi); “What we Italians need is a strong dictatorship with its foot on our
necks” (“Luigi Capello”); “In Italy, we need either Joe [Stalin] or Hitler.
Either one. It’s time we were shown a straight furrow to make us walk the
line” (Cesare Conti).
“When he was executed, [Mussolini’s] pockets were empty” (Settimio
Bernarducci). Refraining from political judgment, many narrators replace it
with moral opinions: “Mussolini was human, let’s admit it—he didn’t have
people killed or something. As far as I’m concerned, he made so many
things, he built roads, telephones. Mussolini always loved and respected the
workers,” says Maria Pitotti, who never owned a telephone and voted for
the Communists. Fascism is often perceived as an all-encompassing, and
therefore contradictory, reality that contains the positive and the negative,
140 A. PORTELLI
mediated by the myth of the betrayed leader and the untrustworthy Italian
character: “Mussolini, the rich put him up, and the rich took him down”
(Pompilio Pileri); “He was betrayed by the King, by all” (Maria Pitotti);
“Mussolini made a mistake when he went to war, but actually he was
deceived: it was us Italians that deceived him. He’d inspect airports, saw
airplanes and things, but they were always the same, carried from town to
town” (Anna Santini).
Mario Sassi. You know why we lost the war? I will tell you my humble
opinion, okay? I don’t know whether you remember Enrico Fermi, he was an
Italian scientist; whether you remember [Bruno] Pontecorvo; whether you
remember [Wernher] von Braun.55 During the war, these three scientists,
with Italian and mainly German means—they were more serious than us—
created the first atom bomb, which we didn’t use because Hitler and
Mussolini didn’t mean to use the atom bomb. They only kept it as a deter-
rent. Except that at one point [Enrico] Fermi, [Wernher] von Braun and
[Bruno] Pontecorvo—all Jews56—ran away by night and went to England
first and then to America, and turned over their studies to the Americans,
who used the atom bomb at Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. You see? That’s
why we lost the war, because of the defection of these three, faithless cowards.
In the mid-1930s, the secretary of Terni’s Fascist labor unions was

Captain Corrado Cagli, a Jew. He was removed when the regime stepped
up its racist policies. Fascist racism was rooted in a racist commonsense that
was not exclusive to the Right. “The Jew is the enemy of all nations,” said
Riziero Montesi, an anarchist, trying to justify anti-Semitism in the Soviet
Union; in 1945, the Socialist periodical Avanguardia ranted against
“Baron Franchetti, a Jewish feudal master.” In 1982, after the massacre at
Sabra and Chatila, I saw a store window with the sign “no Jews allowed.”
In 1926 two consenting adult males were caught having sex in the
steelworks; they were dragged out, jeered, insulted, fired.57 The Fascist
myth of virility drew on and reinforced earlier cultural traits, found among
the workers as well as the middle class, the intellectuals, and the vernacular
culture. In 1909 Il Messaggero reported: “A pervert whipped by the
crowd.” It was a bricklayer who had made a homosexual pass at an
apprentice. The man was chased out of the plant, wearing “a pallid face
streaked with blood, between two carabinieri; and a mob followed after
them, vociferating and screaming and throwing the most cruel insults at his
back.” Even the strict moral code of the Communist movement turns a
blind eye on the “weaknesses of men”: “We had comrades who had
women outside marriage. Well, we sure couldn’t be the party of [homo-
sexuals]. Us communists, we also needed virility to be… Surely, it is
human, we didn’t claim to be perfect” (Arnaldo Lippi).
Remo Righetti. They had an employees’ club at Terni, that had a lot of
members; it was run by the Fascists, paid for by Terni. The club ran
everything, everything, they had a theater that did all the dialect plays, they
ran the company store. And when payday came, the workers didn’t get any
money: because they had spent everything in there, for shoes, clothes,
bread, cheese, food—all in that store. Workers hardly saw any money. Even
tickets for plays or the cinema, you bought them there; the company paid,
and docked it from your paycheck. On payday, they had spent more than
they had made, they were always in debt, always in debt to the company.
Terni controlled not only the town’s economy, but also its daily life,
including family budgets, housing, transportation, leisure, and imagination.
“Back then, the idea was that the company did everything. It hired when it
pleased; it fired when it pleased” (Ilario Ciaurro). “For years, we lived
exclusively for Terni. Students wrote theses on Terni, on Terni’s
accounting, on Terni’s oil consumption, on Terni’s waste” (Canzio
Eupizi). Yet, in a way the company remained a foreign potentate. A 1930
report to the government reads: “Terni is a huge industrial conglomerate
that invades the whole town; there is hardly a family that does not have a
Terni employee in it… Terni is called the ‘dynamic town,’ but all it can
offer the industry is its rich natural wealth of water. The financial capital
came from outside and the board sits in Genoa; only the cold and rigid
executors of the orders from Genoa live in Terni.”58
The history of Fascism in Terni hinged on the conflict between the local
Fascists and the company, perceived as an almost colonial power. “I wish to
confirm,” podestà Elia Rossi Passavanti wrote to Terni CEO Bocciardo, “that
Terni’s Fascism, as per the Duce’s guidelines, must be the supreme regulator
of life in its area. Terni must recognize this fact.”59 Terni’s power, however,
was beyond the reach of local potentates: Bocciardo was a senator, and had
direct access to Mussolini himself. Then, in 1933 Terni was included in the
newly created IRI (Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale) and thus came
under government control, a condition that would last until the 1990s.
What was at stake was control of the town’s main economic asset, its
hydraulic resources. An earlier contract had given control to the company;
when it expired, the local administration refused to renew it. Podestà
142 A. PORTELLI
Passavanti and his followers hoped that the revenues would bolster the
municipality’s budget; Terni aimed to become the keystone of the national
energy market and the clearing house between north and south, by seizing
control of the whole Nera and Velino river basins. The conflict even led to
actual old-style duels in which Passavanti faced company executive Amati
and Fascist labor official Tullio Cianetti, a sign of the cultural clash between
the archaic paternalistic and the modern industrial souls that coexisted
uneasily in Fascist totalitarianism. The conflict, however, also saw a return
of such Fascist methods as raids and aggressions led by Passavanti’s ally,
“Pignattino” Salvati, and his Collescipoli action squads—this time, how-
ever, also against other Fascists. Passavanti and Salvati campaigned among
the workers, accusing the company of practicing an “egotistic vision” of
capitalism and encouraged them when, in 1930, in full Fascism, they
walked out demanding better pay and working conditions.60
Mussolini finally adjudicated in favor of the company, and forced
Passavanti to resign. While the new contract guaranteed the company’s
profits, a government report concluded that it disregarded the users’ needs
and interests; hence, “much resentment toward Terni, the widespread
belief that Terni has an excessive and illegitimate power over the town’s
life, the persuasion that the local Fascist hierarchy either tolerates this or is
powerless to reestablish a measure of balance.”61
Terni’s supremacy over civil society turned Terni into a company town.
Terni provided working-class housing, sports fields, company villages with
their own school and church houses, welfare, health service, company
stores. Space and time were redefined to suit the company and the regime:
“A representative example of the regime’s extensive network of institutions
—a company publication explained—is the Dopolavoro.62 By penetrating
among the masses, it provides spiritual cohesion in works and aims, as it
draws chiefs and subalterns, blue- and white-collar employees ever closer in
pleasant family-oriented communion, yet without undermining the disci-
pline and hierarchy that are the foundation and basis of every well-ordered
community.”63
9 RITUALS AND GAMES

As the regime and the company (and the Church) vied for and converged
on complete control of Terni’s social life, many tried to retain a degree of
autonomy and to organize their own leisure time and activities. “What did
people do, when they had no other possibility? On Saturdays, on Sundays,
they’d fix a bundle [of food], and go to the fields; there was always
someone with an organetto, with a guitar, a mandolin. It was a kind of
socialization of leisure to pass an evening. The only way to do something
different” (Enrico Ferri). “I was nine or ten years old, and I saw several
compagni pick up big bowls of wine from a tavern, on May Day, and go
drink it at a crossroads, hidden out of town” (Antonio Venturi). Compagno
means both comrade and companion: in these gatherings, politics and
socialization went hand in hand. “On Sundays, with a bunch of comrades,
we’d go out to the fields, other comrades came from Narni, and we held
meetings, we fished for crawfish, caught birds, and cooked them with
potatoes, like that. This was our Sunday” (Agamante Androsciani).
Therefore, Fascists were suspicious of any gathering that did not take place
under the aegis of the regime: “We organized parties over at the Palazzone,
but secretly, because the Palazzone belongs to Terni, and you had to do it
kind of on the sly, even if it was just a small family party. Four or five of
those goons would knock on your door and force you to stop it” (Alfredo
Vecchioni).
The regime and the workers engaged in what can be described as a form
of class struggle over rituals, in which ancient anticlerical rituals also became
expressions of anti-Fascism. When the former Socialist deputy mayor Arturo
Luna died, his lay funeral was scheduled to pass by the factory gates at
quitting time, so as to intercept the majority of workers; the police reacted by
arresting the organizers and sending some of them into internment. One
night Fascists broke into the cemetery and destroyed the graves of the vic-
tims of the June 28, 1920 massacre and other radicals. Street names were
changed from Socialist to Fascist heroes, “to the evident satisfaction of the
inhabitants”—but for some reason the changes were made “at night.” In
1936 unknown parties tried to cut down a tree erected in a public garden in
memory of Mussolini’s brother Arnaldo; the authorities accused “the dark
and brutish animus of those who attempt to hurt the sentiments of the
people [by insulting] the cult of their Duce’s brother.”64
The merancolata, the ritual staging of class conflict on Carnival was
forbidden; the Cantamaggio was shifted from April 30—May Day’s eve!—
to the patron saint’s day (April 14, Saint Valentine) and then to April 21, a
holiday invented by Fascism to commemorate the founding of Rome.
Eventually, Cantamaggio was placed under the aegis of the Dopolavoro
and, indirectly, of Terni: “Through town parade the floats of the Terni
company Dopolavoro, vibrant with music and lights. The manly and silvery
voices carry the salute of the working masses to the authorities and to the
144 A. PORTELLI
population, by pausing beneath the residences of the factory managers: a

homage of affectionate deference, a sure index of the climate that Fascism
has created in Italy, token and guarantee of the fusion of spirits and aims
that now welds workers and employers together in the name and symbol of
the renovated homeland.”65
Anna Santini. I was doing all right, because Fascism gave us many grat-
ifications. For instance, I was an athlete; they allowed us to go skiing, to
train, for free; and you know, at that age, ten or twelve, I was happy. All
paid for, all regular. Of course, we wore a Fascist emblem on our sweaters,
we had to give the Fascist salute all the time. We were in a meet at Sestriere
[in the Alps], I was the youngest, and between one Fascist salute and
another we did great, and I won the long-distance race, and then, imagine,
eja eja, salutes, with this big fascio on my shoulders that we wore, that back
then didn’t feel too heavy, nowadays it might, but back then it didn’t. It
was good. It all ended, when Fascism fell.
“Sports during Fascism, leaving aside the errors it made, yet it was well
organized. It was a collective thing; nowadays, instead, a worker, a
worker’s son, they have no access to these things anymore” (Augusto
Cuppini). Sports was the central ritual and leisure activity that clinched
Fascist hegemony. In 1925, in the midst of infighting over the use of water
resources, Terni announced the construction of “Central Italy’s largest
sport arena,” a token of its “lofty feeling of love” for the town. Actually,
Terni gave only the land on which the arena was built, but construction
was paid for with money docked from the workers’ paychecks: “With the
excuse of sports,” a worker wrote, “Terni has found another way of
sucking its workers’ blood.” Fascist workers from Narni protested, because
they lived too far to attend events at the new stadium, but had to pay for it
anyhow.66 On the other hand, the fact that the stadium was built with their
own money entitled the workers to feel that it belonged to them: “We paid
a lira per month. We were obliged to pay. So it’s not as if the arena was
built by Terni. It was built by the working class” (Augusto Cuppini).
The stadium, then, as well as sports and most mass culture, seemed both
a gift and an imposition: two opposing signifieds of one shared signifier, in
the struggle between workers, the regime, and the company over culture,
rituals, and symbols. Fascism appropriated the sports heroes of the time (in
songs remembered by Trento Pitotti, the football hero Giuseppe Meazza
was celebrated for scoring a goal against England as “the Italian Balilla”67;
the cycling champions Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi “raced in a luminous
dawn \ For the glory of Italy and the Duce”). In turn, anti-Fascists tried to
invent heroes and symbols of their own. When popular cyclists Learco
Guerra and Costante Girardengo openly sided with the regime,
anti-Fascists mythicized their rival, Alfredo Binda: “He came from an
anti-Fascist family that had escaped to France in 1921. Once, he won a race
and they gave him a red, white, and green bunch of flowers; he kept the red
ones and threw away the rest” (Bruno Zenoni).
The Dopolavoro publication explained: “The moral education, the
military education, and the sports activity of the masses are the foundations
on which stands the great edifice we are building…The Dopolavoro youths
are inured to all endeavor and trained to the healthy and steadfast discipline
that characterizes the organization of the Dopolavoro. Just as they pre-
vailed in National and International Competitions, likewise they distin-
guished themselves in the [war] Fields of Glory.”68
An important sports symbol was redefined in 1930, when the auto-
mobile racer, Baconin Borzacchini, the anarchist mechanic’s son, was
pressured into changing his name to Mario Umberto (after King Umberto
and Queen Maria José). After his death, the regime changed the name of
the local football club from “Terni” to “Mario Umberto Borzacchini
Sports Association.” The football club was also controlled by Terni: as a
northern newspaper wrote, “more than their place in the team, those
athletes had been attracted by the promise of lasting employment in the
firm… The ‘Terni’ players: the workshop first, the gym later.”69
Athletes often perceived company sports less as a generous offer on the
part of the company than a service rendered by them to the company’s
image, for which they expected adequate compensation. By threatening to
stop competing, Aldo Galeazzi, a popular athlete, got the company to take
him off the shop floor (“I’m not catching silicosis for the sake of sports”)
and giving him the less unhealthy job of a company guard. “I took
advantage of mass sports. I was a gymnast, so they gave me a job at the
steelworks,” recalled Giovanni Catoni. He had been listed by the police as
a Communist; but perhaps for Terni another Communist at the rolling mill
was not too high a price for another athlete for the glory of the
Dopolavoro.
“The war in Ethiopia was just over” [in 1936] and the fountain in
Piazza Tacito had just been inaugurated. Terni was chosen as the neutral
ground for a Cup game between Rome and Turin. “Most of the ternani
tended to root for Rome. But Rome’s supporters came to town, they
146 A. PORTELLI
began to make fun of us” and laugh at the new fountain, the thin tall spout
planted in its circular basin, that was supposed to be the symbol of new,
modern Terni: “‘look, they even have a pen in an inkstand’” (Valtero
Peppoloni). To the arrogant chauvinism of Rome’s citizens, Terni has often
represented the epitome of an uncouth boondocks; hence, the feigned
surprise at signs of civilization: “They came up on the street that goes to
Pazzaglia’s, in convertible cars,‘Look, they even have coffee, they even have
coffee’” (Vincenza Giontella). “Word got around all over town, and
friendship turned to hostility. And bedlam erupted” (Valtero Peppoloni).
“The battle in the streets went on until seven or eight p.m. I saw it all,
savage clashes in the streets—Corso Tacito, the streets around the station.
It seemed it would never stop” (Emilio Ferri).
Most narrators locate the epicenter of the fighting in front of Pazzaglia’s
—another symbol, like the fountain—of insulted local pride. All sorts of
people converged to punish the Romans’ insults: squadristi raring for a
fight as well as “some of those usual outlaws, anti-Fascists” (Augusto
Cuppini). Rome was the symbol of the Fascist empire, so that for some the
fight also took anti-regime overtones: “You were able to give vent to what
you couldn’t express, because Rome back then was the empire” (Valtero
Peppoloni). Cuppini enriches the symbolic import of the events by (mis)-
placing in this context another episode that has been etched onto Terni’s
popular memory: “So then, in front of Pazzaglia’s, Bishop Boccoleri also
joined in. He picked up a chair and hit a Roman.” “Part of it was the myth
of [Rome’s] greatness, the ignorant, uncouth way of flaunting the supe-
riority of the capital. And there was also a resentment toward the big city
and the idle bureaucracy with which it is often identified. They said, ‘[In
Rome] they don’t work, and they eat. Here we work…’” (Emilio Ferri).
NOTES
1. Fascio means “bundle.” A bundle made of canes and an ax was the symbol
of power for ancient Roman magistrates.
2. “Il fascismo contro la classe operaia ternana,” unsigned, in Sergio Bovini,
ed., L’Umbria nella Resistenza, Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1972, p. 64;
Francesco Alunni Pierucci, Violenze e crimini fascisti in Umbria,
Umbertide, self-published, no date, p. 63 ff.
3. “Eia eja alalà,” a meaningless phrase in pidgin Greek, was the Fascist war
cry. Quoted in Giuseppe Gubitosi, “Socialismo e fascismo a Terni,” Annali
della Facoltà di Scienze Politiche dell’Università di Perugia, VIII, 1982–
1983, pp. 1–46.
4. In 1919 the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, an extreme nationalist, led an

expedition to the town of Fiume (now Rijeka, in Croatia). While Fiume
had a majority Italian population, it had not been assigned to Italy by the
Versailles peace treaty. D’Annunzio set up an independent state that lasted
about a year and anticipated many features of Fascism.
5. Elia Rossi Passavanti, La città dinamica. Sommario della storia di Terni
dalle origini all’Impero Fascista, Roma, Darmasso, 1938, p. 631; F.
Bianchi, Relazione di F. Bianchi sulla situazione del partito fascista a Terni,
November 1930, ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 24 (henceforth, Relazione Bianchi);
Cesare Moroni, letter to the Fascist Federation of Terni, quoted in the
Socialist periodical Avanguardia, July 16, 1945.
6. The government-appointed official with which the Fascist regime replaced
elected mayors.
7. For similar (and equally unreliable) narratives, see Jerry Lembke, The
Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, New York, NYU
Press, 1968.
8. A member of the special elite assault troops.
9. Head of the local party federation.
10. Quoted in Giuseppe Gubitosi, “Gli Arditi del Popolo e le origini dello
squadrismo fascista,” Annali della Facoltà di Scienze Politiche
dell’Università di Perugia, II, 1977–1978, pp. 122–125; the song was sung
by Dante Bartolini, Castel di Lago (Terni), November 5, 1975.
11. Cesare Rossi was later involved in the 1924 Fascist murder of Socialist
member of Parliament Giacomo Matteotti.
12. Perugia, Umbria’s capital, about sixty miles from Terni, was one of the
meeting places from which the Fascist columns marched on Rome on
October 28, 1922, marking the beginning of the Fascist regime.
13. ACS, ACP, 1922, b. 74; Umbria Proletaria, March 18, 1922; ACS, Gab.
Finzi, 1922–1924, b.8.
14. ACS, PS, GR, 1922, b. D 13.
15. Ibid.; ACS, PS, AGR, b.1922, b. 145.
16. ACS, PS, GR, 1922, b. D 13; Gubitosi, Socialisti e fascisti a Terni; F.
Alunni Pierucci, Violenze e crimini fascisti, pp. 129–131.
17. Action squad members.
18. ACS, PS, GR, 1922, b. D 13; Roberto Orlandi, “Episodi della leggendaria
vigilia,” Acciaio (publication of Terni’s Fascist federation), October 23,
1937.
19. See ACS, PS, AGR, 1921, f. 103.
20. Pietro Farini, In marcia coi lavoratori, p. 269; Avanti!, July 30, 1921;
ACS, PS, AGR, 1922, b. 145.
21. The “People’s Storm Troopers,” an armed self-defense organization cre-
ated by war veterans in response to Fascist violence.
148 A. PORTELLI
22. Francesco Bogliari, Tito Oro Nobili, Perugia, Quaderni Regione

dell’Umbria, 1977, pp. 25–26; F: Alunni Pierucci, Violenze e crimini fas-
cisti, pp. 117–124.
23. Otello Bordoni, letter to Terni’s Fascist federation.
24. Remo Righetti and Bruno Zenoni, eds., Contributo dell’antifascismo nel
temano, Terni, ANPI, 1976, pp. 7–13; ACS, PS, AGR, 1922, b. 98.
25. Cesare Moroni, letter to Terni’s Fascist federation, in Avanguardia, July
16, 1945.
26. ACS, PS, AGR, 1922, bb. 145, 74.
27. Otello Bordoni, letter to the Fascist Federation, in Avanguardia, July 16,
1945.
28. R. Righetti and B. Zenoni, Contributo dell’antifascismo, pp. 15 ff.; ACS,
PS, AGR, 1922, b. 145.
29. Remo Righetti, “Un fiero combattente,” Resistenza insieme (periodical of
Terni’s ANPI—Italian Partisan Association), IV, June 1984, pp. 18–19.
30. Terni. Rassegna del Comune, January–February, 1935.
31. Renato Covino and Giampaolo Gallo, “Appunti per una mostra sulla storia
di Terni fra ‘800 e ‘900,” Indagini, XVII, June 1982, pp. 14–18; Aldo
Tarquini, “Gli anni trenta: il progetto della città,” catalog of the exhibition
Frammenti di storia della città, Terni, 1982, p. 157; Massimo Coppo, “Il
Piano regolatore di Terni,” Urbanistica, xxxiv, September 1961, pp. 69–77.
32. Literally, “mouth officer”: a cuisine superintendent.
33. Vittorio De Sica (1901–1974) was a popular actor in the 1930s; after
World War II he became one of the most important filmmakers of Italian
neo-realism, with such films as Bicycle Thieves and Miracle in Milan.
34. Ruggero Ruggeri (1871–1953), Ermete Zacconi (1857–1948), Emma
Gramatica (1874–1965), Marta Abba (1900–1980), Memo Benassi
(1891–1957) were theater stars of the first half of the twentieth century.
35. À nous la liberté (Give us freedom), a classic French film, René Clair, 1931;
Rotaie (Rail tracks), directed by Mario Camerini, produced in 1930 as a
silent film and reissued in 1931 as the first Italian “talkie.” Austrian director
Georg Wilhelm Pabst directed a film about a mine disaster, Camaraderie,
in 1931 (there was also a 1926 Pabst Mine disaster in Michigan, followed
by the dramatic rescue of forty-three miners trapped underground).
36. Arturo Bocciardo (1876–1959), was CEO of Terni from 1922.
37. Il Messaggero, August 28, 1927. For a later memory, see Chapter 10.
38. See Alessandro Portelli, “Absalom, Absalom!: Oral History and Literature,”
in The Death of Luigi Trastulli and other Stories. Form and Meaning in
Oral History, Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 1991,
pp. 270–281.
39. Giovanni Mattioli, Maggiorina’s brother, was an underground Communist

activist, who spent 6 years in internment and then migrated clandestinely to
France.
40. Alfredo Filipponi, owner of a coal shed, was the secretary of the under-
ground Communist Party in the 1930s. See Chapter 8.
41. Hand-made noodles with no eggs in the dough; olive oil kept in earthware
pots.
42. Furio Miselli, “Prima Terni e po’ Londra e Parì,” in Le più belle poesie in
dialetto ternano, Terni, Thyrus, 1938, p. 187.
43. Acciaio, May 14, 1937; G. Moretti, Il teatro di Renato Brogelli e la realtà
ternana, in Indagini, XVII, June 1982, pp. 19–21.
44. Spino Biancifiori, “Poema operaju,” Lu Ndruju, special issue, Christmas
1983, p. 4. On Ettore Secci, Corriere di Terni, November 18, 1933.
45. Il Messaggero, February 16, 1925. Interamna [between rivers] is Terni’s
ancient Roman name.
46. Alfeo Paganelli was active as a musician until the 1970s; here, he synthe-
sizes experiences and repertoires belonging to different times.
47. Mino Valeri, “Appunti per una storia della pittura a Terni nel Novecento,”
Rassegna Economica della Camera di Commercio, Terni, 1974.
48. On Giulio Briccialdi (1818–1881), L’Unione Liberale, January 8 and April
28, 1882; on both Briccialdi and Alessandro Casagrande (1922–1964),
Manuali per il territorio, Public Relations Department of Terni, vol. 3/4,
1980, vol. 3, pp. 64 and 241–42.
49. Cesare Bazzani (1873–1939) was the architect of most public buildings in
Terni, inspired by the rationalist geometry and the neo-classic white marble
aesthetic of Fascist architecture.
50. Materiali per il territorio, vol. 3, p. 102. On Metelli, Orneore Metelli. Il
calzolaio pittore di Terni, catalog of the exhibition for the centennial of his
birth, Spoleto 1973; Le Arti, special supplement on Orneore Metelli,
December 1972.
51. Libero Bigiaretti, in Le Arti, Metelli supplement.
52. Catholic lay organization.
53. Rodolfo Melani, “L’episcopato umbro dallo Stato liberale al fascismo,” in
Alberto Monticone, ed., Cattolici e fascisti in Umbria, Bologna, Il Mulino,
1978, p. 160.
54. A pseudonym for a narrator who did not wish to be identified.
55. Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) and Bruno Pontecorvo (1913–93) were Italian
nuclear physicists who left Italy after the anti-Semitic laws passed by the
Fascist regime in 1938. Fermi moved to the United States, worked on the
Manhattan Project and designed the first nuclear reactor; in 1938 he was
awarded the Nobel Prize. After leaving Italy, Bruno Pontecorvo worked in
France, Britain, and the United States; in 1950 he defected to the Soviet
150 A. PORTELLI
Union. Wernher von Braun (1912–1977) was the leading scientist in the
Nazi missile program; after the war he was recruited by the United States
where he became the head of the US space programs.
56. Von Braun, of course, was not Jewish.
57. Il Messaggero, September 6, 1909 and November 13, 1926.
58. Relazione Bianchi.
59. Relazione Bianchi; ACS, PS, AGR, 1927, b. 130.
60. Bonelli, Lo sviluppo di una grande impresa in Italia, Turin, Einaudi, 1975,
pp.151–161; Il Messaggero, September 24 and 25, October 3, 1925; ACS,
PS, AGR, 1922, b. 200; Ibid., 1929, b. 185 and 1922, b. 74; Relazione
Bianchi; M. Ilardi, “Ristrutturazione aziendale e classe operaia.”
61. Relazione Bianchi.
62. An “After Work” club.
63. Terni. Società per l’industria e l’elettricità, Dopolavoro. Assistenza di fab-
brica. Assistenza sanitaria, Terni, 1936, p. 11 (henceforth, Dopolavoro).
64. ACS, PS, AGR, 1932, b. 52°; Ibid., 1936, bb. 29 and K-13; Ibid., 1937, b.
9; Torquato Secci, “Una pagina inedita di storia ternana,” Indagini, XVII,
June 1982, pp. 19–30.
65. Dopolavoro, p. 70.
66. Il Messaggero, May 4 and March 26, 1925.
67. “Balilla” was the nickname of Giovan Battista Perasso, a 10-year-old boy
who started a rebellion in Genoa in 1746 by throwing a stone at the
Austrian troops that were occupying the city. Fascism named its paramili-
tary youth organizations after him.
68. Dopolavoro, p. 49.
69. Alberto Bellavigna, La Ternana dal ‘900 al 2000, Terni, Alterocca, 1967,
p. 32, quoting the Trieste newspaper Il Piccolo.
CHAPTER 7
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:

Surviving and Resisting Fascism
1 GROWING UP
Alvaro Valsenti. I’m telling history as if it were a biography, the way we

always do. Always with an eye on politics, on the life of society. I’m from
Sant’Agnese, in fact I was thinking one day of writing a book: the kids of
Sant’Agnese.1 I was born in Terni in 1924, the years I remember of my
childhood are the terrible years, the years of the great economic crisis; and
this childhood spent in a neighborhood, Sant’Agnese, the poorest neigh-
borhood. Where we didn’t have running water, where we didn’t have
sewers, you might say we had malaria, because it was teeming with mos-
quitoes. It was a neighborhood between the waters, huge bodies of water,
from Serra [creek] to a big canal, so we played between the earth and the
water.
I remember those years that were, so, difficult; we went barefoot;
imagine that most kids, almost all, because it was mainly a working-class
neighborhood, and those years the workers of the steel mill, of Bosco, of
Papigno, they didn’t get redundancy payments; they’d go over, didn’t find
their card—“wait on call.” But this situation, without pay, without a
subsidy, lasted for months, months, months. We never saw any money; we
bought everything on credit. And the better-off ones were this little bunch
of Fascists tied up with the regime; they were never placed on call.

152 A. PORTELLI
Elchide Trippa. I’m telling what I was told by my father; who still today I
respect, I trust completely. We were in the popular suburb, so-called
Sant’Agnese. There, the only Fascist was my dad. He had demonstrated in
favor of World War I, had volunteered, was a follower of D’Annunzio, he
leaves for the war, returns ill with typhoid fever, is hired at the Arsenal,
soon as the war is over he is attacked by a bunch of [leftist] thugs. He fights
back, some are wounded—he is wounded too, badly, a wound 6
centimeters deep. And my mother, who was pregnant with me, and my
father, they had to run away.
Alvaro Valsenti. I was one of the ringleaders, in Sant’Agnese. So this street

life, we invented the craziest, dangerousest things. We’d swim in the
steelworks’ canals, we’d dive and swim across the tunnel, three, four
hundred meters, nobody knew what was in there, then along by the pro-
jects, all the way to Sant’Agnese. It was a big adventure, like a sea cruise or
something, This chilly water that came down from Papigno, merged with
the waste of the steelworks, minerals, oil. Back then we swam naked.
Behind the steelworks, we called it Capri: up here it was called the scojitto
[little rock], the so-called raji [canals]. That was the beach for us kids. We
all knew how to swim; we had our own Olympic games. Sant’Agnese gave
a big contribution to sports in Terni, from football to swimming, to
gymnastics, to boxing. We were incredibly physically fit, because we did
things, like we’d jump into the river from the iron bridge. Once we built a
wooden cart, four meters long, with thirty centimeters wheels, we went up
to Marmore and raced it downhill. We had riveted a lever on either side, as
a brake. When you pulled, it caught fire. By the time you got to the
bottom, it was burning. We came down the hill, bang against the wall.
Elchide Trippa. So we up and go to France. He gets a job in a workshop,

and the boss kept telling him, “Why don’t you get a French citizenship?”
My father felt a one hundred percent Italian, because he came from an old
carbonaro, Republican family. He was harassed all the time, and of course
he rebelled; he talked back to the boss, the boss slapped him, my father
picked up a knife, chased him all around the plant, until he stuck it in his
butt. Of course he already had his passport, he ran away and came back to
Italy. We were in 1920, 1921; and he found a situation that he didn’t
understand. He joined the other side, the Fascists. Against those who had
assaulted and stabbed him. He was in the March on Rome and all.
7 LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN: SURVIVING AND RESISTING FASCISM 153
Vincenzo Trippa had been wounded in the first, failed, Fascist raid on
Papigno. Old neighbors remember him by his nickname, “Cincittu”:
“During Fascism, I had to deal with what’s his name, Cincittu. He was a
nuisance. He’d go up to the young men, slap them, then the squadristi
would attack them with bats, with whips. We used to throw stones at him
when he rode his bike home at night.” “If you didn’t take your hat off to
them, he and three or four of his ilk would confront you—‘Roman salute!’
[He was so short] he’d stand on tiptoe to slap someone’s face.” “Cincittu”
was also involved in inter-Fascist feuds; in 1928, he was whipped by
“Pignattino’s” squad.2
Elchide Trippa. For some time, 1922, 1923, my father was a squadrista.
What I remember, what his friends, his comrades of the time told me is that
he was—yes, I won’t say violent, but, dad, you have to understand him. He
was a meter and a half tall. He was extraordinarily strong, one of those
well-made he-men. Now, if you are physically small, you have an instinct,
unless you’re held back by reason, that you must prove that you are like
everyone else. This was his only reason for living. He slapped a few, that I
know; especially those who were taller than him. But that was all. Today,
everyone in Terni knows who my father was, no point in hiding it.3
Alvaro Valsenti. My family, from 1930 to 1936, we moved six times, always
looking for cheaper quarters. We weren’t a big family, three children. But
some had eight, nine children, and they lived in two rooms, the beds and the
fireplace. Evenings, we’d start from Sant’Agnese and go to the hills to make a
bundle of wood; stealing, always, because it belonged to the municipality, or
to some landowner, so it was dangerous. One incident that turned me into a
rebel, that influenced my whole life, is that we kids were out picking country
grass, and the farm watchman chased us away at gun point. What we called
country grass, that you made a big pot of it, with a couple of lima beans, and
that’s what you ate. And so, at the time of the Depression, eking out a way to
survive, it weighed heavily on our lives and I think also on the consciousness
of our generation. My father was a laborer at the steelworks, and a laborer
then earned half the pay of a regular worker. Though all had jobs, my bigger
brothers, yet it was terrible. My father had been a farmhand, he helped at a
restaurant, and with the waste from Terni’s slag heap we fertilized the
onions, we had plants 30 cm high because perhaps those ashes were good
for that kind of plants. Fig trees, all around the slag heap, they grew
amazingly; in wartime, they helped feed us.
154 A. PORTELLI
Elchide Trippa. My father was a janitor, his wages came every month, so I
had more opportunities. He had built his own house, with my grandfa-
ther’s help, so he didn’t pay rent. In our neighborhood, it happened often
that a family was left without income; and often we’d see one or two
children sitting at the table with us. We thought that if we had happened to
be at their house at mealtime, it would have been the same with us; instead,
it was another matter.
My father was the only Fascist, as I said; my mother wasn’t, because she
still harbored Republican feelings, from France. And there were very
respectable families, of a different political color: Socialists, Communists,
they lived next door. We all led sorry lives, of sacrifice, of toil. I remember
when those workers’ wives went to work at Centurini’s, they crossed the
Serra stepping from stone to stone off the surface of the waters. Husbands
and wives had to work, and we children played on the clearing, in the dust,
in the canebrakes, in the creek. This was the life of the common people.
But there was an incredible solidarity. Politics didn’t matter in time of
need. In fact, when my father heard that one of his neighbors was going to
be visited by the police, he wouldn’t do it himself, but he told mother, I
heard him say it, too, “go warn him.”
Celsa Paganelli. Cencio was our landlord. And, his wife was not fascist.
And I had a cousin, Vincenzo Galeazzi, who was persecuted for political
reasons; they had grown up together in that house. So one night he heard
that they were going to set fire to my cousin’s house. She went and told
him, “Run, Vincenzo, because my husband and the rest of the Fascists are
going to burn your house. Get away.”
Alvaro Valsenti. In this neighborhood, when we went to school, the

October 28 school,4 the teacher greeted us: “Here come the Bolsheviks.”
Because he knew we were children of anti-Fascists. People gathered at the
tavern, and we’d sing anti-Fascist songs, Bandiera Rossa, Addio Lugano
Bella …5 When we got to the fifth grade, teachers would ask: “Who goes
on? Who quits?”
Very few would rise; some would go on to vocational school, some to
the industrial institute, maybe five or six out of thirty-five. Skilled workers’
children went to the industrial school; but for the majority the way was
this: at age eleven, pitch in [to help the family], and on your vacation go
help the barber, the grocer, the photographer.
Elchide Trippa. When you bought bread, or cheese, there was no money
to pay, so the merchant had a little book, and he’d give you a piece of paper
—“on such a day so many lire….” On payday, you’d pay him back. And
sometimes, after they’d paid their bill, some families would leave a little
extra money for those who were in dire straits. At olive-pressing time, there
was a street, along the Nera river bank, that ran along a canal; and it was
lined with olive-pressing mills, and people would take the olives there to be
crushed. There was a form of solidarity: you’d bring a plate of beans, and
the mill owner would pour oil, very abundant, on the beans. And there
were some who thought they were smart, they’d put a few beans on top
and a false bottom underneath, and it would fill with oil. And the owners
knew, and, to the poorest people, they’d turn a blind eye. If someone went
too far—“that’s enough, all right?”
Alvaro Valsenti. Back then, in the factory, you worked a twelve–hour shift,
and when you came home you were worn out. Most workers didn’t live to
be sixty. Those who worked at the Martin furnace, around the fires, sheet
metal, section bars, tinplates, presses—the factory destroyed people phys-
ically. I started out at Alterocca’s [print shop], doing the work of five men
who had been drafted; I met other anti-Fascists, this feeling of rebellion,
seeing how others lived, it was the beginning of class hatred. We wanted
fruit—and we’d go steal in the villas. We had the map of fruit orchards in
Terni. Then I got a job at Bosco’s, as a janitor’s helper. The police kept
coming, asking questions, because it was full of anti-Fascists. Other fac-
tories wouldn’t hire them, but Bosco’s did because they knew they were
the best workers. And there, the first contacts with the Party: I met Sante
Carboni, an old anti-Fascist, and, even though I was afraid to talk to him,
yet I heard them when they talked among themselves. My father was
illiterate, like most men of his generation; but they knew all about politics,
especially international politics. Oral information among them was huge.
They were anti-Fascists, but most of that generation, other than Party
activists, were syndicalists, anarchists, I mean. It was a feeling of rebellion
against this condition of poverty, of exploitation.
Elchide Trippa. When the war ended, I said, all right, if dad was a Fascist,
was guilty of some things, it means that I’ll be the one to pay for what he
did. And I did pay, you know. But I must add that the feeling of humanity
and solidarity that had existed before also existed later. I could name names
of Communists, important ones, too, that helped me then.
156 A. PORTELLI
2 WORK WAS JUST WORK

Dante Bartolini. Why did the Communist Party grow? Because those who
weren’t Communists, the others turned them into it. You asked for your
rights, they’d say, “Do you hear him? He’s a Communist! Arrest him, take
him away!!” Internment—or, a good whipping. And we, the Party, kept
growing. Because the good people who were treated that way, who
because they asked for their rights they told them, “He’s a
Communist”—“Well, then it means that the Communists are right, aren’t
they?” And people realized what the Communist Party is. It’s when you
protest, that you need something, a right that you’re not given, you pro-
test, and you want it. And they refuse you because it’s the master’s
dictatorship. Because these were Fascist bosses.
“I went to work at Terni in 1933. And, back then, you couldn’t speak,
in the plant. You had to shut up. I worked at the machine shop, and we had
a boss that was a big Fascist, if you said a word he’d turn you in on the spot.
Which he did to many; but when July 256 came around, he got such a
whipping, they nearly killed him” (Calfiero Canali). “If you didn’t carry
the [Fascist] party card, you didn’t get a job. Unless you gave your wife or
your daughter to one of the bosses—that did happen. There was the
notorious [X], or the head of general services—if you wanted a job, he’d
say, ‘Bring me your wife, and your daughter.’ And some did” (Valtero
Peppoloni).
Remo Righetti. Nowadays company guards are not even allowed on the
shop floor, but back then they’d watch you on the job. If they saw you
idling, they’d fine you. You took too long in the toilet, they’d follow you
in. Or five minutes before quitting time, you’d already washed your hands,
already cleaned your machine? There came the guard, and fined you. When
they identified [an anti-Fascist], they drew a red ring around his name in
the personnel file, he was under special surveillance, you wouldn’t get a
raise, a promotion, anything. We had sort of an internal police in the plant,
I mean.
Alfredo Vecchioni. You’ve seen those movies where they’re on forced

labor, they pull things with ropes in the mud and they fall and get whipped.
Those who worked at the gas-production plant, at the Martin open-air
furnace, at the rolling mills, these divisions [were like that]. Nowadays, the
Martin—you could go to sleep in it, look, as compared to what it was then.
Frightening. You have no idea what it was like. Down in ditches five or six
meters deep—I’m not lying, this is the truth—after they did the casting at
night, you had to go in the next morning and clean it up; and it was still
burning, boiling, you went in on wooden shoes, on clogs. Dust, you had to
bathe every day, you had so much dust on you, and dust in your lungs.
How many, at forty, their life was already over, physically, I mean.
In the early 1930s, Terni’s prefect reported that piece rates at Terni
imposed a workload “beyond what is physically possible”; Acciaio, the
Fascist federation’s paper, admitted that “it is almost impossible for a human
being to make” the required production. A Fascist labor official wrote that,
with the 1930 contract, “piece rate pay was further cut,” as if the company
was intentionally setting impossible tasks. A company memo explained that
the purpose was “to eliminate those who have no attitude or will to work,”
because “with a little more effort, workers can easily increase production and
earn as much as they were doing before.”7 “After 1929, a guy started going
around in the plant, incognito. Nobody knew who he was. It turned out he
was a big Terni shareholder. And after a while he wrote a report: that the
workers were doing nothing, that they slept on the job. So they called in a
team from Genoa, political thugs, and what they did was worse than the
penitentiary. You couldn’t rest a moment” (Faliero Corvo).
Ferruccio Mauri. I went into the steelworks at fourteen—as an apprentice.

The impact was terrible. There was this old worker, I still remember his
name, Materazzi; and I asked him, “What are the bosses like in here?” He
looked at me, all grouchy, and says “Remember, boy: here, you ought to
kill the good ones and use their guts to hang the bad ones.” I was stunned
—is there nothing but enemies, here?
Mario Gabrielli. Anyway, the years go by and we go to work at the steel

mill. At fifteen, in short pants. I started in 1940, in full Fascism. Back then,
work brutalized you. They gave you a little money, just so they could say
they paid you; other than that, they brutalized you with labor. The
rolling-bar mill; it worked 700-kilo ingots; and the weight of each piece
varied according to gauge, diameter, it could be twenty-five, thirty kilos.
You lifted them with your tongs and piled them up. There, quick, cut
them, and then, heat, fire still around four, five hundred degrees. Some
workers no longer had hands; they had hoofs, like cows’ nails. Corns,
three, four centimeters thick, if they caught you with a hand they’d break
158 A. PORTELLI
your arm, no doubt about it. Imagine that after the war, because of the
great physical effort they went through, they were given a supplement of
cheese and wine. Because it was a huge physical effort. Understand? They
used them like tools, like beasts. Like slaves, just like that. Only the chains
were missing.
Antonina Colombi. The war was on. My husband, he was thirty-seven, and
he was supposed to go to war, because they’d redrafted former NCOs, too.
The steelworks were hiring; so he went to work at the steelworks as a
bricklayer, and [was exempted from the draft]. But it killed him anyway,
because he was a fixer at the furnaces. When they did the cast, he, with a set
of long-handled tongs, had to reset the refractory bricks. With an asbestos
suit on: they caught fire in front, and from the back they threw water on
them. How could he survive in those conditions? He’d caught silicosis in
the war. And, he smoked, too. Each pair of workers took a ten-minute shift
in the furnace; you couldn’t last longer. When he was paired with some old
man, who already had silicosis, bronchitis, he went alone, without his mate.
Often, he breathed fumes; he’d come home, he couldn’t eat. His eyes were
all green, he saw everything in green, his mouth stank of gas. “I wish I’d
been killed by the gun—he kept telling me—rather than agonize like this,”
eight years in the sanatorium and then he died.
In 1936 the local Fascio secretary announces the raising of a monument
in memory of the work dead: “Not victims,” Acciaio explains, “but in virile
and Fascist fashion, ‘fallen’.”8
Alberto Petrini. [My father] had an accident [at the Papigno cyanamide
plant], and was in a coma and then more than a year in the hospital.
A furnace blew up. Later, I worked in the same place, because when I was
at the steel mill I was the [Communist] Party’s factory representative, so
they sent me there as a punishment. I was thirty years old, and I saw the
place where dad had his accident. I saw people burn like human torches, I
did. One morning I was going to work at 6 a.m., and it was coming on
May Day and I lingered by the changing room stairs [to collect union
dues], and I heard this huge deflagration, there were two work mates who
—we wore wool clothes, but when that incandescent mass hits you, it
burns everything, it burns everything. They were rolling on the ground, to
put it out. Why, they scream, they call for help; but when it hits, it’s like
going into a furnace. You wait for it to ease a little, but meanwhile they
keep burning. I still remember [my father’s accident]. I was small, I was
barely walking. Afterwards, he eked out a living for the family any way he
could.
Posters in the plants listed the safety rules; one explained accidents like
Petrini’s father’s by blaming workers who did not follow the safety rules
because this way “they think they work faster.” In the early 1930s, as piece
rate pay dropped and work rhythms increased, the labor office recorded an
increase from 2,000 to 3,600 accidents (300 resulting in permanent dis-
ability and twenty in death). Terni, instead, claimed a decrease, both in the
number of accidents and in their cost to the company (−41%).9
Riziero Manconi. Well, Nera Montoro [chemical plant]. They built new
installations for methanol. Methanol was a name for methyl alcohol; and, it
was supposed to be used as fuel, but it never was. It was made with carbon
oxide; and carbon oxide is poison, a deadly poison. And, in fact, many died.
Once, in a ditch, two were killed. There was a carbon oxide leak, one went
down to fix it, he fell; his brother followed with a gas mask on, but the
mask is only good up to a certain point, so the brother was also killed. It
wasn’t heavy work, but it was dangerous: the methanol pressure is not so
high, but with ammonia you work with pressures up to 750 atmospheres.
And installations did explode. Not all workers were aware of this danger;
danger is not easy to see, it’s always somewhat hidden. Then, they were all
in need; and need forced them to work in spite of danger.
Alberto Petrini. My father spent a year in the hospital, because he also had
a splintered—no, a broken leg. The doctors thought he was going to die
[from his burns], so they didn’t take care of it. “What’s the use of fixing his
leg, he’s gonna die anyway.” But he didn’t die. When they realized he’d
survived the critical moment, and would live, they were going to break his
leg all over again so they could fix it right. But with his other leg, the good
one he had left, he kicked the doctor all the way down the ward. He
wouldn’t let them break his leg again. He was crippled for life, but had
suffered so much pain that he couldn’t stand having his leg broken again,
coldly, like that, and then have it fixed, go through the whole tribulation
again. You know, he had looked death in the face.
Portelli. Was work heavier during Fascism?

Dante Bartolini. Well, no, work was just work.
160 A. PORTELLI
3 CIANETTI’S AUTOMOBILE
Calfiero Canali. [Fascist labor official Tullio] Cianetti came to Terni, made a
speech, and said that all steel workers soon would be riding automobiles.
Because, they thought, we were highly paid. So, one day, a worker went up to
the personnel office, walking in on his clogs, because back then those who
worked at the gas plant, at the furnaces, at the rolling mills, they wore wooden
clogs. Soles this thick. So he came up the hall; when you walk on those things,
burubum, burubum … So [the chief of personnel] asked the usher what was
this noise. And this worker answered, “It’s Cianetti’s automobile.” He’d
promised us automobiles, and we were walking on wooden clogs.10
In 1934 Arturo Bocciardo celebrated Terni’s fiftieth anniversary in the
presence of authorities and workers. After his speech, a steel worker named
Ettore Secci climbed on the stage and, with Bocciardo’s “kindly” per-
mission, read a poem he had written: “City of fire, throbbing steel mills \
All your family hails you… \ Your might is the fruit of a faith\ That did not
waver even in the dismal days\ When hatred armed with slander\ Bandied
fatal ideologies \ Now swept away by the maelstrom of history.”
“We proudly describe our province as the most proletarian in Italy,”
Acciaio proclaimed. Yet, in 1930 the fascio only counted 150 members at
the steel mill. An agent of OVRA, the Fascist secret political police,11 on
the eve of World War II, reported: “Unfortunately the majority of the
workers’ mass cannot be considered sincerely Fascist, though they are
enrolled in the regime’s organizations.”12 The Fascist era had begun with a
wave of layoffs—at the tramways, at Terni, in other factories—openly
meant to “get rid of those who are reluctant to adjust” to the regime. In
1923 Terni’s management acknowledged “the new climate of trust, safety
and discipline achieved by the enlightened and powerful action of the
government that holds our country’s destiny.”13
At first, thanks to the business-friendly political climate, to the acqui-
sition of Carburo, and to investments in new power plants, Terni’s
employment and wages did rise.14 Yet, in 1925, Il Messaggero wrote that
“the popular classes, distressed by the rise in the prices of food and other
necessities, are exasperated.” Shortly afterwards, Furio Miselli launched his
most famous Cantamaggio song, a complaint against high rents, poor
housing and costly food: “Nowadays, getting married \ Nina mine, it can’t
be done \ It’s sighs and great pains\ If love is all you have to live on” and on
the stove we can only boil “the little kisses we exchange.”15
Bruno Zenoni. My father worked all his life at the steel mill. We owned our
own house, with a little garden. And yet, what was our meal? Pasta maybe
once or twice a week. Other than that, a bowl of soup, and nothing else.
Perhaps in the evenings you might have, say, a little mortadella.16 On
Sundays, you boiled meat—sheep, goat. I married at twenty—my wife was
seventeen, in 1929—she came from a family that was even worse off than
mine, because her father was a bricklayer and had five or six daughters. She
still says: “Mama, when she had a sack of flour, she thought she was rich,
because for two days she kneaded the dough, and made ciriole.”
To many, the realization that a change had come with Fascism was not
the March on Rome but, in 1927, the so-called Quota 90, Mussolini’s
deflationary policy that badly injured the purchasing power of workers’
wages,17 soon followed by the crisis of 1929. Quota 90 helped large
enterprises, but it harmed small- and mid-sized businesses: Grüber’s closed
in 1927; Centurini’s and Alterocca’s barely survived; demand for steel and
chemicals dropped but Terni’s profits soared thanks to the electrical sector.
Bocciardo dangled the danger of the closure of the steel mill and conse-
quent social unrest, to wrest new government contracts and financial
guarantees. In 1933 the state-controlled Institute for Industrial
Reconstruction (IRI) became the company’s major shareholder and Terni
became to all intents and purposes a state-owned enterprise. Meanwhile,
however, it kept cutting wages and jobs, stepping up hierarchy and disci-
pline, dividing the workers in a multitude of different job descriptions and
pay levels. “They fired the best workers, kept them at home for a couple of
months, starving, and when they went back begging for a job, they or their
wives or daughters, they took them back, at a lower job level” (Agamante
Androsciani). “In 1929, when the crisis was on, at the rolling mills I
worked 104 days in 3 years. So, I eked out any way I could. I’d help a
bricklayer, a contadino… and got a loaf of bread here, a sack of fruit there—
I fed my children” (Settimio Piemonti). The production cost of steel ingots
fell by 47% in a few years; wages did not return to 1921 levels until 1937.18
“In 1938, 1939, at Marmore, a village of workers, there were at least
twenty workers’ homes had no electricity because they couldn’t afford it.
At Papigno, they used a bit of acetylene or carbide [from the plant]; they
let them take it because they weren’t earning any money” (Bruno Zenoni).
Unemployed workers earned a little money by working as extras for the
film Acciaio, a drama set in the Terni steelworks.19 “They placed the
camera on the factory gates, made us go in and out, let on that we were
162 A. PORTELLI
working, mass scenes, while in real life there were only a handful” (Vero
Zagaglioni). A worker from Borgo Bovio, arrested in 1932 for uttering
“anti-Italian” sentiments in public, told his story to the police. He was
36 years old, married, with three children. Had worked as a smelter at
Bosco’s and at Terni; was arrested for stealing company property and after
he came out of jail worked for a small firm until it closed. “I received
unemployment benefits for four months, then made the rounds looking for
work, in vain. Aid agencies gave me one box of victuals and nothing more”:
he could not afford to pay dues to the Fascist labor union, so was entitled
to nothing more. He worked as a digger at a public works site, but had a
rupture and quit. His subversive utterance was: “If Fascism thinks it can
hide unemployment by paying workers eight lire, it isn’t right.”20
“You worked for a pair of shoes. You couldn’t afford any luxury. You
worked for a trench coat. You worked for a bite of food” (Augusto
Cuppini). “What you earned was the bare necessary. If you needed a pair of
shoes, or a suit of clothes, you bought them on the installment plan. The
family: kitchen and bedroom, forget the living room” (Remo Righetti). “I
had enough to eat because dad worked at the steel mill, he shopped at the
company store. But—was eating all there was?” (Antonina Colombi).
“Anyway, they weren’t starving; they couldn’t afford the luxury of
wearing a tie as they do nowadays; but they weren’t really starving. They
got along” (Vincenza Giontella). Company archives are full of stories of
workers fired without severance pay for being too much in debt to the
company store.21 “Dad was fired in 1929, the plant closed, four children, a
family of seven with grandma. We were evicted, we had to move to a house
without electricity or toilet. You were always stigmatized. If a well-to-do
boy liked you, forget it. You couldn’t have him up to the house, all you had
was some chairs and a cupboard, you were ashamed” (Aurora).
Aurora adds: “There was no waste. Our meals were what they were, we
weren’t doing too bad.” At Alterocca’s work was hard and “you had to go
to work when you were sick. You couldn’t shirk, my dear.” Survival on bare
essentials was rationalized as virtuous austerity. Yes, Antonina Colombi’s
question remains: “Was eating all there was?” The other side of this atti-
tude is a yearning for the superfluous, for “luxury”—a pair of shoes, a
movie ticket. “Allow not nature more than nature needs,” says
Shakespeare’s King Lear, “Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s.”22 By denying
“more than nature needs,” Fascist capitalism denied workers an essential
aspect of their dignity.
Alfredo Vecchioni. “Look, my dear: here [on the table] we have one, two,
four—five bottles. Back then you couldn’t afford to stand a glass of wine in
a tavern. You bought by the quart, by the half-liter. Life standards have
changed from night to day: otherwise, what have we fought for, why did
we create the Republic, why did we struggle so much? Because back then,
if you said “worker”—operaio—it meant a plebeian, a third-rank person,
voiceless, without any rights in society.
4 SUBTERRANEANS
Claudio Locci. When I went to work at Papigno, in 1938, 1939, the
situation was odd. When a young man arrived, they didn’t know you, there
was reserve, there was silence. Then by and by they found out who I was,
and I realized that the situation was really different. One time someone
found a red star of the Red Army—we’d never seen one before. And we
began to make a lot of these little red stars. In the machine shop, there
were no more than three or four Fascists; often they had to bear with the
things we talked about every day and not turn us in. Perhaps they did it also
out of friendship, because we were friends with them, too.
“Around 1929, 1930, they decided to reform the organization of work.
Timekeepers came next to your machine to check how long it took you to
do the work. We [Communists] explained [to the workers]: ‘When he
comes, try by all means, make a little breakdown here, a failure there, every
five minutes’” (Remo Righetti). “We did adequate production, but no
more than that, because if you do more, after a couple of days the boss says,
‘Well, now, if you want to keep the same pay you must do this much every
day’” (Settimio Piemonti). Resistance in the factory begins with basic levels:
limitation of piece work; absenteeism; “low willingness to work”; practical
jokes on the bosses (Piemonti remembers a company guard—“a beast!”—
who was covered with “ashes and dirty rags,” buried under a pile of greasy
jute sacks; or an overseer hosed with a mix of water, oil and grease);
sabotage (“pulleys cut every day, pieces of iron wedged in the machinery,
pulling ropes broken”). Between September 1930 and February 1932,
Terni reported five cases of intentional damage to machines; in 1932,
seventy workers were indicted for a stoppage at the casting mill.23
Claudio Locci. Papigno was a small plant, we all knew one another. When
someone acted a little funny, we avoided them, they were isolated. And it
164 A. PORTELLI
was clearly shown later: during the Resistance in the plant we repaired
weapons, we repaired rifles, machine guns, pistols. All the cadres of the
Gramsci Brigade in Valnerina were young people from the Papigno plant.
What does this mean? It means that our elders, the old anti-Fascists who
had maybe been given castor oil, had been jailed, whipped, they did a good
job in this plant.
“Evenings, when we weren’t conspiring, we’d go to the cinema, to the

theater, depending on the money we had, and when we came out we’d
walk up and down and talk politics and philosophy” (Arnaldo Lippi).
“During Fascism we had comrades who always spoke openly. The
Communist Party didn’t trust them because they had big mouths; and
Fascism perhaps didn’t think they were important. Yet after liberation I
heard young people say, ‘The first time I heard any words against Fascism,
or about Communism, I heard it from…’ from these comrades who spoke
openly” (Bruno Zenoni). “We talked politics all the time. And your girl’d
say, ‘are you here to talk politics [with my father], or are you here to make
love to me?’” (Claudio Locci).
Bruno Zenoni. Papigno was a seasonal plant, because it ran on overflow of

electrical power, what they couldn’t sell. So for ten, nine years, workers
worked every other week; they were starving. So I began to work on some
of the more intelligent ones: “We must make a demonstration.” I said,
when the situation is ready, start, and go to Terni to protest, to demand an
end for these rotation shifts. One day, they broke into the office employees’
mess hall, ate all their food, and started out to Terni. The Fascists thought it
was spontaneous, instead it was us, who had been in internment and were
organized, it took us five or six months, but it was a big thing, a success.
They arrested thirty or forty people—but it put an end to the rotation shifts.
The police kept discovering “dens of anti-Fascists”: a tavern in Terni

Vecchiu, a bar on Corso Tacito, “the so-called coffee house of the sub-
versives, where all sorts of talk was bandied about.”24 In Papigno, “at the
Dopolavoro, we had a group of comrades, some of them back from
internment; and they were outspoken, organized” (Comunardo Tobia). In
Marmore the Dopolavoro “turned into our meeting place” (Bruno
Zenoni). “In full Fascism, people talked politics in my father’s [tailor’s]
shop” (Comunardo Tobia); “The blacksmith shop was where all the cart
drivers met; and most of them were comrades” (Vero Zagaglioni).
Bruno Zenoni. Every barbershop—at Marmore; Papigno; Piediluco … All

that time, from 1924 to 1943, my barbershop was a standing debate club.
Small town, you knew everybody, you could talk freely. We talked of things
that weren’t directly political—but, in a working-class community, what do
workers talk about? People hung out in my shop for hours, talking, and I
was known for where I stood politically, people came to hear the news, to
exchange ideas. I was the only one who bought the newspaper, back then.
It was the Fascist newspaper, but it was available, we discussed it.
“What did the Party do, in those days, so that we could reach the
working class? It made us study, it made us know not only Marx, but
anything we could. The Communist Party always used knowledge. Every
activist was given something to study” (Arnaldo Lippi). Lippi recalled
discovering Jack London’s Martin Eden (“If he had been such an ignorant
drunkard and brawler, why shouldn’t I, too, open some book?”),
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo, the Russian classics (“it couldn’t be
otherwise, could it?”), and Marx: “Sure, for me… it’s tough; I had to work
hard on it. Some of the comrades helped me, too.” Claudio Locci found
Maxim Gorky’s The Mother in the Papigno plant library: “we circulated it
among us for years, from young man to young man, from family to family.”
Bruno Zenoni remembered the soldier who walked into his barbershop for
a haircut, and later got in trouble for mailing him a typewritten chapter
from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath; or the worker from Brescia
who initiated him to proletarian literature: “The Iron Heel and The Mother
for us were especially formative. After liberation, I heard someone say, ‘I
understood class struggle from London’s The Iron Heel.’”
“You know that for us, winning over an intellectual who joined the
proletariat was a great achievement” (Arnaldo Lippi). In 1925, out of 666
registered Party members, only five were intellectuals, plus two students
and four white-collar workers. Of the ninety-five political internees from
Terni province, only four were classified as intellectuals or professionals;
only one intellectual was among those who went to jail.25
Bruno Zenoni. It was January, 1932—a secret meeting near Arrone. Many
comrades wore hunting or woodsmen’s clothes. And a well-dressed
gentleman stood out, wearing a watch on a gold chain, glasses with gilded
sidepieces. I wondered what kind of comrade could this be. He seemed too
much of a gentleman to be a member of the Communist Party.
166 A. PORTELLI
His name was Dante Brini, a bank teller who had recently reestablished,
through Giovanni, Maggiorina Mattioli’s brother, contact between Terni and
the Party leadership in Paris. When Clemente Maglietta, the first Party envoy,
came to Terni, “he wore a necktie and all, he spoke Neapolitan—we thought,
he’s a provocateur” (Agamante Androsciani). When Carlo Bracci, a doctor
from a well-known Fascist family, contacted the Communists in 1938, he
supplied valuable tools and instruments (“he had a typewriter, a mimeograph
machine, he had a law degree”), but remained suspect because of his class
background (“I thought he might be an infiltrator, a spy—also because of his
elegance, his gentle face,” Bruno Zenoni).26 During the Resistance, Celso
Ghini, another Party representative, was arrested by the partisans the moment
he reached the brigade: “Here comes this man, wearing a white raincoat, you
could see he was educated. He says, ‘I am…’ I say, ‘You’re nothing; come
with me.’ And I took him to a house—I blush to remember it, now! I placed
a guard on the door with a machine gun, “If he moves, off him!’. Because I
didn’t trust him, I thought he was a spy” (Mario Filipponi).
Ines Faina. My father was a railroad worker who had been fired in 1922,
along with seventy thousand, for striking, and Fascism kicked them all out.
After that, he did whatever he could find. My father never took the Fascist
party card, which means he lost his job in 1934; he got other jobs, but
every two or three years they’d fire him. You see, with a large family, it
wasn’t easy to live decently without a pay that was enough for the basic
essentials. So I remember Fascism as the most bitter time of my life, also
because at home there were arguments all the time, when there is poverty
inevitably there are arguments. My mother of course understood that what
we were going through was caused by a regime that didn’t allow people to
breathe, to think as they liked. So she knew who was to blame; yet, she also
knew that sometimes at home there wasn’t even money for bread.
Ivano Sabatini. [My father] was an anti-Fascist, he was whipped by the

Fascists, they tied a rope around him and then they pulled it off and it tore
his flesh. Then they lashed him twice on his shoulder. We didn’t have a
toilet, we washed in the creek behind the house. When my father stripped
down for me to wash his back, I saw those two welts; and he told me it was
because of a fall … After Fascism fell—my father had five children, at home
hunger was rampant, he was under political surveillance, nobody gave him
work and we divided up that little morsel of bread, hungrily; we ate, I’m
not ashamed, unripe cherries, unripe peaches—so one day off he goes,
carrying a stick. He goes up to this guy, hits him on the head, and knocks
him down. I say, “Are you crazy? What have you done?” He says, “My son,
when you washed my back and saw those marks on my shoulders, it was
him who tied me and tore my flesh and lashed me.” Well, then I
understood.
“Ninety percent of the anti-Fascists’ wives helped. When we printed
leaflets, they used their rolling pins to press lead and ink” (Ambrogio
Filipponi). “In Marmore we didn’t have potable water. So we organized, in
1931, a women’s protest in Terni, a couple of 100, maybe 250 women”
(Bruno Zenoni).
Evelina Zenoni. We organized the women, we left the men out of it. “We
must go to Terni, for the water, the water.” And they all came. House by
house, neighborhood by neighborhood. The wife of the Fascio secretary
joined, all kinds came, Fascists, non-Fascists, all came for the water. We went
down, to City Hall. They knocked us about some; my sister, they tore her up,
because we were screaming in front of the prefecture, of City Hall. However…
We got to know the other anti-Fascists’ wives always in bad places, by
the prison door at Via Carrara.27 When they sentenced them to intern-
ment, that moment, that gate. I go in—“Zenoni’s wife? five years’
internment.” I turned around. I walked down six or seven steps and then I
fell, I couldn’t take it anymore. While I’m lying there, there comes Adalgisa
[Quaglietti]. She hugs me, I say, “My dear, Bruno…” She was waiting for
the verdict. She came down—[her husband] was sent up for five years, too.
Ambrogio Filipponi. The family lived thanks to my mother’s enormous

sacrifice, because my father had been fired even before they got married—he
worked for the tram company, the Valnerina line—so to eke out a living he
set up a coal sale; very hard work, that my mother did when my father was in
jail. I remember her bending down to fill the coal sacks, soot black, all day,
and then she’d take care of us at night, washed, ironed, cooked for the next
day. The police kept breaking in, violently, the cops turned the house upside
down. I remember an old organetto that my father played when he was a boy,
they tore it apart to see if there was literature hidden inside. My mother was
for years under police warning, they came every night to see if she was at
home. [My father Alfredo] was tried a number of times, also in Special
Court.28 In 1932, for a time he was a fugitive, they couldn’t catch him, and
still he organized the underground. I was barely two years old, and I spent
fifteen days in jail at Via Carrara. My mother, many more.
168 A. PORTELLI
5 FOUNDATION
Giuseppe Giovannetti. After I left Terni [where I’d been Communist Party
secretary], a Party envoy asked me, “Who could [replace you], someone
who is not too well known?” So I said, “there’s a good man, [Alfredo]
Filipponi.” He wasn’t too bright or anything, but he was sincere; you could
rely on him. “There’s not a more trustworthy person in Terni.” Comrades,
there were many; but he wasn’t under suspicion yet. He sold coal. Brave. If
you told him something, mum’s the word. So we went, I explained, and he
accepted. And, poor guy, it cost him, because they even arrested his child,
and his wife.
Alfredo Filipponi was from Ferentillo, in Valnerina. He was a former

factory worker, tram driver, coal seller. Steeped in the oral tradition, he had
a sixth-grade education and was more at ease with dialect than with Italian;
he played the organetto and based his political arguments on proverbs—
that he sometimes attributed to Lenin. His police file credited him with
“limited intelligence,” yet he was smart enough to convince the police,
after he’d been the Party secretary for years, that he was only “second
fiddle” in the organization.29
He spent eight months in jail in 1926; indicted by the Special Court in
1932, he spent months in hiding. After he returned, he became less active;
yet, he was a protagonist of the Resistance, and the first to enter liberated
Terni at the head of the partisan brigade. In 1949 personal and political
disagreements caused him to be expelled from the Party.30
When I went to see him in 1972, he was 75 years old; he had been ill for
a long time, and deeply resented his exclusion from political life. As the
conversation went on and he became tired and the conscious controls gave
way, the epic tones with which he had begun crumbled and slipped into
fantasy, as though the weariness of age eroded the controls of rationality
and memory, and gave way to a daydream of desires and frustrations long
buried in his unconscious. The precise details (which, on verification,
turned out to be invented anyway) were gradually replaced by fantasies,
imagination, and dreams that were the stuff of his inner life. By placing
himself at the center of Communist Party history, Filipponi expressed his
pride for what he had done, his resentment for his exclusion, the range of
his hopes and dreams, and the pain of laying them aside. The weaving of
memory, imagination, and desire in Filipponi’s story was the inspiration for
this book.
Alfredo Filipponi. The Communist Party, I was the leader for Umbria,
Marche, Abruzzi, you know that. We had clandestine meetings. We didn’t
issue cards. We’d take secret note of who they were, where they lived, and
all. And instead of meeting in Terni, we met in the country, in the villages,
out of town. But many of us were arrested, I myself was in jail thirty-six
times.31
I was sentenced to twenty years by the Special Court. Fortunately,
however, I was in jail in Civitavecchia with another comrade who now is
dead, Antonio Gramsci; we managed to escape and remained in hiding for
five months.32 There was a million lire bounty on my head, because I was a
regional leader; he was a national leader, so the bounty on him was three
millions. When we were caught, they sentenced me to time in jail, and he
was sentenced to more.
I worked at the steel mills as a turner. When they created the [Valnerina]
tram line, I saw that they paid twice as much as the steel mill, I applied, got
first place out of thirty-one applicants, and started working at the tram.
However, Mussolini, after I’d been there several years, wrote a letter to the
manager: “Within four days you must fire the famous Communist chief
Alfredo Filipponi and write me to confirm that you did.” He summoned
me, read me the letter and said, “I don’t have the heart to fire you.” After
less than ten days there comes another letter from Mussolini: “I heard that
Filipponi is still at work. Within three days, if you don’t fire him, you’ll be
fired yourself.” He sent for me, asked, “What shall I do?” “What shall you
do? Just fire me.” And that was the end of it. Afterwards, I went to work in
the woods, I managed on my own.33
At Livorno, first spoke [Umberto] Terracini, then Antonio Gramsci, I
was the sixth. I spoke, I told the [Socialist leadership] what we were going
to do: “If you don’t expel those social democrats who did what they did in
favor of the rich exploiters in Terni and elsewhere, we will make another
party.” Two or three replied, “Well… no… see…” Then their coordinator
spoke: “As far as I’m concerned, comrades, do what you want. You want to
found another party, go ahead.” We left the meeting, went to a hotel in
Livorno, held the meeting, and founded the Italian Communist Party, with
[Amedeo] Bordiga as secretary. And I was elected to the executive board.34
When I returned from Livorno, I gathered all the young Socialists from
Umbria, Marche, Abruzzi, I told them what I just told you. “Now it’s up
to you to decide whether I did right; if I did wrong, I’ll resign.” I asked for
a vote, out of eighty-six, four abstained and all the others voted for the new
Party.
170 A. PORTELLI
We were never destroyed; I was a resolute leader, I made changes, I

created underground cells, because we could no longer meet as locals,
small cells, because the fewer we were the better, no?
6 FEW BUT GOOD

In 1927 two young Communists, Cesare Angeletti and Ettore Suatoni,
were facing trial by the Special Court. Someone suggested to Suatoni that
he plead insanity. He replied: “What? Never! What I did, I did with full
intention, full awareness. I have no one, all I have is my mother. First
comes the Party, then comes my mother” (Bruno Zenoni).
Around May Day 1930 a Party envoy reestablished contact with “a
dozen comrades [who], in spite of the isolation, have remained active.” “I
told [one of the leaders],” he writes, “that they shouldn’t live for years only
among the same group of old trusted comrades. He answered, ‘We think
we have to be careful, you talk about recruiting new comrades, while we
are of the opinion of comrade Lenin: Better few but good.35 Through all
these years when we had no contact with the Party’s Center we proved that
we can make it on our own, and we always helped our victims.’”36
In 1925, regional secretary Francesco Innamorati reported that the
Party in Terni had 311 members and the region’s two largest cells, at the
steelworks and Papigno; that year, a successful rally at the steelworks’ gates
confirmed this positive trend.37 “In Terni, the Party remained active all the
time; it was more or less effective depending on the circumstances; how-
ever, we must admit that after the ‘emergency laws’ we were somewhat
dispersed” (Remo Righetti).38 Filipponi and Innamorati went to jail in
1926; in 1927 all the youth group was arrested. Within a few months,
membership dropped to fifty in Umbria and to nine at the steelworks.39
“This is what repression does: it divides father from son, brother from
brother. You didn’t trust me; I didn’t trust my brothers, my father only
trusted me” (Arnaldo Lippi). At Centurini’s, “we were always in fear
because there was no longer the old confidence in one another, because
some had a [Fascist] husband, others a fiancé, others a brother…So we
were fragmented, we were reserved with one another. A fearful coldness.
Even among friends” (Angela Locci). “I lived [near] the jail. And on Fascist
holidays, October 28, these subversives were whipped. You could hear the
blows, the lashings, we heard the screams from here. From inside the jail”
(Giuseppe Laureti).
In 1934 Fascists attacked Bruno Zenoni’s house, chanting “We are the
Fascists \ The terror of the Communists \ who daren’t show their face.” To
show that Communists weren’t hiding, Zenoni came to the door, at the risk
of his life: “It was important [to show] that somehow the Communists were
still alive. And this impressed the mass of the workers” (Bruno Zenoni).
Communist presence was confirmed by the distribution of leaflets (against
Italian colonialism and Italy’s intervention in the Spanish Civil War), the
display of red flags every May Day, and a black-lined red flag hung on the
power lines across the river on the day of Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution.
“Actually I never happened to pick up one of these leaflets; I remember
those who threw them around, one of them was Remo Righetti. There
were still a few Communists at the steelworks. I remember, I’d see them at
lunch time, they sat around the stove and talked among themselves”
(Calfiero Canali). “They worked with me, we worked together; but they
were kind of old. They were deep in the knowledge. But they were iso-
lated” (Alfredo Vecchioni). Yet, “If they were going to arrest all those to
whom I’d given some literature, some papers, the whole rolling-mill
department ought to have gone to jail” (Giovanni Catoni). “The workers
never turned us in. There were no informers in Terni” (Remo Righetti).
“There was a continuity, we kept recruiting young comrades. I joined the
Party officially on August 2, 1931. There was a meeting by the river on the
Piediluco road and we set up two cells, for Piediluco and Marmore” (Bruno
Zenoni). New young comrades were among those arrested in 1927–1928,
in 1936, in 1938. However, most of the young members came from old
anti-Fascist families: repression and the loss of contact with the Party’s
central leadership reinforced the mentality of “few but good.”
In 1938 an OVRA agent wrote: “Whether Communists should be
retained at work in the factories is uncertain.” On the one hand, “Many of
the most ardent Communists are good skilled workers… who try to make
themselves indispensable because they know that they are politically ‘de-
fective’.” Also, “forcing these people out would create an exasperation
among the masses who, unfortunately, cannot be yet considered com-
pletely Fascist.”40 As the war loomed closer, Communists may have been
few, isolated, and even divided among themselves, but they still enjoyed
the sympathy of the masses.
In 1943 the police noted that “These days, the card-carrying
Communist Bruno Zenoni, a barber living in Marmore, has changed his
habits and visits often Papigno, Piediluco, Labro, where he has no personal
business.” What Zenoni’s “business” may have been can be evinced from
172 A. PORTELLI
the date of the report: September 8, the day of Italy’s separate peace with
the Allies, the dissolution of the Italian state, and the beginning of
Resistance.
NOTES
1. Alvaro Valsenti, Erimo bardascitti, Terni, Galileo, 1996.; Id, Diventammo
protagonisti, Terni, Galileo, 1998.
2. The narrators’ names are withheld because they still lived in the same
neighborhood.
3. ACS, PS, AGR, 1928, b. 200.
4. The anniversary of the Fascist March to Rome.
5. By the anarchist activist and poet Pietro Gori (1865–1911).
6. July 25, 1944: Mussolini’s arrest and the end of the regime.
7. ACS, PS, AGR, 1932, b. 52; AST, ASST, b. 112; Acciaio, November 21,
1934.
8. Acciaio, April 14, 1936.
9. Terni. “Società per l’industria e l’elettricità,” Dopolavoro. Assistenza di
fabbrica. Assistenza sanitaria, Terni, 1936 (henceforth, Dopolavoro);
“Terni,” supplement to Acciaio, May 11, 1935.
10. On Cianetti, see Renzo De Felice’s introduction to Tullio Cianetti,
Memorie dal carcere di Verona, Milan, Rizzoli, 1983.
11. OVRA—Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo
[Organization for Vigilance and the Repression of Anti-Fascism] was a
secret police established by the regime in 1927.
12. Acciaio, January 9, 1937; ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 24; ACS, PS, AGS, 1943, b.
81.
1975, p. 151.
14. Bonelli, Lo sviluppo di una grande impresa, pp. 147–161.
15. Il Messaggero, February 4, 1925; Furio Miselli, “Oggigiorno a pija’ moje,”
Il Cantamaggio a Terni, Terni Province Administration, 1982, p. 52.
16. A cheap type of bologna sausage.
17. Quota 90: the policy that aimed to appreciate the lira bringing it to a 1:90
exchange rate with the pound. Launched by Mussolini in 1925, it was
achieved in 1927.
18. Renato Covino, “Classe operaia, fascismo, antifascismo a Terni,” intro-
duction to Gianfranco Canali, Terni 1944. Città e industria tra ricos-
truzione e liberazione, Amministrazione Comunale di Terni, 1944;
F. Bonelli, Lo sviluppo di una grande impresa, appendix, Tables 10,
12, 20), ACS, PS, AGR, 9132, b. 52° and 1933, b. 55.
19. Acciaio (Steel) is a 1931 film directed by Emilio Cecchi, with a script by
Luigi Pirandello.
20. ACS, PS, AGR, 1932, b. 52°.
21. AST, ASST b. 29.
22. William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act II, Scene 4, 263–264.
23. Gian Filippo Della Croce, “La Resistenza in fabbrica: il caso della Terni,” in
Giacomina Nenci, ed., Politica e società in Italia dal fascismo alla
Resistenza, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1968, pp. 457–69; ACS, PS, AGR, 1932,
b. 52a.
24. ACS, PS, AGR, 1932, b. 52a.
25. APC, 1917–40, f. 329\1\61–64; Remo Righetti and Bruno Zenoni, eds.,
Contributo dell’antifascismo nel Ternano, ANPI (Associazione Nazionale
Partigiani Italiani), Terni, 1976; Gianfranco Canali, personal
communication.
26. In 1938 Carlo Bracci was sentenced to 17 years in jail.
27. Terni’s old jail, later turned into a public library.
28. The Special Court for the Protection of the State was established in 1926 to
try political dissenters thought to be dangerous to the regime.
29. ACS, CPC, b. 2062, f. 73 071.
30. Il diario di Alfredo Filipponi, comandante partigiano, Foligno, Editoriale
Umbra, 1991.
31. In the 1920s, the Party secretary for Umbria was Francesco Innamorati,
from Foligno. Filipponi writes in his memoir that in the mid 1920s the
leadership was transferred to Terni; this is not confirmed by any other
source. However, between 1927 and 1930 the Party actually existed “only
around Terni”: APC, 1917–1940, f. 661. Filipponi’s police record men-
tions five arrests.
32. Filipponi never met Gramsci, who was in the penitentiary but never in
Civitavecchia. Neither was Filipponi: his Special Court case was never tried
because he was in hiding; the case was closed when the regime granted an
amnesty to celebrate its tenth anniversary. I love the understated way in
which Filipponi drops Gramsci’s name. For other imaginary tales about
Gramsci, see Collettivo di ricerca del Circolo Gianni Bosio, “Osservazioni
del folklore su Gramsci,” I Giorni Cantati, I, 1981, pp. 31–45.
33. A folk tale motif: the story of the hunter who refuses to obey the evil
Queen’s order to kill Snow White; Filipponi uses it to turn on its head the
Fascist myth of a kind-hearted Mussolini surrounded by evil collaborators.
There is no evidence that any of this actually happened.
34. The Communist Party of Italy was founded in 1921 at Livorno, when the
Communist faction walked away from the National Conference of the
Socialist Party. Amedeo Bordiga was its first secretary. Umberto Terracini
was among the founders of the new party, and in 1946 chaired the Italian
174 A. PORTELLI
democratic Constitutional convention. Filipponi did not attend the

Livorno conference and was never elected to any national position in the
Party.
35. The speaker may have been Filipponi. In that case, it would be another
example of his habit of attributing proverbs to the founders of Marxist
theory.
36. APC, 1917–1940, f. 496.
37. APC, 1917–1940, f. 496/26–27; ACS, PS, AGR, 1925, b. 137.
38. The leggi eccezionali, also known as leggi fascistissime, were a set of laws
issued in 1925 and 1926 that clinched the transformation of Italy into a
Fascist state. All parties other than the Fascist were declared illegal.
39. Righetti and Zenoni, eds., Contributo dell’antifascismo; Filipponi, Diario.
40. ACS, PS, DPP, b. 7 (February 26, 1938).
CHAPTER 8
Apocalypse Now: War, Hunger,

and Mass Destruction
1 LIKE AN ADVENTURE
Canzio Eupizi. Well, look, I went to [fight in] Africa because I didn’t
think it was right for—what we called the perfid Albion, back then; and for
France, Holland, to give vent to their birth rate and occupy four fifths of
the world. So I thought it right that we—who lived in this land so beautiful
but so poor in raw materials and in space, space for agriculture—we ought
to give our people, Italians, the chance of a better living. In fact, it was a
splendid thing, which the English and the Libyans later managed to
undo—the Italian colonization of Libya and Cyrenaica, it was a huge, a
very worthwhile enterprise. I took part in it by laying out the Balbia,1
because I was a rank-and-file black shirt. We didn’t go to colonize, but to
civilize; in Libya, in Somalia, where I’ve been, we didn’t take anything from
their way of life, from their civilization; all we brought was progress.2
Ferruccio Mauri. I remember when the XXIII Marzo battalion came home
[from Ethiopia]. I was in elementary school. This battalion came home; and
we school children were taken up to the apartments overlooking Via Roma.
When they came strutting back, we were supposed to throw flowers over
them. To me [General Pietro] Badoglio was a god; Africa’s conqueror. And
what cut him down to a mortal was that while he was chairing the ceremony
he blew his nose with a handkerchief. I couldn’t conceive that a god would

176 A. PORTELLI
blow his nose with a handkerchief. So I went home and I said, “How come
Badoglio blows his nose just like us?”3
The authorities claimed that “thousands and thousands” were volunteering

for Italy’s colonial wars, but provided no specific figures. “A contingent that
was already in the service was listed as volunteering, which wasn’t true
because they drew lots and [those whose number came up] were sent off to
destination unknown” (Vero Zagaglioni). “All the militia4 was voluntary, a
whole battalion went to Eritrea. I wasn’t in the militia, so instead I went to
Cyrenaica first and to Somalia later” (Canzio Eupizi). “They’d summon you
over to the Mussolini barracks. And I remember that [a guy] wouldn’t sign
up, they slapped him around a couple of times. A comrade talked back, and
they put him in jail for a week. And my brother was an officer in the militia;
they kept him in jail a week because he wouldn’t go to [fight in] Spain. And
after they were roughed up, some were afraid, and went” (Aldo Galeazzi).5
Calfiero Canali. I served almost 9 years in the navy. All right: I started out,
and there was a war in Africa; then we went to Spain. They called it
non-intervention; we escorted the ships that carried supplies to [Francisco]
Franco, and sank those that carried supplies for the other side. The Italian
navy back then was called the pirate navy. Instead of guaranteeing neu-
trality, we acted like pirates. They’d filled our heads with propaganda to the
point that if we’d run across an Englishman, we’d eat him. Why? Because
we didn’t know anything. All we knew, we were spoon-fed with their
propaganda and nothing else. Who knew anything about what was going
on outside of Italy? We began to understand how we Italians were per-
ceived outside of Italy when we cruised to France, we cruised to Turkey.
I mean, everywhere we went, nobody wanted us. “Italians?! For goodness’
sake!” They didn’t want us because of the dictatorship of this Fascist party.
And from there we began to understand: “How come nobody wants us?”
Nobody wanted us.
Valtero Peppoloni. I went to work at Papigno. I was only fifteen; you made
good money, worked 12 hours a day. But after eight or nine months I had
stopped growing. The cyanamide stunted me. They wouldn’t transfer me
to the machine shop, so I left the plant. Back then, there wasn’t much
work, you didn’t know how to make ends meet. I went hungry, in those
days. I’m not kidding. Then I found a job, they were laying a sewer line,
until the sewer was finished. Then, out of a job again.
8 APOCALYPSE NOW: WAR, HUNGER, AND MASS DESTRUCTION 177
So, it happened through a friend—look: I’ve been a member of the

Fascist youth. If this is history, we must tell it the way it was. I was a
member, but I hardly ever went to meetings. Anyway, together with this
friend, who had fought in Africa, I happened to pass by the [militia] bar-
racks. I went inside, signed a paper, I the undersigned Valtero Peppoloni
enroll for an indeterminate length and destination unknown, I signed, and
that was it. Three days later I left for Spain.
Ferruccio Mauri. I was going to the vocational school, as workers’ sons

did. A Fascist principal; and Fascist teachers, so a Fascist education. And it
was all about the adventure, the war was on, something new that broke the
routine. I remember the slogans against the plutocracies, perhaps there was
an ember of anticapitalism, vague, ignorant, inarticulate. I remember a big
demonstration of students, on Corso Tacito, I remember a coffin, that two
schoolmates of mine carried. It was unbridled nationalism: give us back
Savoy, Corsica, the question of Tunisia, I don’t remember why.6
“In Berlin and Rome,” said a song remembered by Maria Pitotti, “there
is a bell\That when it rings the whole world shakes.\We want Nice and
Savoy, Corsica and Tunisia\Because it belongs to us\You took it, you stole
it, you cheated us\And you must give it back.” In Spain, “there were many
of us from Terni. Not all Fascists, listen, because 80% didn’t know a thing
about Fascism. Those who went to Spain, 80% went because they were
unemployed. The black shirt, none of us wore it; we wore army uniforms.
Same as in Africa. Then there were army units that were not volunteers,
they’d been sent over there. Also from Terni” (Valtero Peppoloni). Upon
his return from Spain and Africa, Peppoloni got a job at the steelworks and
married. “Three days after I married, I was drafted again. Sent to Greece.”7
“All I remember is that we went to the square to hear [Mussolini’s] war
speech: ‘Proletarian and Fascist Italy, arise!’ I remember that people applau-
ded. Yes, they did” (Sante Carboni). “We were very young; and like all young
people, adventure—to us war was an adventure, we didn’t know anything.
We’d never suffered a war. So it was like an adventure” (Settimio Bernarducci).
Ferruccio Mauri. They brought all hands—that’s how they called us then:
hands—to Piazza Tacito, where the loudspeakers were, the radio that was to
broadcast Mussolini’s famous war speech. And what impressed me—some
may disagree on this, but the ones near me… I was all excited about the war,
a naïve young boy. I remember that when I started at the steelworks
178 A. PORTELLI
I couldn’t wait for war to begin. But—but all around me I saw, while I heard
that in Rome they were clapping—those around me were deeply worried.
That is, for the first time—this is not poetry I’m making—I saw the seri-
ousness of the working class, the preoccupation. Even though I could not
understand why. While I exulted, while in Rome people applauded, around
me—others may say, “No, they clapped their hands”—but around me, the
workers that were with me showed a deep worry, a deep concern.
2 AND WIN WE SHALL

“In the marketplace, people complain about the cost of living,” anony-
mous letters from Terni to the leadership of the Fascist Party reported;
“graffiti appear in the factories, which do not express hostility toward the
regime but clearly state what the workers need”; “from the way people talk,
you realize that there is not a single worker who is not against Fascism.” In
1939, Terni’s prefect reported: “All the population admires the Duce’s
ability in keeping Italy out of the war”; in 1940 he wrote: “There is no
enthusiasm for the war, indeed it is seen with worry.” In 1941, however, he
reported “a degree of selfish satisfaction [among workers] because the war
creates jobs.” At the Arsenal, the work force went from 910 in 1937 to
6000 (including 1000 women) in 1940; at the steelworks, from 4540 in
1934 to 9964 in 1942.8 Evictions were more frequent, fuel was scarce and
public transportation shut down; artisans and merchants resented the
wartime price cap and the lack of raw materials.
Bruno Zenoni. I got out of jail in 1940; they had already rationed bran,
what you feed to pigs—you know, in these villages, every family has a pig.
So I came to Terni; there was a farm union store, and a long line of women
and, as we always did, you tried to throw in a few words to fan discontent.
They said, “Look, they rationed bran.” And I said, “This is nothing; in a
few days, bread.”
Vincenza Giontella. All those memories of war, I could go on about it

forever. They gave us a card—100 grams of bread a day; a bread that it’s a
shame to call it bread, because it was all sorghum inside, it stuck, it stunk,
unbelievable. Then, they gave you sugar: you’d line up half a day, to get
sugar, to get bread, to get meat with your ration card. Salt, you couldn’t find
it anywhere; coffee had disappeared. I had been far-sighted, we never ate
unsalted food; I had a little pasta saved up, I remember that on Christmas eve
I’d fix spaghetti with a few tuna chips, it was a feast… But bread was
unimaginable, uneatable, it made you sick. And I had a family friend who
was a milkman, he’d give me 5 or 6 liters of milk, when my children were
hungry I’d give them milk to drink. And a bowl of soup maybe; we got
along. But many families went without soup, without anything.
Lucilla Galeazzi. My mother tells me that when she worked at the Arsenal,
when they went to work in the morning and they heard the radio—“today
the army has conquered… has advanced, has reached…”—they’d say, with
joy, “See? We got another town, we’re doing great, we’re gonna conquer
Russia, too.” But her section boss kept saying, “Don’t worry. See how fast
they march forward? They’ll run twice as fast coming back!” They were all
intrigued, when he said this. It sounded like… the ravings of a madman.
Disenchantment became the town’s dominant mood. The authorities

reported almost fifty “anti-national episodes” in two years: a vagrant
complaining aloud about the price of eggs; the rolling-mill workers wishing
the Allies won the war “so at least we eat”; clients in a tavern overheard
saying “it’d be better if lost the war, so we can get rid of Fascism.” “Things
are bad, no food, no drink; it would be better to lose the war.”9
Bruno Zenoni. At the hammer and press department, there was a group of
four or five subversives, Communist sympathizers, so they were always
talking among themselves. But when the Germans advanced all the way to
Stalingrad, to Leningrad, to Moscow, in the morning you’d find these
workers half dead; and you had to try to encourage them, with logical
arguments, that Russia couldn’t be invaded, that it was a big territory, that
Napoleon… Luckily, in jail I’d read about Napoleon’s retreat, by General
Ney, I think. All right, I’d leave them at 2 p.m. feeling better; next
morning, they’d heard the radio at night, they were half dead again.
However, very few believed in the war, especially among us workers.
“At the Arsenal, it was terrible; we worked twelve hours a day. Well paid,
don’t get me wrong; but the discipline! The machines were worked so hard
they caught fire” (Umberto Martinelli). Wartime production needed tougher
discipline and heavier workloads, but also added to the workers’ power to
negotiate. Work stoppages at Papigno’s and Bosco’s achieved concessions
unthinkable until a few months before. There were rumors of sabotage in the
workshops that produced ammunition and cannon barrels. “This guy wanted
me to help him organize some attempts on the main gantry cranes; I almost
went for it, which wouldn’t have been right after all” (Bruno Zenoni).
180 A. PORTELLI
“The militarization of the workers. If you showed up late two days in a

row, this was not regarded as tardiness, but as sabotaging war production”
(Ferruccio Mauri). “They came every morning, a policeman showed up at
the gates and took note of those who weren’t at work [and then] they’d go
to their house, and check on them” (Sante Carboni). “Back then we all
rode bicycles; the line at the Arsenal gates, four by four, must have been
five, six thousand workers each shift, all on bikes. At the gate, the whistle
blew, the gates closed automatically [and the line was so long that not all
managed to get in], so the police came out to take the names of those who
had remained outside. And they took them to jail” (Umberto Martinelli).
Fabio Rossi, a carpenter, was arrested in 1943 for waging three bets: a
flask of wine against the fall of Singapore; fifty lire against the conquest of
Alexandria; a 100 lire on the loss of the war.10 “I was in the fourth grade
and we marched out of school, all in formation, and they made us sing
Vincere e vinceremo, ‘We must win, and win we shall.’ And I kept thinking
of my father’s words at home: ‘They make us sing Vincere e vinceremo, and
instead pretty soon it’ll be a disaster” (Santino Cappanera).
Veniero Giontella. There’s one thing I remember well, when Prince

Umberto11 came to Terni. It was 1941, 1942. He came, and they lined us
[young Fascists] up along the road, right at the bend. And here comes this
pretty coxcomb, I can still see him—but even clearer is the image of the
cohort of generals. I can still hear this silence; the trumpet, the sharp
commands, the clicking of boots, the jingling of medals, of all these big
generals, ringing. In that moment perhaps I became aware of something I
couldn’t grasp fully, because I realized how ridiculous it all was. And now,
in this moment, I relive this feeling of something that made me aware of a
danger.
3 THE NIGHT OF THE FALLING STARS
Irene Guidarelli. [World War I], they fought it… among themselves.
Now, instead, we were all affected.
Santino Cappanera. The war here was the first bombardment from the air
on August 11, 1943. At the time I lived at Le Grazie, high above Terni.
From there, you could see very well the spectacle of the bombardments.
On August 11, 1943, at ten after ten, ten and a half, I was ten years old, it
was something to see, [planes] the size of swallows, coming from the
south, at that high altitude, and then those blasts, that noise, that disaster.
It wasn’t easy to understand; in fact, I didn’t realize how bad it was until
four or five hours later, when they set up a hospital near us, because the
hospital in Terni had been bombed. With tents, all makeshift. And all these
people coming up, walking, or on trucks, any which way, bleeding, ragged,
covered with dust. A terrible spectacle for a 10-year-old child.
And it went on, I can quote a few dates, August 28, another bombard-
ment, perhaps with fewer victims, because the first one killed 3000 people,
as they say in Terni, the second less. The third, October 14, still 1943, the
alarm didn’t sound, another huge disaster. And then they kept coming, I
had noted down the dates, the type of airplanes, everything, but I can’t find
that paper anymore. There were 116 raids, this I remember, between
bombings and strafings.
Severino Severini. During the war I had some bombardments. My wife was
mutilated, she lost a leg in the bombardment of… I can’t remember, in
October. I was an evacuee, between Terni and Spoleto; on a hill. The first
wave came and… caught me inside the house. I went out, toward the open
country; another wave… I lost my father who died from the bombard-
ment, there; then my wife, it tore off her leg, I remember, I was carrying
her in my arms down this hill, on a board, all covered in blood. I have a son
who now is forty, who’s still covered with wounds, a disaster. And so, you
can’t imagine what I suffered, what I went through. There was a Red Cross
here at Le Grazie; and from there they carried my wife to Acquasparta with
my son; and my father died here in Terni. Then my wife, they took her to
Terni; so I walked from Terni to Acquasparta and back on foot, because my
wife was in Terni and my son in Acquasparta. Which, they’d call me from
Terni, say, “Come here, because your wife is, you know, in desperate
conditions.” I’d get there, and another call from Acquasparta, I had to go
up there because my son, you know, was in a desperate state.
“We looked out from our windows at the Palazzone, and heard the planes
coming loaded with bombs, loaded, loaded, one wave after another… We
saw it like a newsreel, like a movie, when they unloaded those bombs” (Celsa
Paganelli). “I had learned the difference between American and British
planes, from the shape, the color, and also the way they bombarded. They
said that the Americans bombarded from high altitudes, whereas the British
dropped low and strafed” (Santino Cappanera). “So, imagine, I took my
182 A. PORTELLI
field glasses and went to look; the camera to take pictures” (Rosetta Falchi).
“The last nights, what it was, a spectacle. A spectacle, much better than
fireworks” (Arnaldo Lippi). “The night raid—we’d never seen bombard-
ments at night in Terni. So at night we thought we were safe. Instead that
night the planes came, with Bengal lights, they illuminated everything, like
daylight, more than that, a blinding light. The bombardment lasted an hour
and a quarter. In the morning, when it was over, when day came, we were all
like crazy; we felt lost; it was terror, sheer terror” (Santino Cappanera).
Terror and spectacle, horror and beauty: death dropped from on high on the
stage-lit landscape seems a pure artistic gesture that can be understood only
in aesthetic terms.
Fabio Fiorelli. They’ve spoken of 108 bombardments; but it’s an

approximate figure, because when they bombed you several times in one
day it was hard to tell whether it was one bombardment or two; or the
large-scale actions made to terrorize, to get people to rebel, to protest—
when they strafed the evacuees as they walked or rode their bikes back to
work in Terni from their places of refuge, every day, and they shot them
and many died. In 1944, after a hundred bombardments, Terni was 65, 75,
80% destroyed. Many houses were destroyed, many were inhabitable. And
even those that were still standing were shaken, unsafe.12
“Mostly, the bombardments were aimed at the railroad, the railroad

bridge, the station, the roads” (Alfio Paccara). “At Sant’Agnese, it was a
shambles, lots of people died. There were no shelters at Sant’Agnese—they
hadn’t made them” (Alvaro Valsenti). The working-class neighborhoods
paid a heavy price for being near the lines of communication and the
factories, supposed targets of the raids; but the worst hit was the center of
town, Terni vecchiu, far from any conceivable military target.13 “Always
Corso Vecchio, Corso Tacito: they didn’t go for the target. No: it was the
town that they bombed. At 10 a.m. When women went to the market,
that’s when they bombed Terni. My poor father, he had gone out to the
market, to shop; and they killed him, those beasts” (Maggiorina Mattioli).
Death comes from way above, the killers are invisible; and it is hard to
conceptualize that they were the liberators, not the enemy. “Who was
bombing you?” “The Germans—the Allies” (Irene Guidarelli); “the fas…
the bombers” (Maggiorina Mattioli). “They weren’t applauded as libera-
tors, those who dropped the bombs; indeed, some even appreciated the
Germans more because they said, ‘at least they never dropped bombs on
us’” (Santino Cappanera). “Ah, it wasn’t our side. Every time I saw a
bombardment on a military target I thought it would make the war end
sooner. But you didn’t end the war by bombing kindergartens, churches,
schools, or hospitals” (Raul Crostella).“Along Corso Vecchio, the day
after, I went out, dead all over, damn it. Young women, dogs, dead, on the
ground, killed” (Giovanni Nardi). Many mention the dead animals—as if
to say, they killed us like beasts; or as a symbol of the indiscriminate killing
of innocent beings.14
Lidia Montecaggi. We were walking down Corso Tacito, the whistle
sounded and we went to the shelter. I didn’t want to go in, I was afraid; all
of a sudden, a blast, I was blown inside. We stayed there a long time, the
lights were out, it was crowded. Then the passages closed, we couldn’t find
our way out; in the shelter, screaming, suffocating. Finally we managed to
dig a hole and came out, one by one. But the bombardment was still on,
and outside it was a shambles, dead all around; dead on the corner, an old
man, dead, and one person was trying to pry his ring from his finger. Along
the street, dead horses, shards of glass, splinters, it was a shambles.
Giuseppe Laureti. Here [by the old hospital] there was a shelter—here
where I was born, they pulled out 105 dead from that shelter. A bomb hit
the entrance of the shelter; a disaster. People were all over one another to
get inside, they climbed on top of each other, I almost got crushed. And
whole families disappeared—under this shelter. I came down three days
later, I smell a stench… “What’s this smell? What’s this smell?” There was a
truck, they were loading the dead. Unrecognizable, they were soaked in
blood, the relatives recognized them by their clothes. Relatives—anyone,
actually; because entire families had been destroyed.
“Terni had been in fear of bombardments but hadn’t prepared for
them” (Fabio Fiorelli). Terni’s chief of police, on June 24, 1943, wrote:
“The anti-air raid preparations in Terni, made highly effective by the
tireless activity of His Excellency the Prefect and followed by the admira-
tion and gratitude of the population, are almost completed.”15 At Bosco’s,
Alvaro Valsenti remembers, the shelter was a ditch covered with bundles of
sticks and brush and a few smoke pots. At the steelworks, “Terni built
separate shelters for workers and for white collars; the office workers’
shelter was twenty meters from where I worked, but I had to go to the
shelter by the Serra creek, we weren’t allowed to go in there” (Raul
Crostella). At the Arsenal, “this friar came to tell us what to do in case of
bombardments; and then, he told us to pray”(Amalia Ferri).
184 A. PORTELLI
The population, too, underestimated the danger. At the steelworks, the

routine blowing of the whistle only signaled a welcome interruption of work.
“False alarm, so at least we found a moment of rest, you’d stop working,
took it easy for a while, and then went to the shelter. And that day, too, we
took it easy. We left the workshop, we weren’t even halfway, people were still
outside, the bombs began to fall, we scattered all over” (Alfio Paccara).
When the alarm rang on August 11, many finished whatever they were doing
before going to the shelter; at the Arsenal, some women were killed because
they stayed behind to collect personal belongings.
On October 14 the whistle didn’t blow at all and the people were
caught unprepared in the streets. “Like the people who were lining up for
salt, at Terni’s company store; many of those people were buried in the
rubble” (Alfio Paccara). “There was no warning, it was terrible. People,
belly up, bellies swollen by the air blasts, gutted, on the ground”
(Antonina Colombi); “They shoveled up the dead, from Via Roma to
[Piazza del Popolo], I don’t know, you stepped over the dead, legs, heads,
I still shudder when I think about it” (“Anna Santini”).16 The worst days
were the last, when heavy bombing cleared the way for the Allies’ entry
into town: the bombardment of the night of June 4 was “the most fearful
and violent bombardment Terni had known since August 11, 1943. For no
less than fifty-five minutes, to the light of an extraordinary quantity of
flares, squads of bombers alternated above Terni strewing it with bombs.”
A public hospital and a private clinic were “especially targeted.”17
“Until the bombardments began, the steel mill was working regularly.
With the first bombardments, it stopped altogether. From full activity it
went to zero. It wasn’t abandoned because the workers were still there; but
the water was cut, power was cut. I remember a workshop, all the machines
were in order, the roof had fallen. How can you work, without a roof?”
(Aldo Bartocci). Bocciardo claimed that the August raids had all but shut
down the factory; he cut the work force by 13,000 workers. He claimed
that the wages paid to those still in service were a “social expenditure” paid
out to allow “idle” workers to survive, and got Mussolini to authorize the
government to reimburse the company.18 The only serious damage from
the bombardments was the destruction of the foundry: “The substantial
damage was caused later by the Germans, who removed the most advanced
machines we had” (Aldo Bartocci). Much was saved by the workers, who
sabotaged the pieces that the Germans were about to remove; but the
majority was taken north and was retrieved only after the war. As they
withdrew, the Germans blew up the power plants and the power lines.19
Aldo Bartocci. At one point—I was the deputy manager; the manager, the
chairman of the board had gone to Rome—I found myself alone in the steel
mill. I was in the shelter, and the German interpreter came down: “The
German commander wants you.” I went—you didn’t question the
Germans, in those days they packed up managers and shipped them on cattle
cars to Germany—and, I remember the scene, all these Germans, with their
scars:20 “I inform you that we have decided to leave the factory.” Because
the Allies were getting near. “The workers—he said—are at liberty.” They
were running away, in other words. Running away. And I, the last one left
there, I wrote a letter to Bocciardo. “At this time, we have paid the workers,
we entrusted the gold to a senior worker”—pounds, to pay the Germans for
not destroying the plant. We had written a note, in German: “Do not take
away our work, do not take our bread, do not destroy our factory: here is a
heap of gold for you.” It worked. At the power plants, they didn’t find the
manager, they destroyed everything. They were looking for money.
The partisans had tried in vain to contact the manager of the power
plant, to defend it from the Germans. The gold that he had been given to
bribe the Germans was never delivered. On June 10, the Galleto power
plant was dynamited. “One of Italy’s most advanced plants was a huge
brazier. Flames and smoke rose high in the sky, for days.”21
As he walked home across the hills after the army disbanded on
September 8, Umberto Martinelli looked down on a landscape of
destruction. “A disaster, unrecognizable. The Arsenal was gone, the roof
gone, you could see everything inside. Terni was unrecognizable. There
were no people, nobody. A few, milling around, aimless. There were many
people around the station but in town there was nobody.” When the
partisans entered Terni, a few hours before the Allies, on June 16, they
found less than 3000 people, wandering like ghosts among the rubble.22
“Some wouldn’t leave the shelter, never, not even to eat, they were so
terrorized—‘Hey, Lippi, don’t you recognize me?’ ‘How can I recognize
you? Are you on furlough from the cemetery?’” (Arnaldo Lippi).
As in much of occupied Italy, the only institution that kept functioning
was the Church: “The priests and the Bishop remained in Terni
throughout the bombardments, even when the local political class van-
ished. So the clergy was, for many, the point of reference: the Bishop, the
soup kitchen, the POA,23 the Bishop’s mess hall, the Bishop’s bowl of
soup” (Gianni Colasanti). The monarchy, on the other hand, was totally
discredited: when the King visited Terni after the first bombardments, he
was greeted with protests and stones, some legendary, some real.
186 A. PORTELLI
Gildo Bartoletti. The King came to Terni with his wife. And, the women,
and the men as well, rushed at them, to beat them up. There was a pretty
brawl. And his wife, they said, told them, “My husband has waged many
wars, he always won, he shall win this one, too.” When she said this, the
women jumped her. Because they had their dead, their wounded, and they
jumped her. So they had to get in a car and run away. They didn’t come
through Terni. There were groups of people ready to ambush them.
Giovanni Nardi. The night of the bombardment the King came, with his
wife, Margherita was her name. I didn’t see it, I heard later. Along Corso
Vecchio, he ran into this friend of mine, whose whole family had died
under the bombs. He got a-hold of him, and spit in his face. The King did
an about face and ran.
4 EXODUS
Santino Cappanera. So we decided, all to the mountains. Get as far as

possible from town. We started out, children, women, old folks; because
there were no men left, they were all either in the mountains with the par-
tisans, or away to the war… Here was this mass of people pouring out to the
mountains. When we reached the last houses, right beneath the mountain,
we were a multitude. But there was no food; there was nothing. Literally
nothing. And we, maybe thirty or forty of us, all together, for days we thrived
on a pig cut and cooked in an oil drum; with no bread or nothing, not even
forks, with sticks of wood. Try to imagine how people can live ten days or so
with nothing; absolutely nothing. Water, that’s all. At night we slept in the
railroad tunnels; on top of the rails. This went on for twelve, thirteen days.
Antonina Colombi. On the way, our mattresses got caught in a tree

branch, they ripped apart. Dad was in tears, we have nothing left, nothing,
not even mattresses… I didn’t have a cent; I sold our sheets, our necklaces;
I sold six linen towels; I sold a set of table cloths; a blanket—to feed my
children, to get’em a bit of flour, a little cheese, a fruit, a drop of oil.
I delivered a daughter up there, without a midwife, nothing; an old
woman, you know, peasant women know what to do. She gathered this
child, my husband went to Spoleto, he found some iodine, a little alcohol
on the black market… We boiled a bottle of water, like that, in a tub, we
added a bit of iodine, and washed up.
Forced to leave their homes and town, refugees were thrown back to a
state of nature. Some lucky ones, who found shelter and hospitality in rural
areas, seemed to go back to the ancestral joys of peasant life: “I lived the life
of a contadino, because every morning we ate fava beans, with maggots in
them, and they were good and tasty. Mostaiola24—mostaiola is when you
rub grapes on each other’s face. Every day was Sunday for us” (“Rita
Luciani”). For many others, however, back to nature meant back to the
ruthless primeval struggle for survival. As they devoured the pig in the
tunnel, the refugees combined both dimensions: it was probably stolen (“it
was found, I don’t how, I don’t know to whom it belonged,” Santino
Cappanera) and was torn to pieces with bare hands; yet, by sharing it in a
communal space they staged a sort of ritual of elementary brotherhood. On
the one hand, Arnaldo Lippi remembers a “war” of all against all; on the
other, “Anna Santini” says that “we treated one another well”: polarities
mediated by the one surviving social structure—the family.
Anna Santini. And one time, I remember, it was around Easter. There was
such hunger in the house, there were six or seven of us. And dad says, “Look,
there’s a farmer down here who’s full of God’s bounty, and he sells it on the
black market to the filthy rich.” So poor dad found an old, rusty machine
gun, out of use. He said, “You know what? Let’s wait until dark. Then we go
down with the machine gun, we pretend we’re from the police, checking
food rations.” So we got organized, seven or eight, all kids, with dad in the
lead, with this gun, unloaded, rusty, all disguised with scarves on our faces,
old wool hats. When this guy saw us, “What’s the matter? What’s going on?”
Dad goes up—“Look, we’ve been tipped off: you sell everything on the
black market and give nothing to the poor families, to the little hungry
children, you won’t even give them a bite of ricotta…” No, no, no, it isn’t
true… Please don’t hurt me, tell me what to do…” To make a long story
short: he gave us a lamb, a couple of wheels of cheese and, which made us
happiest, two big bottles of oil. And—two fresh ricottas, because he had
sheep. A pretty big hen. Flour. And we celebrated Easter.
There was nothing left, social order had disappeared” (Alberto Petrini).
Under the cover of the air raids, Petrini and his brothers raided the German
supply wagons and sold or bartered the loot. “They had boots, good shoes
—me, I didn’t sell them, I exchanged them. I’d go to some country place;
a contadino, you gave him a pair of boots, you saved his life, because you
couldn’t find shoes anywhere. I’d say, ‘Give me two kilos of flour, give me a
couple of rabbits…’ I didn’t want money, I’d take payment in kind.
188 A. PORTELLI
In the collapse of monetary economy, theft and barter mediated the

encounter and conflict between town and country. “A war grew, that made
town people even poorer than they were, because perhaps the contadini
helped them and let them stay [on their land] under a bunch of trees or out
in the brush, but in exchange they gave away all the fat they had on their
bodies” (Arnaldo Lippi). It was often an exchange between the necessary
and the “superfluous”: the contadini had plenty of food, the urban evac-
uees had clothes, shoes, cigarettes, salt. “Soap was gold,” says “Anna
Santini”, who owned a small store in town: “We still had some soap bars,
so we held on to them until it ran out altogether and then sold it on the
black market. I sold shoe polish on the black market. We’d sell to [the rural
people]; these young women, young ladies, they saw a bar of soap, a small
bottle of perfume that you couldn’t find anywhere, and with those little
things I brought back a chicken, a piece of bread, three or four kilos of
flour” (“Anna Santini”). Contadini were rooted on the land, while
workers were mobile and inventive: Alfeo Paganelli and his brothers would
ride their bikes to the Civitavecchia harbor to collect black market salt and
tobacco and sell them to rural families. Contadini had food, while urban
workers had precious technical skills: “I’d fix everything, farm machines,
anything. They’d ask, ‘How much?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘What do you mean,
nothing?’ ‘Whatever you’ve got—a few beans. Give me a fistful of beans.
Or maybe a drop of oil, maybe a bit of lard’” (Arnaldo Lippi).
“Most people tried to find a place within 30, 40 kilometers, so they
could hold on to their jobs” (Fabio Fiorelli). As long as they could, refugees
tried to make their way back to the factories, riding through the bom-
bardments on the tram or on bikes with makeshift tires filled with straw. “I
was evacuated, but stayed near Terni, riding back and forth. I went to work
until the bombardment of October 14” (Alfio Paccara). “After October 14
we never went back to work at Bosco’s. They paid us off [and shut down]”
(Alvaro Valsenti). “Many never returned; they had nothing left in town,
they remained out there, in the villages. This also has an impact on identity:
many ternani stayed in the country, while those who had immigrated to
work in the factories during the war stayed in town, they moved into the
old popular neighborhoods that had been destroyed and emptied. The
identity, the very roots, were changed” (Fabio Fiorelli).
Antonina Colombi. When we came home, the Germans had stolen our
beds, there was nothing left. And then, what they did—shall I say it? They,
the Germans, they shat all over the place. On the cupboard, on the dinner
table, on a piece of paper, on a dish. My dad had a stroke, he was paralyzed

up to his neck. Because, I mean: the October bombardment, without
warning, [the house] destroyed; we hadn’t even finished paying for it, I was
still fixing it up, with no money. And then dad started talking again, and
the strokes kept coming, worse and worse. He said, “the house is gone, we
don’t even have beds to sleep on.” Mom hugged him: “We’ll start over
again.” He said, “I don’t want to die here, an evacuee.” And as soon as we
came home he died. He was working in the rubble, sorting it out, so that
we could start over. Then, my husband—we had our own house; two or
three times, with the bombardments, the blasts of air, we’d raised a new
roof and it was blown away every time. Terni gave us roof tiles at half price;
I had a daughter, 10 years old, she had more will power than all of us, was
stronger, I don’t know. My husband was a mason; he and her took a
ladder, she’d hand him [the tiles] up, and he fixed the roof. Every time they
bombed, he fixed the roof.
NOTES
1. The military road built by the Italian colonial occupation, named after Italo
Balbo, a founder of Fascism.
2. On Italian colonial and war crimes, see Angelo Del Boca, Italiani, brava
gente? Un mito duro a morire, Neri Pozza, Vicenza 2005.
3. Pietro Badoglio (1871–1956) was governor of Libya (1929–1933) and the
head of the Italian army that occupied Ethiopia (1935–1936). He was
named prime minister after Mussolini’s arrest in 1943 and followed the
King to exile in the South when the Germans occupied Rome in September
1943. The “March 23 Battalion” was named after the date of the founding
of the Fascist movement in 1919.
4. The so-called Volunteer Militia for National Security, originally a police
corps in service to the Fascist party, later became, in practice, an auxiliary
army corps, still retaining its party allegiance and the signal black shirts.
5. Italy sent 70,000 “volunteers,” air force units and weapons to Franco’s side
in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939).
6. Savoy, the region in the Alps from which the Italian royal family originated,
was ceded to France along with the city of Nice in 1860, in exchange for
France’s support of Italian unification; the island of Corsica was ceded to
France in 1768 by the Republic of Genoa. Before invading Libya, Italy had
considered occupying Tunisia, which was later taken by France.
7. The invasion of Greece (October, 1940), after Italy’s entry to World
War II, ended in defeat.
190 A. PORTELLI
8. ACS, PS, AGR, 1941, b. 37; ACS, PNF, SPEP, no. 24; Franco Bonelli, Lo
sviluppo di una grande impresa in Italia, Turin, Einaudi, 1975, pp. 233 ff.
9. ACS, PS, AGR, 1943, bb. 26, 47.
10. ACS, PS, AGR, 1943, b. 26.
11. Heir to the throne.
12. A statistic based on Allied air photography lists 32 bombardments. It is
probably underestimated: for instance, it only lists two raids between June
5 and 13, 1944, when actually they occurred on a daily basis: Antonio
Bertillo, letters to the Mayor of Terni, January 14 and February 15, 1983
(courtesy of the Mayor’s office); Libero Fornaci, “Dieci giorni di bom-
bardamenti a Terni nel diario di un ufficiale medico,” Terni. Rassegna del
Comune, III, May–June 1965, pp. 31–73, lists 783 victims; Elia Rossi
Passavanti, Terni, Terni, Thyrus, 1974, pp. 33–43, lists 1018 names. Both
figures are much underestimated. For the extent of destruction, ACLT,
1946, report to the first postwar conference of the Camera del Lavoro; and
the Chamber of Commerce report, Condizioni della ricostruzione e
possibilità d’impiego della manodopera, Terni, 1952.
13. See A. Bertillo, letters.
14. See Alessandro Portelli, “So Much Depends on a Red Bus, or, Innocent
Victims of the Liberating Gun,” Oral History (UK), 34, 2, Autumn 2006,
29–43.
15. ACS, PS, AGR, 1940–1945, b. 3.
16. A pseudonym for a narrator who does not wish to be identified.
17. Fornaci, “Dieci giorni di bombardamenti.”
18. ACS, SPD, b. 27.
19. Gianfanco Canali, Terni 1944. Città e industria fra liberazione e rico
\struzione, Terni, Amministrazione Comunale, 1984; Pasquale Vasio, Vita
della Terni, Terni, ANCIFAP, 1985.
20. The Mensur was the scar received in the traditional student duels, proudly
worn as a badge of courage and honor.
21. Vincenzo Inches, Autobiografia (1954), unpublished, ANPI Archive,
Terni.
22. Fornaci, “Dieci giorni di bombardamenti.”
23. Pontificia Opera di Assistenza [Vatican Welfare Agency].
24. Unfermented grape juice.
CHAPTER 9
Red Is the Color: The Gramsci Brigade

and the Resistance
1 TAKING UP ARMS
The day I met Dante Bartolini—singer, poet, bard of the Resistance, herb
doctor, barman, steel worker, farmer, killer and dresser of hogs—he
introduced his partisan songs with a brief historical narrative. The hieratic
tones, the carefully timed pauses, the solemn rhythm, conveyed to the story
the quality of epic poetry, a monument made of words. The facts, however,
were all wrong.
September eight, nineteen hundred and forty-three
The armistice was announced
The defeat of Fascism and Nazism.
The battle of Stalingrad
Was the end of the Germans.
Von Paulus, the commander of the German army
Surrendered after a month of fighting.
And the war ended.
However
They reorganized the little Republic in the north1
And we
Anti-Fascists
Immediately organized to take up arms.
September 8, 1943, is not the date of the German surrender at Stalingrad

but of Italy’s surrender and separate peace with the Allies, and of the

192 A. PORTELLI
dissolution of the Italian army and state. The historical value of his nar-
rative is not in factual information but in the poetic, ritual representation of
the meaning of a historical experience. Bartolini’s performance went on:
Terni’s Arsenal
We went
Thousands of workers
We broke through the gates
Thrust them wide open
We seized the weapons
Some of them
And then we left
For the mountains.
Again, the facts are all wrong. Although the Resistance did begin imme-
diately after September 8, yet the partisans did not obtain their weapons by
breaking into the Arsenal or other factories. On the other hand, there is a
deeper meaning that Dante conveys by materializing two metaphors.
The first is “prendere le armi”: metaphorically, “taking up arms,” starting
the battle; literally, “seizing the weapons”—as Dante Bartolini and a small
group of comrades did, not in September 1943, but in July 1948, in the
near-insurrectional state that followed the attempt on the life of Communist
Party secretary Palmiro Togliatti. By shifting the times and merging the two
episodes, Dante establishes a continuity between the Resistance of 1943–
1944 and the mass protest of 1948, as if to suggest that the task of the
Resistance was not over with the fall of Fascism but had to continue at least
until 1948—or, conversely, that by 1948 the Resistance was over, and an
episode of armed struggle had to be pushed back in memory to a time when
it was legitimate. On another level, though, the metaphor suggests another
truth: the working-class partisans did find their “weapons” in the factory,
because that is where the roots of their consciousness lay.
The second metaphor is even more complex. “We broke through the
gates, thrust them wide open” is a common image of liberation; liberation,
however, is usually represented as breaking out of the gates, not in to the
factory. In the former sense, then, the metaphor represents the Resistance
as the act of breaking free from the prison of political oppression (like the
taking of the Bastille); in the latter, as economic liberation, the taking over
of the factory and of the nation’s wealth (the taking of the Winter Palace).
Socialism and freedom are but two sides of the same metaphor: this is the
truth in Dante Bartolini’s invented tale of the Resistance.
9 RED IS THE COLOR: THE GRAMSCI BRIGADE AND THE RESISTANCE 193
2 GRAMSCI BRIGADE
Alvaro Valenti. [When Italy’s surrender was announced] I was standing in

Piazza Valnerina, and our soldiers had set up road blocks against the
German reaction. Across the street from the vocational school building,
there was a machine gun, a lieutenant and two or three soldiers. So we
walked up to them; and they were in touch with headquarters, by phone.
“What are we supposed to do?” the lieutenant was asking. “Should we
fight?” He had been informed that the Germans were coming. “They’re in
Narni, they’re at Castelchiaro, they’re at the Rome gate, they’re at the iron
bridge, and here they are, in shooting range…” And then, communication
breaks down, they up and run. They abandoned the gun—and we didn’t
know how to handle it! Damn it! It was a truck with three Germans on it,
that was all. Three Germans: and they drive up to Piazza Valnerina. Had
anyone fired a shot, you’d see how fast they’d have run.
On September 9 Alfredo Filipponi held a rally at the steelworks gates.

“Actually the workers were hesitant…It has been so long since they heard
from their true representatives that they are almost timid.” However, they
listened. Filipponi was arrested on the spot, but released a few hours later.
The next day the local committee of the Communist Party announced the
beginning of the armed struggle. On September 11 Vincenzo Inches,
Alfredo Urbinati and Arnaldo Lippi, accompanied by the national Party
envoy Gino Scaramucci, asked the town’s military commander to arm the
workers to defend the town. The request was denied. That same evening,
meeting with no resistance, the Germans entered Terni.2
On September 12 the Antifascist Committee changed its name to the
National Liberation Committee. Officially, it included Republicans and
Socialists; in fact, it was made up almost entirely of Communists.3 Armed
groups arose, more or less spontaneously. Comunardo Tobia, Dante
Bartolini, and a few young men from Papigno gathered on the Palombara
hill in Valnerina; Saturno Di Giuli, Vero Zagaglioni and a detachment from
Piediluco took up position at a nearby farmhouse known as Montanara.
Both groups met and merged on September 24; on the twenty-seventh,
they met with a group from Cesi, on the other side of the Terni basin, led
by Germinal Cimarelli. Also in attendance were the Elvenio Fabbri band,
from Stroncone, and another group raised by certain army officers and old
Republicans on the Narni mountains. “We gathered all the units,” writes
194 A. PORTELLI
Scaramucci, and explained the political meaning of the armed struggle.

Among the enthusiasm of the young people from Papigno, from Piediluco,
from Castiglioni, we sang the first verses of the song of the Russian
partisans:4
Su fratelli e su compagni, su villaggi e su città
Siamo noi i partigiani per la vostra libertà.
Operai e contadini tutti uniti lotterem

All’appello di Stalin siamo i primi partigian.
Operai e contadini distruggete l’invasor

I fascisti burattini e il tedesco distruttor
Italiani alla riscossa, giunta è l’ora di pugnar

Comunisti, bandiera rossa, or si vede sventolar.5
The partisans operated across a wide area between the two main highways
of Salaria and Flaminia, on the border of Umbria, Lazio, and Marche,
attacking the rear guard of the German army that was holding back the
Allies at Anzio and Cassino, interfering with German transports and
communications: once again materializing a metaphor, Dante Bartolini
sang years later that “la Valnerina è il centro della lotta \ che al nemico farà
strada interrotta,” [the Nera Valley is the center of the struggle, where the
enemy’s roads will be interrupted]. They contacted a partisan group led by
Guglielmo Vannozzi around Spoleto, and an army detachment that had
refused to join the Fascist forces after September 8 and remained in the
mountains under the command of army captain Ernesto Melis. Melis also
supplied a contact that was to become crucial to the military and political
organization of the partisan war: a group of Yugoslav partisans who had
escaped from the military prison in Spoleto. “They had the experience of
the partisan guerrilla in Yugoslavia, they were more advanced militarily;
they all had a fully developed political consciousness, because they had
suffered persecution, they had suffered jail. And they were brave; they knew
about mountain warfare, because most of them were from Montenegro”
(Ambrogio Filipponi). A Yugoslav partisan, Svetoazar Lakovic (battle name,
“Toso”) was named military commander; Alfredo Filipponi (“Pasquale”)
was chosen as political commissar. In early February, 1944, the organiza-
tion—that by then consisted of seven battalions and 1,500 men—took the
name of Antonio Gramsci Brigade.
Bruno Zenoni. The partisan struggle was organized by comrades from

Terni. Seven hundred armed partisans, not all communists—maybe 120,
130. However, the struggle was inspired, organized, led by the
Communists. I made a list, from memory: thirty-five comrades who had
been in jail or in exile, they were the ones who led and organized the
partisan struggle.
Guglielmo Vannozzi. Toward Communist idealism, we were few. I mean,

at the time there was a prevalence of a kind of anarchism, of total freedom,
because after the oppression we had suffered, poverty, despair, hunger, and
all, people made no distinction of political shades. The aim was only to take
up arms and follow a sacrosanct battle, as we called it back then. Especially
the people in the central Apennine mountains, they lived a life of harsh
poverty; there were no roads, there were no clothes. The ones in power
took everything.
Ferruccio Mauri. So—this is the story, then you make of it what you wish.
I took to the mountain the very evening of September 8. Later, one of ours
killed a German in Narni and took refuge with us. I think it was January or
February, 1944. Since he knew me from Narni, he said to me, “This is a safe
place, we’re all Communists.” “What do you mean, Communists? No, we’re
anti-German only.” I mean, as late as January 1944, even though I had
already gone through the experience of the factory, I still couldn’t be—I was a
boy of seventeen, with all the political and cultural deficiencies of a boy of
seventeen, and, and I wasn’t a Communist. I remember that the first night I
went up to San Pancrazio, on the mountain, I came from a certain type of
family, not bourgeois but not very poor either, and my education, as a child, I
had gone to church, too. At the Sacred Heart’s. And for me evenings always
ended with crossing myself and my father’s and mother’s goodnight kiss, I
mean. So for a number of nights in the beginning at San Pancrazio I didn’t
sleep at all because I was ashamed to be seen crossing myself, you know.
“Though Communists are in the lead, yet in proportion they are few,”
Filipponi noted in his diary: “Recruiting among the workers is unsatisfac-
tory.”6 The presence of the workers in the mountains was limited by the
need to keep their factory jobs to support their families. Many urban
workers participated as “irregulars” in single actions; others formed
short-lived urban guerrilla groups, gave logistic and financial support,
refused to participate in the work details imposed by the Germans, and
196 A. PORTELLI
sabotaged the removal of factory equipment.7 The most important con-

tribution of factory workers came from commuters from Valnerina and
other nearby rural areas, who were close to their sources of livelihood and
knew the lay of the land. This was the case with Filipponi and Dante
Bartolini who, as Filipponi himself notes, “knows all the local mule tracks
and many of the people who live there.”8
The brigade also included a number of heterogeneous elements, from
local peasants and farm workers to drifters and draft resisters, opportunists
who caused serious problems of discipline and relationships (“There were
all races of people; even four Russians. There were people from Poland,
from England, all adrift, people who had escaped from concentration
camps. It was a thorny situation, you had to be on your toes all the time, so
you tried to stay close to the people you knew and be wary of the others,”
Luigi Menichelli). Apart from a vanguard steeled in the anti-Fascist
underground, the majority were young men who had perhaps overheard
the political talk of the older workers in the factory. However, all were well
aware of who they were dealing with: “they knew they were from the Party,
there were foreigners, drifters, but by and large they understood”
(Menichelli). In the end, the brigade’s political identity was clinched by the
Yugoslav contingent. According to Filipponi, they were the “backbone” of
the brigade, but their sectarian attitude, their cliquishness, and their
arrogance toward the locals caused tensions and conflicts that were hard to
contain.9
Mario Filipponi. See, our political commissars, they weren’t very educated
either. Saturno [Di Giuli], [Alfredo] Filipponi a bit more. There was a
smattering, something we grasped … Take a boy of eighteen, a lad who
does see the political angle but mainly sees it as an adventure. Me, could
you talk politics to the likes of me? I listened, but I wanted to fight. Us—I
mean, me, I was the only one left at home. Me in the brigade; my father in
jail; my brother, fourteen years in jail; my mother alone at home, losing her
mind. A disaster. So what did you expect me to do? Was I going to listen to
words? I wanted to strike, all the time. I couldn’t sleep at all.10
Vero Zagaglioni. The problems arose when we passed from such practical
activities as, say, teaching how to take a grenade apart, take apart a machine
gun and patch it back together, to theory—that is, what we were fighting
for, why, what would we do when we came back to the towns, to the
villages. This sounded hollow, I mean, like a dumb bell. I could see the
comrades were bored. Some were OK, but most … Instead, when you told
them, let’s do machine-gun practice, they all flocked in.
“We had a vision. We believed that when the struggle was over we
would seize power” (Antonio Antonelli). “Well, there was some kind of
persuasion that there would be changes. Not that we dreamed that we
could take over the government immediately, because we still had the
British and the Americans over us” (Luigi Menichelli). “We were aware
that we could not build socialism; but we imagined that we could establish
a different kind of democracy, a progressive democracy, as we called it”
(Ambrogio Filipponi). This gradualism allowed the Communist partisans to
cooperate with moderates, intellectuals, priests who participated in the
National Liberation Committees in the liberated zones. Ultimately, the
partisans believed that national liberation would be a step toward a more or
less radical social change, and that democracy, republic, independence were
incompatible with capitalism. Terni’s workers would face the postwar years
with these hopes and visions in mind.
3 THE EPIC AND THE PICARESQUE

The meaning of the partisan experience is better understood by paying
attention to its narrative forms than through a detailed reconstruction of
military episodes. Let us follow two narrators. On the one hand, Dante
Bartolini’s epic tale of fire, battles, blood, death. On the other, Claudio
Locci’s picaresque and ironic story of hurry-up-and-waits, tiresome plod-
ding through snow and mud, hunger, cold, cunning, and patience. Both
dimensions are inherent to this history.
Dante Bartolini. We created the Gramsci brigade. Divided into battalions,

each with its assigned task. From administrators to fighters. From scouts to
the National Liberation Committee. It arose. And we carried on the par-
tisan epic, from that day, we carried out actions along the roads, against the
Germans, against their Fascist lackeys, at Leonessa, at Vindoli, at the
hamlets around Leonessa. The Fascists were ousted. Some died. Some, in
good faith, deserted and joined us. The carabinieri surrendered, they
handed us their weapons, we took shoes, clothes, everything we needed.
We fought, we carried out many actions, some good, some bad, which I
cannot describe now, and we suffered much. Along the roads, with
198 A. PORTELLI
gasoline, flasks filled with gasoline and fire bombs. We burned trucks, we
burned armored cars, so many died! The poor people inside, who couldn’t
get out.11 We’d take flasks, toss the gasoline bottle, then the fire grenade,
you see. And we fought the Germans hand to hand, the Germans are
cowards, an Italian can kill a hundred with a knife. They tremble with
fear.12
We waged war from Rieti, Leonessa, Cascia, Norcia, Visso, Cittareale,
Borbona, all the roads that the enemy used to take supplies and rein-
forcements to the [Cassino and Anzio] front. To stop their supply lines, we
did guerrilla actions, we ambushed them along the roads. We fought for
fifteen days on end.13 At Cassino, they were fighting and the Americans
couldn’t break through; and we interfered with the Germans’ daring, with
their hopes, we partisans of the Gramsci, along the road. Germans along
the roads, dead, wounded; trucks on fire; flames. This the Gramsci parti-
sans did, and I am honored in telling because I was one of them and I am
moved deeply as I say these words.
Claudio Locci. When we joined the first group, we stayed a few days at
Polino and had nothing to eat. Aside from Pacchio [Riccardo Conti], who
had a bit of oil and a bit of salt and made bruschetta. So that’s when we
raided the famous Yugoslav depot, down the hill near Arrone, we went
down at night and we took all that stuff. How could we know it belonged
to the Yugoslavs? Which later on [Armando] Fossatelli almost got in
trouble.14 We hadn’t eaten in a week, ten days.
We had been there a week, doing military drill, shooting rifles, lying on
the ground; and here comes a dispatch from Arrone, he says, “look, there’s
a depot down here, filled with hams. Hams, everything.” There were ten or
fifteen of us. We left Marmore on March 3, filed by the Papigno plant, next
to the Marmore waterfall. Down we went, we killed the dog because he
attacked us, a bullet; then we caught a donkey, loaded all those hams, my
dear, hanging on its sides, on flour sacks. And I remember, each of us had a
bayonet, so we stuck a ham on each bayonet, and this poor donkey, we
loaded a couple of sacks on its back, and we had to prop it up because its
legs gave in. Until we got back to base. And then the snow began. Such a
snow, my dear, it was the black year of the snow.
Dante Bartolini. We were in touch with the partisans from Cascia, from
Leonessa, all the towns and villages along the road from Cascia to Rieti and
from Cascia to Visso. The villages and towns were with us. The people
were tired, tired of suffering, every day, they were taking their sons, they
were taking their wheat. They had stored it at Vindoli, for the Germans to
take away. So we partisans, I, Dante Bartolini, with the brigade com-
mander Alfredo Filipponi and other partisans that came with us, we went,
we cut the telephone lines, and we attacked the warehouse. We summoned
all the peasants, from all those hamlets, who had nothing and they had
taken all they had, they came with mules, with donkeys, anything they had,
they loaded up everything—we took 7,000 kilos of wheat. We gave it back
to the peasants from whom it had been stolen.
In battle again. At Cascia our Yugoslav comrades, so brave on that
occasion, the Germans were carrying away two thousand kilos of wool, and
wheat. Two hours of fighting inside the town of Cascia. They were taking it
away. Dead, wounded. The Germans were wiped out. The wool and the
wheat stayed with the people of Cascia. I saw when it was returned to the
nuns, they too, I really admire them, they also must be recognized, many
times they saved us, they hid us in the cellars beneath the Santa Rita
convent, in the church. And they knitted us socks. They took care of us,
they were good nuns, we admired them, there was a good priest in town,
too, who was always in touch with us.
And this man who had been in jail with the Yugoslavs, a rascal, an
adventurer, contacted the Fascists, to kill the partisans. He led them up to
Salto del Cieco, where Mario Magrelli was stationed. And this poor man,
Mario Magrelli, was taken by the Fascists. He was stabbed, his eyes taken
off, defaced, that’s what the Fascists did. And there was a tough battle, that
night. The Fascists withdrew, some were wounded, some died. And we
withdrew, and redeployed again.15
Claudio Locci. So here comes this order that we’re supposed to move to
Villa Pulcini [near Leonessa]. The great march through the snow. All right.
With this donkey, we started out at dawn; by ten at night, we were still on
the mountain. Walking in circles, didn’t get anywhere. We kept coming
back to the same spot. We were lost, because with the snow, the roads were
gone, a few of us had been in those parts hunting, but you understand,
with all that snow … One of us, we had to lift him off from the snow two or
three times because he kept sinking in. So Bobò [Fossatelli], who was
already trying to set himself up as a leader, he says, “Look, we can’t go on
like this, with this poor donkey with all this weight,” so we divided up the
load among ourselves, and killed the donkey. So it goes.
200 A. PORTELLI
A few left us, two or three comrades were so exhausted, they said,
“we’re going home,” and left. So we fell back that night. It was dark, you
didn’t know which way you were going, and wet, soaked to the bone.
Hunger, because you’d slice those hams with the bayonet, but it was so
cold, we were young … Later, at night, around 10.30 p.m. we saw a little
light from afar; down we went, it was Bardino’s farmhouse.16 And we
stayed there a month or so. I remember this poor old man—he had a whole
slew of children, he had sheep, he had everything. Dear me, when he saw
us, he greeted us like we were his own children. “You’re all wet!” He let us
sleep, I remember, among the cows, among the sheep, among the goats, all
in there, dirty and all. And I’ll never forget, a soup his wife made, with bits
of pasta in it.
Then the order came that we were supposed to go to Villa Pulcini. We
walked all night, got there, and met with the Yugoslavs to sort out the story
of that famous ham depot. After that, we took Leonessa, and I was sent to
Albaneto. We were staying in this big villa, all the big landowners had run
away because the reds were coming, as they called us then. Anyway, in a
big room we found this big tent, all red. So, there was this nunnery; when
we knocked on the door, those poor nuns—“We’re goners!” So, obse-
quiously and all: “Look, us, total respect…” In fact, I remember we had
only one anarchist in the brigade and he gave us a bottle of wine and a
chicken or two as a gift to those nuns. However, [we asked them] kindly if
they could sew us some red shirts. With that red drapery, and in fact a week
later we went and they had made us those red shirts—which we were never
able to wear anyway. I mean, they were very nice, they gave us a tour of the
convent, of where they slept; and us, respect, because though we were all
young men yet we realized that the question was … politically, too, you
know.
Dante Bartolini. It was the night of April 3, 1944 and I was coming down
from the mountain to see the family and show them that I wasn’t dead
because we had been fighting the Germans for two weeks and they
expected that some of us were dead.17 The families were worried, my own
because I was the commander, and those of the partisans that were in my
battalion. I gave them permission to go each to visit their families, and then
return to their battle posts. And so did I, I, too, went to see my family.
At night, as I came home, I was followed by the Fascist police. I had
been sighted, someone alerted the Fascist headquarters at Arrone, and they
phoned the command in Sangemini, and all the Fascists from Terni came.
They surround the village of Castiglioni, arrest all the workers who were
going to work at 4 a.m., stopped every one, no one could get through.
They were afraid that they would alert me. Anyway, I say goodbye to the
family and leave the house without telling them where I was going. All they
knew was that I had to go back to fight. Instead, I stayed at Castiglioni
overnight. There was a shack behind the church of St. Anthony, a peasant
kept some clothes in it, all rags, and I slept in there, covered up with those
poor rags to rest inside that shack. It was the pigsty, the pig was absent, I
took its place.
At daybreak, another partisan comes. “Dante!” he says. “We are sur-
rounded. They’re going to kill us all.” And I thought it over, because I was
the one they were looking for. I had to pay the penalty for all. He says:
“What shall we do?” “Try to save yourselves, I’ll take care of the rest.” I
take off the clothes I had on, bury them, under a bit of hay, grass, dirt that
was there. And I only kept my ten-shooter German Steiner pistol. I come
out wearing those old rags, a broken hat, ragged trousers, shoelaces untied,
and I find a bucket of ashes, an old broken umbrella handle and I lean on it.
And I was walking like a little old man, all stiff and bent. Here come three
or four Fascists: “Halt!” And I: “Who are you, my children?”, like this, my
voice querulous and trembling. They say, “Where are you going?”
“Oooh,” I say, “I’m taking a bucket of ashes to the garlic plants, in my
garden.” “Do you know the captain of the rebels?” “Who is that, my
children?” He says, “Dante Bartolini.” “What can I say, my children—they
say he’s up on those mountains, some say he’s dead, some say he’s alive, I
don’t know, my children, look, Christ keeps me alive in this state, so many
young people are dying, what does he let me live for…” “Poor old man,”
they thought. So, they say, “Let’s go, he must be over here…” So they
went out looking for me, which instead I was it, they go down the hill and I
get away. And I saved my life.
4 THIS IS HOW WE OUGHT TO LIVE
At seven a.m. on March 16, 1944, in Indian file, after disarming the cara-
binieri, the following enter Leonessa and take a stand on the town square:
“Tito” and Dante Bartolini, with two partisans, go to City Hall and requi-
sitions the cattle rolls, the draft rolls, and the area’s topographic maps.
202 A. PORTELLI
Vero Zagaglioni leaps on the rim of the fountain on the square and addresses
a hundred citizens of Leonessa who have gathered around the small partisan
band. Vero says: “Leonessa is free. Your children shall no longer abide by the
will of Hitler and Mussolini, your cattle shall no longer be raided by the Nazis
and Fascists.”18
After the taking of Leonessa, the brigade controlled an area of 800 square
kilometers on the Lazio, Umbria, and Marche borders. Leonessa was dubbed
as “the first ‘liberated zone’ in occupied Italy.”19 The liberation of such a
wide area was an important symbolic act, but in military terms it was difficult
to keep, and this task subtracted men and resources from the struggle against
German communications and supply lines. Yet, the experience of the liber-
ated zone revealed important aspects of the meaning of Resistance and of the
relationship between the partisans and the local population.
On February 25 the young ladies of Cascia, where the brigade was
headquartered, organized a dance in honor of the partisans. “We live a
special moment,” Filipponi notes, “of the life we should always live, a life of
work for all, of tranquility and peace.” A Dutch colonel who had taken
refuge in the town echoed: “This is how we ought to live the brief time
that we are given.”20 Both were thinking both of the dance and of the
experiment of self-government that the dance symbolized. A liberated
zone is like a feast, a holiday; an exceptional space and time in which new
relationships are experienced, a world turned upside down, in which
workers and peasants are in power—and the fear that it may only be
temporary only reinforces its festive connotation.
“We had an accordion; some of us were real clowns, it was a lot of fun.
What respite we had, it was the accordion, drinking, because we never
parted from some little keg of wine” (Gianna Angelini). Parties, music,
dancing take a good deal of space in Filipponi’s diary—like the sponta-
neous celebration that took place even the day after the cruel death of
Marmore partisan Pietro Montesi. “One can’t always be thinking of
shooting and fighting,” he writes, “partying is necessary, especially to the
young, in order to soothe the soul; else, one might fall into madness.”21
His son, Ambrogio Filipponi, recalled: “I remember a night in this village,
Martignano, near Cascia, it was the heyday of dancing, a bunch of elderly
women arrived carrying huge baskets of frappe22 on their heads; frappe,
sweets just made on the spot, which they meted out to all of us. And they
danced the saltarello with these huge baskets on their heads. Without
dropping anything.”
The harmony between the partisans and the local population peaked on
the day of the cattle fair the brigade organized in Cascia on February 1. It
was like coming back to life after the stifling oppression imposed by Nazis
and Fascists on the social and economic life of the community.
Everybody is passing around good wine and toasting the leaders of the bri-
gade and the partisans who are struggling to free the people and the country.
The market day becomes a feast. Butchers buy more meat animals than they
ever did before. We all drink together, we sing, and thus ends the first market
day celebrated after the liberation of Cascia.23
Actually, wine flowed less freely, singing was less carefree than Filipponi
wrote in his memoir. While he described the liberation of Leonessa as a
celebration and feast, others saw it more critically: “The population—of
course they were pleased with us, but they were also a little concerned.
They were glad when we arrived, but were not exulting. When there’s a
war on, you walk into a town, people are always a bit uncertain” (Mario
Filipponi).
The brigade’s function as governing body was also more limited than
appears in its commander’s memoir. “Whenever there was conflict between
a tenant and a landowner,” Party envoy Celso Ghini noted, “the partisans
were on the side of the tenant, but they never really operated in the town’s
administration, in welfare, in culture, to reopen the schools and keep them
open.”24
Yet, the gap between events and story is itself a sign of the dream of the
liberated zone as a realized fragment of an envisioned future. Not only
“this is how we ought to live,” but also how we could live. Filipponi
recognized that utopia needs a good deal of management: it took a
complex mediation to pull off the cattle fair in Cascia; it takes a great deal of
work to restore telephones, hospitals, supplies. “There is much bureau-
cratic work,” he wrote, regretting that the time thus spent “would be put
to better use” in military operations.25 And yet, the generation that is
taking shape in Cascia would not be a generation of warriors but one of
administrators and local politicians that would supply mayors and coun-
cilmen for at least 30 years.
And yet, in 1983 the neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano won 23%
of the vote at Monteleone di Spoleto, which had been the base of opera-
tions of the Stella Rossa [Red Star] partisan band. In many communes in
what had been the partisan area of operations, the neo-Fascist vote was
204 A. PORTELLI
close to that of the Communist Party. The former liberated zone remained
“white” (that is, Christian Democrat), and anti-Fascism did not plant very
deep roots in it. As Celso Ghini wrote, the partisans “believed that the
population that received them fraternally had been won over, but they
were wrong. A deep gap existed between the combatants’ advanced ideas
and the culture and needs of these local populations.”26
“I saw people who said they were partisans, and went around stealing
chickens, stealing hogs, stealing anything” (Settimio Bernarducci). “People
still said that the partisans stole sheep. We took them, we didn’t steal them;
because we weren’t an army where you could enforce discipline” (Bruno
Zenoni). The brigade often reverted to harsh measures to prevent abuse
and conflicts between the partisans and the local populations. The
Yugoslavs executed one of their more expert members on a charge of
drunkenness: “They tried him and though we [Italians] disagreed, they
said it was their own business, they tried and executed him on the spot”
(Ambrogio Filipponi). Two “false partisans” who had seized horses and
money from farmers near Cascia, claiming they were acting under orders
from the brigade’s command, were executed summarily by the Yugoslavs.
Alfredo Filipponi noted that the punishment was out of proportion to the
crime, but concluded that it was inevitable, lest such acts “tarnish the work
of the Resistance.”27
“The podestà,28 the [Fascist] political secretaries, those who had been
afraid and ran away, those who crawled on their bellies, yet they all kept
telling the people that we were outlaws, that we were murderers, and the
priests, too, they believed that we ate everything and killed everybody, that
we were materialistic beings” (Gugliemo Vannozzi). Peasants cannot easily
make the distinction between theft and what Zenoni calls “taking”—
confiscating with a view to future compensation (later, when compensation
was indeed made, it was not perceived as a sign of the partisans’ honesty
but rather as a belated acknowledgment of their guilt), or even the sys-
tematic looting and sacking carried out by Fascists and Germans. “We had
this big haystack. I came home, and there was an invasion, my house was
unrecognizable, the Germans’ horses were devouring all our labor, all that
we had built” (Vincenza Bonanni). “Those families, they gave us food;
they also helped the others, when they came by. Because they didn’t know
which way to turn, they were afraid of everybody” (Dante Bartolini). At
Villa Pulcini, near Leonessa, “we had up to two hundreds of those partisans
stay here; well, it was the only village where they could be safe, because it’s
only a couple of steps to the woods. And our reward was that the Germans
came and burned our house. Seven goats they killed, nineteen hens,
nineteen heads down the coop, two calves, the house burned, and me, they
took me to jail” (Leonardo Pulcini).
Alfeo Paganelli. They came to where we were staying, to buy [cigarettes].

The partisans and the Fascists. They all knew me, they were all my friends,
the partisans and the Fascists, they were all Terni guys. [A partisan] drops
in. “You got cigarettes, Paganelli?” They pay. “Have you seen the others?”
“Well, not today.” Maybe later the Fascists came: “Got any cigarettes?”
And, “Have the partisans been around?” “Well, they were here yesterday;
watch out, you guys, go that way.” I mean, I was sorry for them, they were
all friends of mine, I mean even if they think different, yet getting them
killed … Why don’t you kill the big ones, the big ones who are the cause of
all this, not us workers who end up killing one another for their sake?
Filipponi recalls that the rural people “looked at the scattered partisans
with a feeling of pity, almost”; they were “poor people” (Vincenza
Bonanni), ill fed, ill dressed, wandering through the mountains. “They
looked at us in sympathy, sometimes in pity, perhaps we reminded them of
their lost or missing sons” (Albano Renzi).29 The relationship between the
partisans and the rural families is often mediated by “motherly” female
figures, such as “Mother Teresa” Fioretti or “Mother Loreta” Pennacchi.
“During the partisan struggle, if it weren’t for these women, you wouldn’t
eat; someone got sick, where could you take him? Intelligence…” (Bruno
Zenoni). “Women, mainly, were in charge of making bread, washing
clothes, finding wool, knitting sweaters” (Ambrogio Filipponi). Yet, the fact
that these services were rendered for men who were not family members is
a change, and it opens the way for other, more active functions in the
struggle—dispatch riders, intelligence gatherers, and fighters.
Gianna Angelini, a school teacher with no political background, joined
the Resistance almost by accident, and was drafted as a typist for the bri-
gade’s command. Soon, however, she took up political functions as well.
During the last battle, on the Pelosa hill, she was confined to tending to the
sick and the wounded; she left them, went to the front line, picked up a
gun and started shooting. “They had sort of put me aside, because we’re
women, as usual… So I ran away, climbed this knoll where they were
posted. I remember that I was wearing this blue sweater, and they kept
yelling at me, stay down, because this blue sweater, in the full daylight… At
home, I didn’t know anything about arms and weapons. Then—the world
206 A. PORTELLI
was very different back then, and, the time I spent with them, I saw how
they cleaned them, I had a little pistol of my own I didn’t let anybody
touch… I tried, it worked out. Wounded, dead, there were some, but
whether I was the cause, I don’t know.”
Mario Filipponi. And we got married there. On the Pelosa hill. One day,
Filipponi called the brigade together, and we married, our way. Filipponi
officiated our wedding, in front of the brigade. He made a speech, that we
loved each other and all must respect our union. I’ll never forget, on a
clearing, arms in hand, all these men around us, Filipponi climbs on a stool
and makes this speech that we were together … It was a nice party, we
drank some wine, we even had a little music.
“Later,” Gianna Angelini says, “we repeated it in church, with all the
rites.” Yet, for Mario Filipponi the partisan wedding on the mountain “to
me, that was it, and that’s the one to which I was always true.”
5 “WE WANTED THE SKIN OF THE FASCISTS”: THE BATTLE

AT POGGIO BUSTONE
Vero Zagaglioni. The night of the ninth of March, when we reached [the
mountain hamlet of] Cepparo, this man came over to us. Says, “Look, the
Fascists are at Poggio Bustone, and they’re looking for you. They say,” he
says, “where are the partisans? They’re hiding from us…”
On March 10, 1944, the Fascists of Rieti (a provincial seat in Lazio, next
to Terni) entered Poggio Bustone, a small town in the Sabine hills, to mop
up draft resisters and arrest political dissenters. At their head were Captain
Mario Tanturri of the Fascist militia and Rieti chief of police Bruno
Pannaria. In a song, Dante Bartolini imagines them strutting into town as if
they owned it: “With all your arrogance \ you acted as if you were the
master\ of the whole human kind.”
Vero Zagaglioni. At this point, I began to rouse those who had gone to
sleep, tired from the action we had carried out that night. Yet, when I said,
“Look, the Fascists are at Poggio Bustone and they’re looking for us,”
when they heard the word “Fascists,” their spirits picked up. Once they
were up, I said: “Now, let’s have a serious talk.”
Mario Sabatini. And so we started down the hill. There were twenty-six of
us, with twenty-six rifles. Down we came, and we ran into this bunch of
Fascists, must have been more than 180 or 200. And they say, “Look, we’ll
give you anything you want, just don’t attack us.” Instead, I mean—we
wanted the skin of the Fascists! We wanted the skin of the Fascists. There’s
no backing out now; I mean, you’re killing our comrades, how could we
stop? So we didn’t listen to them, and attacked. And then a woman, an old
woman—“Look, the trees are moving, the woods, with all these partisans
coming down, must be two hundred.” Instead, we were twenty-two, or so.
I remember [this Fascist], he was singing “I won’t give up my machine
gun,” that famous Fascist song. He had his finger on the trigger, aiming
toward where we stood. So I circled around the village, a blow on the
pumpkin, and he was gone.
Vero Zagaglioni. After that, they moved the machine gun. And I, with
another shot, did away with the second gunner, too. And so it began,
inside the town. At one point, I came back to the upper square, and I saw
this stream of Fascist militia going down toward [the village of] San Pietro.
Then with my rifle, I lowered my sight, and fired. I guess the bullets, when
they fell [must have hurt them]. After that, we came into the town, and we
told them to surrender because we were fighting for free Italy, the usual
talk, I mean. But they wouldn’t listen.
As the partisans arrive in town, narratives and memories begin to frag-

ment and contradict one another. Zagaglioni says that the chief of police
and other Fascist officials were barricaded inside a house. The partisans
offered them a chance to surrender: “Come on out with your hands up and
we won’t hurt you.” Someone climbed the roof and dropped a grenade
through the chimney to drive them out; and out they came, but “they
didn’t come out with their hands up, as we had ordered; they rushed out
with machine guns and hand grenades, and one of us, I guess he was faster
with his gun, and got them.”
There are other versions of this crucial moment. Let us take two nar-
ratives, included in the same book.
Ezio Ottaviani, a former partisan. “The chief of police was invited to
surrender to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. His men, however, responded
by firing. So the partisans dropped two grenades down the chimney. After
this eloquent warning, the chief of police decided to surrender. But he
came out of the house shooting, and the partisans killed him.”
208 A. PORTELLI
And Silvio Micheli, a journalist and historian. “The leaders resisted,

barricaded inside a house. A few partisans, among them was Emo Battisti, a
student from Poggio Bustone and Hurricane [battle name of Enzo
Cerroni] climbed the roof, dropped some grenades down the chimney, to
get the Fascists to surrender. This, too, was in vain. Captain Tanturri, Chief
Pannaria and other officials responded with their machine guns. Suddenly,
the partisans dropped in down the chimney and ordered the Fascists to
surrender. The chief of police tried to mow them down by turning around
and firing, but the partisans’ volley was faster.”30
There are at least two discrepancies among all these narratives.
Ottaviani’s version coincides with Vero Zagaglioni’s story, except for one
detail: if the Fascists had “decided to surrender,” why did they come out
shooting? And then, did the Fascists die inside the house (Micheli) or
outside (Zagaglioni, Ottaviani)? The latter version is more likely to be
accurate, while the former is a condensation of two separate episodes, in
two separate houses.
Mario Filipponi. At one point, this woman calls to a partisan [Enzo

Cerroni]. Those poor people, they couldn’t even tell who was a partisan
and who was a Fascist. She says, “come, there are some people wounded,
on my bed.” He goes in, finds a Fascist and—tac!—he up and shoots him.
Because this Fascist was holding a machine gun. Meanwhile, he hears a
noise behind him. He was quick—‘Come on out, all of you!’ There were
about eight or ten of these big chiefs; he drew them out, and then he
executed them on the spot. The one who went in from the roof, instead,
was the carabiniere [Angelini]. He dropped a bomb, came in through the
roof, he killed six or seven big shots.
In some versions, then, the Fascists are killed as they rush out of the
house (Zagaglioni, Ottaviani); in others, they are killed inside (Micheli,
Filipponi). The former version is more accurate, while the second is
influenced by the story of Cerroni’s feat. All versions, however, converge
on one point: the Fascists fired, or tried to fire, first; but the partisans were
quicker and smarter. There is a cinematic element to all these narratives,
reminiscent of Western movies and stories, all the way back to James
Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer, in which the Indian or the outlaw are
about to shoot the hero, but the hero beats them to the draw.31
At Poggio Bustone, however, the battle had been raging for hours, with
shooting on all sides. Why do all narrators have to insist that Fascists fired
(or tried to fire) first, as if the partisans only killed them in self-defense?
Actually, even a Fascist version of the story confirms that the Fascist chiefs
came out shooting before they were killed (in this case, however, the writer
may be trying to make his comrades’ death an heroic one).32 But then, why
does Zagaglioni insist that they didn’t come out “with their hands up, as
we had ordered”, why does Sabatini mention an incongruous Fascist offer
to surrender, why does Bartolini’s song say that Pannaria and Tanturri
“shall face the tribunal,” even though he knows that they are already dead?
Perhaps another story—clearly imaginary but, like many of Dante
Bartolini’s narratives, endowed with another kind of truth—can suggest a
deeper layer of meaning.
Dante Bartolini. Then the prefect and the chief of police and all the brass,
the ones in charge, they hid inside a room. And a woman who saw them
says, “They’re in there, the rascals!” There was a partisan by my side; he
heard this drama, and told them from outside: “Come out! If you come
out peacefully—maybe—you will be spared. Else, I’ll burn you alive in
there.” They opened the door, raised their hands, and came forward. They
came out, in the square, where all the other corpses lay. As they were
standing in front of them—brrrr! All mowed down to the ground. They
had to die with the others.
Let us repeat: this is not a true account. In fact, Dante Bartolini wasn’t
even there. The “truth” in this story lies not in its factual accuracy but in its
mythic and psychological overtones—no wonder Bartolini, a consummate
actor and performer (this story was told from the stage during a folk song
concert) talks about “drama.” The whole story, indeed, is surrounded by
myth. The woman who draws the partisans to the house, the old woman
who tells Ezio Cerroni about the wounded Fascists on her bed, the old
woman in Sabatini’s story that tells about the moving forest, all evoke
reminiscences of ancient, prophetic seers: any parallel with Macbeth’s
Birnam wood coming to Dunsinane is accidental, but also very suggestive
(another narrator evokes another mythic reference: the partisans, he says,
seemed more numerous because they came to town mixed among a flock
of sheep—like Odysseus’ comrades in their escape from the Cyclops
Polyphemus). On another level, the key phrase in Bartolini’s narrative is
“they had to die with the others.” The death of the Fascist commanders is
210 A. PORTELLI
perceived by all (and staged by Bartolini) as an act of justice. If this was not
an execution, it was because an execution was not necessary.
Bartolini conflates two episodes: the battle at Poggio Bustone, and the
December 4, 1943, public execution of the Fascist officials in the village of
Polino, “in full daylight, in the town square.”33 Polino and Poggio Bustone
were the partisans’ most dramatic confrontations with death as perpetrators
rather than victims. It was then that these young people found out that they
were ready not only to die for country and freedom, but also to kill.
Thus, the undercurrent that unifies these fragmented and contradictory
narratives is the uneasy awareness that, if the Fascist chiefs had not got
themselves killed in a desperate sortie, the partisans would have probably
killed them anyway. In fact, two Fascist policemen who had been taken
prisoner during the battle were later shot by Mario Filipponi on the town
square; he was later charged with homicide and acquitted in consideration
of the fact that the act had taken place in the heat of a pitched battle.34
Dante Bartolini’s song describes the partisans as “wolves thirsting for these
traitors’ blood”; Sabatini states that “We wanted the skin of the Fascists”:
the crude realism of some of these narratives, factually accurate or not,
remind us that the Resistance was a war—a just war if ever there was one,
and yet a war. And a war, no matter how just, involves actions and feelings
—hatred, revenge, anger—that are hard to countenance in a time of peace
and to reconcile with the very ideals of democracy and civilized society for
which the partisans were fighting, dying, and killing, in the first place.
These feelings were literally unmentionable, and only through the cracks,
the metaphors, the contradictions do they find subdued, even distorted
expression. But anger, fury, wrath was in the air, and not only among the
fighting partisans.
Mario Filipponi. But the population, soon as the Fascists began to flee, the
population stepped in. All—with pitchforks, it was a sight you can’t
describe. I remember that while my men and I were marching into town, I
saw the people carrying the bodies of the Fascists stuck on pitchforks, and
they lined them up beneath the trees, one by each tree. At the entrance of
the village. All in a row, like haystacks. Savage; a frightful scene.
Mario Sabatini. Ah, this is very important, if you’re putting it on the tape
… When the town’s children saw the Fascists lying on the ground like that,
they took sticks and popped their eyes out after they were dead. Brazen, an
incredible spectacle. Boys, children, who know nothing about Fascism,

about partisans, nothing, you know. Well, it sure was a battle that can go
down in history along with the others.
6 RETALIATION
“The news of the events at Poggio Bustone caused quite a sensation in the
Rieti area. The Germans, especially, became increasingly worried about the
safety of the territories behind the front lines, and decided to start a set of
search and destroy operations.”35
Claudio Locci. When they came forward, we saw them come forward, they
fired upon us. We, you know, we fired back, but what good was it? We
tossed grenades, to hold them back a while: they, too, were afraid of dying.
So, slowly, slowly, we began to retreat. Which was a tragedy, because, all
sick, some with pneumonia, some wounded.
The partisan guerrillas had caused so much damage that the Germans
diverted troops from the Cassino front to launch a twelve-day mop-up
operation. The whole partisan area of operation, from Rieti to Terni and
along the Umbria–Lazio–Marche border, was stormed. The partisans
waged a guerrilla war of resistance; while the Yugoslavs crossed over to the
Sibillini mountains in the Marche, the rest of the brigade disbanded, its
members crossed the German lines one by one, and regrouped downhill.
The brigade still controlled a few villages and kept interfering with German
communications along the Salaria and Flaminia highways. Over the twelve
days of fighting, the partisans lost 61 dead, the Germans 180, the Fascists
eleven. The highest price was paid by the civilian population.
A bill posted by the German command at Poggio Bustone announced:
“I have reached the decision to burn and destroy the village” because
“rather than minding its peaceful domestic tasks, it embraced the
Communist cause.”36 On April 1, 1944, the Germans burned and sacked
the town, swept up and deported all the men, confiscated the cattle, exe-
cuted eleven people. One of them was the carabiniere Angelini, who had
joined the partisans. “They found out about it, took him and shot him.
Before they killed him, they cut his feet with bayonets, put salt on the
wounds. It was horrible. Then they gouged his eye with a bayonet. I mean,
they tortured him so crudely, it was a disaster. We, because of that, we
grew even angrier and meaner than we’d already been” (Mario Sabatini).
212 A. PORTELLI
Massacres were perpetrated in the nearby villages of Rivodutri and

Morro Reatino (eighteen victims). Three civilians were killed at
Monteleone (one buried alive), four at Cascia, seven in Orvieto, fourteen at
Calvi. “One day, the SS came, they took eighteen people, one of them was
my father, and shot them. It was the Fascists who had ratted on them, so
this platoon came and killed them all. Among them was a family, five
people, three brothers and two sons, five men from one family. They took
them to the town square, shot them, and left” (Lidia Montecaggi).
On April 5, the Germans raided Cumulata, a hamlet near Leonessa. They
were guided by a local woman, Rosina Cesaretti, with a background of
deluded ambitions, family hatreds, small-town enmities. She pointed out
the victims one by one; fourteen people were killed. Two days later, still led
by Rosina Cesaretti, the Germans massacred twenty-three people on the
Leonessa town square, including the former podestà Ugo Tavani and the
priest Concezio Chiaretti, anti-Fascist sympathizers. Don Concezio was shot
in the act of blessing the bodies of the first victims. Before the Germans were
through, the body count at Leonessa rose to fifty-one. After they left, the
survivors took the zinc off the eaves of the buildings to line the coffins of the
dead.37
“After that, we no longer really had a brigade as it was before” (Mario
Filipponi). “They pushed us up, higher and higher, toward the moun-
taintops, and there was no way you could live that way. As for me, let’s say,
I broke away, I came down, like so many others. Those who could go back
home, they did, and took some of these strays with them. I went back to
Greccio. However, I stayed home a few days, then I got back in touch with
the partisans” (Luigi Menichelli). “We kept fighting even after all that,
because the anger…Especially the spies. We offed them all. All. All the
spies, because we knew who had ratted on us, we sought them out, even if
we had to walk all night. We’d leave at sundown, stop in the morning, start
again at night, till we got to where we knew we had these people’s address.
No one could stop us” (Mario Filipponi).
Bruno Zenoni. We had to prove that we still existed. The people had
grown scared, nobody would give you a bite of bread anymore. The orders
from the National Liberation Committee, through Radio London, were:
eliminate all the Fascists who had reorganized the repubblichetta;38 burn,
put fire to their houses, and kill them, this was the guideline, more or less.
Back on December 4, 1943, the underground paper of the Communist

Party in Umbria announced that at Polino the partisans “executed in full
daylight, on the village square, [Carlo Orsini] a former deputy federale39

and militia captain, and one of his subordinates, despicable minions for the
Germans, deeply hated by the population.”40 Four days before Orsini’s
execution, the Fascists had killed seven heads of families in the village of
Mucciafora (“some wounded; the wounded that were taken prisoners were
tortured, brutalized, with knives, they afflicted them to death,” Dante
Bartolini).41 After the German counterattack in March 1944 public exe-
cutions were no longer possible; retaliation had to be carried out secretly,
silently, and more cruelly.
Dante Bartolini. So I tell them: are your weapons ready? Are you well
armed? Do you have all you need? They say: we do. Then, get your knives,
because knives are better than guns. Because nobody hears you when you
use a knife; if one dies, he falls down and you catch the next one, you
understand?
This is how, in the early days of May, the partisans executed Maceo
Carloni, a Fascist union official; Augusto Centofanti, a member of the early
Fascist attack squads, who had helped the Germans confiscate the local
farmers’ cattle; Alessandro Corradi, an engineer at the Papigno chemical
plant. The total number of “spies,” or supposed spies, killed by the parti-
sans in these actions is eight. On the other hand, the partisans often
allowed Fascists captured in battle to go free.42
Bruno Zenoni. Well, the verdicts were executed as conditions allowed. You
couldn’t arrest someone, put him in jail—you had to do what you could, all
means were good. You couldn’t make any noise, you couldn’t use a gun, I
mean. In fact when we were put on trial, when we were accused of these
acts, even if it had taken place in a somewhat barbarous way, I told the
judge: “You ought to have been with us, to fight for Italy; in that case, we
would have had you act as judge, it would have all been recorded, it would
have been more regular.” You understand that the partisans were infuri-
ated, like angry animals, in the mountains. One’s father has been shot,
another had something else.
Comunardo Tobia. There may have been mistakes, that we committed—

but certainly not in the case of Orsini, Centofanti, Carloni. Yet, you must
remember that you couldn’t sentence people to six months in jail—either
acquitted, or sentenced to death. The error may have been Corradi.
214 A. PORTELLI
Corradi was an engineer at Papigno; he would have given his life for the
sake of his work. He went around with a riding crop in hand, saying,
“Come on! Keep working!” [perhaps because the Germans forced him to].
The partisan movement deemed that Corradi was guilty of excessive zeal,
and sentenced him to death.
As the frontline moved north from Anzio and Cassino, the National
Liberation Committee prepared to take over Terni. In early June a com-
mittee of five Communists and one Socialist took up the task of aiding the
population and reviving the town’s social life. On June 6, as the Fascists
and the remaining bureaucrats fled under the bombs and the Germans
were still in town, the committee took over City Hall and issued a
proclamation to the population. It was the beginning of liberation.
7 A FAREWELL TO ARMS
Alfio Paccara. I remember that I was at Cecalocco [in the hills north of
Terni], when we heard that the partisan units were beginning to go back to
town. So we came back here to my house. This was the day before, when
the Germans were preparing to blow up the Garibaldi bridge [in the center
of town], before they withdrew. A few volunteers, citizens of Terni, they
had seen other bridges destroyed, and they wanted to save that part of
town, to keep the Rieti road open. And a comrade lost his life there.43 And
then, the joy, the happiness of the people, when they saw these so-called
rebels [come into town]. Many were still uncertain, they didn’t know
whether they were liberators or not. Because not everyone was aware of
what they had done, out in the mountains.
Vasco Gigli, the brigade’s deputy commander, described the “trauma” the
partisans experienced on June 13, as they marched, armed and in forma-
tion, down Corso Tacito, among the ruins of a town that had neither the
energy nor disposition to celebrate the triumph they had expected.
Vero Zagaglioni. Terni, nothing but rubble, houses in pieces, houses col-
lapsed, even next to one that may have been left standing you could see a pile
of debris. Down Via Cavour, Via Roma, buildings were still standing, but I
remember, as we marched down to City Hall, the streets were covered with
rubble. And the square, I mean, there was nothing left, in a word.
“In that town we had been born,” Gigli wrote, “but we could hardly
recognize it now, we could hardly find our way in it…A cloud of stillness,
of waiting, loomed upon the ruins. There was no immediate and festive
encounter between the citizens and their partisan sons. We understood, we
realized immediately that reality was very different from the dreams we had
cherished.”44
Vero Zagaglioni. Nothing was working, water, nothing, in a word. So

much that at first we had to take some harsh decisions, tell the people not
to drink the water because it may be polluted, by the bombardments. Same
thing about the retrieval of property; we did see a few small burglars in
action. For about a month, we acted as police, we acted as rebuilders. And
we cleaned up the streets, so they could be walkable. At first, it was us;
then, people started coming back. And the Allies arrived, at the same time.
As soon as they entered Terni, the partisans held a rally in front of the
cathedral, with the units in formation and bearing arms, and the few people
still left in town watching and listening. A few hours later, the Allies also
reached Terni, and the first thing they did was to order the partisans to
withdraw to quarters and stay there. The British required the partisans to
return police and public order duty back to the carabinieri; however, the
partisans resisted, and the carabinieri had disappeared anyway, so in the
end they reluctantly allowed a partisan unit to continue the work under the
command of Alfredo Filipponi. In exchange, they ordered the rest of the
brigade to disarm.45
Ambrogio Filipponi. This was the Allies’ first encounter with a full-sized
and well-armed partisan formation. And the impact was dramatic, because
from the beginning we could see the arrogance, the insulting attitude of
the British. They immediately applied the rule of disarmament, but in an
arrogant way. I remember how painful it was for some of the partisans to
part with their weapons, which they had carried all that time, so there was a
resistance on the side of the partisans and an arrogance on the side of the
British. I remember this unfortunate British soldier who wandered into
Palazzo Cittadini, where the brigade was quartered. The arms to be given
up were piled in the courtyard there. The partisans were so angry that in a
second he was disarmed. So there were also incidents of this kind; especially
in the dances that started spontaneously among the population that now
felt free. Both the partisans and the British attended; and the clash, the fist
fight, was almost inevitable.
216 A. PORTELLI
Alfredo Filipponi “kept telling us that we must not give up our arms; he
said, ‘No way!What do you mean, give them up? We must go on!” (Vero
Zagaglioni). The feeling that the Resistance was not over, the awareness
that all of central and northern Italy was still in German and Fascist hands
led 300 Terni partisans to join the Cremona Combat Group, a unit of the
reconstituted Italian regular army that was fighting along with the Allies.
“They treated us like we were some kind of bandits; our mindset was still
that of the Resistance, while [the army officers] still held on to the old
ways, in which discipline was everything” (Claudio Locci). The army
draftees “were sick [of fighting] and they called us ‘bread eaters,’” that is,
mercenaries (Ferruccio Mauri). The tension, however, was resolved when
the partisans stood in support of three army deserters who had been sen-
tenced to death, and the draftees were in solidarity with the partisans who
were sentenced to death for failing for salute the King’s son (both verdicts
were reversed). The Terni partisans were later on the front line in the battle
at Alfonsine, when the Allies and the Italian loyalists succeeded in crossing
the Po river.46
In Terni, Filipponi tried to play for time, and in the end turned the
delivery of the weapons into a final parade of partisan might. “He orga-
nized the whole thing so as to impress the Allies. He asked the partisans to
appear in formation, unit by unit, each unit carrying a machine gun. In the
mountains, weapons were allotted less systematically, according to the
needs of the guerrilla. But that display of efficiency was a message that said
that we were only giving up our arms, certainly not our capacity of orga-
nizing and arming ourselves all over again” (Bruno Zenoni).
The British were duly impressed—so much so that they found an excuse
to arrest Filipponi and lock him in a concentration camp. “There was an
immediate reaction by the partisans, who sent word to the carabinieri
command that unless Filipponi was released, they would attack the cara-
binieri station” (Ambrogio Filipponi). Actually, nothing of the kind hap-
pened. There were no more incidents or clashes until Terni was returned to
the Italian state, on May 10, 1945.47
Meanwhile, the National Liberation Committee dealt with the imme-
diate problems: stockpiling of crops and food, threshing, tolls, coopera-
tives, a new prefect and a new mayor (the Communist Comunardo
Morelli). However, the dream of creating a new state, on new foundations,
faded among the reluctance of the moderate parties, the daily chores of
administration, the obstacles set by the Allies, the international context,
and the divisions among the Left.
The day Alfredo Filipponi was arrested, his wife asked him: “What kind
of government must come into being for you to be left in peace?” And he
replied: “When we establish the workers’ and peasants’ government, then I
won’t go to jail anymore.”
8 UCHRONIA
Many years later, I reminisced about those times with Alfredo Filipponi.
We have already read (in Chap. 6) the first part of his imaginary tale of his
life. At one point, I asked him: During the Resistance, did you have in
mind only national liberation, or where you hoping for something more?
He responded by going even deeper into his inner world of dreams,
imagination, and desire, with a tale far removed from factual accuracy, but
an accurate expression of what he and many of his comrades had kept
inside all the years after the Resistance was over.
Alfredo Filipponi. Well, we thought of national liberation from Fascism,

and after that there was the hope of achieving Socialism. Which we haven’t
achieved yet. At that time, with the partisan struggle, we should almost
have made it. After the partisan war was over—Terni was liberated eleven
months before the rest of country—comrade Togliatti48 spoke to us. He
called a meeting of all the partisan commanders from every province and
region of Italy. He made a speech, he said there was going to be an
election. “You have prestige, Omega (that was my Party name, Gramsci
himself had named me that way. My partisan name, instead, was Pasquale).
The reason I asked you to come is, you must get to work for us to win the
election.” Four or five others spoke, and they agreed. I raised my hand:
“Comrade Togliatti, I disagree.” “Why, Omega?” “I disagree because, as
Lenin said, when the thrush flies by, then is the time to shoot it. If you
don’t shoot when it flies by, you may never get another chance.”
Here, Filipponi quotes a folk proverb—“when the thrush flies by, then is
the time to shoot it”—and claims it is a quote from Lenin. I have some-
times heard rank-and-file leftist workers attribute proverbs and folk songs
to Marx and Lenin. Folklore was their source of wisdom and ethics, and to
them Communism and Socialism were a matter less of political theory than
of common sense.
218 A. PORTELLI
“Today—Filipponi went on—the thrush is flying by: all the Fascist chiefs
are in hiding and running away, in Terni as well as everywhere else. All the
others said it was the same in their parts, too. ‘So, this is the moment:
weapons, goes without saying it, we know where they are (we had hidden
them). This is the time: we strike, and make Socialism.’ He put his motion
and mine up for a vote, and his got four votes more than mine, and was
passed. But they got the warning; they had to admit that I was right, later.”
Just like his story of the Livorno congress and his adventures with
Gramsci, none of this ever happened. Rather, it was Filipponi’s imaginary
version of the so-called “Salerno turn,” when Togliatti announced to a
meeting of Party cadre in Salerno—to which Filipponi was not invited—
that Socialism was not on the agenda and that Communists ought to
cooperate with other anti-Fascist forces, including the monarchists, to
create a “progressive” democracy.
Yet, this is not just a personal fantasy. As the hope for radical social change
after the end of Fascism faded in the restoration of class and power rela-
tionships, the dream of revolution was buried deeper and deeper in the
activists’ memories and imagination, to re-emerge as fantasy, dream, and
folklore. Filipponi’s daydream is the result less of a ruined personal memory
than of a creative imagination. It is the narrative shape of a stunted vision of a
different personal life and a different collective history that could have been.49
NOTES
1. Salò, on Lake Garda in Lombardy, was the capital of the Repubblica Sociale
Italiana, the Fascist puppet state created by Mussolini in 1944–1945.
2. Alfredo Filipponi, Diario di un comandante partigiano, Foligno, Editoriale
Umbra, 1991, p. 75; Gino Scaramucci, “Come fu impostata e come si
sviluppò la lotta partigiana nella provincia di Terni,” in L’Umbria nella
Resistenza, Rome, Editori Riuniti, 1972, pp. 201–219.
3. Celso Ghini, “La Resistenza in Umbria,” in L’Umbria nella Resistenza,
p. 21; [Aladino Bibolotti], “La libe-razione di Terni e Perugia,” Ibid.,
pp. 180–193; Gianfranco Canali, Terni 1944, Città e industria tra liber-
azione e ricostruzione, Terni, Amministrazione Comunale, 1944, pp. 71–72.
4. Comunardo Tobia, “I primi nuclei della Brigata Gramsci,” Resistenza
Insieme, September, 1983; Scaramucci, “Come fu impostata.” Germinal
Cimarelli was killed in action and granted a gold medal in his memory; he is
remembered as the iconic martyr of Terni’s Resistance.
5. “Rise, brothers and comrades, rise villages and towns; we are the partisans
fighting for your freedom. Workers and peasants, we shall fight together, at
Stalin’s call we are the first partisans. Workers and peasants, destroy the
invader, the Fascist puppets, the destroying German. Italians, arise, the
hour of the fight has come and the red flag is flying.” As performed by
former partisan Narciso De Santis, from Papigno, and recorded by
Valentino Paparelli, the song can be heard in La Valnerina Ternana.
6. Filipponi, Diario, pp. 85, 155.
7. Filipponi, “Elenco delle azioni compiute dalla brigata A. Gramsci,” in
L’Umbria nella resistenza, pp. 238–249; interviews with Agamante
Androsciani, Sante Carboni, Ines Faina, Alvaro Valsenti.
8. Filipponi, Diario, p. 90.
9. Scaramucci, “Come fu impostata,” p. 212.
10. Mario Filipponi is not related to Alfredo and Ambrogio Filipponi.
11. It is only as I reread this passage, more than 40 years after the original
interview and 30 years after the first publication of this book, that I realized
that, though fleetingly, yet Dante associated the partisans’ suffering with
those of the other side and has a word of pity for the enemies that died at
the partisans’ hands.
12. Filipponi, “Elenco delle azioni”; Ibid., Diario, pp. 221, 265. Among the
actions is an attack on a German convoy near Piediluco on April 13, 1944.
13. The reference is to the German’s sweep-and-destroy operation on March
31–April 12, 1944, in which the Gramsci brigade was almost wiped out.
14. “Armando Fossatelli had been sentenced to death by the partisans for
raiding the Yugoslav’s depot” (Bruno Zenoni]
15. Bartolini merges two separate episodes. Mario Magrelli was tortured and
killed in early April, after the Germans took Cascia back from the partisans;
the informer led the Fascists to the partisan encampment on the Pelosa hill
in early June. See Filipponi, Diario, pp. 270, 330; Vasco Gigli, “Relazione
sull’attività del comandante Costa,” in L’Umbria nella Resistenza, pp. 270–
273.
16. Ubaldo Fiorelli, a tenant farmer from Morro. His house was later burned
by the Germans.
17. This was one of Dante Bartolini’s favorite narrative performances, often
done in public, mimicking the gestures and voices of the characters in
theatrical form. It is a comic tale of sorts, yet an epic sort of comedy—the
hero’s disguise as an old man is not unlike that of Ulysses on his return to
Ithaca in the Odyssey. The veracity of the episode is confirmed by other
narrators.
18. Bruno Zenoni, “La presa di Leonessa,” Resistenza Insieme, April 24, 1981.
19. Pietro Secchia, “La guerra partigiana nell’Italia centrale” in L’Umbria nella
Resistenza, p. 169.
220 A. PORTELLI

21. Ibid., pp. 343–344.
22. A traditional Carnival sweet, made of fried dough and sugar.
23. Ibid., p. 214.
24. Celso Ghini, presentation at the conference on “L’Italia e l’Umbria dal
fascismo alla Resistenza: problemi e contributi di ricerca,” Perugia,
December 5–7, 1975, archive of the Istituto Romano per la Storia d’Italia
dal Fascismo alla Resistenza.
26. Il Messaggero, June 29, 1983; Ghini, presentation at the Perugia
conference.
28. Appointed heads of town governments that replaced elected mayors under
Fascism.
29. Quoted in M. A. Tacconi’s dissertation, La Resistenza in Umbria,
University of Rome “La Sapienza,” 1967–1968.
30. Ezio Ottaviani, “Ferro e fuoco a Poggio Bustone” and Silvio Micheli, “A
Poggio Bustone partigiani e popolo fermarono la Hermann Goering e le
SS,” both in L’Umbria nella Resistenza, pp. 349, 340.
31. James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer (1841), Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1987, p. 121.
32. Giorgio Pisanò, “La guerra civile in Italia”, in L’Umbria nella Resistenza,
p. 398 ff.
33. L’Unità, Umbria edition, January 10, 1944. Giorgio Pisanò also claims that
one Fascist was executed in cold blood in the square of Poggio Bustone.
The Fascist official executed was the father of my childhood friend and
schoolmate.
34. Marco Venanzi, “L’onore della Gramsci,” Micropolis, Perugia, July–
August, 2009.
35. Pisanò, La guerra civile in Italia, quoted in L’Umbria nella Resistenza,
p. 398 ff.
36. Marco Venanzi, “L’onore della Gramsci.” Because the events of the
German and Fascist raid and the partisans’ reaction have been the subject of
much controversy in recent years, I break my rule here of leaving my text as
it was and use more reliable data from a more up-to-date source.
37. Giuseppe Zelli, “Sulle montagne di Leonessa,” in L’Umbria nella
Resistenza, pp. 296–325.
38. “The little republic”: the ironic designation used by the anti-Fascists to
refer to Mussolini’s puppet state, the Repubblica Sociale Italiana.
39. Federale was the official title of the heads of local Fascist party
organizations.
40. l’Unità, Umbria edition, January 10, 1944.
41. At Mucciafora, three partisans were killed in action, three shot, along with
seven civilians, after being taken prisoners: Venanzi, “L’onore della
Gramsci.”
42. Ibid.
43. His name was Aspromonte Luzi. He belonged to an independent,
non-Communist band.
44. Vasco Gigli, “La Resistenza entra a Terni,” Resistenza insieme, June 3,
1984.
45. Gianfranco Canali, Terni 1944, pp. 98 ff.
46. 300 Volontari il 22 febbraio 1945 partirono da Terni arruolati nel Gruppo
di combattimento Cremona, Terni, ANPI, 1980.
47. The charge against Filipponi was that he had failed to adequately assist and
host some British officers who had sought refuge in partisan-controlled
Cascia after escaping from a prison camp: Canali, Terni 1944, pp. 100–102.
48. Palmiro Togliatti was Communist Party Secretary from 1927 to 1934, and
from 1938 to 1964.
49. See my “Uchronic Dreams. Working-class Memory and Possible Worlds,”
in Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson, eds., The Myths We Live by,
London and New York, Routledge, 1990, pp. 143–160.
CHAPTER 10
The Best of Times, the Worst of Times:

Economic Boom and Industrial Crisis
1 PASSAGES
On February 14, 1985, the daily La Repubblica wrote:
“No one could have foreseen the spontaneous wildcat strike, the march,
the road blocks, the sit-in at the railroad station. The temperature of the
workers’ anger, however, had been rising since last Tuesday, when two
divisions—the foundry and the steel mill, the heart of steelmaking Terni—
stopped working. Two meetings last week brought further fears to a town
that has already ten thousand unemployed and to a factory that has sent
home twenty-five hundred workers over the last few years. [Lorenzo]
Roasio, the chairman of Finsider [the state-owned industrial conglomer-
ate] had warned the unions and the local administrators who were seeking
guarantees for the future of Terni’s industry: the secondary processes are
too costly, unless there are further financial investments from the gov-
ernment this division is losing money and we will have to close it…So this
morning the workers walked out, spontaneously. No rally, no meeting was
called, but they had the full support of the unions’ factory council. They
assembled in front of the main office building and marched to Piazza
Tacito. After the rally, two hundred workers, who were pushing for a
tougher form of struggle, went to the station and sat down on the tracks,
stopping for several hours all traffic at this important railroad junction.”
“Mario Conti” First of all, we ought to remember the [1950s] TV ads,

where they always had this young manager on his sailboat, or on his

224 A. PORTELLI
airplane, parachuting down, the female in heat waiting by the fireside.1

Back then, we all played the football pools, we played the Merano [horse
race] lottery and all, because we all dreamed of winning two hundred
millions, a hundred millions, so we could buy the sail boat and, most of all,
the female in heat. They were laying roads, building churches—and the
unions were too weak to lead the working masses in the struggle for the
transformation of this social wealth.
Bruno Zenoni. Around July, 1944, we had a meeting, with the mayor of
Terni, the secretary of the labor exchange [Vincenzo] Inches, the prefect
[Umberto] Gerlo. At this meeting, the local representatives insisted for the
factory to start operating again and put the men back to work, but [the
Terni managers] claimed that they could only re-hire 500 men, because the
factory would never go back to the type of production it had been doing
before. And I remember that the prefect, more or less, told them: “Think it
over, because we have people here who have come back from the war, after
years of sacrifice and struggle, the bombardments, the town destroyed, if
you don’t give them work, I am the town’s prefect, I don’t have enough
police to protect your homes.” After this, Terni began again to hire
workers, expand the plant, rebuild the power plants.
“The political and union leadership, back then, rallied the workers
together and told them: ‘We’ll tighten our belts, let’s make all the possible
and imaginable demands, but the agenda now is reconstruction.’ And there
were moments of enthusiasm for reconstruction in the plant” (Alfio
Paccara). “Imagine the miracle that was made possible by the high level of
skill of Terni’s workers. The power plants had not been built by them, but
from the scraps and the blueprints they managed to assemble these new
turbines that kept running for several years” (Fabio Fiorelli). “It was a
heroic time,” says Aldo Bartocci, a Terni engineer and manager.
In the mid-1960s, steel worker Settimio Piemonti was received by the
Terni CEO Leonardo Siliato. He appealed to the tradition whereby the
sons of retired workers were automatically given a job at the plant: “I
mean, does it make sense that since Terni was set up my family always made
its living at the steelworks, I am the third generation, and now there is no
place for the fourth generation? My grandfather drove the oxen when they
were digging the foundations; my father worked here; I worked here. Why
not this one? What did we do wrong?”
August, 1982. On a park bench at the Passeggiata, I talk to a group of
young people. A boy approaches: “How about you, is it at the steel plant
10 THE BEST OF TIMES, THE WORST OF TIMES: ECONOMIC … 225
you work? If it were up to me, I’d burn all the factories down. What are
they for? For me, these are hellish places. Understand? The suffering of
many for the pleasures of few.”
2 TAKING BACK OUR TOWN

“Right there, among the rubble and the ruins, with corpses maybe buried
underneath, there was a boom of music, of dancing” (Ambrogio Filipponi).
“After the war, we all went crazy, you know? All out dancing, on dance
floors, instead of building houses, we were out of our minds. I was out of
my mind, too, because I went around playing music…Women, chicks—a
mess. So I said, we’re headed back to stinkville. After liberation, it was a
trauma, I mean, we all went—‘Oh! At last!’” (Augusto Cuppini).
In 1946 the prefect reported: “The morale of the people is sorely
depressed.” The Communist Party denounced “the utter exploitation of
the people by black marketeers.” Thousands of people were out of work,
the cost of living kept rising three times as fast as wages, there was “an
absolute lack of fats,” bread was “unimaginable.” Armed partisans con-
trolled tolls and food supplies; mobs of women stopped black marketeers at
the town gates. Veterans, unemployed, women demonstrated in the streets
of the still nearly empty town. A song at the 1946 Cantamaggio parade
went: “Sadness is gone, we’re a little weak but it’s all right, we get along.”2
Santino Cappanera. Well, when we came back, the first we saw were I
think Moroccans, Indians, colored troops, anyway. To us, this was new.
But the biggest novelty was that they had squares of chocolate, which—I,
myself—had never seen before. Perfumed cigarettes, in cans, and, what
struck the eye, the whitest, lightest bread. Us kids, we were always running
after those people, asking for chocolate, bread, or cans of beans. It isn’t
that they were too generous. They would give, but always wanted some-
thing in exchange, wine, and all. Or women…some made the exchange,
the trade. Anyway, we stole from them; they had so much, we made off
with stuff, we stole all the time. Kids and grown-ups, from trucks, from
their tents, soon as they turned around we’d steal anything.”
Mario Filipponi. Those of us who came out of that war, no one can
imagine what it is like to come out of such a war, and immediately find the
real life, of cleanliness, of dialogue, of reason. After you’ve been six, eight
months, a year, in the mountains, when you come down, you’re a half
226 A. PORTELLI
animal. No two ways about it. I was no longer a normal human being.
Today, I say: I was an animal. I realize that in those times I was out of my
mind. You’ve come down the mountain, with all that hate, all that fighting,
the guns…all the time, you expected a shot in the back, so you brought
yourself up to such a frenzy that [when it was over] it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t
easy. And we were all like that. Back then, we thought we could turn things
over, that we could overthrow.
“Now, taking charge of a town, none but the Communists were up to it”
(Arnaldo Lippi). “Us workers, who had never seen the inside of an office,
who could barely read or write, we reorganized our society. It took courage,
because we took over the administration with an elementary school edu-
cation, we hadn’t written for twenty years, it took courage, and the Party
gave us courage, even though we were not up to it” (Bruno Zenoni).
Gino Paiella. I came here [as parson of Collescipoli] in 1945; I found a

population that was as distant as can be, you could write a novel about it.
I was able to penetrate enough; but I must thank the American authorities
and our local authorities, the prefect, the police, and all. Because when I
arrived, there was hunger, real hunger, among these people. In early 1946, I
rode back from Terni on my bike, met a friend on the village square, and he
says, “look, Don Gino, the English Miss came and brought school lunches
and the Socialist mayor refused because they don’t have the equipment.” I
rode right back, went to the prefecture, looked for the officer in charge, and
said, “Look, if the town thinks its not up to it, I’ll do it, I’ll take care of it.
How many rations do you want?” “Seven hundred.” They gave me seven
hundred and I set up three refectories. And this gave me the opportunity of
thanking God, who is the author of these things, because I, with or without
the consent of the authorities, out of seven hundred users there were always
a few, ten or fifteen no shows. [Instead of returning the unused rations to the
government] I would use them to help this family, that family, who had
nothing to eat and came on the sly, with bags, to get them.3
Alberto Petrini. I remember that in 1948 there was a place, near Amelia,
where our members were not allowed to speak in public. This comrade was
sent to hold a rally at Guardea, they pelted him with tomatoes. At night, he
comes to the local and tells us. Next morning, instead of going to work at
the plant, we marched into the central car pool garage. “Listen: this truck,
this morning, we need it for our use. All of it, engine and trailer.” We went
up to the CEO—just four or five whippersnappers, but back then they were
afraid. He picks up the phone: “Give these kids the truck, immediately.”
Up we climb, we must have been a hundred. We drove to Guardea. We
beat up everybody. Anybody we ran into, we ran them out, kicked house
doors in, and all the people in the streets, we roughed and beat them
up. We were an out of control mob. The local priest was peeping out from
his doorway, and laughing in scorn—“The priest is laughing!” Brrrm, up to
the priest’s house, cuffs, kicks…Even the carabinieri stayed away. We
raised a red flag, marched through Amelia singing Bandiera rossa, then got
back on the truck and on to Montecastrilli. Somewhere down the road, I
don’t know, some country people did something we didn’t like. We
jumped down, went into this yard—the women asking for mercy, the little
children…So one of us said, “We’re leaving, but you must sing Bandiera
rossa.” That was a sad day. We had two barrels of wine, lots of food—
maybe we weren’t used to drinking, maybe the wine was strong, some of us
got...
Meanwhile, word had gone out, police reinforcements came and sur-
rounded Montecastrilli to keep us out. Some of us wanted to break
through; I [and others] were against it, but we came to blows with our
own comrades who had got excited with alcohol and wanted to break
through, wanted to get hold of the priest. At length, gradually, we calmed
them down and came to Terni. But it cost us a lot of patience. And a lot of
blows. Because they were out of control, they were excited, you couldn’t
hold them. Some of them were—unbalanced, so much that some were
actually expelled from the Party. However—I’m still friends with them.
I knew them well, those comrades: look, they’ll never betray you, even if
you put them in front of an execution squad. We ought to have educated
them; we were unable to educate them.
Gino Paiella. So, what was the system I used to penetrate? Much charity,
toward all; and a firm stand on principles. I don’t want to go into details,
because it looks like I’m praising myself. Actually, if I must talk about it, I
did rallies, public assemblies, interfered with Communist rallies, and didn’t
let anyone step over me, every time they attacked the Church. Back then,
we were fighters, for real; nowadays, it’s all watered down.
Mario Filipponi. 1946, [the referendum] over monarchy or republic, I

remember we went through some tense moments, because we were
waiting for the results and we were afraid of right-wing reaction [if the
228 A. PORTELLI
republic won]. That day, I remember, Carlo Farini picked up four or five of
us, Soviet style, didn’t say a word, loaded us on a truck, drove toward
Spoleto, said, “someone is coming and he’ll tell you what you’re supposed
to do,” all of us carried submachine guns…So many times the Party used
us, sent us to break shop windows, if someone didn’t join a strike…I
remember that Gino Scaramucci kept telling us: be patient and wait,
because maybe not in a year, perhaps in five, but we will have to take up
arms again.4 This is what our leaders told us, this is the truth. You have no
idea how many tons of arms we buried in the cemeteries, in the tombs—
truckloads of stuff, bombs, dynamite, machine guns, rifles. Everything.
Because that was how we thought.
“Before the war, there was no freedom at all. Soon after the war, we were
the masters, so to speak. But not masters in the right way. There were people
—look, honestly, I still have friends among them—who acted arrogantly,
because they had been partisans” (Valero Peppoloni). “We had some com-
rades back then who when they came to work they said, ‘Today, when I go
home, I’ll have no dirt on my hands’” (Alfio Paccara). “We worked hard; I
knew young people my age and you couldn’t say a word against them,
because they were beginning to politicize and they felt the responsibility of
reconstruction” (Emilio Ferri). “There was this feeling among them, that
now the factory belonged to them” (Arnaldo Menichetti).
The workers’ movement opposed plans to break up the Terni company.
The unions and the Party believed that they could take over Terni’s
multi-sector, company-town model, as created by Bocciardo, and simply
reverse the power relationships, reverse the town’s dependence on the firm.
Partisan representatives oversaw hirings and forced a policy of expanding
employment. Tito Oro Nobili, an icon of Terni’s Socialist tradition, was
appointed chairman of the board, which included representatives of the
workers.
“They wanted to enforce discipline, but there were things that we didn’t
accept. They—you know, the boss is always cowardly, so they flattered us,
they wouldn’t harass you as they did before. Maybe some who had been
Fascists, who had persecuted families, that had been spies, they still gave us
a hard time—once you found out, if you got a chance, you’d slap them up
and rough them up a little bit” (Vero Zagaglioni). “Every day, outside the
plant, there were scenes, unpleasant. I’m not saying that none of those
deserved what they got; yet, I was angry because such scenes sure didn’t
help the workers’ movement” (Comunardo Tobia).
Alberto Petrini. One day, they fired me and four other partisans. It was
soon after liberation. The plant was still in pieces, we were fixing, repairing.
We weren’t used to working that way. I guess I was doing less than I
should. Not that I that I didn’t want to work, but under the sun, at the end
of the day, I was exhausted. Clearly, we didn’t work as much as others did.
So they sent out a notice: the following workers are fired as of…When we
saw this notice, we up and went to the general manager’s office. “Sir, can I
have a word?” I had taken the notice off the board. “Who signed this?”
“Well, I don’t know, I…” So we got hold of him, we picked him up and
carried him across the hall to the personnel office, then to the section
manager, the engineer who later became my wife’s godfather: “All right,
whose signature is this?” “Well, boys, you know…” “Well,” I said, “right
this minute, you call your wife, tell her to set up five extra plates for lunch
and five extra plates for dinner. We’re not going home until we settle this
matter.” And he canceled the order to fire us.
“1944, this was a different era. The first clothes made with cloth from
UNRRA, from ERP.5 They gave you material to make clothes, and people
were beginning to recover a taste for dressing well. At home, if you had
two working family members instead of just one, you could dress decently”
(Raul Crostella). “Our Party local, the November 7 local, after liberation,
it was a big place of entertainment. We held dances, we had a band, people
in the neighborhood, everybody went. Back then there was this lawyer who
owned a place, called Pergola [the Arbor]. He had a dance floor, an
open-air bar, very snobbish; the bourgeoisie went there to dance,
well-dressed Terni. So the comrades reacted. There was a Terni dump; they
set to work, they flattened it out and rigged up a dance floor, sort of. It was
the counter plan to the Pergola, that snobbish place, where you’d go
dancing in a white tuxedo. I mean, the class gap, the contradiction, the
social friction was such that these people who were on their way to the
Pergola in their white tuxedos, we’d wait and then, from the tenement
windows, we’d drop pails of water on them like manna, we’d give them
such baths, my dear” (Franco Galeazzi).
In 1948 Guido Perona—born in “Terni vecchiu”, “a career between the
velodrome and the steelworks”—won the gold medal in the bicycle pursuit
race at the London Olympics. “Sports in the ‘dynamic city’,” l’Unità wrote,
“has earned the right to be considered reborn at last. Reborn from the ruins,
like from the ruins, through the will of the working people, the town itself
was reborn.”6 The workers’ reappropriation of the town also took place as a
230 A. PORTELLI
revival of the traditional class struggle over rituals and mass culture. The
Church expanded the oratories and sponsored vernacular theater and po-
etry; the Communist locals organized the Cantamaggio floats.
“Mainly, as a kid, I went to the parish, because they had a cinema. And
our passion was Western movies, back then they drove us crazy with
Westerns, I mean. And we couldn’t wait for the cavalry to arrive so we
could raise Cain, every time. After the show, the ticket man came around
—‘Those who’ve seen it once, out!’ And we would hide because we
wanted to see it two, three times” (Franco Galeazzi). “I showed movies,
back then, for the Party. I’d go to this little village, show the film, gather
the people, collect the money—every night. All kinds of movies, love
stories, anything. In a big house, on the village square, or if we had enough
space in the Party local, to raise some money. This we did, too. We kept the
Party going with the little money I picked up every night” (Mario
Filipponi).
The steel workers collected money to enable Libero Liberati, a
motorcycle racer who continued the Borzacchini tradition of working-class
love for machines and modernity, to buy a competitive machine. Money
was collected among the workers to rebuild the Ternana football club:
l’Unità denounced the “dismantling” of the soccer team in the same
language in which it denounced the threatened “dismantling” of the
steelworks.7 The soccer field was across the street from the steelworks, and
workers would go to the games after work, in their work clothes. “The fans
were hot; many times referees had to hide after the game and we chased
them all the way to Orte. I mean, the air was thick with bricks. Tempers
were hot, we were always struggling, always fighting with the police when
we went on strike. Soon as you stepped out of the gates, there they were,
with their jeeps and their clubs, to beat you up. So we had caught the
habit” (Calfiero Canali).
Alvaro Valsenti. Me, a Communist—yet, when I saw that in 1945 they

were starting to rebuild the army, the church, the boss, and that we had to
go into military service, I said: “I’m not a Communist anymore. I’m not
going to serve in the army.” From Terni, nobody went. They put up
recruiting posters, calls to arms, and we tore them off the walls. Indeed,
sometimes I still think about it—what if we had taken that struggle all the
way? Why do we need an army? Would that have been a realistic goal?
Claudio Locci. Then the orders came: the Party recommended for us [for-
mer partisans] to apply to join the police. And I remember that I, too, applied,
like many others. At the last moment, though, I withdrew, because I heard
this policeman who was teaching us about submachine guns—which we
knew better than they did anyway—say: “Well, from the top of the bell tower,
when the rabble below are making a noise, a machine-gun volley…” Then I
realized what it was all about. I said, forget it, or there’s gonna be trouble.
3 JEEPS
“The [1948 national] elections—well. Here in Piediluco one man actually
threw himself and drowned in the lake, so great was the disappointment;
soon as the announcement was made [that the Christian Democrats had
beaten the Communist–Socialist People’s Front coalition], he jumped into
the lake” (Mario Filipponi).8
The defeat of the Left opened the way to the restoration of power rela-
tionships in work places. “At the Terni steelworks,” historian Franco Bonelli
writes, “the problem awaiting solution was the disproportion between the
cost of wages and the company’s revenue-making capability.” The Terni
steelworks were going through the difficult shift from war to peacetime
production, while the national reconstruction plan favored moving steel
production to locations closer to the sea.9 In Terni, local and national
conditions combined to generate a trickle, then a flood, of layoffs and firings,
against the workers’ mounting resistance. From 1948 to 1953, “it was a
constant agony” (Arnaldo Menichetti). “Because, you see, [Mario Scelba],
the cop,10 he filled Terni with celere cops. They came on trucks, on trains, at
all hours, and each ternano had four cops on his back” (“Rocco Bianchi”).
“They brought in the timekeepers—American style, the famous Taylor
[system]. The engineer would gather six workers he trusted and put them to
work on a machine, bending iron. They, go, go, go, they didn’t realize the
harm they were doing. Then they called other workers: if they did it, so can
you. So you vomited your soul, on those machines” (Mario Gabrielli).
Calfiero Canali. Well, back then they sent those timekeepers in, to measure
people’s work. And the workers competed with one another. When the
second shift came in, first thing they’d do, they’d look up at the blackboard
where the other shift had marked the number of ingots they’d made. “How
many did they get? Two hundred? We’ll do two hundred and ten.” Next
shift comes in: “Two hundred and ten? We’ll do two hundred and twenty.”
232 A. PORTELLI
And they worked until they could work no more, because there were
incentives—a pittance, but we needed that money, and we wanted it. And
when those steel bars went through the hewers, well, there were a lot of
accidents back then. Over at the coils, they did everything by hand, then.
Did you ever see it? This white-hot steel bar comes out of the train, and
you’re supposed to catch it with a set of tongs and pass it on to the next man
and he puts it back into the other side of the train. And every once in a while
someone would put this white-hot steel bar right through their leg, or would
saw off their feet. Why? Because they were working too fast.
“Clashes in Terni were frequent and furious. And I don’t think I ever
missed one. One time, the maddest jeep driver we knew, who was reckless
in driving and running over people, he had the gall of driving after the
demonstrators past the City Hall gate. We were there, with a thick bunch
of former partisans; the jeep was attacked, overturned, the rifles broken,
and I guess a few cops heads, too” (Ambrogio Filipponi). On March 17,
1949, the 21-year old steel worker Luigi Trastulli was shot dead by the
celere at an anti-NATO demonstration.
Dante Bartolini. It’s Trastulli I’m talking about. When we all came out of
the factories to demonstrate against war, the Atlantic treaty. And then, the
jeeps, my dear, against the workers, and, you see where the cross is, he was
killed right at the steelworks’ gates, a little further up. Soon as he walked
out, the jeeps rushed aganst him and crushed him. They ran him over.11
Portelli. What did the workers do then?
Bartolini. Well, the workers, strike, what else? There was nothing else they
could do.
Raul Crostella. Well, one day the celere came, and they sent a unit of
soldiers as a reinforcement. This had never happened in Terni, this was the
first time they sent soldiers to keep public order. So the soldiers lined up,
they blocked Corso Tacito across from Pazzaglia. The soldiers were
blocking the road, the celere below and the workers above. At one point,
the commissioner ordered the police to attack; and the commanding army
officer told him he had been sent to keep order and order he would
keep. And he lined up the soldiers against the police. In three rows. And
the scene there was unbelievable, the women hugging the soldiers, “Long
live the army!” And the police had to go back sadly to their barracks.
“When [CP Secretary Palmiro] Togliatti was shot,12 the morning we

heard the news, we shut down everything, stopped trams, buses, everything.
We were a tide: if they’d but put a match to us, we’d have exploded like
dynamite” (Alberto Petrini). “We hear the news, on the radio; you can
imagine what happened. In Arrone, we were still angry over the elections—
he’s dying, he’s not dying, he’s dying… And if he dies! What happens then…
Nobody knows. So then, my son, we blocked the threshers, the farm
machines, everything. In less than half an hour, everything was blocked”
(Trento Pitotti). “[At the steelworks] we deactivated the power lines and the
phone exchange, we armed a group of workers, placed them on the gate-
house roofs” (Francesco Nulchis). “We carried submachine guns, we carried
hand grenades, we hid them inside the hollow section steel bars. Because we
were waiting to see if there was an insurrection” (Valtero Peppoloni). “There
was a meeting at the Party federation. It was like the day Lenin arrived in
Russia, at the very moment of seizing power, where he describes that every
peasant from the tiniest village in the middle of Siberia was able to debate—
and here it was the same. Some comrades spoke to say we should go all the
way, and you wouldn’t have expected them to be able to argue their point so
eloquently. That informal meeting was extraordinary. The workers came,
took the floor, spoke their minds” (Bruno Zenoni). “Anything was possible.
The cops at the Arsenal had already handed over their guns to us. But
[Togliatti sent word] to keep calm—calm, calm” (Settimio Piemonti). “So,
when the whole thing calmed down, the reaction began” (Claudio Locci).13
Remo Righetti. One time, in city council—I wish I hadn’t had to speak
these words, but the Christian Democrats drove me to it. So listen, I said:
“In 1932, I was tried by the Fascist special court; I came home after the
tenth anniversary [of the Fascist regime] amnesty, and in 1933 the steel-
works hired me back, even though they knew I was a Communist. Now in
1951, you and your man Scelba, you drove me out of my job.” Because
after twelve years as a workshop foreman, not only did they kick me out of
the plant [for political reasons], but I was blacklisted, no one would hire
me, I had to start selling socks. I have to change my trade, at the age of
fifty. Under the Christian Democrats.
On October 7, 1948, Tito Oro Nobili resigned as Terni president,

refusing to carry out the policy of layoffs and personnel cuts imposed by the
new political climate. Workers had already been fired from the Terni-
owned lignite mines and power plants; at the end of October, mass layoffs
234 A. PORTELLI
began at the steelworks and other Terni plants: 500 men lost their jobs,
followed by 700 in December, 1952, and 2000 in October, 1953. Industry
historian Franco Bonelli notes: “The new management had evidently been
released by the control agencies from any concern over the complications
that might ensue from the decisions they were about to take.”14
4 LIKE JUDGMENT DAY
Dante Bartolini:
Il dodici dicembre a mattina
Brutta notizia alle nostre famiglie
piange la madre, la moglie e la figlia
Che più nessuno gli porta il denar.
Settecento famiglie in miseria

Abbandonate nel cuor dell’inverno
Questo regalo ci ha fatto il governo
I bisognosi ha voluto colpir.
[“On the morning of the twelfth of December, bad news came to our
family. Mothers, wives, and daughters weep, because no one is bringing
money home anymore. Seven hundred families in poverty, forsaken in the
middle of winter: this is the present we got from the government, they
chose to punish the needy.”]
“The letters arrived in the space of two, three days, about two thousand
between [October] 15 and 17 [1953]. The first seven hundred had already
received theirs in November, 1952. I remember that in those days some
said, ‘I didn’t get one yet’; and then on the seventeenth there was the
official delivery. I got mine on the afternoon of the sixteenth” (Enzo Di
Loreto). “Two thousand letters. The women were waiting, sitting, afraid to
ask, jolting at every noise and standing at every crossroad, watching for the
mailman. And in two thousand homes the message did come, at Papigno,
Borgo Bovio, at Villaggio Matteotti, Villaggio Italia, [Villaggio] Cianferini.
At Borgo Bovio, the mailman, a young man, in tears, kept telling the
women: ‘It’s not my fault, it’s not my fault’.”15
Alfredo Vecchioni. I, myself, I didn’t expect it, look. It was really a bolt out
of the blue. Many who suffered it, who were doing our duty, I mean, at
that age, thirty, thirty-one, you did your job with a bit of passion, too. It
was a crossroads, that layoff, it was a crossroads in a person’s life. Snapping

the rose, as they say, snapping the rose before it blooms, many had their
lives snapped in two, ruined. They cut off the core of those who produce.
As in the past, the initial criterion for the selection of workers to be
dismissed was “self-sufficiency.” Gino Campanella, who was the chief of
personnel at the time, recalled: “We tried to do as little harm as possible.
Based on information from the authorities, the police, the carabinieri, on
what each one possessed…Of course, that was not enough to reach two
thousand; so we checked family sizes, and we first fired those who only had
one child, and it still wasn’t enough; so, those who had two children.” The
underlying, untold criterion, was political. “At Borgo Bovio, out of one
hundred and ten comrades, ninety-eight were fired” (Gildo Bartoletti).
“The Farini local, which was the factory local, was beheaded, mowed
down. Many migrated to Switzerland, to Canada, to Germany. And then,
fear ran high. We still had many members on the factory floor, but the cell
leaders, the local secretaries, all decapitated” (Comunardo Tobia).
On October 14, 2003, Terni’s popular mayor Paolo Raffaelli told a
theater full of high-school students: “I was born in 1953. When mother
walked with me around Viale Brin—I was born at the head of Viale Brin,
beneath the steelwork stacks—when they asked her, how old is this child?
She’d say: He was born in the year of the two thousand. The year of the
two thousand was 1953, and there was no need to explain because
everyone knew it meant I was born in 1953—[the year] of the social
catastrophe of two thousand breadwinners who found themselves thrown
on the street and out of a job.”
The police attacked the women who were seeking an audience with the
bishop and cleared the Town Hall square from the workers who were
milling about there. The next day, “the air was heavy with forebodings; in
the square, knots of people gathered, scattered, gathered again, while
others stood silent and still, as if waiting for something to happen.”
Suddenly, the police jeeps rushed in from Corso Tacito. “It was the matter
of a moment. A thick hail of stones fell on the police and the carabinieri,
who reacted by charging on the demonstrators.”16 “That moment, a
number of comrades had disappeared. About an hour later, back they
come, toting their hunting rifles” (Mario Gabrielli).
Angela Locci. I had these two sons, and down we went, Piazza Solferino,
they had the police surrounded and they couldn’t get out of the square.
They came with rifles, and the workers with stones, with rocks, all the
236 A. PORTELLI
comrades from all over, on motorbikes they came. It was a revolution, all of
Terni on those barricades. Kids, women, too: “Cowards!” and then run.
To be safe, I carried the guns of my rascal sons and husband inside my bag.
I felt safer, knowing my sons weren’t armed. But the women that were
with me, they were comrades all right, but not as bold—“You dirty rascal,
you’re carrying that stuff and you’re near us!” In a second, they left me
alone—such a laugh, my son!
Enzo Di Loreto. Back then, on the sidewalks of Corso Tacito there were all
those heaps of paving stones. In a couple of days, they disappeared because,
especially the smaller ones, we used them as weapons against the jeeps.
There’s no telling what we carried. We went empty handed. Some of us
worked at Bosco, and back then at Bosco they made these big containers
that they filled with a sort of little steel globes, and we carried that stuff on
us. We threw them hard, at the police, the carabinieri, we carried all that.
“I was out of a job, and we, young men from Collescipoli, we got
together and went down to Terni and raised Cain. The idea was to raise
Cain, we didn’t go to just stand there” (Menotti Zocchi). “The union and
the Party said: what shall we do? Shall we lead this protest? No, we won’t;
let the workers themselves lead it” (Bruno Zenoni). “So many people were
so embittered that all were ready, with gasoline cans, with hoses, to strike.
I mean, the celere had been wiped out” (Antonio Antonelli). “Anyway,
back then, you either should have blown everything up, or come to some
kind of agreement. Either you take up arms, or you go home. Take up arms
—what can you do? We did have arms. We all had arms. As for me, I didn’t
have anything—I had a hunting rifle. What’s the use, against a machine
gun?” (Calfiero Canali).
Amerigo Matteucci. Well, in practice, when they began to talk of this

strike, of this great strike, general strike—you remember, don’t you? Terni
went through terrible moments then. The merchants pulled their shutters
down, without even being asked to join; without being called to the
struggle. But they reasoned this way: “Two thousand and seven hundred
people out of a job—and our economy, what will happen to it? And us,
how about us? What’re we going to eat?” So there was this resentment, and
they closed down everything, shut down everything.
When the workers walked out of the factory, they came out in groups,
because the jeeps were lined up outside. Viale Brin—you know Viale Brin,
what it looks like? From the Valnerina gate on up, it was all a storming of
jeeps, cops carrying clubs. Anyway, they came out the way workers do,
exasperated with worry about losing their jobs, but somehow disciplined,
thinking they were going to a rally. Every worker thought he was going to
a rally, to hear a speech in the square about what was going on, to make
public opinion aware of what was going on. Instead, things turned out
different. Out came one group, then two groups, then three groups—at a
certain moment, there was gunfire. Gunfire, and this poor guy was walking
out…twenty-one-year-old kid—he was mowed down by a volley that left a
stream all across the wall.
But it was a two-edged weapon. Because we saw the blood, the blood.
And when all over Terni, men like us, like other people, began to shout
“They’ve killed the workers,” when the people heard the shots—with the
memory of the war still alive, because Terni had been martyred by the
bombardments—the people went blind with rage. From the windows, they
began to throw—I mean, the women, even—dishes, pots, and pans, as the
jeeps rode by. I’m telling you, it was like Judgment Day. When we mar-
ched down Viale Brin toward the square, it was out of this world; I mean,
people along Corso Tacito, the new main street that goes toward Town
Hall square…hundreds of people on the rooftops, ready to drop tiles on
the cops. It was unbelievable, unbelievable. Water hoses…pieces of wood
to build barricades because they said that police were bringing in rein-
forcements from Rome…building sites that were emptied and planks
placed across the street to block passage. Well, it was a moment of…And it
went on, this struggle; it was successful. But, it was successful in that it
enabled us to negotiate. Because of course, in order for that struggle to
succeed, there would have had to be a revolution.
Like many other narrators, Amerigo Matteucci merges in one symbolic
and imaginative story, the two main events in the history of postwar
working-class Terni: the killing of the worker Luigi Trastulli by the celere
on March 17, 1949 during an anti-NATO demonstration, and the insur-
rection that followed the mass layoffs of October, 1953. It is a sign of how
those years were not perceived as a sequence of discrete events, but as one,
continuous war; and the killing of Luigi Trastulli became the unifying
symbol, with little regard for chronology but with a deeper psychological
truth. Terni’s workers had fought in the Resistance, rebuilt the town and
the factories, conquered the city government; they thought the town
belonged to them. The unpunished killing of one of their number was the
238 A. PORTELLI
humiliation that they were powerless to avenge, until they did so sym-
bolically on the barricades of 1953. It was a fight for jobs, but also for
dignity and pride.17
Arnaldo Menichetti. And I myself suggested that we [union officials] take

things in hand, have the guts to go down to the square and persuade the
workers to give up. I went down to the prefecture, asked the prefect to give
me a jeep, with a police lieutenant, and on this jeep we drove across Corso
Tacito, I won’t tell you how hard it was, the threats and abuse we got from
the workers. At last I managed to break through the barricades, and reach
the square. And then the police marched off in formation, among the
insults of the population, among screams, boos, and insults. Then things
calmed down.
“I remember the meeting, when the union reported on the outcome of
the negotiations. The union had to take the responsibility of telling the
workers that the struggle was over, and those who were listed in the layoffs
must leave the plant. These were truly dramatic moments. The meeting
ended in dead silence” (Alfio Paccara). Historian Bonelli writes: “The
company management, local political clienteles, labor organizations all vied
to supply subsidies and help for the laid-off workers of known
anti-Communist faith.”18 “The working class became weaker, because they
no longer had trust, you see; they no longer trusted certain struggles,
because the working class never said ‘give up the struggle’, but the other
[conservative] unions would have let us down. But the workers weren’t for
ending the struggle. The workers said: ‘back to work or fight, back to work
or fight.’ Instead, promises were made, ‘they’re taking us back. They’re
taking us back, they’re taking us back…’ And they said, ‘well, if this is it...’”
(Antonio Antonelli).
“I know that some men got together, they ambushed the bosses, the
ones they knew were spies, and gave them some real serious thrashing”
(Greca Campus). “My grandfather was supposed to be fired, he was a
Communist, a union member, everything. The legend says—I was always
told this story but knowing my grandfather it’s possible—that he wasn’t
fired because the moment they called him up to tell him he was on the
black list—they were the first to go, the Communists—the legend has it
that he literally threatened to kill the guy. So he wasn’t fired, this is the
legend, this is what I’ve been told” (Lucilla Galeazzi).
Aldo Galeazzi, Lucilla’s uncle, was one of those who received the letter
of dismissal. He was a former athlete, a wrestler, and a discus thrower,
already legendary for his physical strength. As soon as he got the letter,
Lucilla recalls, he showed up at the residence of aptly named chief of
personnel, Francesco Crisi. Crisi’s wife opened the door, and told him her
husband was not at home. “‘Should he come back,’ he told her, ‘tell him
I’ll be here. Morning, noon, and night. If he doesn’t take me back to work,
I’ll break both his arms and legs.’ And this was no empty threat, he would
do it for sure. No one in the family ever had the least doubt about it”
(Lucilla Galeazzi). “And the fact is, that Galeazzi was hired back to work”
(Calfiero Canali).
“The morning the lists came out, that same evening ten or fifteen of us
were already committed: tomorrow morning, we’ll do an action in the
plant, and kill ten or fifteen bosses. All set, all agreed. In the morning,
when we went to work, the plant commission—they say, ‘Look, we’ve got
the struggle all but won, you’re ruining the struggle…’ So we had to give
up on that plan. Now, we might have all ended up in jail, but I think that
once we’d offed fifty, we weren’t gonna stop at that, we’d make a hundred,
once we were at it. And once you had a hundred dead bosses in there, I
guess things would change. Aside from the fact that we’d still been in jail to
this day. But we were all young, we had no families. We’d up and—there!
We were ready, we had sharpened steel rods, we were gonna do a neat job
of work. Maybe after they’d buried those fifty or sixty bosses, they would
go ahead with the layoffs anyway. Yet, there would be fifty jobs open. It
might have been a mistake, I admit it. But I have a hunch that they would
have taken back all the two thousand.”19
5 THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFÉ
Mario Vella. When I got out of vocational school, the steelworks sought
out the young people with the best grades and hired them. So in those
days, 1953, 1954, at sixteen, you had a steady job, it was a good
achievement. I remember that we were welcomed in Mr. Crisi’s office, with
all the paraphernalia, paternalistic stuff, to motivate us to think of the
company as a part of ourselves, speeches, jokes, to make our first contact
with the company seem like a party.
240 A. PORTELLI
A photograph in the company archives shows the little girls of a

company-owned seaside summer camp lined up on a field so as to form the
phrase, W Crisi [long live Crisi]. “Once in grade school I said that I was a
Communist because my father was a Communist. [They said], ‘Are you
crazy, that you’re saying these words?’ So I came home and I asked you,
‘Dad, aren’t we Communists?’ And you said, ‘Yes, but you mustn’t talk
about it’” (Gianfranco Canali). “The boss, you saw him everywhere, he
was in the air, he made his way into the workers’ minds, too” (Taurino
Costantini). In 1956 the Christian Democrat party took 4500 steel
workers and family members to Rome for an audience with the Pope. Pius
XII reminded them that the laws of the economy are inflexible, though he
wished that they might be mitigated by “ethical principles”, and warned
them that “atheistic Marxism has penetrated among you” so that “there
are those who take advantage of the suffering of the people to plant among
them the seeds of discord and hatred.”20 In 1957, Libero Liberati was
crowned world motorcycling champion. The news was greeted in Terni
with euphoria and a multiplication of traffic accidents. To many, it was a
symbol of Terni’s pride in such difficult times.
Mario Vella. Below the radar, all the time, there were clandestine incite-
ments, to rebellion, from the older folks who were still at work; they
circulated underground those texts on the ideology of anarchism, of
Communism. I was working at the cutter, the machine took two hours to
go through, automatically, so while it did I would read and study for two
hours. Now, I had the level of culture that a naïve young man like me
might have had, yet with a little imagination one might at least ask oneself:
why are they treating us this way?
“The workers sort of coiled up, the ones who had remained at work,
they closed in upon themselves” (Arnaldo Menichetti). “They were like
little lost rabbits, didn’t know which way to turn” (Alfredo Vecchioni).
“When you told them about struggle, about rights, they said: no, at home
we need more a piece of bread today than the vision of tomorrow” (Alfio
Paccara). At Polymer, the new Montecatini chemical plant, “in order to be
hired, it was almost obligatory to go through Don Gino [Paiella, the
parson]’s recommendation. He ran the personnel department, as a very
influential consultant; he knew everybody, all the old left-wingers, he
identified them easily” (Salvatore Portelli). In the plant, “you handled
carbon disulphide like it was drinking water. They breathed it; had they
been told to drink it, they would have drunk it” (Taurino Costantini).
Political discrimination was rampant: Alvaro Valsenti and Alberto Petrini
were only two well-known cases of union activists fired for talking politics
or reading l’Unità.21 “At the steelworks, Terni would take communist
comrades, highly skilled workers with thirty years seniority at the rolling
mill, and put them to cleaning toilets, to humiliate them” (Mario
Gabrielli).
Mario Vella. I mean, when you start at a factory, you think they are going
to initiate you to the job, that’s all. Yet, perhaps because the job is
ineluctable, that’s perhaps the last thing they teach you. What people talk
about, what they get excited, what they get angry about, is something else
entirely; it’s the labor movements, these more or less clandestine things, I
mean. When we came out of the plant, the elders would point out [the
plaque in memory of Luigi Trastulli] and the wreath around it: “See? He
died for you, too; you are here, your bread is guaranteed, because we, our
generation, we fought, with bricks in hands, with stones, with grenades.”
“When Stalin died, as a representive of ANPI [the partisans’ association]

I made a poster. It opened with the words of the song: ‘To Stalin’s call, we
are all partisans.’ This is how we joined the struggle, this is what Stalin
meant in our lives. So, I must not cry because Stalin is dead. I must not
cry” (Bruno Zenoni). “I remember one thing. [The Cremona Combat
Group] was in battle, and the Germans where thrashing us, and we were
about to run, and the army officer shouted three times ‘Go Savoia!’22 and
nobody moved. A comrade—a Republican—stood up and shouted, ‘Go
Stalin!’. The whole unit surged forward” (Ferruccio Mauri).
Portelli. Meanwhile, you were studying singing at the Briccialdi Music

School, weren’t you?
Mario Vella. Well, I had this passion, this youthful enthusiasm, for
music, for singing. It was an elating experience, for sure. Yet, the realities of
life bear upon you. You have to take some decisions, burning ones,
skin-burning ones. I was hoping to keep studying at [the Conservatory], to
do something with it, because people who heard me led me to believe that
I had something. But then there were the problems of everyday living.
More than desire, than ambition, what was powerful was the need of, of
the vulgar everydayness.
242 A. PORTELLI
“After the [firing of the] two thousand, I found myself with three men
at home—my husband was fired, my son Claudio was fired, [my brother]
was fired. Three men at home, the police came every day looking for arms,
they threw everything upside down, the mattresses, looked everywhere…
Three men at home, tempers were high, there was a lot of bitterness. There
they are, idle, at home, no money, nothing” (Angela Locci). “My father
took what little jobs he could, he helped farmers with the harvest, he served
bricklayers; I went to this lady’s house to sew…My mother’s brother had
been fired, too, from Terni because of his political activism, and had come
to work at Fiat in Turin” (Lucia Vernaccioni).23 Many dismissed workers
tried to invest their savings and their severance pay in small businesses and
stores. Many failed, but even those who thrived were filled with “an
enormous rage, because as factory workers they had more respect” (Lucilla
Galeazzi). “Behind the store counter, I was like a bear, I thought I was
going crazy, there was something inside me, a tension, because I was
always afraid of making mistakes, all my movements were awkward. I was
forced to learn. I had to learn that, too” (Alberto Petrini). Lucilla
Galeazzi’s father started a newspaper kiosk: “I am the daughter of factory
workers,” she recalls, “but growing up I never saw my father in overalls.
My link with the factory goes back to the memory of 1953.”
Mario Vella. And then there was something else, that I couldn’t stand life
in the factory. My mother still remembers when I would tell her, in inti-
mate moments, that the feeling when I walked into the factory was like
entering a nightmare of hell, a dark cloud that closed upon me, hence my
moods, you remember, always closed, always silent. The work environment
didn’t agree, let alone with the music school, but even with some degree of
professional gratification. And I always had character, a bit of rebellion in
me, so that many times I was sent to shovel snow in the factory, at the age
of sixteen, as a punishment because I wouldn’t do certain things.
“March 30, 1953, I remember. My wife was in labor, there was a

national strike against the [new rigged electoral] law.24 And I went. My
wife was about to give birth, I went out; I spoke at the rally” (Alvaro
Valsenti). “I still admire the families of certain comrades who worked for
the Party, and their families didn’t pick up a stick and beat them on the
head: because they starved, they lived an inhuman state of things, a civil
war at home, I mean” (AlfioPaccara). “When I stopped working for the
Party federation I had lost all my teeth, I was ill, no clothes, no bedding.
I was in debt, a million lire; a million in 1953–1954 is like a billion

nowadays” (Bruno Zenoni).
Franco Galeazzi. Our parents, our uncles, they wouldn’t go to the café,
they went to the tavern, because at the tavern they always met the same guys,
they had a language of their own—we called it tavern culture. After the war
—I talked to the generation of the forty-eight, fifty-year-olds, who were
young back then, and they told me about it, I, too, built my own historical
memory—there was this bar called Trieste, and they called it Triste, the sad
café. You’d stop by to watch television, people fell over each other to get a
seat close to the TV—television was the ally of the cafés, because taverns
wouldn’t have it. Those who got the idea right away were the parishes, who
got TV immediately—which not all Party locals did. And another café was
Bar Aci, which was a true miracles court. There oughta be a movie. There
oughta be a movie because it was the only night spot in town, the meeting
point of everything, night birds, winos, all the riffraff that a subculture, that a
life of hardship, produces. Winos and drunkards were the butt of all the jokes
at the café, and in a way it’s a form of violence, too, against those who cannot
create a relationship, who are weaker, who are different.
In 1950 the national Communist leadership designated Albertino

Masetti as Terni federation secretary. Masetti was from Emilia, and his
more modern, non-conformist culture shocked the local comrades who
were still clinging to working-class austerity. “He was from Romagna, their
life was different, he didn’t accept certain sacrifices. He’d go out dancing
with girls—money, the Party’s car…So we took a stand and had him
removed—but there were meetings with guns on the table, fisticuffs, and
all. Our mentality was that we didn’t want a leader to be sullied and talked
about because he went out dancing and all” (Alvaro Valsenti).
In four months in 1953, eight people died in work accidents. The
company raised production and profits, cut workforce and salaries. New
machinery was introduced, that privileged specialty steels over more tra-
ditional labor-intensive, skilled, and unionized sectors. The tension
between the company and the town and the union over secondary pro-
cessing, mechanical processing, heavy steelmaking was to last for decades.25
On the other hand, these new production methods renewed the legendary
pride of Terni’s working class: Terni’s workers and engineers still wax
proud about the bathysphere that allowed Auguste Piccard to explore the
deepest ocean bottoms, or the vessel for the Garigliano nuclear power plant
244 A. PORTELLI
(“The head manager of General Electric told me, you know that in
America there are those who wager that you’ll never make it? But we did,
and it was perfect,” Aldo Bartocci).
Mario Vella. When I walked out of those gates that cut me off from the
world, I wanted to retrieve my true identity as a free person, and I abso-
lutely refused to be perceived as someone who worked at the steelworks.
Unlike the generation before me, the masters who taught me the turner’s
trade, who’d go out to the square—“I’m a steel worker!” In their overalls,
maybe with a nice sweater on top, but in overalls because their very mar-
row, their very being, was steeped in the factory. My generation wouldn’t
walk around proclaiming “I’ve been hired at the steelworks.” No: I’m a
person, with an identity, a personality of my own, and I don’t want the
factory to loom over me all the time. No, I had to free myself, I mean.
Class differences, Mario Vella recalls, used to be in evidence outside the

factory, too: workers and managers looked and acted different also in the
street. But when this difference began to erode, “it wasn’t that the workers
gained anything: it was the elite that lost. There were many of them who
needed to lord it over someone, and now in Piazza del Popolo I’m a
worker and I’m wearing a jacket and tie and you’re a manager and you
can’t do anything about it. So they took revenge inside the factory, which is
why when I walked across those gates I felt defenseless.”
Mario Gabrielli. Back then, I was a member of the factory committee, and
there was a strike at the open-air furnace, which was the heart of the steel
mill, so they had to negotiate. There was this man, Mister Crisi, a brilliant
man, full of life, bursting with intelligence. And I remember that at the
negotiating table we raised the question of having a trolley make the
rounds of the factory carrying coffee for the workers. It was like he was
struck by lightning—“Are you kidding? Coffee—for the workers?!” Look,
they were evil—evil hearted, they were.
Taurino Costantini. It came spontaneously. It was 1960, the strike was on,
we were picketing the gates at Montecatini Polymer at five thirty in the
morning. We drew signs, put them on our bicycles. “How about a march?
Let’s march!” All agreed: on foot, on bikes, two thousand workers mar-
ched from Polymer to the town square. And the townsfolk were agape
because back then Montecatini was unheard of, it was under a cloud of
silence, heavy, anguished silence. When they saw those two, three thou-
sand workers marching through town, the old workers came over to us,
happy. Because it was the first big sign of the awakening of the working
class after the fifties.
NOTES
1. Oro Pilla was a popular brandy label. Their TV commercials featured Xavier
Cugat and Abbe Lane.
2. ACS, PS, AGR, 1946, 74b; ACS, Gab., 1944–1946, 198; APC, 1945–
1948, 090; l’Unità, July 10 and September 4, 1947.
3. The prefecture is the appointed local representative of the central gov-
ernment (conservative and Churh-friendly), as opposed to the (Socialist
and anticlerical) elected local government. The prefecture officer who gave
Don Gino the rations may have been my father.
4. Gino Scaramucci was Terni’s Communist Party secretary until 1947; Carlo
Farini replaced him until 1950. The vote in Terni was 31,397 for the
republic and 9253 for monarchy.
5. United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, European
Recovery Plan.
6. L’Unità, national edition, August 15, 1948.
7. Enzo Caffarelli, Una moto per Liberati, Terni, Nobili, 1978, pp. 22, 26;
l’Unità, July 10, August 21 and 29, 1947, August 17, 21, 1946; July 14,
1948.
8. In Terni, the vote for the People’s Front was 28,631 versus 12,174 for the
Christian Democrats.
1975, pp. 254–259: Valerio Castronovo, L’industria italiana, Milan,
Mondadori, pp. 289–294.
10. Mario Scelba was the Christian Democrat Minister of the Interior, loathed
by the workers for the creation of a special fast (celere) corps of
jeep-mounted riot police and for his overall anti-union policy.
11. Actually, Trastulli was killed by a machine-gun volley from a jeep-mounted
policeman.
12. Palmiro Togliatti, Italian Communist Party secretary, was shot by a
Christian Democrat sympathizer in front of the Parliament building, on
July 14, 1948. Demonstrations and protest ensued all over Italy. For a
moment, the country seemed to be on the verge of revolution.
13. Locci was accused of attempting to organize the occupation of the steel-
works, and fled to Czechoslovakia to escape the charges.
14. Francesco Bogliari, Tito Oro Nobili, Perugia, Regione Umbria, pp. 170–
174; Bonelli, Lo sviluppo di una grande impresa, p. 260.
246 A. PORTELLI
15. Arminio Savioli, l’Unità, national edition, October 16, 1953.

16. IL Messaggero, Rome, October 18, 1953, front page news; l’Unità, na-
tional edition, October 17, 1953.
17. See my “The Death of Luigi Trastulli. Memory and the Event,” in The
Death of Luigi Trastulli and other Stories. Form and Meaning in Oral
History, Albany, State of New York University Press, pp. 1–26.
18. Bonelli, Lo sviluppo di una grande impresa, pp. 260–261.
19. To protect the narrator, I withhold his name.
20. “Bollettino ufficiale della Diocesi di Terni e Narni,” XX, November–
December, 1956, pp. 11–12.
21. Pietro Ingrao, “Del parlare e del leggere”, l’Unità, national edition, August
31, 1958.
22. Savoia was the royal family in monarchist Italy.
23. Interview in Orsa Minore, 0, Summer 1981, pp. 16–17.
24. The so-called legge truffa, which for the first time provided extra parliament
seats for the political coalition that gained more than fifty percent of the
votes. It was considered an unacceptable violation of the principle of pro-
portional representation on which the Italian Constitution is based. In
1953 the majority coalition led by the Christian Democrat party failed to
reach the goal of fifty-one percent and the law was quietly dropped. After
the 1990s, new electoral systems have been introduced that depart even
more sharply from proportional representation; however, the former
Communists and the center-left parties supported these changes.
25. Giampaolo Gallo, “L’inchiesta parlamentare sulle condizioni dei lavoratori
a Terni,” Segno Critico, 1, March–June 199, pp. 97–112; Bonelli, Lo svi-
luppo di una grande impresa, p. 259.
CHAPTER 11
Staying Alive: The Rise of Alternative

Cultures
1 THE CENTER DOES NOT HOLD
Lucilla Galeazzi. I, for one, I remember that I felt that I was living among
strangers when I left home for the first time, at nineteen. Because I no
longer had the house key hanging on the door. In my lifetime, I don’t
remember us ever locking the door, even at night. And by day the door was
always open.
On January 16, 1960, Giuseppe Togni, the Christian Democrat minister of

Public Works, came to Terni for a slate of inaugurations, accompanied by
the local Christian Democrat member of Parliament, Filippo Micheli. “The
important public works inaugurated by Mr. Togni are the first chapter of
Terni’s rebirth,” wrote il Messaggero. The national and local Christian
Democrat dignitaries “forgot” to invite to the ceremonies the town’s
Communist mayor. Hegemony was shifting. A few months later, for the
first time in history, the Bishop of Terni celebrated Easter Mass inside the
steelworks. May Day, the workers’ holiday, was observed by raising a statue
of “Christ the Worker” in the factory’s service area.1
Gianfranco Canali. Let’s begin from the beginning, from my adolescent

experiences. I mean, being a teenager in Terni, around 1960–1963, and
from the periphery. We had the myth of Corso Tacito, main street, because
we didn’t know anybody there, we felt out of place, and we admired those

248 A. PORTELLI
kids who fit in there like fish in the water, who all knew one another, who
knew all the girls who hung around Corso Tacito. We spent our time around
here, at Bar Aci, Bar Trieste, and we yearned to be able to join that clique.
Franco Galeazzi. When I was fifteen or sixteen, if you wanted to meet

someone or have a chance to pick up a girl or something, you walked the
laps up and down main street. I never spent much time there, though;
because you could feel that there was a ranking, a class boundary. Say you
were going on sixteen, where did you go look for girls? In the summer, at
the public swimming pool.
“Hygiene and fresh air, amusement and causeries, eroticism and vanity
join in gleeful synthesis of water and skin” at the public swimming pool.
The local reporter clumsily enthused about “young men in fashionable
stretch bathing suits” and “maidens as lithe as Borneo willows.” “On the
dance floor nearby, lights come on and the first notes of a rock and roll
song waft from the band box like a hymn to optimism.” It’s 1960.2
“So what happened in Terni? First of all, the working class was kicked
out of the center of town. Used to, in the morning, the square would be
filled with workers in overalls; then, with the rising of all these public
housing projects, the workers were pushed out, I mean, who were used to
being in the center of Terni. We had a hard time creating an identity in
these new neighborhoods” (Bruno Zenoni). Terni’s old popular neigh-
borhoods had been bombed out: many of the inhabitants were moved to
the public housing projects in the periphery. “Nowadays, workers are no
longer the majority of the population downtown; it’s more the service
sector, merchants, shopkeepers, middle class. There are more of them, in
town, than workers. This changes the relationship between the town and
the factory, it’s no longer as it used to be” (Remo Righetti). In 1964, the
population of Terni reached 100,000.
“Traditional neighborhoods, like Villaggio Italia and Villaggio Matteotti,
have changed dramatically. They used to be basically working class…The
neighborhood was an organic unit, an extension of the world of the factory,
even in terms of habits, of daily forms of behavior…Today things have
changed. Other social groups have moved in, and they are not only the
town’s traditional middle class, but also groups generated inside the
neighborhood, like the students, who are themselves children of workers.”3
The new neighborhoods are architecturally pleasant (commemorating
architect Mario Ridolfi, the author of Terni’s urban reconstruction plan,
11 STAYING ALIVE: THE RISE OF ALTERNATIVE CULTURES 249
starchitect Paolo Portoghesi claimed that “Terni is the only town in Italy
where periphery rhymes with poetry”),4 and socially disorienting: “I’m
having a painful experience in my new place. Coop—four floors, fifty-seven
families. I mean, the town is inhuman, that way. The neighborhood is a small
town in itself. Two hundred and twenty-eight families. You don’t know
anybody. There are no services. Who are they? Who’s living next door?”
(Ferruccio Mauri). “I live in this new residential neighborhood, two hun-
dred families, all Terni workers. Five ten-story buildings, a school, trees and
grass, very green. It’s nice because it’s higher than the valley floor and is well
connected to the center of town” (Loretta Calabrini).
The Italian postwar economy had no room for a major war-related
industrial plant: no more navy ironclads to make steel plates for, or other
heavy armaments. The inland geographic location, which had failed to
protect Terni against air raids anyway, became a liability. The new indus-
trial development plan adopted by the government (the Sinigaglia plan)
favored locations closer to the sea, to facilitate transportation. In 1962 the
production and distribution of electrical power were nationalized. Terni’s
electric sector was absorbed into the new state-owned conglomerate, Enel.
Electricity was the company’s true core business, its main source of profit.
From that moment on, the company’s other divisions—steel and
chemicals—barely managed to survive, losing money, closing plants, selling
the most profitable divisions, surviving on government subsidies. It was
also the end of the company-town model, in which the company was the
center of power and identity that unified and controlled the town. “Once,
if they needed a hospital, they’d turn to Terni; if they needed a gym, a
swimming pool—ask Terni. The train schedule was set by myself, a mere
junior manager, and by the secretary of the steelworks. Nowadays, we
asked the state railroad to get a couple of fast trains to stop in Terni, and
were refused. I mean, Terni’s influence has all but vanished. Once upon a
time, a Terni manager walked on Via Tacito, the ladies wished he’d marry
their daughters. What a loss” (Aldo Bartocci).
It was the culmination of the paradox of Terni’s postwar history: while
Italy’s economy was industrializing and booming, Terni—which had lived on
industry for almost a century—was beginning to experience a gradual erosion
of its industries and its industrial working class, with no alternative in sight.
Giorgio Ricci. I’m talking about 1964, 1965. Clubs. A bunch of clubs
started up around Corso Tacito, meeting spaces for those who hung out in
certain places, like the first discotheques that opened in town. The big
thing was being together, meeting girls, no political or existential
250 A. PORTELLI
implications or anything, music, a space of your own, maybe just a couple

of rooms, but just being together, your friends, when you went out after
you’d done your homework, your girl. Rush out of the house and be there.
“Us, soon as we’re born, we’re born with the idea of working at the steel
mill. Except, with all the problems we’re having now, I guess we might as
well forget about it” (Roberto Marzottini). “We all feel for this factory, I
mean, in a way I feel for it, too. But if I can, I don’t want my children to work
there” (Santino Cappanera). “In bars, in the periphery and in town, it’s
always the same talk: the steelworks, period. Because the only medicine to
heal anything in Terni is always the same: the steelworks” (Roberto Pinoca).
“Some people say they’re giving money to us, because Terni is losing money
and their taxes go to pay us” (Santino Cappanera). “Sometimes it looks like
our lives are all about it; other times, instead…I mean, I myself live just
behind the steelworks, and what I get is the fumes, the toxic waste. That’s it.
We have a pall hanging over us, all the time” (Maurizio).
Paolo Patrizi. All right—let’s go back a little, to 1963, 1964. In those

years there was a group of people—Domenico Romani, Vladimiro Bier,
myself, Oreste Scalzone, who’s now in Paris for reasons that have nothing
to do with Terni.5 Say a bunch of beatniks, lost generation, drifters—a
literary aura. We were beginning to read Jack Kerouac, we knew there was
a youth revolt in Sweden, and all. Some of us went even further, to [Albert]
Camus’ L’homme revolté. It was a mixture of moods, a yen for action and
anger over being unable to act, estrangement but not scorn for our town.
“When we moved from Torre Orsina, Terni’s social environment,

totally bourgeois—but with codes that we didn’t know or share…You were
alarmed if someone rang your door bell—‘O my God, I haven’t finished
washing dishes’…and on the other hand you saw your next-door neighbor,
always spic and span, at all times” (Donatella Montini). “What worries me
is that people are becoming bourgeois. I mean, I’m not worried about the
search for new things; what worries me is that the Party, the people, are
turning bourgeois—the race for the big car, for the villa, for the wife’s fur
coat, riding school or tennis for the children. Sooner or later, you pay for
these things. For this rush to an affluence that is not ours” (Raul Crostella).
Iginio Vella. The economic boom—I lived it and I didn’t. Because in

those years I was in Belgium, working. Yet, once you come back to Terni
and the family settles down, you begin to acknowledge all this progress.
And then here comes television, here comes the tape recorder, here comes
the stereo, color TV, computer…all these things that you can’t do without,
it’s the machinery of the system that makes you reach for these things.
“Progress costs sacrifices. We make the progress, and we pay the cost”
(Antonio Ruggeri). In the late 1950s, when most people still didn’t have
TV at home and would go to coffee bars to watch a popular quiz program,
a sign on the trestle that held the TV in a downtown bar instructed its
customers, in clumsy inadvertent rhyme: “Buying a drink is not a
requirement\ but a sign of good manners.”6 The ethics and etiquette of
consumerism reach Terni on the wave of mass media and the economic
boom, but they jar with the culture of a working class that is not getting
any richer and the mood of a town that is still reeling from the mass layoffs
of 1952–1953. Consumer life styles were both an achievement and an
imposition—desired, strange, and uncertain. “I believe that people feel that
this kind of affluence is precarious. Which is why they cling to it” (Emilio
Ferri). “They are capable of pushing us back and taking back everything”
(Arnaldo Lippi). “The boom was their idea—so now what do they
expect?” (Maddalena).
Alvaro Valsenti. Before television, you saw people together. People went
to the movies, with others. Today people lock themselves in at home, they
don’t get together anymore. Because of this progress, which in the end is
no progress at all because clinically, I mean, I don’t know how to say,
people are suffering. They suffer, because they are alone.
Gradually but relentlessly, all the structures that helped keep the town
together began to fragment. The company was broken up, and its most
marketable divisions were parceled out, either to a short-lived joint venture
with US Steel or to Teksid, a Fiat subsidiary. Piazza del Popolo, the
people’s square, the heart of the working-class community, was all but
gentrified. Like the company and the town, the Party also could not hold.
In 1968 the average age of its members was 47; 17% of local secretaries
were city employees. By 1983, the majority of its leadership were intel-
lectuals, who had been all but nonexistent in 1945.7 “Terni’s factories have
seen significant changes in technology, in the organization of work and
production. Yet, the Party’s life and organizations have remained the same,
unchanged. No initiative, no change in leadership, no recruiting of new
252 A. PORTELLI
cadres and new working-class activists. Our comrades at the steelworks, for
instance, admitted that they have practically no contact with the younger
workers.”8
Mario Filipponi. For years, I worked for the Party and didn’t get a cent.
I did the most unbelievable jobs, never took a cent. Never. Because I was
doing it out of faith, I didn’t care if I wasn’t bringing money home to the
family, my only thought was achieving what we hoped for—to make things
better. And the comrades knew that you’d spent your whole life, when the
Party called you’d take any risk; but when you found yourself in dire straits,
they pulled the reins on you. Because nowadays you see party officials
whose wives, children, husbands, in-laws, they all got public jobs—is that
what the Party was supposed to be for? A former partisan would ask them,
get me some work to do, get me a job—they would resent you, because
they didn’t want you around anymore. You’d given everything, to excess
even—and you are starving. There’s hardly any member of the Gramsci
Brigade who’s settled and got it made. All banished—begone, disappear!
“In the 1950s, houses were empty. Nowadays, you go into a worker’s
home, you may find a picture hanging on the wall or something, I mean.
But back then, you could swing a bat inside a worker’s home, and not hit a
thing” (Mario Gabrielli). In 1972 Terni planned to move the tenants from
the semi-rural company houses of Villaggio Matteotti (built in the 1930s on
the Fascist plan of giving workers land for vegetable gardens to compensate
for low wages) to a new, modern, architecturally cutting-edge settlement.
Many families at first resisted the move: over generations, they had fixed the
houses and enjoyed making wine at home and raising much of their own
food. Moreover, the gardens were a mediating space in which they could be
visible in public while still being on their own ground. Others bought into
the new citified lifestyle with a vengeance, protecting their apartments and
their newfound privacy with all sorts of locks, keys, fences, and barriers,
ignoring the public spaces provided by the architects for socialization, and
filling their apartments with symbolic objects like flowery wallpaper, gilded
frames, credenzas and sideboards, and crystal chandeliers.9
Mario Vella. Why did I buy a crystal chandelier? Well, it’s about what
mother said when we got the new chandelier, all we used to have was a
light bulb hanging low from the ceiling on a wire beneath a painted metal
plate—the kind of thing that nowadays people put in the stables; but that is
what we lived with. So the day we were able to afford a chandelier and
crystals, it was an achievement, it was the gratifying symbol of the great
step forward we were taking.
“In the 1960s, we [New Left organizers] would drive from Rome to the
gates of the Terni steel mills. We were looking for the type of worker that
we had found, say, at Mirafiori [Fiat plant in Turin]: that is, young
working-class generations that had come to the factory with no ideological
background, without any historical memory—fortunately, without histor-
ical memory, because they invented new forms of struggle. And I
remember that in Terni we didn’t find them” (Mario Tronti). Yet, the
remaking of Terni’s working class had been going on since 1953: while
many older skilled workers lost their jobs in the mass layoffs, during an
ephemeral economic upswing around the turn of the decade the company
hired about 1,500 new workers.
Ivo Carducci. I wasn’t hired because I was a good worker; in 1963, when
the new rolling mills were installed, they hired about two hundred people.
Actually, though, they were not hired through the labor exchange; they
were hired because they had acquaintances in high places, company
managers, and all. For us, who had not gone through the experiences of
the older working class, the impact was tough, there was a generational and
ideological conflict. No wonder that the [workers at the] new installations
have been the vanguard, in a way, since then.
Among the outside influences reaching Terni in the late 1960s were the
stirrings of the student movement and the new “extra parliamentary”
groups to the left of the Communist Party. “I myself, I joined the
Communist Party in 1961 because it was a revolutionary force—even
though it was already beginning to crack, there was talk of reformism, there
was talk of revisionism…Plus, in a small town, the union organization is a
pond of stagnation, rather than the ground of culture and debate” (Taurino
Costantini). “I went to the university, I went to Rome, and majored in
physics. And the strongest group there was Potere Operaio [Workers’
Power]. So you see, the transition from the small world of Terni, it was like
opening a fogged-up window and seeing the landscape” (Luigi Castelli).
“Terni had no university, so 1968 was the high schools. We had to wait until
October, the meetings called by some of us who had been in the movement
in Rome, and by people who had read about it in the papers, who were
curious. They listened to a certain kind of music, they found ways of getting
254 A. PORTELLI
attuned to what was going on outside, in the cities, beyond [the] Orte
[railway junction]. Because the most important thing in Terni is the rail-
road, the constant rush between Terni and Rome” (Paolo Patrizi).
Oreste Scalzone. It was 1966, the year of the Florence flood. We had
broken away from the Communist Youth organization, somewhat pain-
lessly, provincially, we were doing a thing called the Spoken Newspaper,
because we could no longer print our little paper at the cooperative printers
owned by the CP. We merged with a street theater group and did all kinds
of things, we brought The Vicar, that had been banned in Rome because of
the sacred character of the city. And I, and a couple of younger guys, had
the idea of a demonstrative action, which was tossing a Molotov cocktail at
the central police office.
I had found the pattern in a Reader’s Digest condensed book about the
Budapest insurrection, but, not being a chemical expert, what did I do?
You’ve got to hear this story, Sandro. To make this Molotov cocktail, the
first seen in Italy, I think, after the years [of the Resistance], I got a bottle
of orange juice, which is hard and does not break. I put a rag on top but
didn’t make the cut that allows the capillary action, so when it gets to the
stopper, it stops. And there I went, with a photographer, and the young
comrades as backups.
Two days later they come for me and incriminate me, on the basis of the
graphological analysis of handwritten leaflets we had strewn around town,
that jibed with the writing on the leaflet I had glued to the bottle. So I
found out from the photos that the police showed me that the bottle I had
thrown hadn’t exploded and had remained whole and standing on top of
the police window sill.
They take me to jail and put me in a cell, much more humane than the
special security cells of today. The state attorney depicts me as a public
danger, maybe not number one but two or three at least, which makes you
a bit proud, you know. Then this lawyer comes in, and he says, “this is a
dreamer, a good student, he had left his signature, so it was only a symbolic
action, the only thing you can charge him for is offense to the police.” I
would have liked to hug the state attorney, but it ended like this.
While the steel workers were unreceptive, the students began to orga-
nize when they went back to school in October, 1968. Gradually, the
leadership shifted from those of the more elite licei to the working-class
students of vocational and industrial schools. At this point, the broad
themes of the national movement—anti-imperialism, anti-authoritarianism

—gave way to more immediate issues: right to education, job openings,
right to political action in schools. Gradually, unlike the rest of Italy, the
new stirrings were brought back under the aegis of the Communist Party.
“We did have the Sixties in Terni, but it was led by the Communist Party
youth” (Lucilla Galeazzi). “At the head of the student movement we
didn’t have the temporarily renegade children of the bourgeoisie, but the
workers’ children instead. These peculiarities allowed the movement, from
its very beginning, to expel extra-parliamentary ideological and cultural
drives” (Giovanna Petrelli). “The movement identified with the
Communist Party—some say fortunately, I say unfortunately. There was
nothing else. I think this caused a gap, a lack of dialogue. We went through
dark times, culturally” (Isoliero Cassetti).
Taurino Costantini. All things considered, Terni is culturally unreceptive,

toward cultural change, toward anything new. While the Stalinist organi-
zation, so to speak, was functional to a revolutionary perspective that was
very intensely felt in the postwar years, yet as times changed and the
structure remained the same, it became functional to a conservative
approach. Perhaps this is why this town remained closed to all the stirrings
that came from outside, 1968, and all; or maybe it comes from some strains
in the character of Terni’s citizens—I mean, this town wrapped in its
mountain basin, isolated also geographically, perhaps this is reflected in the
psychology of its people. The local unions did not understand the new
forms of struggle at Fiat [in Turin] in 1968, 1969; there was a small group
of students with Potere Operaio, Lotta Continua, a few kids, treated like
fascists, an attitude of hostility, of rejection, of suspicion—a shame, a real
shame. I guess it’s because the steelworks are like a big sow sprawling all
over Umbria, and we all suck the milk of security and satisfaction from it…
the fact is that in the end all these new changes didn’t make it to Terni.
“Look, the bitterest struggle I remember, throwing stones, rioting, was

when they closed Centurini. These were my first grown-up struggles, I
remember the demonstrations, these factory women were incensed, spout-
ing venom. So much confusion, all these slogans, songs, riots, anger,
determination—I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it again” (Lucilla
Galeazzi). For years, on the walls and the mountain sides along the road
from Terni to Papigno, one could still see huge red graffiti: “Hands off
Papigno.” In 1961, the Papigno workers had occupied the chemical plant to
256 A. PORTELLI
prevent its closure; it finally shut down in 1971. By 1970 the Alterocca print
shop and Centurini’s jute mill had closed; Bosco (mechanical engineering),
Sit-Stampaggio (an offshoot of the steel mills), Siri (iron works),
Elettrocarbonium and Linoleum in nearby Narni, barely stayed in business,
through temporary receiverships, bitter union struggles, government sub-
sidies. The workers of the Polymer chemical plant and Terninoss steel (a joint
venture of Terni and US Steel) alternated short work stints with temporary
layoffs and redundancy payments. Terni suffered from mismanagement and
the international crisis in steel; it retained a market space in specialty steels
but other departments were constantly on the verge of closure.
Fosco Girardi. The day [Prime Minister Aldo] Moro was kidnapped [by
the Red Brigades],10 a man died in the plant. He was crushed to death by a
gantry crane; we had to pick up the pieces, this is no rhetoric, because no
one saw it happen and the crane went over him three or four times.
Nobody said a word about this worker.
January, 1983. A conversation with the workers at Sit-Stampaggio, the

former Terni pressing plant, that had been parceled out and sold to Teksid,
a Fiat subsidiary. There is talk of closing the plant, and the workers are
occupying it to save their jobs. “It sure is good for the environment—no
more fumes, no more noise, no more anything, all quiet, I mean. You see a
plant like this one used to be, in full swing, and the way it is now—you
might as well take a walk in the graveyard” (Vincenzo Ceccarelli). “From
being a responsible member of the national economy, to being thrown out
on the street, to start all over again—it also hurts a person’s morale” (Sergio
Martinelli). “Look, it’s beautiful work, rough as it is, trip hammer work is.
It’s beautiful, beautiful and strenuous work, but it gives you satisfaction,
there’s skill involved, even creative in some parts. It’s not only us who are
angry for losing our jobs; there are angry people everywhere. If things
don’t change, we’ll end up butting against one another for a blade of
chicory” (Claudio Pagliaricci). “We have shown that we do like the
democratic system; but we must also eat. When you are hungry, nothing
else means anything” (Vincenzo Ceccarelli). “We’ve used our hands to
prove that we know how to work. As for the rest, we are in the hands of
those who ought to know how to govern the country” (Sergio Martinelli).
After a month’s sit-in, the layoffs were suspended; there was talk of new
investments, meanwhile the workers were placed on redundancy payment
for three years.
“I’m telling you this because it’s one of the best things that ever hap-
pened to me. We were passing out leaflets one morning at six a.m. at the
factory gate, and as I was handing a leaflet to a worker, he looks at me, with a
face like one who is disenchanted, who’s dragging forward a life of toil, and
he says, ‘how come,’ he says, ‘how come you guys who could be sleeping at
six a.m., why don’t you stay in bed, and leave it to us unfortunates to…to
come here, I mean, every morning at dawn” (Gianfranco Canali). “When I
started at the factory, I knew that the labor movement of old didn’t exist
anymore; yet, the working class is also a myth…There’s an attitude, even
among the workers, that is no longer of unity, each minds his own business,
they work two jobs, strikes just glide by, “(Sandro Porrazzini). And yet, in
1979 the national metal-workers contract is up for renewal, and negotia-
tions are stalling. “So we decided to sweep the place. We called at all divi-
sions and in less than thirty minutes the whole steel plant had stopped
working. Everybody. All the workers gathered in the square by the office
building. I was afraid they might get out of control, and yet I saw this, how
to say, this elation that they had finally been able to march through the plant
and give management a sign; all these workers, happy, were swarming all
over the management building” (Guido Botondi).11
“In Terni you can live very well—well, not very well; decently—on a
Terni payroll. In Milan, a family of four, with a pay like ours, couldn’t make
a living. Take me: I am married, with two children; the rent I pay is a
pittance; but so is the flat, forty-six square meters, four people in one room,
it’s a shame” (Roberto Pinoca). In the early 1980s redundancy pay grows
dramatically; unemployment reaches eighteen percent (32% for women).
Irregular and non-union labor, emigration, aging of the workforce are
rampant. From 1971 to 1981 Terni slides from twenty-third to fifty-ninth
place in a national ranking of social well-being (based on data on infant
deaths, crowding, crime, unemployment). On Piazza Tacito, the gathering
place of the white-collar middle class, the windows of fashionable Hotel
Plaza and Café Principe are boarded up.12 “If you think about it, you see
that the main square in Terni is dead. You’re telling me that Terni is better
than [when you were growing up]…Well, it is, but it is fragmented, it has
no center” (Paolo Patrizi).
Roberto Giovannelli. The Terni worker has two attitudes. Inside the fac-
tory he’s a revolutionary, because he struggles against that kind of labor. In
society he’s a conservative, because he has a stable and secure job, as
opposed to the majority of small-business employees. Plus, he is a
258 A. PORTELLI
conservative in a town like Terni: why? Because it only takes him ten
minutes to reach the countryside and relax; one bus ride takes him all over
town; and relationships are still those of a small town, among people. So,
he has a chance to take it easy, to relax.
In the late 1970s, on Corso Tacito, next door to a sadly reduced
Pazzaglia café, the town’s most luxurious movie theater closed down. As its
name—Modernissimo—proclaimed, it was a symbol of dynamic,
twentieth-century Terni. The city buys it and reopens it with an even more
pretentious name: Post-Modernissimo. Terni still retains preindustrial traits
and relationships; and now the crisis of modernity seems to open the new
vistas of the postmodern age. Modernity is over, the industrial revolution
lasted barely a century. To the new elites, the factory and the workers are a
parenthesis that can be closed without many regrets. But the meaning of
“post”—what is supposed to replace them and their culture—will remain a
blank for decades. In time, the Post-Modernissimo will also close its doors.
Luigi Castelli. The industrial managerial elite came to Terni from Genoa,
from Milan, from Rome, so there was always a gap between the town’s
intelligence and the running of the factory. We never had a serious local
industrial bourgeoisie. One of the most important elements in Terni, I
believe, the loss of intelligence, the emigration of people who couldn’t find
a space of their own in Terni. I remember this because when I was young
some of the smartest students ended up moving to Rome. For them, Terni
was nothing but the uncouth native hamlet they left behind.13
2 ALTERNATIVES
Giorgio Ricci. “I was born in Terni; in Terni, there are fifteen or twenty
factories, and for eighty percent of the people getting a job at the steel-
works means you give a party, pop the champagne. This I could not accept;
as I couldn’t accept sitting at a desk in school. I tried other things; for some
time, I made crafts with my hands, I tried to reproduce oriental figures,
exotic things, and we managed to live for one summer with these crafts,
traveling all over Italy. It was something that gave you satisfaction, you
could live on the beach.
Enrico Cardinali. It isn’t easy to reconstruct a personal and political

identity. We ought perhaps to start from the impact I had with politics,
quote unquote, when was in high school in 1973, after the coup in Chile.
Back then I was what for lack of a better term you might call a qualun-
quista.14 This attitude was rooted in an utter poverty of relationships, a
family environment that was rife with—with “studentism”, if you know
what I mean. And it was then that I began to realize what the situation was,
what I was suffering from, also with the onset of a number of… of
symptoms, neuroses, that might be described clinically, too. In the summer
of 1973, all these lines of suffering came together. Which led to me leaving
home and finding myself, all of a sudden, in the fray.
Giorgio Ricci. Many people back then went to Afghanistan, because it was
cheap, you’d share expenses with three or four other people, rent a car,
load it with a trunkful of old cassette players, clothes, anything, as long as it
was from the West, you’d travel there and live on barter. Somewhere inside
me I had the residues of Buddhist literature, Zen, the myth of the Orient.
There was a fable going around, of Afghanistan as a heavenly land where,
aside from pot, you could feel a rhythm different from the West’s, from the
stressful, exhausting rhythm that the movement of 1968 was trying to
break up. But it was also a practical, very practical plan: go there, buy crafts,
skip the middleman, buy stuff for a hundred lire and sell it maybe for two
thousand. So I manage to raise a little money, buy a van on debt, and out
we go. It was 1976, the spring of 1976.
Enrico Cardinali. So it happens that all the energy that was frozen inside
me or that fell back on me in terms of agony, of neurotic symptoms, I
invested it all, not even very lucidly at first, in activism in Lotta Continua.
I became an activist with the same pedantic, obsessive, somewhat unhappy
attitude that I had had before as a student. And none of the comrades
noticed or discouraged this. To the comrades, I only showed the image
they were comfortable with. In order to sustain this perverse mechanism, I
had managed to construct a sphere in which my abnormality—because I
still adhered to a reactionary image of mental illness—was dismantled. Just
like the man that says, if I can keep working ten hours in a row at a
machine, that means I am sane, I am normal. This way he can bracket away
his pain. So that when I had problems with my family, and my neurotic
symptoms returned, I found myself as helpless, as confused, with no
direction at all, as I had been before.
260 A. PORTELLI
Giorgio Ricci. So we stayed there three and a half months, and then we had
no money left to bring home all the crafts we had bought. The van was full;
we filled it up with fuel cans, and sold back much of what we had bought.
And we bought pot. We bought pot to take home and sell, so we wouldn’t
come home wrecked, ruined. At least, we thought, when you return you can
manage to live, to pay back the debts you made when you left.
But because we were carrying this pot, we avoided Iran’s northern
border, which is terrible, and came in from the south. The desert. We
reached that last desert town, in Pakistan, where a sign says London
9,000 km. The desert was our ruination. The van broke down; we only had
two spare tires, the first one broke… We had been told the road was paved;
it wasn’t. It was desert, total desert. Stones, sand, rocks. So as we traveled
on we began to sell the things we had bought, as we drove twenty kilo-
meters an hour to get out of that place. It took us two weeks. We sold the
van in a town in lower Iran: Four hundred dollars to go to Teheran.
Enrico Cardinali. At first, my family considered the fact that I had joined
Lotta Continua as just another aspect, if not the worst, of my more clin-
ically recognizable forms of deviancy. To the point that for quite a time the
doctors, who had been told about my, my political evolution, prescribed
sedatives and psychiatric drugs, to counteract this symptom, that is, the fact
that I was a Communist.
The time I spent in Perugia helped. I was studying medicine, politics no
longer took first place, and what came to the foreground was… my
anguish, the material distress of boarding in a room like the majority of
students in Perugia. And also the passing of time, the getting older. I came
back to Terni, and the return coincided with bad conflicts with my folks, I
found myself, it was the summer of 1978, kicked out of the house, sleeping
on park benches. And this was how I came to become acquainted with
certain individuals and contexts that are usually labeled as the problem of
marginal youth.
Giorgio Ricci. When I returned, hashish was already going around, at the
Ambassador café. Before that, these things gathered around the New Bar;
back then in the New Bar there was another type of politics—the politics of
living differently, on the road, packing a sleeping bag. These were people
who had taken all sorts of beatings, maybe had fought the Fascists on
Corso Tacito, they were so fed up with everything that they dragged their
balls under their feet. There was no heroin in Terni then; around pot, you
found all the losers, the politically disenchanted, who were seeking different
experiences. I’m not going to idealize pot, no way. I only mean that it was
a very good tool for getting together, say ten or twelve people in an open
field, opening certain locked doors inside you. Moments stolen from the
system, in which you were able to think, to meditate, to know yourself.
Back then we were all strong, beautiful inside, so much so that we were
able to kick out those who came bringing heroin. The first person who
brought heroin to Terni was chased away; we didn’t want heroin, we
wanted acid, we wanted to be together. Which, in a town like Terni, as
square as Terni is, could not be tolerated. And there was this repression,
the police, that isolated people from one another while they were still
seeking. All the police does—and they know well what they are doing—is
to persecute groups of people, carloads driving out to the country, or
renting farmhouses to do crafts and smoke a joint or something. I spent
seven months in jail for possession of hashish. People began to withdraw,
to break away, to isolate.
Enrico Cardinali. Anyway, when I retrieved some kind of standing with

my family and went into therapy, with those people we began to talk, to
organize. 1976, the breakup of the radical political organizations—we
focused more on daily life, on relationships. Ironically, it was on this plane
that I suffered the worst setbacks. The rediscovery of the politics of private
life became for many an alibi to go back to those contradictions that had
been only swept under the carpet, and it led to the worst kinds of solitude,
of confusion, and all.
Giorgio Ricci. So this is what happens. No grass or pot in town.

Somewhere, somehow, they say, a person we all know has come home with
a gram of something that is heroin. He shows it to a few friends. You don’t
know it, hardly anyone knows much about it. And then, a little gift to a
friend, to another, and you shoot up a little heroin. People are still in jail for
smoking pot. Someone maybe travels to Thailand and comes back with a
hundred grams of white heroin, very good, the most sought after on the
market. Someone else hears about it, and takes another trip. There’s more
stuff on the streets. People have had a chance to try this heroin: something
that is better done in isolation, the very queen of isolation.
For a couple of years, people came and went, and the police kept out of
sight. And there was always heroin on the street; good, available. There was
no black market; there’s a difference, between a town that does heroin, and
262 A. PORTELLI
the black market. People didn’t have to go out of their minds; they could
go out at night, get an envelope of heroin and maybe between three of
them they had a hundred grams each. All of a sudden, after two years, the
police strikes again. We saw a hundred years of jail sentences; all the users
in jail. I, one gram of stuff, a year and four months. That’s when the black
market took over Terni: people were addicted, and there was no drugs on
the street. Now you have the black market, you had the pinch of stuff that
you don’t know what it is, the craziness where a gram of stuff for Terni you
have to go get it in Spoleto, you have to go get it in Perugia. I mean, now
you have the black market. The real true black market.
Enrico Cardinali. After 1977 [in the movement] you didn’t find only the
children of the regular working class, but also the children of the extra-legal
proletariat. This is related to the unmaking, the impoverishment of the
working class. Two collectives started up, their reference was Autonomia
[Operaia], the tough, radical image of Autonomia [Operaia] that they got
from the media.15 One was a throwback to Third-International models and
ideas; the other was livelier, friendlier, so I took up with them. And the
action exploded when we occupied the Palazzo Sanità16… Listen, how
long are we going on? Because my head is spinning, my blood sugar is
getting low, I can’t talk, I’m losing the thread of the discourse.
3 DAYS
Massimo. I get up in the morning, help my father who does some elec-
trician work on his own, just to keep from doing nothing. Then nothing,
you have lunch around one, before lunch you hang out here [in Piazza
Tacito] a while, you meet someone, the usuals. Then in the afternoon, in
the afternoon, nothing, you go to the bar, talk football and all… Evenings,
back here again, it’s a bit more lively, after six p.m. everybody hangs out on
main street, more or less, those famous two hundred meters… Then
nothing, at night, the same thing, you go out. You go to a discotheque,
but they’re not open every day; and they’re full of young kids, and a mess
of drugs going around. [Television], not much, not even the new private
TV channels. I don’t go to the movies much, in fact lately not at all: steep
prices, no good movies.
In 1977 19-year-old Lamberto Lucchini, aka “Occhialino,” dies from

heroin. “He died, number one, from blood infection; he died because he
used to shoot up in a very reckless way. I mean, Occhialino, while he was
doing heroin was also drinking alcohol every day; he smoked, and he shot
up in the most unsanitary conditions you can imagine. I wonder if
Occhialino thought about it, before he died—that is, what it means, to die.
The way he was living, he thought he was invulnerable, so he kept shooting
up, and he was killing himself. You heard this kind of talk, it was going
around—might as well die for a fix” (Giorgio Ricci).
“Terni is a rather orderly, quiet, clean little town. I’ve seen others, and I
like it enough here” (Maurizio). “The only problem is drugs; [drug
addicts] who steal car radios, snatch bags”(Andrea). Il Messaggero writes:
“Giacomo Porrazzini, the Communist mayor, upholds the ‘positive bal-
ance’ of his 5 years in office. He mentions the many new sports facilities,
like four indoor swimming pools and an outdoor Olympic-size one, the
growth of nursery schools and kindergartens. A serious unsolved problem
is drugs.”17
Roberto Risoluti. … he was in the hospital. He asked for morphine, they

refused. Until then, he was using. Then, he began to drink. Within three
years, he died, an alcoholic. He drank ninety-degree alcohol, mixed with
milk to dilute the bad taste.
Fosco Girardi. The day we had an open meeting of the factory council,
eleven young men were on trial on drug charges. I attended both [the
meeting and the trial], and they seemed two entirely different worlds. One
of them was a young man who used to work in this factory, and we know
him well, and he gave up his job because he couldn’t stand the assembly
line. He ended up among the marginals, the addicts.
“A characteristic aspect of the situation in Terni,” writes a young man in a

letter from jail, “is the way in which the organs of repression blow up out of
proportion and criminalize any deviant behavior… A bag snatching becomes
armed robbery… I think this draconian behavior is due to the delusion of
making this town into an island apart from all problems.”18 Mario Tronti, a
Terni-born leading Marxist scholar, comments: “Everything is institution-
alized, everything is under control, all services are at your hand, swimming
pools, sports—but civil life is stunted. There is no youth movement, there is
no women’s movement. I mean, in Terni cultural life is terrible: there are
264 A. PORTELLI
only two or three bookstores, and they are premodern, the few times I go to
them to look for a book it’s hopeless.”
Maurizio Millesimi. I’m 30 years old, all right? I have an experience with
heroin, you see; of jail, too. I was in the 1968 movement; I did heroin; I
got out of it. I’m not using anymore. Look, listen, what does shooting up
mean? It means relating to others; it broadens you. I don’t remember when
I began, and I was hooked. I followed the drift—“Go ahead, try heroin…
no, don’t ever try it… try, try heroin”—I liked it. There was a moment,
“All right—what the fuck do I care?”
“Terni, I always felt this way about it: a town where all things considered
you don’t live badly, a town with no sharps and no flats” (Lucilla
Galeazzi). “A perfect, synchronic fit, between a pain that is never elabo-
rated as organization and antagonism, and international drug trafficking”
(Enrico Cardinali). “After all, Terni is very isolated, made of separate
nuclei. Stray dogs” (Donatella Montini).
Marcello. In Terni we never had much of a struggle movement, so the

majority of young proletariat gathered around the soccer ultras.19 People
sneer at it. “I mean, with all the problems we have, you’re thinking of
soccer? How stupid can that be?” All right, and yet I think about it because
just like you think about politics and in the end it’s only a cerebral mas-
turbation of your own, so I think of Ternana. At least, it gives me
something, a direct connection with my friends, my gang.
In 1981 a report to Terni’s Communist Party federation’s annual

meeting wonders whether “there may not be afoot, in the current power
establishment, a plan to marginalize the economy of Terni and perhaps all
Umbria.” While the town is reeling from layoffs and redundancies, an
umpire’s decision against the soccer team leads the local paper to wonder
“whether there is a plot to hurt this team and this town.”20
Marcello. When the teams walked on the pitch, we’d launch smoke
bombs, and it was a constant struggle with Terni’s folks because the smoke
bothered them. I mean, they spend all day in the factory breathing trash;
the air pollution in town is awful, and those five minutes at the stadium—
fights, fist fights, with the workers. [The workers] don’t join the cheering.
But then they explode. The stadium is a moment of anger. I’ve seen it
twice, when the spectators broke on to the pitch; in both cases, we ultras
joined in, but we didn’t start it. Two years ago, we invaded the pitch, we
besieged the referee, the police had to charge us four or five times to break
it up—to break up us, of course, but also fifty, sixty-year-old guys that
normally wouldn’t even dream of doing such things. They are sort of
apathetic, you know; but they exploded.
In 1977 Albino Cimini, a twenty-seven years old musician from Terni,

was sentenced to 36 years in jail in Turkey for possession of 100 grams of
hashish. He ended up spending eleven years in jail before he was finally
released.21 A few months before Cimini’s arrest, a group of young people
(the collective mentioned by Enrico Cardinali) had taken over an aban-
doned building in the center of Terni. Rumor had it that the building,
known as Palazzo Sanità (Health Building) had been abandoned so that its
owners could get permission to tear it down and replace it with a luxury
hotel or some other profitable private enterprise. After the first occupation
failed, they tried again in 1979, with a view to turning the building into a
social and cultural center, a youth center of activity in the center of town.
The name was changed to Palazzo Primavera [Springtime Palace] and it
was held for two months before the police threw them out again.22
On the post office steps in Piazza del Popolo, I talk to Mauro Carnassale
—a former member of the occupation, a clerk at the army arsenal, and a
“heavy metal” musician. “We listen to heavy metal music, we take after the
movements that came about in England before ours, and are labeled ‘heavy
metal kids’. We meet in a bar in Via Battisti and, nothing, we meet to listen
to music and also to deal with what life brings, always with relation to the
music. That is, music is the magnet that draws us together.” I ask him if he
ever made a connection between the heavy metal of Terni’s steel industry,
and the “heavy metal music” he likes. No, it never occurred to him. I ask
Fabio Scipioni, the group’s songwriter, who is sitting with us, what his songs
are about. “Oh, they’re about what we see; when we hang out, about the
people, the absurdities that are going on.” What language do you write in?
“English.”
“We’re branded as Fascists because we wear black, because sometimes
we wear leather jackets with little swastikas, and people don’t understand
it’s a whole other message, it’s only a provocation” (Mauro Carnassale).
“It’s the whole setup that shocks people, and it tickles you to see their
reaction on people’s faces. Since all they look at is a person’s external
appearance, this is why I like to use these symbols to shock them, or maybe
266 A. PORTELLI
get them interested” (Fabio Scipioni). Terni’s best heavy metal group is an
all-girl band, with rigorously English nicknames: Lady Evil, Bloody Mary,
Jane, Fast Annie. The band’s name is Walkyria; their greatest hit is
“Warhead.” “We’re all into heroic fantasy and Scandinavian myths; as for
the lyrics, some may be taken for right-wing ideology because perhaps they
exalt war, they say that war is holy. But you must look at it the right way:
war is also a form of rejection, a refusal to abide by certain patterns”
(Mauro Carnassale).
Graziano De Renzo. At age three I was taken to the Gugliemi, an

orphanage, run by nuns, that was like a prison. Walls, locked gates… So
what did I do? I raised Cain, stayed in bed until nine, skipped Mass, stole
croissants… By the time you were six, seven, or eight, you were able to
jump that gate and go steal jackets at Berarducci’s, and stuff. By the time I
was eight, they couldn’t hold me any longer.
Cinzia Dini, 16 years old, mother of a little girl, died of heroin in

November 1979, a few days after the occupation of Palazzo Primavera was
broken up for good. A meeting of the city council, called to discuss the
problem of drugs and marginal youth, failed to reach a quorum: the city
fathers must have had more urgent things on their minds.23 “Death of
Cinzia Dini. What happened? Well, there was a rebellion inside us, a bit of
dignity. We told ourselves: this is enough. And we meant it” (Giorgio
Ricci). The addicts themselves set up a struggle committee, attempting to
turn the isolation of heroin into a collective initiative. It was one of the
earliest such experiences in Italy, and in the end it was bogged down in
politics, technicalities, contrasts within the movement, exhausting dealings
with institutions, agencies, bureaucracy. January 1980, another young man
dies. His name was Bruno Perinovich.
Rosanna Gabrielli. My class, at accounting school, we were 33. Out of

them, only four or five are working at a real job. The rest do odd jobs, just
like I did, off the books. I worked a year at a health office for fifty thousand
a month. The girls—a few are married, some stay at home, doing nothing.
And those who couldn’t find work, it hurts you when you hear this talk,
they are desperate, or they are disappointed, they go through all these
existential crises, they resent everybody and everything.
Graziano De Renzo. I’m taking a class on construction work. They say that
if you learn a trade, you can get 250,000 lire, eight hours under the sun. This
morning I went up to my social worker, I said: look, tomorrow I go to work,
I sit down, every once in a while I daub a bit of lime, and sit back down.
Period. Why don’t you try digging eight hours under the sun yourself?
“Right this minute, while I’m talking to you, right now, I don’t like
[work]. But later when you start a family, you’d better learn to like it,
anyway. And I think your attitude changes. When you grow older, it’s no
longer only about having a good time, like now” (Fabrizio). “I don’t think
anybody likes to work. But then you must. And you take it seriously,
whether you like it or not” (Corrado). “Work—I mean, you want some-
thing, how do you buy it? Either you work, or you steal” (Daniele).
Maurizio Millesimi. Anyway, listen. Is there still tape left? Can I talk? Are
you writing a book? If you are, you must include the experience of an
anonymous comrade who has contradictions of his own, contradicted
contradictions. What does it mean, to be a comrade? I remember—I’ll give
you an example. Sergio Secci and I, Sergio who died, we were at my house,
he had a girlfriend, a Buddhist. We went to my place, he started playing the
flute, you see; and we drained a bottle of whisky. Do you know what it
means to be a comrade? That is, here he was at my house—poor Sergio
Secci—did you know him?24 I mean, now you hear all this official rhetoric;
I find a way of talking of Sergio Secci. Listen, I wish, I wish with all my
heart, honestly, with all my soul, to remember Sergio. This is my first
opportunity. Sergio Secci died from the bomb, the fascist bomb, the
whoever-did-it’s bomb,…their bomb. Their bomb. But honestly, I
remember—he and his flute and the Buddhist, I was with this girlfriend,
and we went to my place, we went to bed and all. Later, when we came
out, we started playing music… And so, you are doing these things, and
they kill you, I mean, understand? So in the end being comrades means
seizing certain moments, certain things. And all you do is run and try to
catch them. Yesterday, on television, it says that Oreste Scalzone was
arrested, they say he was making bombs…. Anyway, Terni will not forget
Oreste. Listen, I remember when Oreste’s baby died, Emiliano. He is
buried in the cemetery in Terni; he was seven months old, he was small.
I don’t remember what he died of. Emiliano, the son of Oreste.
268 A. PORTELLI
Three months after our interview, I found Graziano De Renzo’s picture

in the paper, on a hospital bed. He had just turned eighteen and was
supposed to leave the institution where he had lived since he was a child; so
now he was waging a hunger strike to claim his right to a place to live and
means of support. The Communist youth organization was in solidarity,
denouncing “desperate conditions that have no precedent in the history of
our town.” However, after two weeks, Graziano gave up. “None of those
who really count deigned to come and find out about my problems.”25 “A
grave existential distress that we may describe as ‘new poverty’ is now
dangerously spreading in Terni [and sowing] impalpable anguish and
despair. Nowadays in Terni it is much easier than it used to be to end up
inadvertently under the spell of heroin rather than in a context of partici-
pation and struggle.”26 “In the space of a year, you find kids who started
on heroin at fifteen and didn’t even go through a phase of hashish or pot”
(Azelio Fulmini). “They’re kids, say their father beats them, he goes out to
the game room, to the discotheque on Sundays, and scores. Say he fights
with his father every night, every night he scores” (Graziano De Renzo).
4 GENERATIONS
Santino Cappanera. Since the day this factory was born, we took a certain
rhythm. This rhythm was handed down from father to son; and it’s a long
story. I am a member of the older generation, and I work in a certain way,
with a certain rhythm. I can see now that I can keep a faster rhythm than the
young people who have just been hired. It isn’t that I like to work harder;
but I’ve carried this rhythm inside me since I was a kid, like an education
that I received, that had been given to those who came before me.
“My father, for one, he’s a worker, at the steel mill. The conditions he
works in, he just has to be a comrade. Yet we never agree, because he can’t
conceive of some of the things I do” (Corrado). “My father says: What the
fuck do you think you’re doing? You, what are you complaining about?
You have bread, you have everything, and you complain? When I was
fifteen, I ate meat once a month” (Azelio Fulmini). “It makes sense, but in
practice it doesn’t mean anything. Nowadays, everything’s changed, the
world and things, there’s no war on, there are more problems and fewer
problems” (Maurizio).
Santino Cappanera. I don’t know how they look at work; certainly not
with the same eyes as we. They don’t come from a generation like ours,
who went to work when we were still children; they have been in school
until they were twenty. And when you arrive in an environment like ours,
they’re actually physically afraid, the deafening noise, the moving machi-
nes, they’re afraid, they’re scared.
“What we had in mind when we thought of the working class, wasn’t

my father, or your father, people we know. Because if I had to think of the
flesh-and-blood worker, the flesh-and-blood worker was the guy who hung
out with me when I was a hippie at the Aci bar; he was my father who
repressed me if I wore my hair long, who was ashamed of his hippy son.
But you didn’t think of this. Perhaps, you thought, that’s just the indi-
vidual worker; workers as a whole, it’s something else” (Gianfranco
Canali). “At first, when I was at work, I was all the time humming,
whistling—and they looked at me, I seemed… less serious perhaps. All
right. I’d talk about being out packing a sleeping bag, with friends,
camping—and they: ‘Ah, you hang out with chicks, all together, like you
do nowadays, smoking joints, stuff, taking drugs…’ Now the relationship
has changed, though. I’ve enrolled in the university, I approach the work
differently. Before, it was just a job, you were resigned to it because there
are no alternatives, you try to be in there and make the most of it. Now, I
see it differently” (Battista Garibaldi).
Mauro Carnassale. I was a raised in a left-wing environment, a Communist

family, San Giovanni neighborhood, families with eleven, twelve children,
one of the poorest parts of town; a part of town where you see marginality
for what it is, where you see hunger because, it’s weird to say it in 1983,
but out there there are still people who have to beg for money to eat, you
understand? People who may have three or four children in a mental
hospital, a drug addict, absurd, I mean. And we are trying to get these
people to work with us, to write for our paper… My father, he works in a
factory, at Polymer [chemical plant]. He’s about to retire on seniority;
because he’s almost lost his hearing, had an ulcer operation; he caught
hepatitis and it had consequences on his liver; plus, his eyes aren’t any good
anymore because he worked standing in front of the ovens and beside
losing his hearing his eyes also got hurt, I don’t know what the fuck is the
matter with them. He had an operation—oh, and on top of that he has a
slipped disc, too. Now I wear a leather jacket with safety pins stuck on it,
270 A. PORTELLI
and my father, an old Communist, goes berserk because he can’t under-

stand the choices I’m making, why I dress that way. His friends talk, and he
feels wounded in his honor because he has a son who he thinks is out of his
mind. He checks out the people I hang out with, asks why I don’t go to the
discotheque on Sundays like all good kids do, why I don’t wear a tie, and
all. My mother, they’re at it all the time, because he takes it all out on my
mother. My father and my mother, it must be twenty years since they last
went out together.
“I don’t feel that much need to know what life in the factory is like; that
is, I only care up to a certain point. I prefer more current things, things that
concern me personally like, say, our problems, the problems of youth”
(Rita Cappanera). “The working class was always perceived as the revo-
lutionary class, wasn’t it? So the same could be said about us. That is, we
are in revolution against our parents to keep anyone from taking hegemony
over us” (Rosanna Gabrielli). “I can hardly talk on an equal basis with my
father, let alone my mother, about the things I am studying. But this is all
right; it isn’t this what binds me to them. I can’t talk to them about
structuralism, but it doesn’t bother me. If anything, the conflict is over
bigger things: personal freedom, political choices” (Donatella Montini).
Loretta Calabrini. I have a close connection to my family’s social back-

ground, especially to its rural origins. So there was never a conflict on basic
values. There was a conflict on my identity as a woman; yes, it’s been a
head-on collision, and is still going on. The difference is this: I am going to
school, I have an education. And my folks, they only went to the fifth grade.
I can feel their respect for this difference of mine; but it isn’t about class, that
is not a tie I want to break. To me culture is a weapon of social redemption,
from their material conditions and mine. Yet, in terms of everyday experi-
ences—my contacts, my horizons are, not necessarily broader, but different.
Perhaps, it is normal for children to be different from their parents.
Aldo Galeazzi. All right, I was born in Sant’Agnese; and we lived there
until I got married. Then, I built this little shack of a house, with pick and
shovel we built it. Come the bombardment, we rebuilt it again. And now
our children say, “Well, what kind of house did you build? Dad, you
worked so hard, you worked and worked, and what kind of house did you
build? I tell them, “Damn you, you’re doing me like Khrushchev did to
Stalin! Like Khrushchev to Stalin. If we hadn’t built this house, they
wouldn’t have anything. Instead, you’ve been living rent free all these
years. So: like Khrushev did to Stalin. You did the same.
5 END OF AN ERA: A WALK WITH MEMORY

In 1984 the government, led by prime minister Bettino Craxi, announced
the abolition of the automatic cost of living adjustment clause. They
claimed that this would keep inflation down and lower unemployment.
The Communist Party and the left-wing unions opposed it, seeing it as
only a way of cutting wages. Enrico Berlinguer, the charismatic
Communist secretary, called a referendum, which was lost. This defeat
marked the beginning of the end for the Communist movement and all it
represented, a few years before the fall of the Berlin wall.
Before the referendum, on March 23, 1984, the rank-and-file factory
councils called for a national demonstration in Rome against the abolition of
the cost of living adjustment clause. Seven hundred thousand people marched.
At least three thousand came from Terni, proudly displaying Party symbols,
excited at making a radical stand after years of compromises and uneasy alli-
ances. I did some interviews, only getting vague generalities and the Party line.
Then, I noticed three elderly ladies, marching arm in arm in the crowd.
“Tell me, dear. You want to interview me? Tell me, honey. You want to
record me? Tell the government that we poor retirees ought to be treated
better, not left to starve to death.” Her name is Maddalena, she is 60 years
old, she went to work at Centurini’s in 1938—“when they made jute out
of broom stalks,” I say. “Bravo! With broom stalks. Ten, twelve years; then
I got married, I raised my own family and… I went back in 1952, three or
four more years. Back before the war, if you stopped a moment to warm
your hands, they’d dock you, the militia, the Fascist militia did; today
instead there’s freedom for the workers, well, things are a little better. But
we’ve been in all the demonstrations, to help one another, because we are
working women, and we are still here to support those that come after us.”
Portelli. Have you been in the Party long?

Maddalena. Before I was born! Yes indeed, before I was born. Ah, we
took some beatings, didn’t we—let’s not talk about it, for goodness’ sake.
Go interview someone else, darling, it’s such an ugly life that we lived. Tell
him, Marisa, do. Her uncle, they undressed him naked; they knifed him…
back in the time of the Fascists.
272 A. PORTELLI
Marisa. It was the Disperata squad from Perugia. My father jumped off the
walls of Collescipoli when the Fascists were after him to make him drink
castor oil. Now let’s hope for something better for those that are being
born and those who will be born in the future.
Portelli. Do you have children?
Marisa. One, married, she’s a head nurse in the hospital. She has her own
family, plus I have a wee granddaughter… Anyway, she still believes in the same
ideal as her mother. Right or wrong, I was born with it, and with it I’ll die.
The rivers of memory are flowing freely now; it is as though the whole
story of this book and the people in it, memories that will fade from public
discourse after this day and the defeat of this struggle, were being rehearsed
as they talked to each other, rather than to me, and we made our way down
Via Merulana with slogans and drums sounding in the background.
Maddalena. They had running hot water, to soften the hemp; I put my
hands in it to warm them a little, because I was working in weaving and if
you didn’t wean out those little leaves and curls from the hemp the wire
would break and they had to stop the looms. I’m warming my hands, the
Fascist police sees me, they fined me two lire, which you were only making
four a day, plus a two-day suspension. This they did to me, yes, to me. To
me, and to many others, poor women, and us walking all the way to work,
in freezing cold, for four lire a day. If you stepped a bit out of line, you got
a fine and suspension… And my parents? My father, back in 1921, I wasn’t
born yet, he worked at the steel mill. He refused to take the Fascist party
card, and they fired him. After that, no person loved us, because my father
taught us not to bend our backs before those people. Hunger, you could
hit it with a stick, and nobody would give him work, even though dad was
a great pruner of trees. After we grew up, right when things were getting a
little better, the war came, we went back to square one again.
Portelli. Did you marry after the war?
Maddalena. In 1944. Quite a wedding—a plate of pancakes, that was all
we had. At home. Could you marry in white, when you didn’t even have
shoes? The war was still on; I was a child. Now it’s all gone. Far as I’m
concerned, we ought to never even think about it. Never go back.
At the intersection with Viale Manzoni, Marisa starts the Centurini

song: “You see us on Sundays /when we’re all got up /you’d think we’re
ladies /we sure look chic.” Diana, the third member of the group, joins in
with the company’s praise song: “Centurini is a word /that a young
woman knows /children and old folks, too /it’s a word they all know.”
“What about the one about Grüber’s?” I ask; and Diana: “Grüber’s with
parasol, Centurini’s with patches on their britches, the Arsenal with a
walking stick. And the steel mills with their balls in the air.” Maddalena:
“Neat, ain’t it? Because at Grüber’s they were elegant, they were skilled; at
Centurini’s, you work the jute, they were destitute.” Meanwhile, Diana has
moved on to Cantamaggio songs: “As you go around Terni /you see so
much /you hear so much /you feel like crying /but you laugh about it /
and start to sing.” Marisa recalls Furio Miselli’s masterpiece: “it’s sighs and
pains /if you must live on love./To afford getting a wife nowadays /you
need to set up a joint venture.” Diana evokes the famous verse on the Corso
Tacito dandies: “They’re such big chunks of baloney /that Pazzaglia wants
to hang them up.”
Now we are climbing toward our destination, Piazza San Giovanni.
A group of women beckon me, I must record one of them. Her name is
Vittoria Terzaroli, she was a local secretary at Villaggio Italia. She was born in
1907. “The year of the lockout,” I say. “The lockout, indeed. I was born
when the lockout was on. One of my brothers was sent away, because they
took the children and sent them to Piombino.27 I instead lived through
World War One, 1915–1918; I went to all the bread lines, I was eight, I’d get
up at one thirty a.m. and went to queue up for bread. Because my mother, to
help the family, was taking in boarders, I had to take care of that.”
Portelli. You remember Fascism of course.

Vittoria Terzaroli. Don’t I? My husband, he had to run away from Spoleto
because he was a subversive. Afterward, we always lived at Quartiere Italia,
we always lived as Communists. I joined in 1944; he seceded from the
Socialists [in 1921], he was one of the Party’s founders in Spoleto. [We
married] in 1930; 33 years I lived with him, then he died. He was a steel
worker; they fired him with the two thousand. I worked as a seamstress.
Portelli. Do you remember women’s fashions back then?
Vittoria Terzaroli. Very pretty. In fact today you can see that the fashions
of the 1930s are coming back. Yet, life was different. Your parents kept you
in check, and you had to make do with one dress. If you wore it on Sunday,
you couldn’t wear it on weekdays.
274 A. PORTELLI
Portelli. I remember the story in the paper, the girl who….

Vittoria Terzaroli. Who bobbed her hair. I mean, it was a scandal.28 I
myself only bobbed my hair when I went on honeymoon. Because my dad,
if I cut my hair—forget it! Well, life was different. But how many struggles
did we go through? Many, many—for the Party. We’d go door to door,
some gave us flour, another gave us pasta, we fed the workers who were on
the reverse strike, over at hospital.29 We sold the Party press, l’Unità, Noi
donne, we raised a bit of money to organize Party festivals. Because the
Party told us: Jesus Christ says help yourself and I will help you. So it is only
right that we try to get a better life. It’s the others, those who are against
us, who claim that we eat children. It’s the opposite; we love them, our
children. How we love them.
Portelli. Were you involved in the referendums on divorce, on abortion?
Vittoria Terzaroli. Of course! Look, I myself am against abortion; because
once children are created, they must be born. But they [the rich] don’t. So
the ones who can afford it, go abroad; and the poor have to die. So, no.
Now it’s legal. If you want to do it, do it; if you don’t, don’t.
“My mother died from it, back when only the rich could afford it,”
Diana had said a few minutes earlier. “Was it better when the so-called
gentlefolks made children and left them on church doorsteps in Narni?”
(Maddalena). I asked them if they are religious. “No,” says Diana, “If we
want to believe in something, let’s. But He ought to do things right. Each
is religious in his own way. You ought to ask poor Christ, who was han-
ged.” And the aptly named Maddalena brings it all home with the supreme
uchronia30—how different history would have been if God had been a
working-class woman: “If I’d been God, if I’d been the father, I wouldn’t
have let him die like that, hanging on that cross.”
NOTES
1. Il Messaggero, January 27, April 22 and 24, 1960.
3. “Partito, città e fabbrica,” in I comunisti umbri. Scritti e documenti, 1944–
1970, Perugia, p. 481.
4. Paolo Portoghesi, “Quando l’architettura è poesia,” La Repubblica,
November 14, 1984.
5. Oreste Scalzone was a national leader of the radical left group Potere
Operaio [Workers’ Power]. He was charged with complicity with the
terrorist Red Brigades, and escaped to political asylum in France. He was

later acquitted.
6. “Non è obbligo ma buona educazione \ fare una consumazione.”
7. Renato Covino, “Il PCI negli anni settanta. La composizione dei gruppi
dirigenti umbri,” Segno critico, I, March–July, 1979, pp. 19–54; Ibid.,
“Dopo il congresso del PCI. Il partito in Umbria,” Segno Critico, VIII–IX,
April–September, 1983, pp. 25–64.
8. A. Valli, “Dov‘è la presenza del Partito nelle fabbriche?” Rinascita, 13
February, 1983.
9. G. Muratore, “Il nuovo Villaggio Matteotti a Terni: un’esperienza di
partecipazione,” Casabella, n. 421, January, 1977, pp. 11–13. The con-
troversy ended in compromise: the old village was not torn down, the
families who chose to stay were allowed to, while others moved into the
new spaces. Today, the old and the new village exist side by side, and the
new section is recognized as a successful urban experiment: “Terni,
Villaggio Matteotti: un quartiere come lezione di storia e di architettura,”
Arketipo Magazine, April 2013, http://www.umbria24.it/terni-villaggio-
matteotti-un-quartiere-come-lezione-di-storia-e-di-architettura/166084.
html, accessed February 7, 2016.
10. March 19, 1978. Moro was held prisoner for fifty-six days and killed on
May 9, 1978.
11. Il Manifesto, July 21, 1979.
12. Il Messaggero, March 10 and 23, June 12 and 16, October 15, November
18, December 23, 1983; V. Palanca, “La geografia del disagio sociale in
Italia 1971–1981,” Politica ed economia, supplement to n. 9, September,
1983.
13. A reference to Giacomo Leopardi’s classic 1829 poem, “Le ricordanze”
[Remembrances].
14. A politically apathetic (but often angry) person who rejects all politics
because he believes that all politicians are corrupt and there are no differ-
ences among them: from the Partito dell’Uomo Qualunque [The Party of
the Ordinary Man], a short-lived, self-proclaimed, non-ideological but
basically right-wing political organization founded in 1944.
15. Autonomia Operaia [Workers’ Autonomy] was a loose galaxy of radical
groups that flourished in the late 1970s, after the demise of the earlier
extra-parliamentary Left organizations.
16. An unused public building in the center of town, which was occupied by a
number of independent radical groups and individuals and run for a while
as an autonomous cultural center.
18. Letter dated February 17, 1983; from the Cooperativa La Strada archive.
19. The rowdiest and most extreme football fans.
276 A. PORTELLI
20. “Organizzazione della cultura e classe operaia a Terni”; Il Messaggero,

January 23, 1983.
21. Il Messaggero, October 10, 1977; Albino Cimini, Cose turche. 4123 giorni
nelle carceri di Dogubeyazit, Agri, Izmir, Rome, Stampa Alternativa, 1999.
22. The story is told in a special issue of the movement’s publication, La
Breccia, March, 1979.
23. Il Messaggero, November 15, 21, 1979.
24. Sergio Secci, from a leading Communist family in Terni, an art student at
the University of Bologna, was killed by the Fascist bomb that massacred
eighty-five people and wounded over two hundred at the Bologna central
railway station, on August 2, 1980. I had met him a few weeks before and
we had made an appointment for an interview when he came home in
September. See http://www.iitaly.org/15203/massacre-bologna-30-
years-later, accessed July 3, 2016.
25. Il Messaggero, March 1, 6, 1984.
26. Paolo Marconi, “Ambiguità sociale e droga a Terni,” Segno Critico, VI–
VII, November–December, 1981, pp. 108–115.
27. A steel town in Tuscany on the Tyrrhenian coast.
28. Her name was Valentina Parisella: see Chapter 6, Sect. 4.
29. In a reverse strike, unemployed workers do unpaid labor to do works of
public utility, hoping to get jobs afterwards.
30. On Uchronia, see my “Uchronic dreams: working-class memory and
possible worlds,” in Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson, eds., The Myths
We Live By, London and New York, Routledge, 143–160.
PART II
Specialty Steel
CHAPTER 12
David and Goliath: The Town,

the Factory, and the Strike
1 JANUARY 29, 2004
Nevio Brunori. It was the beginning of the end. That day, I remember, I
was coming out of the night shift, around six a.m., and I start hearing talk,
rumors, that something big was being discussed at the Garden Hotel in
Terni, so let’s all go to the Garden Hotel. It’s our future that’s at stake after
all, isn’t it?
“Luciano Berni”. We heard that they were going to close the magnetic steel
division–we were already worried, news came and went, we oscillated from
euphoria to dejection—I mean, we had had the first cuts in production, a cut
of 120,000 tons of non-grain-oriented steel, a lower quality product, while
they promised that Terni would become the hub for better quality [specialty
steel]. We were still making 90,000 tons of magnetic steel, which was
something to go on. Until this January 29 meeting at the Garden Hotel with
the management of the ThyssenKrupp multinational. In so many words,
they said that Terni is unprofitable, and announced that on February 9 the
board would sanction the closure of Terni as an industrial center.
In 2004, the Terni steelworks was the property of the German multina-
tional ThyssenKrupp and was renamed TK-AST (ThyssenKrupp Acciai
Speciali Terni). Since the 1960s the plant had become a white elephant of
sorts: too big to close, and yet not profitable enough to run. Some

280 A. PORTELLI
technological improvements were made, while the more profitable sectors

were parceled out and privatized. Until the mid-1990s, however, the core
of the enterprise remained under state control as part of the state steel
conglomerate, Finsider.
Enrico Gibellieri. Finsider was already in a critical state in the mid-1970s.

After the war, and through the 1950 and 1960s, the management of
state-controlled steel industries had been highly qualified and relatively
independent of political power. Gradually, however, the dominant political
parties took over the highest managerial roles, and policy was increasingly
based on political considerations, removed from correct industrial practices
and dependent on power games and clientele. This took the company to the
verge of bankruptcy. On the one side, you had the technical cadre, middle
management, and the workers whose professionalism and productivity were
among the highest in Europe; on the other side, you had those who
squandered the fruits of all this labor and the wealth it produced.
“I never liked, and tried to oppose as firmly I could, the idea of Terni
and state-participated firms as a big cow to be milked; even among the
workers, some were saying, ‘Well, who cares, let’s just drift along, it isn’t
your property anyway” (Battista Garibaldi). “In the early 1990s, our steel
industries were on the verge of bankruptcy for the third time. So, bypassing
European rules on state aid, the Italian government was allowed to cover
the debts in exchange for privatizations, plant closures, cuts in production”
(Enrico Gibellieri). In 1994 AST was sold for 621 million euros to a joint
venture that included a 50% share of the German company Krupp and the
rest to a group of Italian steel entrepreneurs (the package also included a
steel plant in Turin). In 1999 Krupp merged with Thyssen to form the steel
giant ThyssenKrupp (TK). TK bought up the shares of its Italian partners
and the new company, ThyssenKrupp Acciai Speciali Terni became the sole
property of the German conglomerate. TK decided to concentrate all the
magnetic steel production and marketing from all its plants into a new
company called ThyssenKrupp Electrical Steel (TKES).
“It was a difficult time of transition. I always told the workers that, while
we couldn’t know what would actually happen, yet things couldn’t remain as
they were. We couldn’t accept that people who worked eight hours a day in
difficult working conditions were pointed out as a burden on the economy
and on taxpayers. The priority was to retrieve our dignity as producers”
(Enrico Gibellieri). “Though I hate to admit it, I saw the Germans as a
12 DAVID AND GOLIATH: THE TOWN, THE FACTORY, AND THE STRIKE 281
managerial class that tried to get things done in a serious, industrial way”
(Battista Garibaldi).
Changes in labor relations were gradual but not traumatic: “They did
things which by the letter of the contract they were allowed to do, but that
had always been dealt with more loosely in the past” (Claudio Cipolla). An
uneasy social peace took hold. Terni’s mayor Paolo Raffaelli would boast
later that “Terni’s working class, among Italy’s most responsible and
hard-working, struck for no more than a few dozens hours” in ten years.
“There was conflict, but it was sort of smoothed down, people were afraid
of sticking their necks out”: most of the workers were no longer protected
by the stable, lifetime contracts of the old Terni, but were hired under
temporary contracts and “were afraid of retaliations” if they stepped out of
line (“Luciano Berni”).
“In 1994, the Germans dictated the rules but there were no German
managers on the site; after 1999, they brought in a German manager, in
2002 the last Italian CEO was removed, and his place was taken by [Harald]
Espenhanh” (Pietro Marcelli). “The Germans bought Terni in 1994
because Terni was the cutting-edge site for specialty steels. They knew that
they were laying hands on a gold mine. Since 1994 they always made profits,
there was not a year where they didn’t make money” (Attilio Romanelli).
What made Terni desirable was, on the one hand, the lower cost of energy
(as compensation for the loss of the electrical sector in 1960, Terni had been
granted a discount on the price of electricity, valid for fifty years, until 2010)
and, on the other hand, the acquisition of advanced technologies that had
been developed by Terni researchers and engineers, such as the prized OGH
patent, which permits the production of grain-oriented steel of better quality
at lower cost. “In all of Europe, there were three plants that made magnetic
steel: in Terni, in Germany, and in France. The OGH patent was developed
in Terni; when they bought the plant, they also bought the patent. We tested
it, we fine-tuned it, we developed it, and in the end they’re the ones who
exploited it” (Claudio Cipolla).
ThyssenKrupp did invest in research and technological innovation,
“they didn’t just squeeze the lemon” (Enrico Gibellieri). “If you ask me
what I think of the 1994 privatization, it’s still positive, because it allowed
this factory to live. What is negative is that, instead of giving way to the
delirium of privatization at all costs, the State ought to have retained some
forms of control, some say-so on strategic productions—because Terni’s
magnetic steel represented 60% of the national market, and stainless rep-
resented 40%” (Attilio Romanelli).
282 A. PORTELLI
In a globalizing economy, privatization is not just a matter of efficiency

and economy, but also of power, of citizenship, of sovereignty.
Multinational ownership (as well as European community regulations) limit
severely the State’s possibility of carrying out some kind of economic policy
and the citizens’ power to influence matters that affect their own lives.
A production that was crucial not only for the market but also for the lives of
thousands of citizens and of a whole region was placed entirely in the hands
of a multinational that was free to choose to promote and expand it or to cut
it down or shut it according its own industrial strategies and decisions made
in faraway places, to which the citizens of Terni were all but irrelevant.
After it concentrated all its electrical steel sites into ThyssenKrupp
Electrical Steel (TKES), the company decided to move the production of
non-grain-oriented steel to Germany and France. “It was a rational move
because these kinds of steel can be produced at lower costs in integrated
steel plants. In fact, when the decision was announced, nobody in Terni
said anything. Also because TKES announced that it would make Terni the
excellence site of production for the more sophisticated grain-oriented
steel” (Enrico Gibellieri).
Nevio Brunori. In 2002 they created the Electrical Steel society, and we
were supposed to become the cutting edge place for grain-oriented steel.
They took away some of the productions, the non-grain-oriented steel; and
we were supposed to reach a production of 100–120,000 tons of
grain-oriented steel. The pact was signed, by regional union secretaries and
coordinators. I turned to another delegate and said: I’m not signing. They
went ahead and signed, too. So, after we signed, they took us down to
eighty tons, then sixty, then they talked of 45,000, until word came that
they were closing us altogether.
“There was a crisis in the magnetic steel market, so ThyssenKrupp’s

strategy changed. They decided that one of their three magnetic steel
plants ought to close; they evaluated costs or whatever, and decided to
close Terni” (Faliero Chiappini). “When they saw this market loss, they
panicked. They stopped production in a country that is one of the highest
users of the product. A year after they stopped production in Terni, a
company report admitted that since they closed Terni they could no longer
supply the market. They had meant to rationalize but it was done in the
worst possible moment and way, both because of the prices they had to pay
when the struggle in Terni shut down production, and because they found
themselves unable to meet the market’s demands” (Enrico Gibellieri).

“The whole operation was carried out in a savage manner, we went from
600 employees [at the magnetic steel division] to 350, and most of them
were trainees, temporary workers, so they cut a lot of labor costs and they
thought this would save an activity that had an excellence of its own.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way” (Gianfranco Fattorini).
When the closure was announced the magnetic steel division employed
450 workers, mostly young; as many jobs were in jeopardy in spin-off
enterprises. Many feared that this was only the beginning, and after the
magnetic steel division the whole factory, the heart of the town, was slated
for closure. “We felt we were the object of unwarranted injustice. First,
because you are losing your job; second, because you wonder: why are they
doing this to us?” (“Luciano Berni”). “Cheating is supposed to be an
Italian character trait,” said Mayor Paolo Raffaelli at a rally. “Instead, it was
ThyssenKrupp that played with a rigged deck. They destroyed a relation-
ship of trust. Do you remember, you gentlemen of Essen and Duisburg,
when one of your most important representatives climbed the stairs to this
historic City Hall, under the frescoed ceilings you admired so much, and
was greeted warmly as a trusted friend? We made him an honorary citizen.
For ten years we met in this building and signed pacts, and for ten years
you kept them. We still recall your words of appreciation for the work we
were doing. We always kept our word; we supported your choices,
encouraged the investment you made with the huge profits you made. In
the space of a few days, you destroyed all this, with a one-sided decision I
still fail to understand and you still fail to explain.”
2 THE NIGHT OF THE FLYING CAKES

“The news of the layoffs reached the factory. Cell phones ringing, text
messages. Some clench their fists, others bite their lips. The foremen: ‘All
right, you guys: strike! We stop here. Total stop of production. No trucks
either in or out.’ Some go get spray paint to make banners. Others, dozens,
march toward the hotel ‘where the Germans are.’”1
Lucia Rossi. I had never had to deal with a multinational like

ThyssenKrupp. The multinational does not discuss, does not negotiate; it
just announces decisions already taken. So, all the steel workers were
284 A. PORTELLI
milling outside. We told them what the [company’s] intentions were, and
the workers broke into the room, and there was a melee because the
workers started tossing whatever they could lay hands on. There was
pastry, cakes, on the table, and they began to throw them every which way,
I still remember [Ada] Girolamini, the regional secretary for economic
development, with custard all over her hair.
Mayor Paolo Raffaelli recalled: “When the AST workers broke into the
room where we were discussing with the ThyssenKrupp management, I
and the union officials shielded them with our bodies, and I turned to CEO
Wolfgang Trommer and told him, you are pushing us back half a century,
when this town was wounded by two thousand layoffs at the steelworks.
That’s the year I was born.” History seemed to be repeating itself. Many
things had changed since 1953, but many had stayed the same. In 1953
certain workers ambushed and attacked members of management thought
to be responsible for the loss of their jobs; now, “we went down there,
broke down the Garden Hotel gate, we marched in, I too threw a few
cakes, pastries flew, the buffet sandwiches” (Emanuele Albi).
“Luciano Berni”. There was this immediate, unexpected reaction: breaking

into the hotel, a real manhunt, not very rational perhaps but you see, there
you had fifty year old men whose first reaction when the news arrived was
tears, and then—“let’s go, we can’t let these people lay waste to the history,
the life of a thousand people.”
Nevio Brunori. What struck me was the look on Trommer’s face. He was
standing in the back of the room, a hand on the table, turned to stone. He
must have been speaking, with his hand on the table; when this bunch of
workers broke in he remained like that, he looked at us but had no
expression, like stone. I don’t know if he was defying us or was afraid, all I
know is that things began to fly, because they had set a small buffet, and
cakes, pies began to fly, a telephone flew.
Alberto Galluzzi. What I had read in books and newspapers for years,
about the struggles of the working class, I lived it when we broke in at
Garden. It was a thrill, a shot of adrenaline. When we got there, we found
two cops at the door, and when they saw us they dropped everything and
ran. When the door fell down I was beyond myself, I let the crowd carry
me up the stairs, I remember the waitresses running scared. The police kept
telling us, take it easy, calm, calm, where are you going? And then the
breakthrough into this room where all these people in jackets and ties were
discussing our future. I saw the terror on their faces, they didn’t know what
was coming next.
All around town, “Merchants pulled down their shutters. ‘They are
workers like us. They’re fighting for their jobs. They are right.’ Police line
up. Some workers are more nervous than others. The hotel door collapses
into a carpet of glass shards. A worker’s hand is bleeding. The police lower
the visors of their helmets. Four German executives hear the shouts, lock
themselves in the bathroom. Then they come out and scream at a police
official: ‘Get us out of here, this minute, understand?’” Even in this situ-
ation, they are still giving orders.2
Lucia Rossi. Everybody said that the labor movement was over, that
industry and the working class were finished and should be replaced by
alternative ideas of development—and here instead you had this very
tangible reality: a working class that is different, younger, than the one that
created the identity of this territory; and yet here is this new working class,
standing up to defend the factory, standing up to the police. It was a scene
that conveyed deep identity, deep political meanings. You could see these
cops, all lined up, and afraid, because they knew that if they stepped over
the line, we were all there: the company was there, but so were we.
“Other workers are barricading the main roads into town. Citizens
applaud from the windows.”3 “As for me, I was so excited my eyes lit up”
(Marco Allegretti). “Your eyes lit up because you saw that everybody was
totally involved, institutions and all, and it was beautiful” (Marco Bartoli).
“Luciano Berni”. So the thing we said was: occupy the road. The first,
immediate thing: we were next to the expressway—if we hadn’t done that,
no one would have noticed us, the whole affair would have been confined
to the local news, no national media would talk about it. So we realized
that we had to step up the struggle, because we knew that if it remained
only a local matter of Terni we would have no impact on the outcome. So
we did the most immediate thing, what we had at hand: we blocked the
expressway. And it all followed from that.
286 A. PORTELLI
3 STEEL AND PAPIER MÂCHÉ

“Visitors who reach Terni by the railroad are greeted by a huge twelve-ton
press, dismantled after half a century of service, and reassembled in front of
the station.” The press is the first object that met the reporters who flocked
to Terni to cover the steel strike: “a metallic, East-Europeanish monument
to steel labor: an icon.”4
Much has changed, in the economy, in the composition of the popu-
lation, in the mentality; yet, “In Terni the steelworks are the town” (Nevio
Brunori). “I mean, for those who never worked in there—like women,
unless they’re cleaners—this thing is always there, you hover around it, you
don’t know what they do inside, what it’s like, it’s this huge thing that’s
always been there…like, say, the Coliseum in Rome, which is there but you
never go see it” (Keji Adumno). Take a walk around Terni, and today it
looks like any other mid-size town. But sometimes you only need to stop
and chat a while with the teenagers who hang out on Corso Tacito to find
out that they all still have at least one relative who works or has worked in
the steel mill, or a mother, a grandmother, an aunt who worked in the old
Centurini textile mill. In 1990, when the student movement occupied the
vocational school, a student explained to me that he was taking part in the
occupation because in this way he felt as if he were carrying on the history
of his steel worker father and grandfather.
And yet. I talk to a young cultural worker in Piazza del Popolo. “Terni
can’t be the town of the steelworks and the Cantamaggio” (Fabrizio
Terranova). It’s an ambivalent comment that I’ve heard before around
town.
It may mean an opposition: the coexistence of the factory and the ritual
—the iron press and the decked floats—is a paradox of sorts, because
originally Cantamaggio was revived as a semi-invented tradition in oppo-
sition to the coming of industrial culture. But the factory–Cantamaggio
dyad may also be (and in Terranova’s comment I think it is) a continuum.
In time, modernity prevailed and appropriated the anti-industrial ritual: the
floats now start from the steelworks’ gates and reach the center of town, as
if to confirm each time that the town, the factory, and the workers are one.
Valentino Paparelli, an anthropologist who, as director of Terni’s tourist
board, was in charge of coordinating the Cantamaggio, noted: “The
technical and artistic level of the Cantamaggio floats would be unthinkable
if it weren’t based on the technical skills that their builders acquired in the
factory. These animated papier mâché machines you see on parade on the
night of April 30, are all made of welded pieces of rebar inside. The steel
workers helped the maggiaioli not only with the welding of the pieces, but
also with the technical design of the float.” It’s a good metaphor: in Terni,
underneath everything, holding everything together, still stand the steel of
the factory and the culture of its workers.
On the other hand, it may be a continuum because in the postindustrial
vision of the virtual world, both folklore and steel are relics of a past that
must be left behind. As early as the late 1970s, Communist Party confer-
ences discussed the need for Terni to emancipate from the burden of the
factory and its working class, and move forward toward “the advanced
service sector”: “Yes, in Terni there has always been this love-hate attitude
toward the factory, because they say it has blocked other roads to devel-
opment. I don’t agree” (Emanuele Albi).
Maurizio Fioretti. Anyway, Terni must change, it can no longer depend on

the steelworks. For one thing, I hate ThyssenKrupp and all multinationals;
it disturbs me that they always decide everybody’s destiny. Plus, I think the
town must change, it must become something else, it can’t be stuck forever
in working-class monoculture.
Donatella Montini. Terni has this sort of boulder that weighs it down, and
is not changing much. Nothing else can start up. Terni is still paying for
this inextricable bind to a factory that used to have an ethical, economic,
political identity of its own. But this, I think, is the past. Nostalgia is a
beautiful thing, but it paralyzes us, see? So also the company, also the
factory, must take new directions, revamp in new forms. Whereas if it is
experienced, narrated and explained in terms that were appropriate to
other times, I think this is an obsolete vision.
In 2005, the paper of Confindustria, the Italian Management
Association, commented: “In 1990 three out of four families lived thanks to
the manufacturing system; today, only one. Terni has already taken the road
to diversification, focusing on research, on the University, on enterprises
with higher technological content, less environmental impact and lower
energy consumption.”5 Yet, the factory was still crucial: in 2008, out of a
population of 100,000, at least 3,500 were employed in the steelworks;
2,700 worked for contractors that served the steelworks exclusively; and
7,900 were employed by firms that supplied them with goods and services.6
288 A. PORTELLI
The idea that nothing can start because the steelworks take up all the
space is debatable. In the factory’s heyday, Terni had Bosco, Centurini,
Papigno, Polymer, Nera Montoro, Alterocca, Viparo, Fucat (a chocolate
factory). As the steelworks declined, all this also went.
Indeed, when Terni chose to aim for culture as the new development
sector, it turned out that many of the new cultural spaces were former
industrial sites, as if the growth of culture and the dismissal of industry were
part of the same process. The old SIRI, one of Terni’s most ancient
industrial sites, became a center for experimental theater; the former Bosco
mechanical works a multimedia center; the Papigno chemical plant was
bought by film star Roberto Benigni, who used it as the location for Life is
Beautiful and Pinocchio. But then Benigni gets rid of Papigno (“he’s gone
and has left us nothing,” Marco Coppoli), the many excellent cultural
structures remain underused: Terni has neither the intellectual and artistic
cadre, nor the audience, adequate to its cultural infrastructure.
Even the University, a secondary campus of the University of Perugia,
fails to fully connect with the life of the town; the majority of its faculty is
made of commuters from Perugia or from Rome. Yet, the campus does
create spaces for new directions in research and cultural work, and some of
the old technical knowledge and work ethic of the working class seep into
the new professionalism: “I did get a job as a video artist thanks to the
training I received in the university,” says Greca Campus, a young film-
maker whose most important work to date is a documentary on the 2014
Terni steel strike.7 The university also brings new faces and people to
Terni: “There are many foreign students of medicine, economics, political
sciences: Israelis, Iranians, many Africans. There’s a big Albanian com-
munity; they spend all their time studying in the library, maybe they take a
couple of courses in Terni but when they want to party they go back to
Perugia” (Greca Campus).
The university’s most important contributions are in the fields of
medicine and technology, on nanotechnologies and space physics, and on
new materials and processes for steel in connection with CSM (Centro
Sviluppo Materiali [Center for Materials Innovation]), the AST-owned,
advanced research center. Terni, however, “never managed to establish an
integrated chain of production, where invention, production, and utiliza-
tion are part of one process” (Lucia Rossi). This is due in part to the small
size of many local enterprises, and in part to the lack of vision of an
entrepreneurial class inured to subordination and dependency. “We have
the bourgeois, but we don’t have a bourgeoisie. Even the owner of a firm
that works for the steelworks lacks the cultural traits of an entrepreneur
who invests, who takes risks. Soon as he reaches a certain sales volume, a
second home, a big car, and all—I wonder if this is because we’ve always
been a community of employees, of workers, we never developed an
entrepreneurial instinct” (Emanuele Salvati).
“It’s a livable, very livable town, the only problem is that it flattens
everything” (Claudio Aureli). The décor of the town improves, with new
or newly restored buildings, stores that would look good anywhere. The
architectural “poetry” that Mario Ridolfi brought to the reconstruction of
Terni8 was a severe, rational, straight kind of poetry. In continuity with the
centrality of work in the town’s history, and in harmony with what is left of
medieval and Renaissance Terni, modern Terni has the color of natural
stone, rust-red lines that can be elegant and often stern but hardly ever
colorful and lively. The sculptures that stand in several squares and cross-
roads are metallic homages to the symbols of industrial memory.
Maurizio Fioretti. What we still lack is beauty, the culture of beauty. ten
years ago they said this was an ugly town, the Italian Manchester, all
hangars and warehouses…We liked it, we who were part of it, because you
felt there was a certain authenticity in the town; on a human level, it’s a
sincere town. Now, however, they say it’s beautiful. It lacks color and it
lacks imagination, I think. Working-class culture—which I call my own, all
of it—was lacking on the side of imagination, of beauty.
Beer joints, clubs and pubs sprout all over, and nourish a degree of
youth culture and night life. “I used to hang out, always with the same
group of friends, we looked for fun; in the end, look, Terni, there isn’t
much you can do for fun, everything and nothing, the same old things”
(Daniele Tacconelli). “Always the same clubs, Terni is a town that is…
immutable, an eternal city in the sense of stagnancy, I think kind of like
Dubliners…a city of paralysis, because it’s always the same crowd. For
twenty years, I remember the same people in the same clubs wearing the
same clothes, with the same glass in their hand on the club’s door. Since
high school. Maybe now they’re married, have children, but they still do
the same nonsense” (Keji Adumno).
Sergio Cardinali. They talk about a modern city, a city full of innovation,
but I see a town that is folded upon itself, a town poor in intelligence, poor
economically, poor in the ability to change, to take chances, to think of the
290 A. PORTELLI
future. So it is bound to remain a second-class town, with an aging pop-

ulation where the young have to go away to find work.
Maurizio Fioretti. Workers in the last few years…it’s as if they didn’t exist
anymore, if all there was was consumers, see? That is, those who work and
produce are ignored and despised, even as a public image. I’m an electri-
cian, sometimes I wear dirty work clothes; you ought to see how people
look at you, especially downtown, they think you’re a thief, because you’re
dressed as a worker. The perception that has been created in these last few
years, especially through the manipulation of the media, is that if you wear
jacket and tie you are a good person, that is, a good consumer—I can’t find
the right words, but you know what I mean.
Marco Coppoli. Terni has become a town of hypermarkets and banks.

Once upon a time the factory was the center, now for the last 20 years
they’ve been talking about closing the steel factory, so it is bound to lose its
centrality, but there is no alternative in sight. We have no idea what its
identity will be, it’s become a town of merchants who lord it over every-
thing. But there is no identity. They used to talk of ternitudine
[Terni-ness]. Now, I couldn’t tell what Terni is about, anymore.
“After years of nonsense on the prevalence of the service sector and the
waning of the steel age,” writes journalist Mario Pirani, “we are faced with
some amazing data”: the surplus generated by the manufacturing sector in
Italy’s balance of trade, Italy’s position at the head of Europe’s industrial
added value.9 Meanwhile, a country like India, which is not ashamed of
making steel (while yet developing a cutting-edge technological service
sector) buys steel factories in the United States and Britain. In 2016 there was
talk of the Indian conglomerate Tata Steel buying into ThyssenKrupp. How
this would affect the workers in Terni is still unknown.10
4 CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’
If you drive to Terni via the expressway that connects to the A1 turnpike at
Orte, you end up at a roundabout called Piazzale dell’Acciaio, Steel Plaza.
In the middle, stands a huge iron and steel crescent surmounted by cogs
and gear wheels—another “monument to rust” (Maurizio Fioretti). In the
late 1980s, someone wrote on it in still visible yellow paint: Benvenuti in
California [Welcome to California].
The graffiti’s American dream played ironically on the gap between

Terni’s utopia of modernity and its small-town reality: the intricate mesh of
junctions and viaducts and the broad boulevard on to which it opens
suggests “something that is out of proportion with the actuality of the
town” (Maurizio Fioretti). When the graffiti appeared young people were
beginning to distance themselves from their parents’ industrial culture, but
found little else to identify with. Hence the irony: “It’s a stroke of genius:
an aesthetic redemption of the monument, which to me seems obscene;
with this writing, at least [it means something]” (Greca Campus).
I looked up Martina Canali, one of Terni’s punk icons. I’ve known her
since the day she was born. She is one of those who did leave, so it was two
months before she was in town and I could talk to her.
Martina Canali. I spent some time in Barcelona [on the Erasmus pro-
gram in 2004] and stayed there until September 2007. Then, for love, I left
Spain; we’ve been traveling, across France, parts of Italy, and then from
Berlin down to the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, and back to Italy a
week ago. We just happen to be in Terni because Thursday or Friday we’re
leaving for three weeks in Albania and Kosovo, we’re going on a human-
itarian mission, with school children, in Tirana and then Kosovo.
“Yet,” I say, “you keep coming back.” And she, accentuating a Terni
intonation that years abroad have not scratched at all: “Ternitudine is
something you carry inside you. Terniness is like punk, something within.
Terni, you bad-mouth it, you say what a shame I had to be born in Terni,
of all places, OK? But if someone says a word against it—oh no, our Terni,
I can bad-mouth it but you can’t. Every time I come back, I think,
wonderful, I’m back in Terni, I kind of missed it—the next day I’m already
rarin’ to leave. But the first sensation is happiness.” The last time I had seen
her, she was standing with her inseparable dog in the middle of the square
on the day of the general strike. “I came back on purpose—of course, these
are the great cult moments that a ternana cannot miss—I mean, had I been
in Katmandu I wouldn’t have come, but if I can I come. It’s normal, it’s
your duty, to come back for this kind of thing.” Martina is the daughter of
Gianfranco Canali, the brilliant historian of Terni’s subversive tradition,
and the granddaughter of a worker fired in 1953—the third generation of
her family that I interview. Do these memories mean something to you? “It
means that I come back to Terni to demonstrate for the steelworks.”11
292 A. PORTELLI
This coming and going, like a rubber band that stretches but never
breaks, is a fitting image of the ambivalent relationship of belonging and
estrangement that many young people feel toward their city. “Ternitudine
is that you get used to being in Terni. Ternitudine is living the town,
despising it, hating it, but in the end the way you live here [you wouldn’t
live] anywhere else” (Alberto Galluzzi). “The ternani always have this urge
of fleeing from Terni but then something keeps bringing you back, it’s like
a magnet, you know? You may stay away a year or two but then you need
to come back. Ternitudine, that’s it” (Keji Adumno).
Maurizio Fioretti. We always come back. Terni is a good starting place, but
then you need to not stay here all the time. Ternitudine, it’s like a pathology,
like a virus, it means inertia, closing up…In a way, Terni has improved.
Certain meshes, certain networks of bigotry have faded, because we are
mixing with new faces, new ways of life, new kinds of food…Young people
who’ve been to the university have brought back to Terni a wealth of
knowledge, of different ways of looking at things. So many want to get things
done, they don’t want to work in the steel mill, and they are right. Honestly,
I’m optimistic, because I see all these people who travel, we have internet—in
a way, it’s as if the mountain basin around us was opening up a bit.
Martina Canali. I hated Terni because Terni wouldn’t let me be different.

So I had to leave. When I was a youngster and living in Terni I was active in
politics, with the youth league of the New Foundation Communist Party,
for years. But they were too set in their ways, with blinkers on, you
couldn’t step out of their line of thinking, so for me it was tough, I was
sixteen, fifteen—on Thursdays and Fridays we went to meetings, talked
politics, went over [party secretary Fausto] Bertinotti’s speeches, and then
played cards, which I don’t even know how to play… I spent time with
them, and then I started hanging out with all those who were considered
odd, crazy—who there aren’t that many of in Terni, because there were no
alternative places in a reality made of penny arcades, discotheques, and all
those spaces that are typical of a provincial town.
Whether a pathology or not, ternitudine is an implicit, almost subliminal

sense of belonging. Even youth culture turns out to be steeped in traits that
come straight from the town’s deep cultural history: the love of dialect (“I
had to lose my accent because I’m working in Rome and they made fun of
me because of my accent, but soon as I spend two days at home I pick it

up, my Terni spirit comes right back. Honestly, I like it. Ternano dialect is
friendly, is humorous—and yes, it’s a bit coarse, but a pretty kind of
coarse,” Keji Adumno); or food and sociability: when I asked Greca
Campus about places that make you feel like you’re really in Terni she
answered with a list of eateries, and explained: “I grew up with my
grandfather, I was very close to him, and he was an electrician in the steel
mill, and I saw him leave the house with bags of meat and they’d cook it at
work. So the work ethic was connected to a broad sense of conviviality.”
These days, her friends who work in the factory call her on her cell phone
and commission her to buy ice cream for the whole team and bring it to the
gates, “because they take turns and everyone is supposed to take something
to eat. It’s a fixed system. And they still do it.”
Paolo Patrizi, a leading youth figure of the 1960s in Terni, used to say
that the most important thing in Terni “is the railroad, the constant
coming and going between Terni and Rome.” Terni is good because it is
easy to leave (and to return), sort of like an empty center surrounded by
significant places. “A good thing about Terni is that it’s well connected, the
only good thing is that it takes you just about an hour to get to Rome, to
get to Perugia” (Stefano Marchetti). “You are close to everything, you want
to go to Rome you go to Rome; you want to go to the beach, in two and a
half hours you’re at Riccione, in three hours you’re in Florence or Perugia”
(Alberto Galluzzi). “What I appreciate most is that a twenty-minute drive
takes you to the countryside, lovely countryside, mountains, so you can
take a break and do it in a natural environment. Then I like it that it’s
manageable: I don’t have a car, I can walk anywhere, I only take a car to go
out of town” (Greca Campus). It’s as though Terni was never completely
citified, always retained a contact with nature and with its rural back-
ground. You can stand in Piazza del Popolo and still see the blue outline of
the mountain basin that surrounds, encloses, and protects the town. The
old working class was made up of hunters, who would get up at dawn after
a week of work in the factory and go hunting out of town. Nowadays
hunting is less fashionable, but there are other ways of stepping out of the
urban space: “We go to the Irish Pub” but also hiking, fishing, or
“swimming in the lakes around here, in the chilly waters at Narni” (Alberto
Galluzzi). Emanuele Salvati, a young steel worker, suggests that an addi-
tional economic resource might be a nature-oriented tourism, made of
country walks, excursions, visits to the Serra creek gorges, the Marmore
294 A. PORTELLI
waterfalls, the archeological site of Carsulae: “Of course Terni is not a

tourist place in itself, but its surroundings can be quite attractive.”
After I leave at the end of the interview, Emanuele Salvati says to a
friend, “too bad, I forgot to tell him about my vegetable garden.” This is
another trait of traditional culture that is handed down to new generations.
“My father helps me with my garden. I’m from town, but I have a bit of
land and when I can, on the weekends especially, I go out the country.
I like it because I breathe a different air, I can clear my mind of all the
worries that come from being the secretary of the chemical workers union,
I don’t know how long a person can go on dealing with all the problems,
so I need this kind of release every once in a while” (Sergio Cardinali).
Tending one’s garden may be part of that aspect of the local culture that
is satisfied with what it has, that is content with a peaceful life and basic
pleasures, and seems to still resist the excesses of consumerism. On the
other hand, it may also signal a lack of forward drive, of imagination, of a
vision of growth, increase, progress. In a way, the image of the garden
helps explain both why Terni isn’t growing, and why it is still a livable
place. “I have a good life in Terni” is a phrase I heard any number of times;
on the other hand, Giampaolo Palazzesi, one of Terni’s leading medical
researchers and practitioners, noted that “the incidence of depressive
anxiety syndrome in our town is no negligible matter.”
As I drove into Terni one day in the early 2000s, I noticed that someone
had erased some letters from the Benvenuti in California sign. It now read
Benvenuti in C a f onia [Welcome to Cafonia], that is, welcome to
Hicksville. The sarcasm is still there. What they tried to erase is the dream.
5 VALENTINES
You turn right at Piazzale dell’Acciaio, hit the oversize boulevard leading
to the stadium both named after Terni’s sports heroes (Libero Liberati,
Mario Umberto Borzacchini), then you are greeted by another sign of the
times: Benvenuti a Terni. Città di San Valentino.
Saint Valentine, the eponym of Valentine’s Day and the protector of
lovers, is supposed to have been born here in the year AD 173 and is
therefore Terni’s patron saint. “At one point, faced with the crisis of heavy
industry, [the municipality] tried to turn Terni into a tourist attraction.
I mean, I was born in the San Valentino neighborhood, but frankly, when I
hear things like ‘the city of love’ I have a sense of rejection. It’s a sideshow,
a second-rate sort of thing” (Paolo Palazzesi).
Valentino Paparelli. Given the job I had [manager of the tourist board], I
told myself: In Terni we have a famous saint, let’s see whether, without
slipping into the creepier aspects of tourist marketing, whether we can use
this saint to build an image of the city that goes beyond steel or chemistry.
It was the early 1980s, when the town was beginning to seek alternative
economic models, everybody talking about the “advanced service sector.”
Yet, Saint Valentine was an empty image: unlike Saint Francis [also from
Umbria], he only has a name, with no doctrine, no religious orders, no
work of art. In fact, there are even doubts whether he existed, or whether
he was actually born in Terni. Yet, this idea, which was shared by the whole
tourist industry, gibed with the Catholic world’s wish to dignify this saint.
Like all (re)invented traditions, the cult of Saint Valentine hinges on

earlier rituals and narratives, not necessarily only spiritual. “Saint Valentine
is special. We have the world’s most famous saint, little known in his own
hometown. There’s a fair, we all go up to Saint Valentine’s fair and eat
porchetta” (Alberto Galluzzi). “Of course, Saint Valentine was better
known abroad, in America, even in Japan, than in Terni. It used be nothing
but a pilgrimage you took up the hill to the Basilica on Saint
Valentine’s day, up to where they had all these trattorie that did fried frogs
and stuff” (Franca De Sio). “I may be the only ternana who’s never been
inside the Basilica, but what I always liked about Saint Valentine was the
fair, you walk around, maybe don’t buy anything but people are out, with
children, it’s a way for the citizens to be together, very nice. Now every
year they invent other kinds of celebrations” (Keji Adumno). At first, says
Valentino Paparelli, “We didn’t want Saint Valentine to be just the patron
of lovers, but of love, period; so we gave awards to persons who during the
year had performed a significant act of love—for one, Mother Theresa.”
The Saint Valentine Foundation, co-chaired by the mayor and the bishop,
turned the month of February into a sequel of events that ended up
replacing the more traditional celebrations.
“One day I get a call from the father superior of the Basilica, and he says:
‘Look, this lady from Japan came, asked a lot of questions, left her card.’…
When I saw the card I realized that she was a representative of a Japanese
confectionery firm, Morozof, and was looking for ideas to promote
Valentine’s day. I called her up, and two days later the Morozof head of
marketing flew in from Osaka” (Valentino Paparelli). Morozof started a
big campaign in Japan, presenting itself as the rediscoverer of the real
296 A. PORTELLI
“Valentine” and the origins of the lovers’ day: TV ads, all kinds of events
with participants from Terni, even a brand of chocolates called “Terni.”
“Couples came from Japan and converted to Christianity so they could get
married in the Basilica” (Franca De Sio).
Valentino Paparelli. We invented the National Betrothal Day. We selected

—I don’t remember how—a hundred couples that came to celebrate
Betrothal Day in Terni. The Chamber of Commerce helped us set up an
exhibition of engagement and wedding rings made by local goldsmiths.
Another firm provided the gowns and the suits. I got national TV to
broadcast the ceremony live.
“Terni city of love? Nothing. I never went to any event, though

Valentine’s day is my favorite holiday, perhaps because it’s part of the
town… I like the aura that has been created these last few years. Everybody
seems gooder, more…love, chocolates, these little things. And young
people exchanging love pledges… It’s just for appearances, but some take
it seriously. If I found the right person, I’d take it seriously, too” (Chiara).
“I coudn’t care less, I mean I’m not baptized, I’m an agnostic, and about
Saint Valentine I couldn’t care less. But I went as an anthropological
experience. I said, I want to see those who come here to get married. The
Basilica is horrible; it’s not big enough to marry them all so they set up a
makeshift altar behind, which in fact is a soccer field. I was shocked, I
couldn’t believe my eyes. Most of all: there was nobody from Terni there”
(Greca Campus).
Valentino Paparelli. One night, three a.m., the telephone rings. It’s the
bishop: “Paparelli, sorry for the ungodly hour, but you know, these bigots
always messing around… Anyway, the question is: these kids, are they in
single rooms or in double rooms?” “Look, we’ve reserved all double rooms.
They’re supposed to be separate [sexes], but who’s checking?” “Forget it!”
6 ON THE ROAD
Alberto Galluzzi. After the invasion of the Garden Hotel, we went back to
the factory, there was an open mass meeting, and we decided to block the
gates, two-hour strike in rotation in each division, we let the raw materials
in to continue production but would not allow the product to go out.
“At night, we went back to block the expressway; it was snowing, wind
blew, rain” (“Luciano Berni”). The workers’ families and children were on
the front line, too. “It’s freezing cold. Some of the demonstrators can
barely move their hands.”12
“Luciano Berni”. Then I had to go home. That day was really…special, a

combination of things that tell you that it’s going to be hard, it’s the
beginning of a hellish course, with obstacles of all kinds. I don’t even
remember how many times we blocked the road. I remember one time, it
was snowing and I came home at night and had no snow tires; I left home
at four a.m., came back at ten p.m., drenched to the bone…So one puts
everything together and says: you’re at the start of a course that is going to
be very, very hard.
“We blocked the turnpike, blocked the railway at Orte,13 the express-
way, blocked everything” (Gianni Sabatini). It was a tense moment: on
one side, the angry and excited workers “on the edge of fury” (Sabatini),
on the other the police ready to attack; and in the middle, the represen-
tatives of the institutions, who joined the blockade but tried to keep it from
breaking into battle. “If you have ten people, you can control yourselves;
but when you have a road block of six hundred people, it’s different, isn’t
it?” (Claudio Cipolla).
Nevio Brunori. First thing I said in the meeting, was: we are dealing with a
multinational, David and Goliath. From what I was taught in school, the
Bible, at least one time David managed to defeat Goliath. We must take the
struggle to the outside, if we remain in our shell [we’re lost]. Twice we
blocked the expressway, we had arranged it with the police because I’m
afraid some people may worry—“if anything happens, I’m responsible, I
pay for the consequences”—but thirty years ago it would never even have
occurred to us, when there was a labor problem we didn’t think of con-
sequences: it’s a democratic, legitimate form of protest. Instead, some
hesitated. We did start right away, but it took time before we got to Orte.
Then some guys broke away and went and occupied the station at Orte,
which we know is an important junction.
“In the afternoon, we all went to Orte, to the expressway. And that’s
when the workers’ anger exploded, irrepressible, we knew we could not
control it, because the people were angry, the workers were pissed off. After
298 A. PORTELLI
the [attack on the] Garden, for two days we didn’t let cars through, those
who tried to go through got kicked and beaten” (Emanuele Salvati).
“When you decide to block the Orte road or the motorway or the railroad,
the problem was not deciding to go; the problem was when to come back.
The leaders had a hard time managing those moments. Some didn’t want
to stop. But we needed to make alliances, and you don’t make alliances by
keeping people stalled on the motorway or on a train that is held back”
(Gianfranco Fattorini).
On February 3, the government summoned TK management and the
unions to a meeting in Rome. Six hundred workers were milling in the
square below the Prime Minister’s office.
Battista Garibaldi. Eight buses were supposed to go to Rome that after-

noon. I wondered, how are we going to we fill eight buses? Instead, as I
got off work at two thirty, here’s this line of buses, all full, and not only
were the buses all loaded and full, but there were people on foot that were
mad at the organizers because there was no room for them and they were
left behind. That’s when I understood that this was going to be a powerful,
a really powerful thing. The injustice of closing this division was so dire, the
damage so huge, that the mobilization was immediate and you realized
that it wasn’t only you, or the more conscious ones on our side, but it was
all.
Many workers followed the buses in their own cars; in the end, “We
came down to Rome and there were more of us than had been agreed with
the police so they wouldn’t let us get off the buses. And then they kept us
behind barriers in a corner of the square, they penned us in, we weren’t
allowed to get out” (“Luciano Berni”). I joined the workers in Piazza
Colonna around six p.m. A police officer stopped me: “Where are you
going?” In a corner of the square, the workers were corralled like cattle.
A young woman was trying to get in. “Are you a demonstrator or a
sympathizer?” “A sympathizer.” “In that case you are not allowed behind
the barriers.” Workers must ask permission to go in and out of the secluded
area to use the toilet in a nearby café, lining up two at a time like school
children.
I said I was a demonstrator, and was allowed through. Inside, the dour
seriousness of the workers was striking. While each was worried about their
own fate, yet all together they seemed to retrieve the sense of the working
class as the bearer of the general interest, and were still able to express
anger and worry with irony, humor, and sarcasm. A sign said: in 2004
they’re closing magnetic steel; in 2005 will they close the Marmore wa-
terfalls, too?
The Marmore falls are a symbol of Terni just like the steelworks. The
feeling was that what was at risk was not only an important plant division—
in itself, the loss of nine hundred jobs, with grave repercussions on the
families and the town (“If nine hundred families have no income, who will
go shopping in supermarkets? And if people can’t afford to go to the
restaurant, who will take the tablecloths to the cleaners?”)14—but Terni’s
whole industrial future. So the whole town was in solidarity. The workers
told me about the lady who came to bring sweets to the picket lines; or the
elderly man who told them, “I went to jail in 1953 for throwing stones at
the police”; “We all have a father or a grandfather in the factory”; a young
man sported a red and green badge, the colors of the soccer team: Forza
Ternana [Go Ternana, go]. “Will you make first division this year?” “Well,
I don’t know, I hear the club owner is looking for partners”—another
endangered symbol.
ThyssenKrupp announced that the final decision would be taken on
February 23. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi—forgetting the memorable
anti-German gaffes with which he had recently distinguished himself 15–
called German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, with no results. TK required
an end to the blockade at the gates; the unions refused.
Battista Garibaldi. When the struggle for the magnetic steel division
began, I didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t go to the march on the Garden
Hotel, the day of the flying cakes. Honestly, I thought it was just another
struggle like many I had seen, which would end badly and give us nothing.
I didn’t expect this kind of mobilization, because much of my generation
had already retired and we hadn’t passed the baton on to the new gen-
eration. We in the union talked about this, and were worried. But the
obstacles were overcome by the harshness of the struggle, because they
were closing a big division, with all it entailed, so all the young, recently
hired workers mobilized, and this surprised us: you didn’t have to be
left-wing to fight, your job was threatened and that was enough.
Gianni Sabatini. That month, twenty-five, twenty-seven days, we hardly

ever went home. We spent the nights there, taking turns, always someone
on guard duty at the gates. And it was a procession of people, I remember,
say, the traffic cops that brought us food, the hospital nurses that brought
300 A. PORTELLI
something, a lady who worked in a confectionery and every night when the
store closed she brought us cakes, a tray full of pastries. We got to know
one another in a new way, because you share things, you hear the stories; it
was a time, an emotion like no other, there will never be another like this.
People in tears, people desperate, that sometimes were not easy to talk to,
because they’re losing their jobs, are suspended, laid off.
“Most of the workers are young, like my brother, who’s twenty-four,

he’s worked here for two years, they renew his contract every six months,
the latest one is for a month and a half”; “Thyssen came here proclaiming
that they would focus on the town’s youth resources; they did, as long as it
was profitable, because they were paying us second-level wages for
seventh-level work”; “Before getting an apprenticeship contract I had two
years’ worth of fixed-term contracts: the first was three months, the next
ten, I don’t know what the next will be. And then the apprenticeship
contract. The result is that I’m thirty two and still don’t know if I have a
job.”16
Nevio Brunori. For twenty-four days I spent fourteen to sixteen hours at

the gates, because I wanted to be there, and because I wanted to comfort
the young workers. I told the guys—I saw they didn’t know what to think,
because they had never experienced a thing like this—look, I’m fifty-four, I
have enough seniority to retire if I want to, the problem is not mine. The
problem is yours, because at twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, you find
yourselves out of a job; and for those who are twenty-eight, twenty-nine,
thirty finding another job is not going to be easy. I remember a worker, at
the main gate, who said: “If they’re going to fire me, better do it now. I’m
twenty-eight, I still have a chance to find another job. If they close five or 6
years from now, when I’m thirty-two, thirty-three. thirty-four, it’s the
end.”
Daniele, thirty, at ThyssenKrupp for twenty months: “I was supposed to
get married on March 28, and I could do it because this was a secure job.
If I lose it, I’ll have to go back to the rut of fixed-end contracts.” Mario,
thirty: “I’ve been in the factory six years. After five years on fixed-end
contracts, I finally gained an open-ended contract. I am married, I have a
mortgage to pay, what will I do if they fire me?” His wife works at an
industrial laundry, she has a secure job. Gianluca, thirty, is married, has a
mortgage, his wife is a temporary checker at a shopping center (“no health
or maternity coverage, no paid vacation, no guarantees”). Both wives are

active in the struggle.17
“Luciano Berni”. You go home and you put on a mask to hide your worry,
soon as I get home I play with my little girl, crack the same jokes, we roll
on the carpet, she shakes me, crushes me, puts her fingers in my eyes and
all, but inside there is an anxiety, a worry, about her, about my partner—I
mean, you make all sorts of plans, the dreams you have for a child, that she
may redeem our condition, get an education, find a job she likes, that
gratifies her, and all this, this plan you have, is in jeopardy.
People file at the factory gates to support the workers. They bring
pastries, sausages, wine, “whole families that came with bundles of food, a
bottle of grappa to make it through the night, because we were freezing,
these things always happened in the middle of winter” (Alberto Galluzzi).
Both in 2004 and in 2005 [when TK reneged on the 2004 agreements and
the battle had to be fought all over again], the struggle took place in the
middle of winter, around Carnival and Saint Valentine’s day (“This saint
didn’t do much for us, did he?” Nevio Brunori). But “people brought us
wood from the mountains, it was February, you can imagine the cold, they
brought us wood” to keep the bonfires burning (Gianni Sabatini). “This
old lady says, ‘I’ve made coffee’ and left us the thermos. ‘Don’t you want it
back?’ ‘I’ll come get it tomorrow. I know I can trust you.’ We always talk
of solidarity, of values, but you hardly ever touch them with your hand like
this” (Claudio Cipolla). “A traffic police van came, they brought us warm
food, drink, everything. It still makes me cry to think about it. This cop
comes off and says, ‘Keep keeping on, I’ve been through this with my
father [in 1953]’” (Nevio Brunori).
“Luciano Berni”. At first we didn’t know how far we could go. But soon as
we blocked the factory gates we realized that by touching the steelworks
they were touching an open nerve in the city. So, from the old lady that
brings you homemade sweets to the people you talk to when you’re
passing out leaflets in town, it was a beautiful beautiful beautiful positive
response, that strengthened our unity and made us feel that this struggle
was not restricted to the walls of the factory but was pervading every aspect
of the town.
302 A. PORTELLI
“The town had been going through a phase of estrangement from the
factory. But right then there was a sense that losing the steelworks meant
decline for the whole town. So the town mobilized, for the steelworks”
(Faliero Chiappini). “We’ve been on strike all this time, and I’ve lost a
quarter of my salary already. I work at the magnetic division, but you know
who I really admire? Those who are not directly threatened, who might
even retire, and yet are striking with us.” “I’m not directly involved, but
how can you help being in solidarity with young people your age?” “The
town, more or less, is on the side of the workers because they all realize that
if the steelworks close the town closes, and even bakers or car salesmen die
with it. As far as I’m concerned, I may have to look for work elsewhere.”18
Families were also involved. “It was cold, but we were there, when they
lit the fires at the gate, we’d go see daddy, remember? We have the pic-
tures. It was beautiful, it was sad but beautiful, the unity among us”
(“Luisa Longhi”). “My wife went through it with me, she came to the
pickets and all. She became friends with another union delegate’s wife, and
she and her came to the gates in the evenings to make dinner, cook a bit of
pasta, I mean. She went through the whole drama like me. And these
things are hard to swallow” (Nevio Brunori).
“Luciano Berni”. Perhaps it’s because the factory stands right in the midst
of people’s homes, is the beating heart of a town that sometimes even hates
it, but at certain moments rediscovers a passionate attachment, in the guts,
in the blood. It’s an excitement that won’t let me sleep at night, an
extraordinary dramatic emotion that drives you forward and gives you the
strength to keep on.
Battista Garibaldi. I always felt that Terni was a piece of my own history,
even now that we’re near the end, I always felt that I was a part of this
century-old history, from the early strikes to the 1950s, to our own
demonstrations, there’s a red thread, and this factory, before belonging to
the Germans, it belongs to the people of Terni, it must live for another
century, no matter all the [environmental] damage it does.19
Of course, not everything was smooth. “I could see the cultural change
our society has gone through: there were many young men who didn’t
show any interest in such a big matter as the magnetic steel problem, they
kept on working, they did everything but take part in the pickets”
(Emanuele Salvati). “I can tell those who are really involved and those who
are just along for the ride. I’m glad anyway, they might learn something
anyhow—were it only how to fry sausages. I’m sure merchants are doing it
for publicity, I may be wrong, but this is how I see it.”20 On the other
hand, “What really strikes me is that young people like me, those who
never cared about the union, who were against politics—‘I don’t wanna
talk politics, let’s talk soccer, let’s talk parties, no politics, for goodness
sake’—these people too were completely involved” (Emanuele Albi).
“Luciano Berni”. The younger generations, as I said, are worried, but

there is among them an enthusiasm, a drive that is not just a will-o’-
the-wisp thing, but a new awareness of the times, of the shape of people’s
lives, of how they are controlled by invisible entities—the multinational,
the multinational that has the power, with a decision, with a board
meeting, to do away with history, with the lives of a thousand flesh and
bone persons, who mean a thousand families, and it affects the soul of a
whole community, of a province, of a region. Maybe it’s this land; perhaps
Saint Francis really left his mark upon it, we still have this kind of sensitivity.
Terni has always taken a stand on important themes, on peace, on this kind
of thing. So there is an awareness, there is a consciousness.
In a high school, a student who will not tell me his name, approaches
me. “When the strike was on, some of us kids heard that the ThyssenKrupp
managers were coming to town, so we took this initiative, a bit violent
perhaps, we went to the station and threw stones at their cars. After five
minutes the police came, but we got away. Two of us were Italian, the
others Romanian, but we all had fathers who work at ThyssenKrupp. Yes,
there are many foreigners who come to work at ThyssenKrupp, they’re
underpaid, but their children…”
7 WINTER DAYS
Battista Garibaldi. It was a special day and I remember it well. I was at
home shaving, and listening to Radio Galileo [the local station]. I’d got up
early because the rally was in the morning and the radio was talking, urging
people to go. The whole town was in motion. And people phoned in, “I’m
an old woman, how can I, I can’t go…” And the announcer: “No, it’s
important, don’t you have a granddaughter, a daughter, call her up, tell her
to come get you and take you there because today it’s important to be with
the workers.” I go out, you know I live in the periphery, I start walking
304 A. PORTELLI
toward Terni. In Terni, hardly any cars, few people around, all the stores
shut like Sunday. Actually, on Sunday at least news kiosks are open, flower
shops are open, bars are open. That day, everything was shut. It gave you
goose bumps to see such a thing.
On February 6, 2004, the day of the general strike, Terni is a ghost town.
The streets are empty. A few half-empty buses shuttle around, carrying
signs of solidarity to the workers and the strike. A press release from the
merchants’ association says: “Our category, which for too long has been
the refuge for individuals expelled from the industry, knows very well that
without a stable economic base, which in this town still depends on the
factory, the whole local economy risks a breakdown.” “It may not be class
solidarity. But they are aware that if this money stops flowing in, many of
them may be forced to close” (Taurino Costantini).
Battista Garibaldi. I reach Piazza Tacito and find this whole tide of people
walking. [The streets] were so full of people that I couldn’t go on. I like to
see demonstrations walk by, and that one was…A slow river of people, you
could see the tension. The weather, too, it was a February day, a sky…it
wasn’t raining, but it was a gloomy day, just like the mood of the people, all
the determination for this injustice, you could see how the town is bound
to this factory, but not only us, all of Umbria. I recognized comrades from
Perugia, the mayors of the other towns, it was not just a formal thing, you
could see they really cared.
Piazza Europa, by City Hall, is full, and people are still marching from
Piazza Tacito at the other end of “new” Main Street. The next day, the
press will speak of 30,000 people. The other ThyssenKrupp-AST plant, in
Turin, strikes in solidarity; some of its workers join the rally in Terni. From
the stage, Mayor Paolo Raffaelli proclaims:
“Not even a big multinational can wage war on a whole town, on
100,000 people, and hope to win. They cannot trifle with the lives of a
thousand workers, of a thousand families, of a civilized and hard-working
community. We have shown that we know how to struggle for our rights,
our jobs, our town. And yet, there is one thing we can do even better than
struggle: we know how to make the best steel in the world; we know how
to build a new model of development around advanced steel technologies.
What we know best is how to work, how to produce, and we want to keep
doing it; this is why we do not accept the amputation of the division of the
future, of advanced technology, of energy saving, the division that interacts

with the scientists and researchers who are developing the new industrial
frontiers that will meet the needs of future generations.”
The next day, Terni workers turn up in another square. “At six a.m.,
Saturday morning, seventeen men started out walking from the factory
gates. Yesterday, around ten a.m., fifteen arrived in Saint Peter’s Square in
Rome: twenty-six hours to walk the 108 km from Terni to Rome” and
hear the Pope say the Angelus prayer from his Vatican window. Others
drive to Rome in cars and buses; families join them.21
“Luciano Berni”. Given my background, I never expected I would live to

go [to the Vatican] and listen to the Pope and the Angelus. We rode in on
the train, others walked the distance, on the wings of enthusiasm—we’re
going to see the Pope, we’re going to see the Pope…Some thought it was
just a stroll, some started out with the wrong shoes and had to give up half
way. But they did get to Rome, and the buses were there, and us on the
train. It was February, around Carnival. Father Fernando, the former
chaplain of the steelworks, had the helmet that the Pope had worn [when
he visited the factory in 1981] and said he would take the opportunity to
return it to him.
“I cannot forget that my first pastoral visit to an Italian factory took

place in Terni on May 19, 1981,” said Pope Karol Wojtyla to the people
assembled in the square. “I salute the workers who have come in pil-
grimage to call attention to the labor crisis in that great industrial complex.
Dear workers, I appreciate your firm will to defend your jobs and your
dignity.” “The Pope’s words moved us and gave us strength,” a worker
said; “It is wonderful that from a window so important for all the world
came words about our struggle. Someone will have to listen to the words of
the Pope.”22
“Luciano Berni”. He spoke of the situation at the steelworks, then there

was a ceremony and everybody was happy because it had gone well, this
bold idea of walking to Rome. [It was Carnival time] and we had our little
daughter with us, in Harlequin suit, we workers with our helmets and she
in her Harlequin dress. So we went into Saint Peter’s, and this Harlequin
was running up and down Saint Peter’s, this spot of color in this building.
Anyway, the strategy was to get as much publicity as possible, so it was OK.
306 A. PORTELLI
Meanwhile, the parties were back at the negotiating table. The company
requested that pickets be removed (“even forcibly”) from the gates; when
negotiations resumed, the workers agreed to open them two hours a day
and let 15% of production go out. ThyssenKrupp announced that it would
present a new industrial plan, and hire all temporary and fixed-term
employees; the closure of the magnetic steel division was no longer on the
agenda. ThyssenKrupp Electric Steel would be brought back into AST. On
February 13 the factory gates were opened; on the eighteenth the agree-
ment was signed; on the nineteenth, the magnetic steel division resumed
production.
“The agreement later turned out to be worthless, yet I supported it
because it confirmed that the magnetic division would stay open” (Daniele
Tacconelli). David seemed to have prevailed over Goliath—but dark cor-
ners remained. For one thing, ThyssenKrupp’s industrial plan depended on
the renewal of the discount on the price of energy even after the 2010 term
—which everyone knew the European fair trade commission would not
allow (“clearly this is a weak point in the pact. Let’s say we agreed to it to
put an end to the conflict, but we were aware of the difficulties in it,”
Faliero Chiappini). Also, while no one was fired, yet TK found other ways
of cutting the labor force: not renewing fixed-term contracts, not replacing
retirees. There was talk of a pyrrhic victory. But for the moment, however,
the danger has been averted.
Battista Garibaldi. It was an incredible lesson in democracy for many

young workers who learned firsthand the meaning of struggle, of union, of
politics. The mass meetings in the factory or outside, when the agreement
was up for a vote, and the tension was high because we didn’t know how it
would go. There, really, it was one head, one vote. All that time after the
demonstration and the agreement, when it seemed that the Germans had
backtracked, that interval of a year in which we thought we had won.
8 LANGUAGES
In 1953 Dante Bartolini, one of the over two thousand workers fired from
the steelworks, wrote a song that years later he still sang with full
conviction:
Socialismo è la nostra speranza

Di chi lavora questa è la storia
Non è lontana la grande vittoria
Lavoratori avanti così.
[“Socialism is our hope, this is the history of working people; the great
victory is near, workers, keep marching ahead!”]
“The great victory is near.” The main difference between 1953 and
2004 was language. In both situations the workers were doing the same
things—blocking roads, picketing the gates, even physically attacking
managers—but spoke differently. In 1953 they were being fired en masse
but they still felt that they were the vanguard of a new world to come;
defending their jobs meant keeping the vision of a better future alive.
History rhymed with victory, the past founded the future; and though the
struggle ended in defeat, yet this belief sustained the workers’ struggles and
conquests for another quarter century.
In 2004 there was no talk of a great victory to come. The struggle was
just as tough, but the vision was different (“If we analyze the slogans and
the passwords, it strikes you how wide is the gap between the hugeness of
the battle we fought, and the weakness of the passwords,” Taurino
Costantini). The only victory they could hope for was not letting them-
selves be pushed back into the past. What had faded away between the early
1980s and the beginning of the third millennium was the future.
NOTES
1. F. Roncone, “Chiude l’acciaieria. Terni in rivolta.” Corriere della Sera,
January 30, 2004.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. M. Gravino, “Amore e acciaio,” National Geographic Italia, February
2007, pp. 100–104; L. Campetti, “Terni in piazza difende l’acciaieria,” Il
Manifesto, January 30, 2004.
5. C. Perucci, “A Terni più high-tech e meno acciaio,” Il Sole-24 Ore, March
1, 2005.
6. C. Carnieri, “Le nuove sfide dell’Acciaieria,” Il Messaggero, July 29, 2005.
7. Greca Campus, Lotta senza classe (2014), self-published through a
crowdfunding project.
8. Paolo Portoghesi, “Quando l’architettura è poesia,” La Repubblica,
November 14, 1984.
308 A. PORTELLI
9. M. Pirani, “Linea di confine,” La Repubblica, July 7, 2008.

10. F. Rampini, “L’alleanza delle Union contro l’India,” La Repubblica, May
28, 2008; On Tata Steel and ThyssenKrupp, http://www.umbriaon.it/
2015/thyssenkrupp-e-tata-dialogano-e-last/, accessed March 24, 2016.
11. As of 2017, Martina Canali was back living in Terni.
12. F. Roncone, “Chiude l’acciaieria. Terni in rivolta.”
13. Orte is a major railway junction of the north–south and east–west main
lines. It is also the place where the Terni road meets the A1 turnpike, Italy’s
most important north–south road. Blocking Orte means breaking Italy in
two.
14. A. Sciotto, “Terni in sciopero. Non ci chiuderete,” Il Manifesto, February
6, 2004.
15. While chairing a session of the European Parliament, Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi had told a German representative who had asked him a question
that he would have been just perfect for the role of a “kapo” in a film of his
own production.
16. Interviews with young workers, recorded by Marco Fornarola, Santi
Minasi, Ulrike Viccaro, researchers from the Circolo Gianni Bosio, at the
Brigata Cimarelli alternative youth center and on the pickets at the factory
gates.
17. Interviews in A. Milluzzi, “La Krupp chiude, rivolta a Terni,” Liberazione,
January 30, 2004; A. Sciotto, “Terni in sciopero. Non ci chiuderete.”
18. Brigata Cimarelli interviews by Marco Fornarola et al.
19. “There’s a part of town, Prisciano, that is polluted every day by the dust
from the factory” (Battista Garibaldi); “the pollution from percolate in
Terni is devastating” (Emanuele Albi); “the geographic location, in this
mountain basin, is unfortunate; and we have this kind of industry—think of
the chemical plants, it’s like a powder keg” (Giampaolo Palazzesi); “If you
come to Terni from outside, especially in the summer, you feel this suffo-
cating cloak of humidity. This is because, along with the percolate, Terni
lies in a basin, so the air doesn’t circulate, the hothouse effect is worse”
(Sergio Cardinali).
20. Brigata Cimarelli interviews by Marco Fornarola et al.
21. R. Monteforte, “Anche il Papa a fianco degli operai di Terni,” l’Unità,
National edition, February 9, 2004.
22. L. Accattoli, “Difendete il lavoro e la sua dignità,’” Corriere della Sera,
February 9, 2004; R. Monteforte, “Anche il Papa a fianco degli operai di
Terni.”
CHAPTER 13
The Workers and the World: Terni Steel

in the Age of Globalization
1 CONVERSATIONS
Battista Garibaldi. I was hired in 1976 and a few years later I enrolled in
the university in Rome, majoring in sociology. I was passionate about
politics, those were the years of the movements, the New Left. I was a
factory worker, and I worked shifts, so I had time to study, I was living
alone, I had a great passion for politics, which sociology intensified,
because it gave you critical tools. I was an electronics technician, didn’t
have a basis in humanities—electronics is as far from politics as can be,
anyway—but with sociology I did rediscover humanities. And I would
bring it all back to politics, to Democrazia Proletaria.
“I had a degree in political science from the University of Perugia; in 1977

I was offered the possibility of a job at the steelworks. I took it, because it
meant a secure, stable future” (Faliero Chiappini). The years between the
late 1970s and the early 2000s wrought amazing changes in the compo-
sition and culture of Terni’s working class. New generations entered the
factory, in at least three waves: in the late 1970s, in 2002 (to replace the
workers who had been exposed to asbestos and were granted early
retirement for health reasons); and after 2005. These new generations were
more educated, more citified, with a different relationship to language:
Battista Garibaldi recalls how the older workers were miffed at seeing the
newcomers pass the idle moments at work doing crosswords. “I went to

310 A. PORTELLI
vocational school here in Terni, electronics; I tried nursing science in the

university for a year, then I gave up and the call came from the steelworks,
and I started work at the famous magnetic steel division” (Alberto
Galluzzi). “Our team is fourteen people. We all have high-school diplo-
mas, none us took the university seriously enough to graduate, but we all
have a technical training background” (Luca Marcelli).
Emanuele Salvati. I came in nine years ago, and the majority of the
workers were still in their forties or fifties. I had some good experiences,
because we managed to have a dialogue, the older men would lend you a
hand. I didn’t find the brutal relationships that our fathers had experi-
enced, where the older workers wouldn’t even let you see [how the work
was done] because they were jealous, they were afraid they would steal
their jobs. In fact, I found people that wanted to teach you, so that they
wouldn’t have to do all the work themselves.
Alberto Galluzzi. I did meet the old ones, because some of them stayed on
the job, they came back from retirement to train the young ones on the
job. The last one, Roberto, retired last May; for us, he was an idol, the
grandfather, the team leader, who taught us all the jobs, from the easiest to
the most unpleasant. And he taught us that you mustn’t overwork yourself,
he taught us all the tricks.
Daniele Tacconelli. When I came in, I met the older ones, and they treated
me well. Of course, the cultural level of a guy who comes into the factory
now and is twenty-five years old is higher than one who is sixty and has no
education. Say you’re taking a course to be a forklift truck operator, and
the older person next to you cannot read the diagram that shows load levels
according to the position on the forklift. So maybe for a young man it’s
easier to learn new technologies, the computers that use Windows to run
the new modern machinery. With the older machines, the older men are
much better. The first thing I taught one of the operators, the one who
taught me how to run the machine, was how to write accents on the
computer keyboard. I taught him one thing, and he taught me another.
Claudio Cipolla. The tasks, the jobs have changed. My father used to work
at AST, and he tells me that certain processes were still done by hand, no
automation; nowadays, the man who works on the same line can be called a
specialist because he must know how to use a computer. You control
13 THE WORKERS AND THE WORLD: TERNI STEEL IN THE AGE … 311
everything from a control board, an automated booth. The work is less tiring,
but you must know all about the technology and the automation of the plant.
“My father worked at the furnaces, always the furnaces until 1972,
because back then you had the option that when the father retired the son
took his place, so grandfather chose to retire and father was hired in his
place” (Emanuele Salvati). As we will see, ThyssenKrupp continues the
policy of hiring the sons of its retired workers in plants in India or Brazil; in
Terni, this practice was abandoned a couple of generations ago. Back then,
family continuity was part of the company-town ideology, where the
company oversaw people’s lives from cradle to grave and across genera-
tions. Rather than filling their fathers’ shoes, the new generations are afraid
of having to live as their fathers had done: “My father worked at the steel
mills; he had an accident, he was crushed by a forklift, and soon after
retired… Frankly, I didn’t mean to go work at ThyssenKrupp, in fact it was
the last thing on my mind” (Daniele Tacconelli).
Emanuele Albi. Honestly, I didn’t want to work at the steel mill. I always
said, as long as I can help it, I’m not going. I studied to be a surveyor, took
classes in computer graphics, then…Every year so many surveyors are
licensed in Terni, when I got there the market was saturated. So you have
to wait until you’re thirty-two, thirty-three, before you start earning
something. I couldn’t allow my family to support me until I was thirty-two;
they were hiring, I got in.
“This new working class must be seen in the light of the cultural changes
that have taken place in the 1990s. Young men with different expectations,
hopes, desires—for many of them, the factory was not a step up socially,
but often was felt as an imposition, an unrewarding job” (Attilio
Romanelli). “I did it for money, for the pay, like everyone else, I think.
I saw that Thyssen was paying higher wages than the rest, I applied, and I
was hired, so I guess I was lucky” (Daniele Tacconelli). “Many young men
who were hired in 2000 like me quit after a few days; I guess they expected
the factory to be different” (Luca Marcelli).
Alberto Galluzzi. Used to be, you got a job at the steelworks—“All right,
I’m settled for life.” Now kids are hired, they quit, they look for other jobs.
I mean, we get paid, better than in other places, but working on Saturday
nights at age twenty—it isn’t like it used to be, you think twice before you
312 A. PORTELLI
start such a life, so soon. Some had a chance of a job at the steelworks, they
wouldn’t take it. I admire them, because they eke out some other way.
They live at home, don’t go out on Sundays, most of them work in the
service sector.
Before he was hired at the steelworks, Daniele Tacconelli went through a

series of jobs—laborer at a brick factory, sales clerk in a store—and found
them all much more strenuous and less well paid than the factory: “They say
that in the factory you do nothing, it’s wrong, it’s only a different way of
working. The process is slow because the cycle takes an hour and a half, and
in that time all you do is make sure that it’s going OK; if there’s a problem,
then you go to work.” Alberto Galluzzi complains that some workers
actually brag that they don’t do anything—“I don’t work and I sleep,” they
say. This is certainly a sign of a crisis in the traditional work ethic based on
hard physical toil, but it also suggests that the new organization of work does
not generate the same identification and pride as the more traditional ones.
“In the space of two, three years, this new working class found itself at
the head of Terni’s work and production, at a time when society has
changed and politics is in crisis” (Gianfranco Fattorini). Politics is one
thing that does not seem to have been passed on to the new generation. At
least until the mid-1980s, the Communist Party was the referent for most
of the working class, it entered all conversations and all stories. In the new
millennium, while the Democratic Party1 retains a sizable membership, yet
hardly any of the interviewees even mention it. It may be wrong to gen-
eralize, but as political parties are less and less interested in representing the
workers, the workers are less and less interested in them.
Maurizio Fioretti. Politics, I still got the bump, but I’m no longer involved
in organization because I can’t find one that… It’s also about the heart,
human relationships, you know. I used to be so active, I mean. But then I
gave up, because I don’t like it that they are not serious about what they
do, I don’t like opportunism—“I am active because I am aiming to get
something out of it for myself…” This is the way it is nowadays, more or
less. They lost their identity, I mean.
Emanuele Salvati. Political activism, I’ve been at it since 1995, and still
am, even though I’m slowly getting out of it. I was active in Rifondazione
Comunista since 1995,2 I took the Young Communist card soon as they
started, then I went to work at the steelworks, was active in the union, I’m
the local secretary of Rifondazione at Borgo Bovio, but I’m giving it

up. It’s come to where it’s all about infighting among leaders, after
sixty-three years the country is back in the hands of the Fascists and all we
have is leaders feuding among themselves.
2 CONTINUITY AND CHANGE

Around 1983–1984, Maurizio Fioretti, then 16 years old, wrote a song
about Luigi Trastulli, the worker killed by the police in 1949, a symbol of
working-class identity and memory. Fioretti came from a working-class
family: “My grandmother talked about him, she used to work at the
Centurini jute mill… Later, we started an organization called March 17,
which was the date of the killing of Luigi Trastulli. He died during a
demonstration against NATO, in practice he was a pacifist, a 20-year-old
kid.” Maurizio Fioretti’s song, however, was an aggressively electric punk
rock piece, a far cry from Dante Bartolini’s folk elegy. For a teenager of the
working class, writing this song meant joining the memory and identity of
his class, but also changing and estranging it.
Maurizio Fioretti. [Our band], we all came from the world of the factory,
we called that culture our own, but we wanted also to challenge it, because
it also had traits of bigotry, of extreme conservatism, you know? Male
chauvinist, patriarchal… So we were interested in punk music, a sort of punk
rock, with Italian lyrics, though. We had a song called “Night shift,” about
our parents who when they were on the night shift became unbearable at
home, [they wanted] absolute silence, if anything moved they went off their
rocker… So we wanted to call this culture our own, but also change it.
“Luciano Berni” went to work at the steel mill when he was almost
forty. He clung to a 1970s alternative culture, that combined the rejection
of traditional work ethics (“It felt like a chain around your legs; there was a
rejection of everything, of work in general”) and the myth of the working
class (“I still have his text messages,” says his wife, “from the first day in the
factory: I am in the temple of the working class…Instead…,” “Luisa
Longhi”). Instead, “the rigid rules of the factory, punch cards, walls that
cut you off from the outside—I mean, it was like a knife stab. You came in
with this rebel spirit, I couldn’t take this situation of total constraint.” So
the choice was either giving up the myth of the working class, or seeking
for the “rebel spirit” in other forms.
314 A. PORTELLI
“Luciano Berni”. The workers in flesh and blood were changed. The myth
was one thing, and what you found in there was something else. All kinds,
a universe of many colors, many odors, many flavors. These young people,
in the new working class, were a spectacle—piercings, earrings, spiked hair
of many colors, yellow hair, green hair, all these kids that while they change
in the morning they start chanting football chants. You ought to see them
—they’re full of imagination, they’re good. Technically, they’re not as
competent as we are.
At least since the 1970s, the “worker with the earring” has become a
symbol of the irruption of alternative youth into the industrial world and of
the unraveling of old working-class cultural traditions. Daniele Tacconelli,
twenty-nine, works in the steel mill, wears a piercing (“but it’s already
going out of style,” he says), loves hip-hop, follows motorcycle races, the
main topic of conversation with his friends is love. Yet, the process works
both ways: youth culture takes over the factory, but in turn it is affected by
the factory experience, by the organization and the timing of work. “A
young man who is used to going out every night, to having free time, he
finds himself in that context where you may have to work the night shift on
Saturday night, or on Sunday, the impact was dramatic, it isn’t easy. Plus,
our generation isn’t used to getting up at five a.m., you know” (Emanuele
Salvati).
Alberto Galluzzi. It’s hard because you feel like all you do is work, you never
party or anything. At first, girls complain: when you’re on first shift you don’t
go out because you’re sleepy, and then on Saturday nights you work. Then
you tell her to get used to it, because this is work, it isn’t easy to be free on
Saturday night. If you have friends, if they are true friends, you don’t lose
them: sometimes, when I’m free on a weekday, they go out of their way, we
go out anyway, to spend an hour together. Sometimes when you tell them
about strikes, meetings, they don’t understand; at first, you lose your friends
but after a while the true ones call you up because they miss you.
Keji Adumno recalls a friend who seemed the perfect “anti-worker” type,
and yet after he got a job at the steelworks he joined the union and became
an organizer. He is so proud of what he does that he uses his cell phone to
broadcast the castings of steel to his friends outside the plant, to show them
the work they do: “He says that to him going to work is like going to a
party, he never talks of the strain of work, all he talks about is this bunch of
friends who joke together, eat together.” New forms of sociability arise in
the work place, and connect leisure time with labor relations.
Alberto Galluzzi. I enjoy working at the steel mill. We’re all young people,
we’re a team. The job, it’s true, you have dust, heat, noise, we’ll feel the
effects in the future, but for now we’re OK. I made this friend, we went to
the May Day concert together, we started going out with our girlfriends
and other friends. My team is a bit special, when we have a grievance with
the bosses we’re all united, when we make a mistake we all give the same
explanation, the same pauses, the same commas. When there’s work to do
we do it and don’t let anything get in the way. But when we have to cover
for a comrade who’s sick or had a bad night, perhaps because the children
wouldn’t let him sleep, we cover up for him, too.
Luca Marcelli. The age averages around twenty-three, twenty-four, they

talk about sports a lot, about women, girls, adventures. Those of us who
are married, or separated, or have children, sometimes the conversation is
more about the family. These days, we talk more about the relationship
with the union, with the company. But never, never or very very seldom,
do we talk about politics.
“I expected the context to be a little more lively. I imagined a class that

was in struggle for something; instead, it’s flat. We’re more or less all in our
thirties, the main topic of conversation is hunting, because there’s a sea of
hunters. I was a conscientious objector, I don’t have a gun license”
(Maurizio Pacini). Hunting and soccer are themes that young workers
share with the older generations (“Monday mornings, Ternana is the main
topic, there’s hardly talk of anything else,” Emanuele Albi). The steel mill is
not an assembly line, and there have always been pauses, time to kill, which
allowed for forms of sociability. Once, workers that commuted from the
countryside brought goat meat and roasted it on top of the furnace; today,
there are different kinds of consumption—ice cream, pizza, coffee—but the
conviviality continues.
Alberto Galluzzi. Cooking inside the plant has been going on for genera-
tions. Now the company lets us use an electric stove, and we use it for
everything. We make pizza, from dough to the finished thing. Sometimes,
someone says, I’d like some pizza—so we call the takeway and have it
delivered at the factory gates. One time I called Greca [Campus]: “Greca,
316 A. PORTELLI
would you bring us a kilo of ice cream?” It’s so hot in there, in the summer
it’s like a furnace always blowing in your face, a breath of wind kills you.
Nowadays we buy food at the Coop and bring it in, we hardly ever bring stuff
in from the country anymore. The rural workers are more citified than us.
3 TAKING CHANCES
Anafreak.3 I had the fortune of being born in a truly ugly place, San
Giovanni. But I was born late; when things were really crazy I was six and I
was spared. Most of those people, I guess eighty percent, went through jail;
then, they went to the soccer games and raised hell, knives and all, almost
every night, ambulances, police… These weren’t ultras [soccer fans], they
were criminals. Then, when I started going to the games myself, there were
the last residues of the heroin age; for about ten years heroin disappeared
from the stadium, then it came back. Say four or five of the leaders fall into it,
then they drag others along. Because if you’re doing heroin, you’ve got to
sell it, else you can’t afford it. So you have a possible market, and if nobody
breaks your bones and kicks you out, in no time you’ve fried fifty people.
“Back then, fifty of us’d go out at night and twenty or more were
addicts. I saw so many die. Terni was like the Bronx, you could find
anything” (Maurizio Fioretti). “Once I met this kid, he must have been
eight, not even ten, a child. He comes and starts taunting us, heavily
aggressive. I said, come on, you can’t talk like this to older guys. A year
later [this friend] says, remember that kid that came up to us? Sure. Well,
he died of an overdose” (Alessandro Toffoli). “The 1990s were a booming
time—discotheques, pills, ecstasy. Fifteen years ago, a gram of cocaine in
Terni cost 180,000 lire [about ninety euros]; today, I think you can get it
for seventy [36 euros] or less. Heroin is coming back, because it is used to
quench the excitement you get from all those other substances, chemical
stuff and all. And once you touch heroin you hardly ever leave it because it
gives you a feeling of protection, of peace” (Anafreak). “Nowadays it’s
cocaine and pills, no longer heroin like the 1970s. Which is even worse
because they don’t see themselves as addicts, and it’s cheaper. Cocaine is
connected to certain social strata, this kid who goes to vocational school
and then becomes an electrician, a factory worker” (Greca Campus).
“There are many, many many, who are drug addicts and work in the
factory” (Andrea Pagliarola). Young workers deny any connection
between drugs and working conditions: “The factory is not a separate
world,” says Anafreak: drugs in the factory, he says, are just a continuation
of society at large.4 But even if it were so, it would be a sign that the factory
is no longer a space where a different level of consciousness prevails.
Or it may be only a form of older problems—like alcoholism, the heavy
wine drinking that helped the older generations survive in the plant.
“Alcohol, too, is a drug. Yes, there are hard drugs going around, heroin,
cocaine, no use denying it. Hashish, joints, this sort of thing, all over the
place. I think it was a mistake to legalize alcohol and not light drugs”
(Daniele Tacconelli). “Alcohol is the source of all evil. Alcohol is the seed,
the seed of evil. The old ones brought bottles of wine; the younger ones
come with gin, a bottle of rum, they mix gin tonic, Cuba Libre—and then
grappa, anisette, whisky cream” (Anafreak).
“In all this, I see the existential crises we all go through at some time in
our lives. But I also see this attitude of, of getting around problems without
facing them. Everything easy, very easy. You have a little crisis, a little
depression, you take a pill. To me, it doesn’t look like a counterculture;
they’re like the dominant culture, executives sniff cocaine, and now
everybody drops pills” (Maurizio Fioretti). “They drop pills and acid to
increase their capacity of enjoying themselves, they’re not interested in
heroin. They want to have fun, not kill themselves. But this way they lose
sight of how dangerous these things are, heroin is not the only deadly thing
there is” (Alessandro Toffoli).
Alberto Galluzzi. Times have changed, young people in the factory are like
young people everywhere; old men used to get drunk in taverns, now they
sniff cocaine. I have heard stories of people who came to work completely
drunk, alcohol kills you like cocaine. The problem is that when you are
working you must to be lucid and if we don’t teach kids, in grade school,
not to drink while driving, not to drink while studying, not to drink while
working, not to use drugs because they endanger their own lives and the
lives of others—if we don’t teach them now we can’t expect that later…
When Oreste Scalzone came back to Terni after spending years in France
as a refugee from terrorism charges, his old comrades surprised him by
presenting him not with a red scarf but with a red and green one, the colors
of the Ternana soccer team. The shift from Workers’ Power to soccer
ultras, the interlacing of soccer fanaticism and anti-Fascist memory are other
signs of the changes and continuity in working-class and alternative youth
cultures. Unlike the right-wing tinge of the majority of Italian organized
318 A. PORTELLI
soccer fandom, Terni’s soccer fans identify with the Left: “The bleachers in
Terni are red, deep red, and they’re persecuted because they are red,” says a
young fan who is also an activist in the anti-Fascist Brigata Cimarelli, named
after a Resistance martyr. On the other hand, the new, young working class
is steeped in a local culture in which sports—from Baconin Borzacchini to
Libero Liberati—was always a sign of identity: “When you say Terni
working class, you also say sports” (Valentino Paparelli). Cycling and
skateboarding are favorite activities, but soccer remains the dominant pas-
sion: “Terni: the steelworks and the Ternana, that’s all, there’s nothing
else” (Andrea Pagliarola). In the 1930s, a northern newspaper commented
that “for Terni’s players, the factory first and the gym later”; in 2007,
Ternana coach Moreno Raggi boasted that his was a “working-class team”
that dealt with all the problems “with work”.5
Anafreak. Ternana is part of my life. I remember going to away games, I

must have been five years old, with my mother, my sisters, their husbands,
the whole family, you know? Then you grow up, by the time you’re twelve,
thirteen, after the game instead of going home you start going around with
those who are raising Cain. I took a liking to it right away—it gives you
adrenaline, I can’t explain it, you don’t know it unless you’ve lived it. To
you, it may be a crime, but it’s something else entirely, when you’re part of
it you don’t see it that way. At fifteen, I started going to away games.
That’s what changes you, because after you’ve been going for four, five
years, you create a group that more or less are always the same. So what
happens? There’s a skirmish with the police, one time one comes and saves
you from the police, the next time it’s another, another time you help
them. It isn’t about the team or soccer per se. What captured me first was
the team, but then it was the group, people who share situations with you,
you understand?
Andrea Pagliarola. Since I was a child I was taken to the games, the
bleachers, going to the away games every Sunday… With all the conse-
quences: police warnings, arrests, going to court… For three years I was
banned from the stadium, because there was an invasion on the pitch and I
was in the midst of it… I remember… because when you’re young you do
stupid things, you go in, break up things…
Anafreak. When we were supposed to go to Salerno [for the return game]

the police told us not to go because they couldn’t guarantee public order.
Of course we went, because—we represent Terni, and Terni is not afraid to

go to Salerno. We went—they were waiting for us. The police, too. They
let us drive up to the stadium, then the police stopped our buses, we were
on three buses and we couldn’t move. And thousands of them surrounded
us, three, four thousand people throwing stones, bricks flying all in the air.
We picked up the stones and threw them back, each stone laid one of them
down, they didn’t dare come into contact with us, if they had we’d have bit
their heads off, such was the rage we had inside us. After a few minutes, the
police drove us away, they didn’t let us inside the stadium. And we were
mad, rotten mad. On our way back, we demolished everything, everything
that got in our way, gas stations, convenience stores, cars…everything,
everything. We were so filled with anger that, as I said, if they had come
near us we’d have bit their heads off. I mean, you ought to have been there.
I’ve had my share of hard knocks, I did, but that’s not the problem; the
problem is when you run, that’s what’s bad. And when you’re part of a
group, you don’t run, you don’t run, no way. That’s what makes you
strong. I mean, the ultra is just a regular person, who, however—I don’t
know, I have overcome fear, I have overcome fear for good.
Anyway, the ultras in Terni are finished. The laws have changed, and I
don’t want to end up in jail, I have a child, I don’t want to go to jail. Yet, it
is true and not true. The ultras haven’t changed. Maybe they don’t go to
the games anymore. But my nature is the same, this is my way of living, I
don’t accept impositions, I’m not afraid even if you are bigger, if you wear
a uniform, if you come in three or four.
4 THE LORDS OF ESSEN AND DUISBURG
Battista Garibaldi. I remember the day I first went to work in the factory.
The German flag was flying at the steelworks gate. To me, seeing the
German flag at the steelworks gates was a blow.
In 1953 the steelworks belonged to an Italian state-owned conglom-

erate. The struggle against the layoffs was also part of an internal conflict in
a country divided by class, a struggle against the Italian government and
the social forces it represented. In 2004 the factory was owned by a
German multinational: the conflict was now formulated in terms of
national versus foreign interest—Italy, including the Berlusconi govern-
ment, united against Germany. Class was replaced by nation. The mayor
320 A. PORTELLI
denounced “the German head manager”; the bishop attacked the

“German management,” the unions rose against “the German multina-
tional”; a sign carried by the workers who demonstrated in Rome screamed
that “ThyssenKrupp is against Italy.”
“The German multinational” is an intriguing oxymoron: if it’s German,
how can it be multinational, and if it’s multinational, how can it be
German? In fact, those two terms suggest on the one hand the local
concentration of power, on the other the global impact of the power that
radiates from this center. “The lords of Essen and Duisburg,” as the mayor
labeled them, hold sway in Germany, France, Italy, India, Mexico, United
States, China, Brazil. The factory, and the town with it, depend on distant,
foreign, inaccessible powers, and compete with other plants spread all over
the continents. The national dimension of the conflict might have appeared
dated in the time of the European union, but was functional to down-
playing the class dimension of the struggle, and even allowed the
Berlusconi government to present itself as a patriotic advocate of Italian
workers.
The approach in terms of national interest and identity, however, also
conveyed a strong sense of disenfranchisement and powerlessness: “All
those slogans about ‘the Germans, the Germans’… there was also the fact
that in this kind of system you have no decision-making power over your
own territory. You feel dispossessed, colonized” (“Luciano Berni”). At the
rally on the day of the general strike, speakers sounded the note of “in-
dustrial feudalism” (Faliero Chiappini). When Mayor Paolo Raffaelli
addressed “the lords of ThyssenKrupp,… the powerful lords of the
multinational” what he had in mind was less contemporary entrepreneurs
than feudal lords, “the lords of Thyssen and Krupp, caught in their
unbearable German dynasty6, their geo-political intrigues, their internecine
wars.” The theme was taken up in less elegant terms in a number of slogans
chanted and shouted during protest marches in 2004 and 2005: “you have
nothing but wurstels” (Keji Adumno), “send those German pieces of shit
back home” (Roberto Rondinelli), “the mother of the German is a whore…
I mean, the poverty of the slogans may be some kind of ludic outlet—but is
also contains a backwash of nationalism, of neo-protectionism” (Taurino
Costantini). “Clearly, the heritage wasn’t passed on from generation to
generation, so the slogans weren’t ours, those of the old Left, but the
chants of the stadium bleachers, the soccer ultras, that kind of language”
(Battista Garibaldi).
“Hence, all these crude slogans against the Germans. Like, for instance,
rehashing the past—Germans: Nazis” (Roberto Romanelli). It’s a battle of
stereotypes: “ThyssenKrupp, we know who they are. I don’t mean that all
Germans are still rooted in National Socialism, it’s an old cliché—yet, they
used [a cliché on Italians] pizza, mandolin and mafia, and we call them
Nazis” (Ciro Argentino). Krupp and Thyssen iron and steelworks were
indeed crucial to the Nazi war effort. After the war, the owners were
sentenced for collaboration with the regime and the use of slave labor; they
were pardoned shortly after and resumed control of their businesses.7 In
Carnival week 2005 “the laid-off workers paraded through the town
wearing masks and chains around the wrists, held on a leash by a vaguely
Hitlerian-looking jailer wearing the ThyssenKrupp logo” and an armband
with the double SS of ThyssenKrupp in Nazi SS script.8 The anti-German
hostility was also rooted in the still very vivid memory of the German
occupation and of the Resistance waged by Terni’s working-class partisans:
those who fought in the Resistance, and those who saved Terni’s factories
from destruction and removal by the Germans were the fathers and
grandfathers of the current generation of steel workers and their families
(“I remember my grandmother’s story about her father who during the
war made the rounds of the steelworks and defused the mines as soon as
the Germans planted them,” Keji Adumno). In a way, the struggle to
prevent the closure of the magnetic steel division could be perceived as a
continuation of that resistance.
Finally, the rivalry between Germany and Italy was played over and over
again on the soccer pitch. Perhaps the most memorable game in Italian
soccer history is the World Cup semifinal in Mexico 1970, in which Italy
prevailed 4–3 in extra time, and millions of people took to the streets to
celebrate. Italy also faced, and beat, Germany in the World Cup final in
Madrid 1982, and in the World Cup semifinal in 2006 (it lost the penalty
shootout in the 2016 European Cup). Umberto Eco once wrote that
sports talk has the same structure as political discourse, but is actually its
ghost, its Ersatz.9 Yet, at a time when political discourse and class con-
sciousness are silenced, sports talk may become a way for working people
to break out of silence. Playing the strike in the guise of another Italy vs.
Germany match may be a way of obfuscating the class nature of the con-
flict, but also at least a way of playing the game.
Thus, the workers who came to Rome to demonstrate on February 3,
2004, chanted slogans that echoed those heard in the stadium, and wore
football scarves and pins. “They had been trained in the stadium, so they
322 A. PORTELLI
know all about slogans and chants, they had changed them, from soccer to
the factory, and you could hear this resounding marching throng, this roar.
Football chants turned into factory slogans” (“Luciano Berni”). Even the
toughest forms of struggle echo the behavior of traditionally unruly foot-
ball fans: when the workers broke into the Garden Hotel and attacked the
German managers, they were acting like the workers who invaded the pitch
and fought the police to protest supposed injustices by the referees in the
1940s and ‘50s.
On the other hand, while soccer language enters the factory and the
struggle, in turn working-class mobilization and union language enter the
stadium. Strike banners and union slogans appeared on the bleachers, even
the fans of other clubs traditionally hostile to Ternana brought messages of
solidarity, and the workers paraded several times on the pitch before the
games: “we had arranged it with the ultras, so we marched in carrying our
Electric Steel banners” (Gianni Sabatini).10
Claudio Cipolla. We went three times. The first time, we walked around
on the pitch, delayed the beginning of the game so that TV would talk
about it. Another time, it was an important game, we got to talking with
some of the players before the game, then we marched around the pitch,
the stadium was full and I’ll never forget that when we walked in carrying
the union banner, all the bleachers were chanting [the 1970s slogan] “il
potere dev’essere operaio,” [power must belong to the workers]. It was
overwhelming, then we walked out and as we walked out everybody was
chanting these words, and cheering us.
5 AROUND THE WORLD: INDIA, BRAZIL, THE UNITED

STATES
In March 2004, a few weeks after Terni’s general strike, I was driving by
Igatpuri, near Nashik, on the mountains behind Mumbai, India, when a
sign on a factory gate caught my eye: “EBG India Electrical Steel.
A ThyssenKrupp company.” I had never seen globalization at such close
quarters. The workers in Terni knew nothing of a sister plant in India; the
Igatpuri janitors with whom I managed to exchange a few words had never
heard of Terni. In globalization, power is unified, while workers are divided
and know little or nothing about one another.
A year later, with the help of Abhyviakti (a local cooperative for alter-
native media and rural development), I was able to interview some of the
factory’s managers and workers. Mr. Somendra Pal, head of human

resources, explained that the factory has been entirely owned by TK since
2000, and is run by managers brought in from Germany. Its main product
is magnetic steel. He said that the market for magnetic steel is good, but
Terni was “a different matter. As far as I know, it was a problem with the
quality of the product.” Terni’s workers claim that they make the best steel
in the world, and are proud of their skill and work ethics; yet,
ThyssenKrupp tells its Indian executives that the problems there are caused
by the low quality of the product. I ask Mr. Pal if he had ever been in Terni:
“I have visited ThyssenKrupp plants in France and Germany, but they
advised me not to go to Terni. They’ll break your legs if you go there. You
arrive on your own legs, but may not be able to walk out on them.” The
echo of the invasion of the Garden Hotel and the day of the flying cakes
had traveled all the way to this air-conditioned office in India.
“In 2003 the Communists came, with a big crowd at the gates: they
wanted a union. We didn’t let them in. We pushed them back. The law in
Maharashtra allows the workers to create company unions, so now we have
a company union and relations are peaceful” (Somendra Pal). “We had
contacted a Communist union,” a worker said, “but the company said they
would never recognize it, so we decided to have an in-house union that the
company would be willing to recognize. Relations are good, I have no
reason to think of quitting” (Rajesh).11 ThyssenKrupp does not recognize
the workers’ right to chose their own union, but secures their fidelity
through traditional paternalistic practices: hiring the sons of workers who
retire, as Terni used to do until a couple of generations ago, or organizing
sports events. “Each year the family calls a meeting of all employees to
listen to what we have to say about the work, our grievances, and we
discuss it all together” (Nisar). I talk to a group of workers—in the
presence of another human relations manager. They have heard about
Terni—“was it because of union problems? It can’t happen here, because
of the production we make, and the good relations between workers and
management” (Ravi). I remind them that they said exactly the same things
in Terni before the crisis—good production, social peace, positive labor
relations…—and they seem concerned.
The stories they tell are those of a first generation of industrial workers
—very different from those of their contemporaries in Terni, but not unlike
those of Terni’s first generation. They have memories of the land, some
work in the factory to help their families back at the village; they don’t
necessarily dislike industrial work but do not take it for granted. “I come
324 A. PORTELLI
from a village nearby. My family works the land. Part of our land has been
bought by the company, and part of it is still ours, my wife works on it. I’ve
been working here for ten years, since the factory started. I used to like
working the land. I don’t mind the work here, but it’s boring. I’ll be here
until I retire” (Ravi). “My family also owned land, but it was confiscated to
build the dam that supplied power to the factory, so mine is what is known
as a ‘project-affected family.’ The law says that the company must hire five
percent of its workers among project-affected families, so I applied and was
hired. I had to go through a training period, so I wasn’t able to finish
college. I was studying art” (Rajesh). “I come from a rural background, a
rural family. I grew up in the village, then I came to Nashik to learn to be a
mechanic. I worked at a number of jobs, then I was hired here. My family
has moved to Nashik but we still own the land at the village and we go for
ceremonies, religious holidays, family events. I don’t know what I will do in
the future but I think I’ll go back to the village. I feel that I have an organic
relation to the earth, like the blood relation I have with my siblings. If you
work the land, you are directed by your family; here, you must take orders
from strangers” (Sharad). “[By working here] I can help my family, and
my children can get an education and succeed in life. When I was in college
my family could not afford to let me stay in school and I had to work at a
brick factory. I don’t want my children to go through the same, I want
them to succeed and do what they want in life” (Ravi).
Vinda. I, too, come from a village, and my family always worked in agri-
culture. I loved agriculture, I worked in the fields all the time, but my
parents sent me here to finish school. I liked some of the subjects but I
didn’t like English, so I failed the final exam. I came to work here because of
the pressure from my family, but I ran away and went back to work in the
fields. I didn’t like the idea of being here and doing always the same job, I
wanted to do something different, something exciting, and working in the
fields seemed different from everything else. But my family forced me to go
back to school, a vocational school—I didn’t like it but I had to finish. And I
was hired here as an apprentice. I ran away again, and again my family sent
me back; now I finished my apprenticeship, I’m here and I don’t like it at all.
We had a deal in the family, that one male child would go away to work [to
earn monetary income for the family], and I was the one. Yet we had agreed
that if I didn’t like the work I’d go back home. Now I don’t mind the work
here, but I guess sooner or later I’ll run away again and go home.
Anita Paranjape, my interpreter, comments: “the problem is that young

people get an education, and then leave.” This is her first visit to a factory:
“Did you see the noise, in there, the heat, an all-male environment—and
they call it a good life!” Later, I give a talk about the struggle in Terni to
the rural activists of Abhyviakti. At the end, the first question chills me: “Is
it such a bad thing if a factory closes?”
“ThyssenKrupp is a multinational conglomerate of 670 companies,
almost 200,000 employees, and 45 offices all over the world.”12 The data
and figures of globalization are one thing; another thing is bumping upon
it everywhere you go: the “fingers” that connect the terminal to the plane
at São Paulo airport in Brazil, the escalators in the Oslo subway (and, I am
told, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia), the elevator at the Brescia railway station,
the giant crane in the Capetown harbor (my friends at Witwatersrand
University tried in vain to interview the South African TK workers), the
elevator in a cheap motel in Logan Country, West Virginia, or in a Holiday
Inn in Lexington, Kentucky—all bear the ThyssenKrupp name. Rambling
Martina Canali confirms: “Whenever I travel around the world and I see
the words, ThyssenKrupp, on the ground, on the elevators, I think, look,
these bastards, wherever I go they are there.”
In 2010 I tried to start an international oral history project on
ThyssenKrupp workers. We failed to get funding, and the only place where
it was brought to completion was Brazil.13 At the time, ThyssenKrupp
owned or controlled twenty-two companies in Brazil, with 13,000
employees, from auto parts in São Paulo and Minas Gerais to elevators in
Porto Alegre.14 An email from Paulinho Almeida, one of the project’s
coordinators, explains:15
“Many time in my life have I heard people say, ‘Working at
ThyssenKrupp is the dream of all the metal workers in the greater São
Paulo region. When I taught high school, many students dropped out of
school to take vocational courses with a dream of one day going to work
for Krupp. Often, in the days of political activism, we demonstrated at the
factory gates, and there was a rejection of the union because they all
wanted to work here. Krupp started a tradition of training their employees’
children so they could go to work for the company. There was a big crisis
in the ‘80 s and ‘90 s, and much of the production was taken to
Mexico.”16
The history of Krupp in Brazil goes back to 1837; that of Thyssen to
1908. Paulinho Almeida adds: “There are rumors that Krupp had estab-
lished itself in the area to produce weapons for World War II. But it was
326 A. PORTELLI
only an assembly plant, so the workers didn’t know what they were doing
because pieces were assembled separately in a huge industrial park and
there was no communication among the workers in different shifts and
divisions. These are the stories you hear. Much later, they specialized in
auto parts for Brazil and Argentina.”
Like in India, ThyssenKrupp practices a careful policy of fidelization,
often in continuity with the previous management of companies its has
taken over. Gisela Marins, who worked at a company that later became
ThyssenKrupp in Porto Alegre, and has relatives still employed in it,
remembers: “The company is a part of your personal life and your personal
life is a continuation of the life of the company. In this factory at Porto
Alegre, for instance, they have a center where employees can organize
parties for their children, playgrounds and sports fields, a whole structure
so that in your leisure time you can keep going back to the company with
your family. The factory as family.”17 The same is true for the auto parts
plant at Ibirité, Minais Gerais, a supplier of the Fiat plant at Belo
Horizonte: the gremio (the employees’ association) “always organized
New Year’s Eve parties. We sang and played the batuque ourselves. The
New Year’s Eve party was sacred, we all took our families. We had soccer
tournaments, each division had its own team, I played left midfielder for
Maintenance. We won almost every year” (Januário Cosme Damião).18
“The ThyssenKrupp model is the German model, harsh, structured,
square, and here we have our little way of doing things the Brazilian way.
In the end, we proved that the firm’s success was not a coincidence, but
was the fruit of a work in which everybody takes part” (Lázaro de Figueredo
Júnior). At another ThyssenKrupp plant in Minas Gerais, management
tried to ban the use of the word “trabalhadores [workers]” and replace it
with “colaboradores [collaborators]”; the workers were not pleased.19 The
Brazilian jeitinho at Ibirité has much in common with the ThyssenKrupp
model at Igatpuri in India: coffee with the boss, megaphone sessions in
which workers can voice their ideas and complaints; and the time-honored
practice of hiring their own workers’ children: “When a father brings in his
son and then in turn the son brings in his own, and now we have gener-
ations that have been working here, this is the sign of a serious commit-
ment toward the company” (Lázaro de Figueredo Júnior).
Eduardo Bertolini. At Ibirité we found out that at the Fiat plant [in Belo
Horizonte, Minas Gerais] they hire no one unless they have a letter of
recommendation from someone who is already working there. We realized
also that at Fiat there were no strikes and that since they had adopted this
philosophy they had doubled productivity and reduced work accidents. We
introduced this system in the plant at Ibirité, and today we rely on it very
much.
October 2005. On the road between Hopkinsville and Shelbyville, not

far from Louisville, Kentucky, behind a row of trees, a sign on a factory
gate: ThyssenKrupp Budd, an automotive part supplier. A few months
earlier, in February 2005, while Terni was again on strike over the mag-
netic steel plant, the ThyssenKrupp Budd union contract expired:
“ThyssenKrupp Budd asked workers for $10 million in concessions,
including cutting pay by $5 an hour, a $160-a-month increase in health
insurance premiums, and elimination of retiree health care benefits and
cost-of-living adjustments.”20 The workers struck and, under pressure
from its customers for deliveries, the company caved in and the contract
was renewed without givebacks. In 2006 ThyssenKrupp sold all thirteen of
its automotive body and chassis operations in North America to Martinrea
International Inc. ; as a consequence, at least fifty workers at the Shelbyville
plant were laid off.21
“On 11 May 2007, ThyssenKrupp AG announced an investment of
€3.1 billion (US$4.19 billion) for a project consisting of building new
carbon steel and stainless steel processing facilities in southern Alabama
that would employ 2,700 people when fully operational. The project, along
with a multibillion-dollar greenfield steelmaking facility in Brazil, is a
cornerstone of ThyssenKrupp’s new global expansion strategy into the
North American and NAFTA high-value carbon steel markets. The com-
pany announced that the investment was increased to $4.6 billion in 2010.
As of the date of the announcement, the investment was the largest private
economic development investment in Alabama’s history and the largest by
a German company in the U.S.” Alabama was chosen because it offered
“tax breaks for everything from utility payments to capital costs,” a nearly
total exemption from corporate income tax, and “substantial cash from
Mobile city and county governments” for an expected 100 million dol-
lars.22 And, of course, no unions.
The company announced that it would employ 29,000 workers in
construction and 2700 once production was on the way. Among the
enthusiastic comments of local bloggers and politicians, some were more
doubtful: “I’m excited about the plant, but I have a math problem. The
26,000 construction jobs seem to end in 2010. The 2700 factory jobs are
328 A. PORTELLI
great, but a 90% reduction in work-force. Am I missing something? Where

do the other 23,000 workers go?”23 In fact, not even all the 2700 who will
stay to run the plant would be local; many might even come from Terni:
“They are asking some of the boys if they’d like to go to America to work,
because of course if they have people who are already qualified it gives
them a head start. Some might actually go. It’s a matter of economic
convenience, and there are so many things involved. I mean, nowadays
America is here, not there, the euro is the dollar. Yet, some young man
might say: I work there for ten years, make 60,000 euros instead of 20,000,
save some money, maybe buy a home or something” (Pietro Marcelli).
The 2008 economic crisis changed it all. The economic feasibility of
Thyssen Krupp’s Alabama plant was founded on imported steel slabs from
its plant in Brazil; the plan however fell apart because of the recession and
increasing production costs in Brazil. Between 2013 and 2014, the plant
was parceled out, at a loss, to the Finnish company Outokompo and to a
joint venture between Indian conglomerate Arcelor and Japan’s Nippon
Steel and Sumitomo Metal. At the time, the plant employed 1600 workers,
less than sixty percent of the vaunted 2700 jobs. None came from Terni.24
6 THE QUALITY OF CHINESE STEEL

February 26, 2005. Terni is again striking and marching in defense of steel
mill jobs. Over a glass of wine, Emanuele Albi and some of his co-workers
discuss globalization, strategies, policies, institutions. Some of the argu-
ments are so general as to risk abstraction; others are rooted in the here and
now. These young workers are fiercely critical toward local institutions,
their working-class professional pride is still the backbone of their identity;
yet, their vision is no longer restricted to the “exceptionalism” of Terni’s
mountain basin, but includes an awareness of the worldwide context and
the global dimensions of what is happening to their town. “I’m making an
effort to avoid speaking dialect” (Valerio); although the accent and some
idioms remain, yet their language now includes all sorts of contemporary
anglicized globalspeak. It occurred first in the discourse of sports, leisure,
entertainment, music; but it also enters the lexicon of factory and union:
English words like corporate, core business, board, controller, stainless, coil,
step, revamp may still be declined with a Terni accent in the mouths of
workers and organizers, but they are a clear signal of a change in
perspective.
The young workers of the Brigata Cimarelli and the Tubificio [pipe mill]
with whom I talk have the data on production, market quotas, and
industrial policies at their fingertips. Being productive is no longer enough;
now workers must come to terms with market problems, company policy,
global context (“our steel,” says one, “is being finished in China”). A
Tubificio worker complains that “to a multinational, Terni is a drop in the
ocean”; another replies that it is a link in a chain that would break without
them: “We make fifteen percent of muffler pipes for the European auto
industry. If we stop, Renault stops, Volvo breaks down.”
Fragments of a conversation between workers of different generations.
Nevio Brunori. We used to make rough stainless steel rolls and send
them to Mexico and China to be finished there, or Brazil. Nowadays in
China they’re building a plant that can produce nine million tons of steel a
year. China only needs three million for its internal market.
Marco Allegretti. Yes, but don’t you know that China had to throw
away several tons of steel because it wasn’t up to European standards? Do
you really think that China can really make quality steel? I mean, once
you’ve saturated the home market, you’ve got to sell it abroad.
Nevio Brunori. Listen, do you still believe that Terni steel is good
because of the quality of our water?25 What you’re talking about was true
for magnetic steel. Magnetic steel, you must make it beautiful inside, not
just outside. It must be beautiful inside, for what it serves. Stainless steel, as
long as it’s shiny on the outside, it’s all right. If you can do the rough
product, it can be finished and made shiny afterwards.
Marco Allegretti. But that’s not the only kind of steel there is; steel also
goes into the infrastructures, and for that it needs to have certain charac-
teristics. The market of steel has changed, it’s been liberalized, the com-
petition is so tough that any kind of steel you make must be good both
inside and outside. The Chinese can make shiny steel all right, but if it isn’t
good inside they can’t sell much of it.
Emanuele Albi. The rolls we send out are used for kitchen sinks, for
forks, and such; there is a whole range of low-quality products that is all
brought in from China, it’s made with steel shiny outside, because anyone
can make that. What he’s talking about, the infrastructures, is forged steel,
magnetic steel, and to make these things it takes…
Nevio Brunori. The stainless steel we make in Terni isn’t meant for big
infrastructures, we don’t make steel construction beams. What we make is
laminates; and nowadays, those rolls we used to send to China and Mexico,
330 A. PORTELLI
they can make them themselves. So let me tell you: China has a surplus of
nine million tons of [that kind] of steel.
Marco Allegretti. You know, nowadays AST [Acciai Speciali Terni] sales
account for two percent of all ThyssenKrupp sales. If China begins to invest
in quality—.
NOTES
1. A political party established in 2007 from the merger between what was left
of the Communist Party after many transformations and name changes, and
a splinter of the former Christian Democracy.
2. Rifondazione Comunista [New Communist Foundation] was the party of
those who refused the Communist Party’s change of name after 1989.
3. Roberto Anafrini prefers to be referred to by this nickname.
4. See L. Campetti, “Quanto tira la classe operaia,” Il Manifesto, May 14,
2008; “La droga, la fine della speranza, e gli operai di Terni,” editorial in
Micropolis-Segno Critico, May 28, 2008: both show that drug consumption
is indeed connected to changes in the organization of work and the crisis of
labor.
5. Il Messaggero, January 2, 2007.
6. In English: an allusion to the TV series Dynasty, that was also popular in
Italy.
7. Trials of war criminals before the Nurenberg military tribunals under
Control Council Law No. 10, Washington, DC, 1949–1952, vol. 10.
8. G. Del Vecchio, “Tk, cassa integrazione anche a Torino,” Il Manifesto,
February 9, 2005.
9. U. Eco, “La chiacchiera sportiva,” in Il Costume di Casa, Milan, Bompiani,
1973, p. 240.
10. “Gli ultras con le tute blu,” Liberazione, February 3, 2004.
11. A pseudonym. The Igatpuri workers asked me not to use their names.
12. D. Novelli et al., ThyssenKrupp. L’inferno della classe operaia, Milan,
Sperling&Kupfer, 2008, pp. 64–65.
13. The project was coordinated by Prof. Yara Khouri of the Catholic
University of São Paulo and Prof. Paulo Almeida, of the Federal University
of Uberlândia. See Yara Aun Khouri, “A empresa ThyssenKrupp do Brasil e
seus Trabalhadores: A problemática da memória como linguagem social e
prática política”, Anais do XXVI Simpósio Nacional de História—ANPUH
• São Paulo, July 2011, pp. 1–13; http://www.snh2011.anpuh.org/
resources/anais/14/1308167312_ARQUIVO_COMUNICACAO_
ANPUH_Yara_Aun_Khoury.pdf, accessed July 23, 2016.
14. “ThyssenKrupp in Brazil,” http://thyssenkrupp-steel.com/csa/en/
brazilien, accessed June 26, 2008. This page is no longer available.
15. Paulo Almeida, professor of social history at the University of Uberlândia

(Minas Gerais), email, June 25, 2008.
16. ThyssenKrupp employed 1,400 workers in its cold-rolled stainless steel plant
in San Luís Potosí, Mexico: www.thyssenkrupp-stainless.com/cn-info/
company/stainless-steel/thyssenkrupp-mexinox.html, retrieved June 26,
2008. The page is no longer available: see now http://mx.kompass.com/
c/thyssenkrupp-mexinox-s-a-de-c-v/mx000070/, accessed July 23, 2016.
17. Gisele Marins, a cultural worker for the Brazilian Embassy in Rome, was
interviewed in Rome, June 5, 2012.
18. The Ibirité interviews were recorded by the Museo da Pessoa in São Paulo,
on commission from ThyssenKrupp.
19. Sergio Paulo Morais, “Memórias em disputa: globalizaçao, trabalho
industrial e pautas sindacais (1990–2015), História e Perspectivas,
Uberlândia (Minas Gerais), 55, July–December 2016, pp. 211–240.
20. B. Adams, “ThyssenKrupp Budd workers Reach Tentative Agreement,”
Business First, Louisville (KY), February 9, 2005, http://www.
bizjournals.com/louisville/stories/2005/02/07/daily24.html, accessed
July 23, 2016.
21. “ThyssenKrupp Budd to sell North American automotive body operations,
http://americanmachinist.com/uncategorized/thyssenkrupp-budd-sell-
north-american-automotive-body-operations; “About 50 workers expected
to lose jobs at Martinrea plant,” March 13, 2008, http://www.
bizjournals.com/louisville/stories/2008/03/17/story7.html, both acces-
sed July 23, 2016.
22. https://www.google.it/?client=firefox-b#q=mobile+county+wins
+thyssenkrupp+plant&gfe_rd=c, accessed July 23, 2016: “The new plant
would have to make over $2.8 billion a year from a $3.7 billion plant…
before it paid any corporate income taxes. Media reports put
ThyssenKrupp’s 2006 profit at slightly under $3.4 billion—meaning the
new plant would have to produce 82 percent of ThyssenKrupp’s
company-wide profit before paying corporate income taxes to Alabama.”
23. Ibid., comment signed “26point2.”
24. Melissa Nelson-Gabriel, The Associated Press, “Massive Thyssenkrupp steel
plant in Calvert being sold for an estimated $1.55 billion,” December 26,
2013, http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20131226/NEWS/
131229821, accessed July 23, 2016.
25. He alludes to the belief that it’s the quality of the water that makes Naples
coffee the best in the world.
CHAPTER 14
The Empire Strikes Back: The Town,

the Factory, the Strike—Reprise
1 DÉJÀ VU
“A year later, ThyssenKrupp was on the warpath again, and this time the
intent was to get rid of the magnetic steel division for good, and they
succeeded—yet, the battle was fierce” (Battista Garibaldi). A few months
after the agreement of February 2004, ThyssenKrupp struck again, with
renewed force and a more subtle strategy. The workers resisted, but the
town was tired and disenchanted: it had been through it before, and it was
hard to face the déjà vu with the same anger, the same enthusiasm.
“In the end, they all but starved us into surrender” (“Luciano Berni”).
A multinational company is never hungry, never cold, never sleepy. It does
not save up to get married, has no children and no family, does not lose its
home if it fails to pay into the mortgage. “The multinational is an invisible
entity that has the power to blow up the lives of flesh and blood people”
(“Luciano Berni”). But this is the point: as William Jennings Bryant argued
in 1900, a company is not a flesh and blood creature.1 A multinational is
immortal; it has all the time in the world, it can wait and learn from its
setbacks. “In 2004, we caught them off guard, they weren’t used to strong
opposition. The next time they were ready” (Nevio Brunori).
“They changed their strategy. They started a media campaign, telling
the press that nobody would lose their job, that there would be invest-
ments” (Gianfanco Fattorini). “They started this in-house daily paper,
Focus, they send it to you at home, they try to make you feel that you’re

334 A. PORTELLI
part not only of Terni’s history but of ThyssenKrupp’s as well” (Battista

Garibaldi).
In June 2004 Giovanni Bertoni, AST chief executive, confirmed to the
government that the magnetic steel division would not be discontinued. In
October Bertoni was replaced by a German executive, Michael
Rademacher; on November 15 TK denounced all previous agreements and
announced that it would close not only magnetic steel but also the forged
steel and titanium plants, retaining only stainless steel.2 Like all autocratic
powers, ThyssenKrupp accompanied the diktat with a unilateral gesture of
paternalism: “December 2004 they sent a letter to all employees
announcing a gift of 250,000 lire [130 euros] each. I told the union
secretary, let’s get their bank account number and send the money back,
because I’m not interested in charity. They said well, no, it can’t be done,
why don’t you do it on your own” (Nevio Brunori).
On January 28, 2005, the ThyssenKrupp board confirmed the closure of
the magnetic steel division, while a decision on forged steel and titanium
was adjourned. The workers responded with the same actions as a year
before: strikes, walkouts, demonstrations in Terni and Rome, blocking
highways and railroads. “The day we blocked the station, we started at four
a.m. and went home at midnight. It was February, and you know here in
Terni February is cold—if it’s cloudy it’s one thing, but those clear starry
nights, you freeze” (Raniero Onori). “At Sabbione [picketing the Pipe
Mill), it was so cold—look, we spent nights there at minus seven, in the
open, only a tarpaulin, no firewood, me and some other guys took the
night shift from ten to six, because nobody else wanted it, these kids, the
younger ones, showed up in the mornings, stayed a while, and naturally
they wouldn’t stay all day” (“Luciano Berni”). The cold, however, is not
only in the weather. “We started all over again, blocked the gates and all;
but public opinion was no longer with us, they said we’re sick and tired of
you blocking the roads, you’ve been at it for two years, always the same
story; so they kind of abandoned us” (Alberto Galluzzi).
On February 1 the company and the unions met at the Prime Minister’s
office. “Radmacher didn’t even take off his coat. He threw a couple of
pages on the table. You know what he said? Ultimatum. Ultimativ” (Nevio
Brunori).
Lucia Rossi. Yeah, that was brutal. The [representative of the government]
told us, officially: “We are a free-market administration, we cannot and will
not interfere politically with the options of businesses, let alone of
14 THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: THE TOWN, THE FACTORY … 335
multinationals. Sure, influencing a multinational isn’t easy, but they didn’t

even try. We had asked the government to play a role, because Terni’s
magnetic steel is a point of excellence and if it goes an important part of the
country’s industrial production goes. But they didn’t. The negotiation was
no negotiation at all.
“At 4 p.m., the ThyssenKrupp representatives, after a short pause to

consider the unions’ counter-proposals, leave the negotiating table saying
that there will be no changes in their plan for AST.”3 Roberto Maroni,
Minister of Welfare, declared: “We cannot force by decree a European
company to open or retain its plants in Italy.” Michael Rademacher
claimed that the failure of negotiations was due to the unions’ intransi-
gence. From here on, the company played on divisions among the unions:
while the more moderate CISL and UIL4 seemed ready to recognize that
the magnetic steel division could no longer be defended, the left-wing
CGIL and its metal-workers union, FIOM, tried to hold on, or at least to
obtain a less damaging deal. “They started dealing with each union sepa-
rately, and FIOM was left alone. Alone to battle windmills, because I
remember very well when we were told that a free-market administration
could not interfere with the decisions of a multinational” (Gianfranco
Fattorini, CGIL). “The problem was getting the best deal we could get.
We thought that asking for more would mean no deal at all. Others
thought we could go a little further” (Faliero Chiappini, CISL).
Minister Roberto Maroni blamed the “rigidity” of the left-wing union for
the failure of negotiations.5 Bishop Vincenzo Paglia criticized the “rigidity”
of both sides, called for a compromise and tried to mediate an agreement
between the moderate unions, the mayor, and the company.6 “Two days
before they signed for the closure of magnetic steel, the Bishop said in public
that the workers had to leave the barricades, and negotiate. Why doesn’t he
mind his own church’s business? I mean, if they tell you they’re shutting
down your church, what do you do? It’s your job; I bet you would do just as
we did, see?” (Alberto Galluzzi). Like the year before, workers worried that it
might be the beginning of the end for all of Terni’s industrial site.
On February 3, the workers took up the struggle again. “We blocked the
gates, allowed work to continue inside but wouldn’t allow the product to
leave the plant. We blocked everything, we only allowed out the supplies for
the Pipe Mill and the Turin AST plant. So they responded by ‘setting at
liberty’ the workers of entire divisions or plants, like the Pipe Mill” (Claudio
Cipolla). “When we blocked the gates, the company counteracted: it laid off
336 A. PORTELLI
all the magnetic steel workers and placed them on cassa integrazione [wage
guarantee fund].7 Next, they set at liberty the Pipe Mill workers. Then, the
forges. And we were always under the threat, there were rumors that they
were going to call the police and the courts and shut down the whole
steelworks” (Nevio Brunori).
2 AN AWAY GAME
In 2004 the workers had gone to see the Pope. In 2005, another pil-
grimage; this time however, it’s not religion, it’s soccer culture. “The
European Parliament was meeting to discuss the question of ThyssenKrupp,
so we decided to attend this meeting” (Marco Bartoli). “We set ourselves up
as the Workers’ Spontaneous Movement and went to Strasbourg to
demonstrate, or at least to bear witness” (Maurizio Pacini). “We had asked
the unions for support, but they wanted us to carry their banners, so we
decided to go on our own, at our own expense” (Marco Bartoli).
Anafreak. We didn’t have the money to pay for the bus. I went to the
Ternana [soccer club], talked to the people in charge, asked them to give
us a bus. Before that we had gone to the mayor—a busload of workers
going to Strasbourg, the first person you go to is the mayor. The mayor
turned us down, we can’t spend tax money for seventeen workers. Ternana
was the last resort. They paid half the cost of the bus, we paid the rest
ourselves, the only way we could, we took up a collection at the stadium.
“They raised the money the way they do for away games: took up a
collection” (Marco Coppoli). “The trip was great. The day before we left
there was a big demonstration in Terni, we collected money for the hotel.
We left at 5 p.m., we’d brought everything, reserves, food, drink. We got
there the next morning and began to look for hostels, cheap accommo-
dation” (Maurizio Pacini). “Chance or luck had it that [at the European
Parliament] they let us in. We marched in, opened our banner; they
probably couldn’t read what it said, but the security bouncers came up,
made us leave the banner…It was a fantastic experience, they welcomed us
warmly, we wore our work overalls” (Anafreak). “So we went to this
meeting where the European Parliament chastised ThyssenKrupp for its
behavior, but that was all, because they have no power to enforce anything.
Other than that, it was a little holiday” (Marco Bartoli). “Yet it was a fine
experience. At least they let us speak to the European Parliament, a few
workers, self-organized. That they gave us a voice at the European

Parliament was awesome” (Emanuele Albi).
Maurio Pacini. We went, we spent the day inside the European Parliament
we attended the meetings they were having, we wrote a statement and read
it on the floor, and left the next day. When we arrived, we were all set at
liberty. They sent us the letters, to us and to so many others. This, in 2005.
3 LIBERTY
January 21, four-hour walkout of all industrial workers, a march and rally
through the center of town. A long-nosed styrofoam Pinocchio, epony-
mous liar, carries a sign: “TK: secure jobs.” From the windows, families
hang sheets with the word “nein.” A huge statue from the Cantamaggio
depot represents the Statue of Liberty carrying a sign: “We are all at lib-
erty.” Libertà means both liberty and freedom: they are now “liberated”
from their jobs. A banner proclaims: “Now set Sabbione [the jail] at liberty,
too.” The pickets at the Pipe Mill show me the letter in which the company
announces that they are “set at liberty.” To the workers this language is
adding insult to injury. “When you think of liberty,” one of them says,
“you think of the opening of the gates of Auschwitz, not locking us out of
the gates of the factory.”
The organizers announce: we are 9000. A year ago we were 30,000, but
it’s not bad, considering things have changed: in 2004, it was a general
strike, today it’s only the factories. Back then, the whole town was closed;
today, bars are open, people from the sidewalks look at the marching
workers (and students) like sympathetic spectators of a game that no longer
concerns them directly. At the rally, speakers insist on the struggle to force
TK back to the negotiating table; they are now much more critical of the
role of the Italian government. The town is friendly but distant; the
workers are united. Each mention of the history of Terni’s steel industry is
greeted with applause and enthusiastic cheers.
“In a way, I must thank ThyssenKrupp: they brought us together”
(Emanuele Albi). I talk to the pickets at the Pipe Mill, way out of town,
between the river and the railroad tracks, in the shadow of the Sabbione
city jail, not far from where I used to live as a child, when all there was here
were a few scattered dairy farms. A young worker named Cristiano, on the
Pipe Mill picket line: “We used to talk of class consciousness, perhaps these
events are bringing it back.” On the other hand, Yuri, 28, from the
338 A. PORTELLI
Alcantara textile factory, another endangered industrial site: “We are part
of the generation that had everything and we have internalized a great deal
of the dominant individualism and free-market ideology.” The workers
insist that the plant was making a profit; layoffs, cassa integrazione, sus-
pensions are only a strategy to punish and divide them. Yet, when the
company “set at liberty” seventy Pipe Mill workers, the whole factory
struck. “A year ago,” a picket says, “everybody talked about us, it seemed
like we were the cutting edge of change and new things; today, we’re doing
the same actions, even more radical, and no one talks about it. Perhaps it’s
because the crisis of Italian industry is unmentionable.” Or perhaps because
the media are not interested in déjà vu. Terni workers occupying the
turnpike or the railroad? Been there, done that. It’s no longer news. As I
leave, I take a picture of the pickets, huddled from the rain under the
tarpaulin. One holds a shaving of steel in his hand: “Can you see it? Will it
come out in the picture? It’s important: it’s all we have left of all the work
we’ve done.”
Two days after the strike, TK “frees” five hundred workers from the
stainless steel lines, and places six hundred magnetic steel workers on cassa
integrazione. “It was a blow. Going home, finding my wife in tears, trying to
cheer her up, it wasn’t easy” (Nevio Brunori). Two workers climb a smo-
kestack and hang a banner: “TK at liberty.” The struggle continues, but it’s
hard to go on: “The second year, the town left us alone, the institutions left
us alone, the government left us alone” (Emanuele Albi). “In 2004, you had
solidarity from everybody, from all the citizens. In 2005—look, it was in
February, always in February. We have our patron saint here [whose day is
February 14]. He didn’t give a damn about us” (Nevio Brunori).
Claudio Cipolla. Workers kept getting messages or phone calls from

organizers from other unions, telling them, “look, stop picketing, give up,
by now everything is written, everything is already written.” Apparently we
were all united, but actually…political parties, too, the whole context
slackened, because the multinational has a lot of strength, a lot of power, it
controls the economy of a whole province, a whole region, and in the end
we had to give in.
Emanuele Salvati. People were discouraged, even the magnetic division

workers stopped coming to the pickets. The morning they were laid off, the
last shift that came out at 6 a.m., they didn’t even stop to talk to the
pickets, they went home and went to bed. They weren’t even mad, they
were completely discouraged, they just up and went home. So that was a
sign of the worst to come, and in fact the last few days we didn’t even have
enough people to fill the pickets, so it was clear that they had won.
“Luciano Berni”. Perhaps also a part of the workers, of the unions, were
beginning to think that some kind of mediation was possible. The first time,
we had rejected the company’s decision, flatly, no negotiation at all; the
second time around, we started out knowing that we would negotiate and
see. There was a lack of unity among the workers, too, it must be said.
Those who were directly concerned, the magnetic steel workers, insisted on
retaining magnetic steel at all costs. The others, they weren’t as sure as they
had been a year before. They asked, after all, if no jobs are lost, what more
do they want? At meetings, some wanted to go back to work, they said, if we
go too far, they up and shut down the whole thing. The investments they
had made in China, in Mexico, were the deterrent: “if they can take away
magnetic steel, which was born in Terni, developed in Terni, the patents
made in Terni, getting rid of stainless will be even easier.”
Nevio Brunori. I wasn’t about defending magnetic steel in Terni, I was

about defending a unique product in the Italian state. During a pause in the
negotiations at [Rome’s] Palazzo Chigi I told [a CISL representative]: if you
think we came thus far, after the myriad of strikes and all, because we couldn’t
find a way of saving four or five hundred jobs, you’re wrong. You’re wrong,
because in Terni we know how to do that. We’re real good at that in Terni,
and we’ve proved it, because in Terni there have been a number of plant
closures but we were smart enough so that no one was left begging in the
street. I started in 1978, we were seven thousand employees; I left in 2006,
we were two thousand and two hundred. So the question was not how to find
a solution for four or five hundred people. If we’ve come thus far, it is to
decide whether this production is supposed to leave Italy or to stay in Italy.
It was not just a question of jobs, but one of industrial policy and,
ultimately, of democracy. Ironically, while the media, institutions, even
some of the unions, attacked FIOM and CGIL for sticking to the defense
of a small group of workers, FIOM and its organizers felt that they were
standing for a broad vision of the public good that went well beyond the
local dimension and its immediate problems. So when they, too, ended up
signing the agreement that sanctioned the closing of the magnetic steel
division, the disappointment was great.
340 A. PORTELLI
Alberto Galluzzi. When they met for the final round of negotiations at
Villa Centurini, we knew this was the end. At night, we lit fires all around
the villa, we stayed out all night. Then around 6 or 7 a.m. I went home
because I was working the next shift, and they were still locked in there.
The next day, around eight or nine, I get a phone call from the union: they
had signed.
“Luciano Berni”. When they signed the agreement, we were picketing as

usual at Sabbione, it was February, seven below zero. At night, everything
frozen all around us and, well, I remember that we heard the news that the
agreement had been signed and no one had told us anything. This made us
real mad, in fact, a number of people from the pickets started out and went to
Villa Centurini and tempers got hot, there was a good deal of exasperation.
The unions, more or less reluctantly, were resigned to the closure of

magnetic steel. ThyssenKrupp committed to “substantial investments” to
improve the quality of stainless steel and to open a new cold-rolling mill;
titanium and forged steel would remain open; all fixed-term contracts
would be renewed and magnetic steel workers would be moved to other
sectors. No jobs lost, at least until 2009. In a mass meeting, 70% of the
workers voted to accept.
Alberto Galluzzi. At 10 a.m. I came over to the CGIL and FIOM office.
I managed to get in, and Giorgio Cremaschi was going to speak.8
Cremaschi was the only union official who took responsibility, throughout
the negotiations. And I remember that this rank-and-file organizer,
[Nevio] Brunori, when Cremaschi came in, he threw a chair against the
wall and told Cremaschi he ought to be ashamed because he had come to
talk to us after the agreement was already signed, and this was wrong. And
this episode has stayed with me, because everybody bad mouths the union,
say that the organizers only mind their business and their privileges, while
actually there are people who weep for the shop where they spent 30 years
of their lives. This is why I love the steelworks: because there are people like
Brunori in it.
Nevio Brunori. Sunday morning we held a mass meeting at work and, I

don’t know whether you’ve already heard this, I went up and said: “Excuse
me: a service announcement. We lost.” I told the workers: “When I started
out in this struggle, I was aware that it was a battle between David and
Goliath, however, as I said, at least once David prevailed. As the thing went
on, the Goliaths became two, three, four, and poor David couldn’t cope.”
A 25-year old worker: “What kind of pact is this? Employment guar-

anteed until 2009. By then, I’ll be 30, shall I start picketing again?” And an
older one, who voted to accept, replies: “Look at this padlock. It’s my
locker key, I’ve had it for 27 years. I’ve worked here since I was eighteen;
before, ten years in my dad’s bakery. What do today’s young people think,
that everything is free? You join the struggle, too, but you have your mom
that cooks you a warm meal each night, who hands you some money if you
need it. At night you went to the pub, while we were freezing in the tent. If
you have a better idea, go ahead, we’ll think about it and if we like it we’ll
follow you. I was on strike for one hundred and fifty-nine hours , it shows
on my paycheck, I have five children and I’m up to my neck in debt; I
don’t have a dad to cover for me. For me, next month’s wage is a matter of
life and death; we got the best we could get, in this situation.”9
Lucia Rossi. In the end this struggle, what shall I say, in the end its outcome
left me with a sense of bitterness. We put a check on a situation that might
have become explosive, because the multinational might have just shut
down magnetic steel, period; the final agreement conditioned their deci-
sions. What remains with me of the whole affair, I’m going to say something
unpleasant now, is that the union, faced with the choices of the multina-
tionals, is powerless to do anything but try to make their choices a little less
painful. We [CGIL] were the only ones who said from the start that this
affair couldn’t end the way it had begun, with the closure of magnetic steel,
without any kind of compensation. If it hadn’t been for our commitment as
a union and that of the workers, we would not have succeeded in getting
this agreement, which somehow compensates for what has been lost.
Raniero Onori. We [the union] did all that I think was in our power.
Honestly, what has happened, I still disagree—I don’t want to talk politics
—but I disagree with the fact that our society, from the first of the
politicians to the last of the ternani, allowed us to be expropriated of a
historical heritage of the town of Terni, and of our region and our nation as
well. It made me so angry.
Lucia Rossi. We achieved a great deal, thanks to the leadership of the

workers themselves. Their role at the time was explosive. We [the union]
342 A. PORTELLI
took the initiative, but the leaders were a young working class, different
from the one we had known before—with different aims, not only different
ideology or party allegiances. In the end, some remained [active], others
drifted away; but it’s a fact that there has grown a young working class
different from the past.
Alberto Galluzzi. I mean, you get to a place where things keep dragging
on too long and the end is not in sight, so the enemy, the one you fight, is
no longer the company; the enemy becomes the union, because you think
that they’re not doing all they should. And then you realize that they too
are powerless, in a struggle against a multinational like this, that dominates
the world market of steel. I mean, if they want to close a plant I’m sure they
can go ahead and close it without so much…I guess they have a book, it’s
all written in the book: they read it, and act. I guess the shareholders write
it, the managers read it and obey.
4 STORMING HEAVEN
“Closing magnetic steel was a defeat, not just for the workers, but for the
country. Yet the union has made some changes; once we had to
acknowledge that that was the intent of the multinational, at least we got
them to commit to a number of things—some of which are happening,
some not” (Gianfranco Fattorini). On August 4, 2005, with the mediation
of the government, the unions, the local institutions and the company
committed to a number of actions to facilitate industrial investments,
research and training in the region. Other provisions were improvements
on roads, railroads, and other infrastructures; a direct railway line to the
Civitavecchia harbor10 and a dedicated pier for the transport of raw
materials to the factory; a continuation of power supply at reduced costs
after 2010.
TK did inaugurate the new cold-rolling mill in 2007. Praising the speed
with which it had been created, and boasting a thirty million euro
investment, CEO Harald Espenhanh appreciated (and appropriated) the
history of Terni’s industrial culture: “We have behind us a tradition and a
culture that, in the case of Terni, are 125 years old.”11 Yet hardly any of
the other provisions of the agreement came to fruition: the discount on
energy cost is forbidden by European regulations, and the new road and
railway to Civitavecchia are yet to come.
The closing of the magnetic steel division remained a painful wound, for
a number of reasons. Italy is the most important Western European market
for magnetic steel; the closing of Terni’s site turns the country into an
importer of what used to be a prime national export.12 Also, by reducing
the diversity of production, AST became less flexible, and more dependent
on the erratic market and fiercer competition of the stainless steel industry
(“They were also going to close the forge and the titanium plants; fortu-
nately they didn’t, and that’s what saved them when there was a slump in
the stainless steel market,” Enrico Gibellieri).
The deepest wound, however, was not a material one: the loss of a
shared cultural heritage of skill, research, technology, and labor that joins
rank-and-file workers, researchers, technicians, and engineers in a com-
munal sense of pride. As Nevio Brunori says, magnetic steel must be
“beautiful inside and outside”: an image that suggests a moral metaphor, in
which the beauty of the product reflects on the identity of the workers who
create it. “From the ‘50s on, when we began to make the so-called
grain-oriented steel, a very technologically advanced product that is used
for transformers, for rotors, the best quality was achieved at AST. Because
it was the result of a long study by people who knew their jobs well” (Pietro
Marcelli). Anafreak, who only has negative things to say about the factory,
still insists that “Terni’s magnetic steel is the best in the world, there’s none
like it.” The sorrow over the loss of magnetic steel, then, is caused not only
by concern for the future of the town’s industries, but also by a feeling of
waste and injustice: the patents that were result of their work, intelligence,
passion, would be appropriated by powers that did not work for them, and
would be taken away, to Germany or France.
Nevio Brunori. I’ll carry this experience within me as long as I live. Some
manage to overcome it some way but I don’t, I can’t. I can’t because I
lived inside that shop until the end, as I told you, and look, seeing the
dismantling of a shop, look, it’s tragic. This whole affair really hurt me,
because—I’m talking about my own union, too—you can’t take a struggle
up to this level, national, European level, a whole town, everybody talked
about it, and then you end it with this piece of paper. Might as well have
signed right away, I’d have been spared twenty-four days of picketing.
It is the ancient sin of the Left: attempting over and over to storm
heaven, and failing. The higher the intensity, the hopes, the enthusiasm of
the struggle, the deeper the bitterness, the disappointment: “You start out
344 A. PORTELLI
with this beautiful anger, this beautiful faith, and then it’s all over, why?
What did you get? It’s been four years and it still gnaws me inside, it gnaws
because it was our umpteenth delusion, and it really hurts” (Anafreak).
Nevio Brunori. What I’m sorry for, it isn’t myself, because by now what
I’ve done I’ve done, but I have a 27-year-old son, there are so many young
people in the factory, and I don’t know to what future they can look
forward. I blame them, too, because they have no interest in these things,
in politics, in the union. They only feel it when it closes upon them. But I
also blame politics and the union, because they have lost touch, they’re
very very distant from the real needs of the people. In Terni, now, if you
talk about the problems in the factory, nobody gives a damn. As I told you,
the union has wasted a golden opportunity. I mean, thirty thousand citi-
zens marching, stores that closed with the sign—“we’re closed today so we
don’t have to close tomorrow”—when will you ever see a thing like that
again? When will you see it again? You had created something out of this
world. The people now are disappointed, they endured, they endured,
because they had their eyes on a mirage, they hoped, and now they lost
even that mirage, which turned out to be nothing but a mirage, you get
there and there’s nothing there. What are people supposed to do?
At the end of 2005, the official ThyssenKrupp websites announced:

“The restructuring of the electrical steel operations of ThyssenKrupp Steel
is starting to bear fruit: for the 2004/2005 fiscal year, subsidiary
ThyssenKrupp Electrical Steel GmbH reported an eight-figure profit,…set
a new production record…a 28% improvement on [sales] …ThyssenKrupp
Electrical Steel is currently profiting from dynamic market growth, driven
mainly by strong demand from India and China” which was made possible
by “the closure of the unprofitable electrical steel production operations in
Terni…and the integration of the non-grain-oriented electrical steel
activities in the parent company ThyssenKrupp Steel.”13
Nevio Brunori. We made innovation, we invented a new product, the

OGH. Do you know what Rademacher told us at Palazzo Chigi, when we
told him that it was a Terni-only technology, the fruit of our researchers
and quality technicians? “You should be proud of your contribution to the
progress of the ThyssenKrupp family.” We all burst out laughing. I mean,
the family? When you hear this kind of talk, what can you do? Either you
break a chair on their heads, or you laugh.
NOTES
1. W. J. Bryan, speech at Chicago Conference on Trusts, 1900, in A. and O.
Hoogenboom, eds., The Gilded Age, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ,
1967, pp. 41–45.
2. P. Di Blasio, “Acciaierie Terni, torna la tensione”, Corriere della Sera,
December 3, 2004; G. Rossi, “Terni difende l’acciaieria”, L’Unità, Dec. 3,
2004.
3. “A Terni arriva la cassa integrazione”, La Stampa, Feb. 3, 2005.
4. Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori, Catholic; Unione Italiana
Lavoratori, nominally Social-Democratic.
5. “Thyssen: Terni un fiasco per tutti. ‘La rottura è colpa di Cgil e Uil’,”
Corriere della Sera, February 3, 2005; G. Del Vecchio, “La Thyssen a
valanga su Terni,” Il Manifesto, febbraio 3, 2005; W. Patalocco, “Terni,
partono gli scioperi e i blocchi in fabbrica,” Il Messaggero (national edition),
February 4, 2005; “Terni, gli operai respingono la cassa integrazione,”
l’Unità (national edition), February 7, 2005. There was dissent and there
were protests among the CISL rank-and-file workers, some of whom
wanted to continue the struggle: A. Melluzzi, “Scioperi e picchetti a Terni,
gli operai rispondono a ThyssenKrupp,” Liberazione, febbraio 4, 2005.
6. E. Lomoro, “Intesa alle acciaierie di Terni: un successo del territorio,”
Avvenire, March 1, 2005; A. Pergolini, “A Terni anche il vescovo è d’ac-
ciaio,” Panorama, marzo 10, 2005.
7. Cassa integrazione salari [wage guarantee fund] is a government fund that
supplies redundancy payments to temporarily laid-off workers.
8. Giorgio Cremaschi was the chairman of the FIOM central committee.
9. A. Sciotto, “Fine dei blocchi. Ma la vittoria ci lascia l’amaro,” Il Manifesto,
February 28, 2005.
10. A direct line to Civitavecchia was part of the initial plan for the creation of
the steel mill in 1885 but it was never realized. At present, materials arrive
by ship at Civitavecchia, then travel south to Rome by railroad, and back
north to Terni.
11. Protocollo di intesa per favorire lo sviluppo del territorio di Terni-Narni,
Terni CGIL Archive.
12. Osservazioni delle istituzioni e delle Organizzazioni Sindacali relative alla
produzione di lamierino magnetico a Terni. Riunione Presidenza del
Consiglio in data 3 febbraio 2004, Terni CGIL Archive. In 2016 Italy
became for the first time a net importer of steel: see Massimo Minella:
“Antonio Gozzi: ‘Acciaio, il sorpasso dell’import, non era mai accaduto
prima’”, Repubblica, Sept. 11, 2016.
13. http://www.tkes.com/web/tkeswebcms.nsf/www/de_fvor-6jwkls,
accessed July 31, 2016.
CHAPTER 15
A Tale of Two Cities: Death, Survival,

and Powerlessness in the Neo-Liberal
Age
1 WORKERS’ LIVES MATTER

Turin, the night between December 6 and 7, in the former Fiat subsidiary
Ferriere Piemontesi [Piedmont Iron Works], now owned by ThyssenKrupp
Acciai Speciali Terni (TK-AST)—a sister plant to the Terni steel works.
The factory was due to close in a few months. Giovanni Pignalosa is having
a cup of coffee before entering the cold-rolling mill shop for the night shift.
“All right—this boy came running, shouting from afar, Giuseppe, run,
run, number five has blown up, they’re all dead!” Giovanni thinks it’s a bad
joke; “but when I saw that his face was white, his eyes bulging out of their
sockets and full of tears, I realized it was no joke at all.”
Giovanni Pignalosa. I ran toward number five; before I reach the shop, I
run into [Rocco Marzo] the foreman, the first one I saw of the seven [who
died]. I still have the picture before my eyes, like when you go to the doctor
and you see an image of the human body with all the muscles showing. My
first thought was, run, run, because this is going to be the end of us all. Then
the foreman kept telling me, “Giovanni, tell my family, don’t let them
worry, Giovanni, I’m counting on you.” He had this voice and said these
words over and over, and my first thought was, “I’m running, I’m getting
out of here.” Then this boy who was with the foreman turns to me and says,
“Giuseppe, you’re the oldest, what shall we do?” What can I say, I don’t
know what the fuck snapped in my brain, I still can’t explain. I turn to the

348 A. PORTELLI
boy and I say, “Take the foreman, take him to the ambulance meeting
point, the ambulances are coming, don’t worry.” And into the shop I ran,
without thinking “it’s gonna blow up, I’m gonna die,” my mind went
blank, all I thought about was getting the boys out of here.
So when I got to where the fire was, I realized that I was facing a scene
that was ghastly, horrifying because you’re looking at people whose bodies
are charred, turned into coal, they’re alive, they feel no pain because—a
doctor told me that after the first and second layer of skin burn, the nerves
closer to the skin also burn and you feel no pain anymore. I went up to
them, spoke to them so they recognized my voice, and the first thing they
said was, “Giovanni, what has happened to us? We can’t see, what hap-
pened to our face, what’s on our face?” So how can you tell someone that
he’s unrecognizable, that he has no skin, how can you tell a person your
ears are crumbling, your skin is falling to the ground?
So you try to calm them down, imagine, my first impulse was to pick
them up in my arms and carry them away, but I didn’t because you realized
you didn’t know where the fuck to put your hands, you touched them and
didn’t know whether you’d go through them, I had no idea of the damage
you could do if you held them, if you hug them and carry them away. The
first thing I did was sending out of there all those who were crying, who
were screaming, because in these straits you have to know who you can
count on, who you can rely on, and you must be cool enough to decide
what to do. I don’t know, I’ll tell you, I don’t know who gave me the
strength, the strength to me came from my children, I thought of my
children and so I thought of the children of these co-workers.
Ferriere Piemontesi was founded in 1907; it was bought by Fiat ten
years later, then went through the same vicissitudes as the Terni steel works
—state ownership, crisis, privatization—until it was bought by
ThyssenKrupp in 1996–1997 as part of the deal that included Terni, under
the label Acciai Speciali Terni.1 “Then one fine day you wake up and the
Germans say, ‘Gentlemen, it was a pleasure, but now, due to dealings you
can’t even begin to understand, we’re closing’—and your whole world falls
to pieces, a wooden bridge you have under your feet crumbles and falls.
And I’m sad to say this, because I had believed in them” (Giovanni
Pignalosa). On June 7, 2007, ThyssenKrupp announced that within fifteen
months the Turin site would close.2 “There was a deep psychological
disappointment, loss of, of faith toward the company. When we came back
to work in September we knew it was the end, and those who came after
15 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: DEATH, SURVIVAL … 349
the summer break didn’t have much of a motivation to keep working”

(Ciro Argentino).
The company didn’t have much interest in keeping the plant running,
either. Workers who quit to seek other jobs in view of the closure were not
replaced, and those who stayed were pushed to do more overtime and fill
more tasks: “Some people gave their life blood, they were squeezed until
the end. Our foreman Rocco Marzo, a wonderful man, used to be in
charge of a shop and now was in charge of the whole plant—one person in
charge of a whole plant is not normal” (Christian Rubino). The plant was
slated for closure, so maintenance and safety were minimal at best: “There
was a sort of betrayal on the side of the company, because, I can say this
candidly, I’m not ashamed, they abandoned the line that took fire, number
five, let it go entirely, there were pipes held together with scotch tape, open
electric cables in contact with paper, oil, extremely high temperatures”
(Costantino Armiento). In October 2007, an inspection identified eighty
violations of safety rules—but missed the one that caused the tragedy a
couple of months later.3
Antonio Boccuzzi, a survivor of the fire, testified that in the night of
December 6 “we realized that a small fire had started in the steel input area.
A small routine thing. Maybe a piece of paper caught fire, or some oil, that
was oozing all over.” The cause might be sparks from the friction of a
ribbon of steel slightly off kilter. “I get to the fire first, with a fire extin-
guisher. I try to squirt the liquid on the flames, but nothing comes out. It’s
empty, depleted.” Boccuzzi and other co-workers try to open a water
coupling overhead, but before the water can reach the flames the oil pipe
that runs above the line breaks. “I see a huge hand of fire from above that
seizes the men…Inside it, I can see them screaming, calling for help.”4
Antonio Schiavone was the first to die: 36 years old, two children, two
months and six years. They didn’t all die at once. Some lasted weeks, even
though it was clear from the beginning that they would not live. Roberto
Scola (36), Angelo Laurino (43), Bruno Santino (26) died within
twenty-four hours. Rocco Marzo (54), the foreman, close to retirement,
died two days later. Others died weeks later, each time renewing the pain
and the anger, making it impossible for the country to turn another page
and forget. Rosario Rodinò (26), died after two weeks of suffering.
Giuseppe De Masi (26) survived until the end of December. It was a
factory full of young people, normal kids, they loved dancing, music, cars,
soccer; they were engaged, married, had children and parents. Many came
from the South.
350 A. PORTELLI
As Turin was nearing closure, some of the workers had been moved
(some said, “deported”) to Terni: “My father migrated here from Naples,
and I’m supposed to go to Terni? With all respect, I’d rather go to Rome,
I’m a Turin person, a fucking big city guy, I’m not going to a village, I’m
not. We said, fuck you, this is mass deportation. We made this famous
banner, ‘No to mass deportations to Terni’” (Ciro Argentino). Others
adapted, not without problems: “I like Terni better than Turin, is much
more tranquil, you can take a stroll downtown and not worry about
parking, which in Turin you couldn’t, and people are very friendly. In
Turin the weather was gray, on Sundays you’d stay home, here you can go
to the lake, to the waterfalls, you have Assisi, Perugia, Rome” (Alfonso
Alongi). “They gave us some money to cover moving expenses, but the pay
is less, there are problems at home because my wife used to work and now
she has to stay at home” (Costantino Armiento).
One of the victims, Angelo Laurino, had spent some time in Terni
before going back to Turin. So the tragedy has an immediate echo in Terni.
Battista Garibaldi. That morning, before going to work, I had heard on

the radio that a worker had died in Turin, in the AST ThyssenKrupp plant.
Nothing else. I go to work, it seemed like one of those accidents that
unfortunately do happen. But in the office next to mine there was this
young man from Turin, and he was in touch by telephone, so that every
thirty minutes or so it seemed that another man was dying, and he knew
them all by name.
Christian Rubino. I was going to work at four a.m., and of course at that
hour you don’t turn the TV on. I go to work, ask the foreman what work
I’m supposed to do, and he says, ‘Haven’t you heard about Turin? Seven
people hurt, one is dead.’ I went down as if I’d been stabbed. And I started
calling Turin, looking for someone to give me all the information they
could. And of course I couldn’t get hold of anyone. So we all got on the
phone, because we knew these people well. It’s like when a close relative
dies, because we were friends, we went out together when we could. We
asked ourselves, what were we doing here, while we ought to have been
over there. So the next day I found myself in Turin, because of course
when it happens—you live eight hours in a factory, it’s your family, you live
at home with your parents but you spend more time with the fellows at
work, it’s like having brothers, we grew up together.
December was a month of funerals. “First, shock, pain, fear. Then anger.
Egle Scola, twenty years old, two children of seventeen months and three
years, screamed at [her husband] Roberto’s coffin: come home, come
home now. Angelo Laurino’s mother told him: wait for me now. Bruno
Santino’s father, an old Thyssen worker himself, appeared on television
holding his son’s picture and screaming bastards, murderers. The day
Rocco Marzo was buried, the news came of the death of Rosario Rodinò,
after two weeks of agony. Ciro Argentino tears apart the flower wreath sent
by ThyssenKrupp”5 “At first, the families of those who had been hit by the
tragedy gave vent to their venom, their resentment. Then there was a
moment of silence, and you could hear the people keeping quiet, nothing
stirred. It was moving, because the city embraced us, protected us”
(Costantino Armiento).
Christian Rubino. The demonstration was the most beautiful demon-

stration I’ve ever been in. Other factories were marching with us, who are
endangered and will end like us closing, too—Pirelli, Michelin, Bertone,
they were all for us that day, they put aside their own problems for our
sake. There was an almost unreal silence, I mean, a big city like Turin was
motionless, still, time had stopped. People rode from Terni with us and
they were amazed. When we got off the bus, people came and hugged us,
we had come home.
Alfonso Alongi. The unions in Terni chartered a bus for us from Turin to go
to the demonstration. The demonstration was tough. The father of one of
the fellows kept saying the same things over and over, he had a newspaper
page with his son’s picture, and he screamed, “you killed him, you killed
him.” One thing I want to be clear about: the people also dissed the unions.
Because many of us think that the reason the company was able to shut us
down [so easily] was because the agreement they signed was a shame.
Giovanni Pignalosa. The funerals were moments in which you gave vent
to the anger, the anger that leaves you with a bitter taste in your mouth,
because it isn’t only about the German multinational, but the Italian
managers that you deal with every day, who kept telling us that we union
people didn’t want to work and we protect shirkers and deadbeats. Now
I’d like to tell those people: you will be all right, until the day the judge
points his finger at you and tells you you are guilty. What pleases me is not
the punishment they’ll hand you, but the knowledge that your conscience
352 A. PORTELLI
is gnawing at you. Perhaps at first they won’t feel it, but it will come to
them and they will realize they have a conscience, and it will burn them.
We will let Wikipedia tell us the rest:
CEO Espenhahn has been charged by the State prosecutor of Turin with
“voluntary multiple murder with eventual malice”, while five other managers
and executives have been charged with “culpable murder with conscious
guilt”. All have been also charged with “malicious omission of safety mea-
sures”. On Friday 15 April 2011, Espenhanh and all the other indictees were
pronounced guilty of all charges; Espenhahn has been sentenced to 16 years
and 6 months in jail and to a lifelong ban from holding public offices. Prior to
the court case, Espenhahn was transferred from Italy and is now believed to
reside in Brazil. On 23 February 2013, the Appellate Court changed the
sentence for Espenhahn to culpable murder, not recognizing the voluntary
murder, thus reducing the conviction. Convictions for the other managers
were reduced as well.6
2 IS TERNI DIFFERENT?
Lucia Rossi. When people are killed, when people die on the job, it’s like a
rock that falls on top of you, the union feels this feeling of powerlessness,
you know? This sense of total defeat, it weighs upon you, even if you are
not directly concerned yet you feel it.”
Ciro Argentino. Terni, we have a love–hate relationship. When we fought

against the closure of magnetic steel, we [in Turin] did strike—I struck for
ten hours, I can show you my paycheck. Was it nothing? Yes, it was
nothing. I picketed the gates, I stopped the trucks that were taking out the
product. Was it theater? Yes, it was theater in part, because the unions in
Turin didn’t really believe in it, they only did it to clear their conscience. It
is true, we should have done more to help the comrades in Terni. And yet
—what have they done when it was our turn? Not one hour of strike, not
one hour. And this thing opened a wound, we felt that we had been
abandoned, every single worker in Turin felt this way. I understand why
the unions in Terni acted this way, but we were abandoned. And this made
me realize that even in the labor world there is individualism, we are
becoming selfish, every man for himself, the so-called war among the poor.
We felt that we had been abandoned, most of all, by the union.
Portelli. How did you feel about the tragedy in Turin?
Lucia Rossi. Awful, for two sets of reasons. One of course is the tragedy
per se, because people die on the job all the time, but this was such a
symbolic place of working-class identity, so the emotional impact was
terrible. And then, because we always said: Terni is not Turin; yet, even in
Terni we have safety problems on the job. The second reason, when we
went to the demonstration in Turin after the tragedy, they looked at us as
the ones who did nothing to stop the closure of Turin, as if we were the
beneficiaries of the closure because the production was transferred to
Terni. Actually, the [Turin] Thyssen workers were angry at all unions, in
general, but you could feel that there was also this unspoken accusation
toward us. It felt bad.
The first reaction had been one of identification and brotherhood: “We
were in touch every day with the plant in Turin, and it’s the same company,
the same machinery, the same thing, so it was like it had happened ten
meters away, in our own work place” (Battista Garibaldi). It’s a humane
feeling, but also an unbearable one. One cannot go to work each day
thinking that what happened there “could happen to us.” So there is
another line of defense: it happened to them, not to us: “The first few days,
tragedy, protests, slowdowns on the job, demonstrations, we gave a few
hours’ pay for the families of the dead. And now the tragedy of Turin is
almost forgotten, water under the bridge, life goes on. The fact is that you
lose the sensitivity, along with the memory, toward certain things. When
the tragedy does not strike you personally” (Pietro Marcelli).
If it happened to them and not us, it is because Terni is different. Terni is
supposedly doing better work in terms of safety, maintenance, attention on
the job, union consciousness. “There was this attitude as if it all belonged
to Turin, only to Turin. There was the idea that Terni isn’t Turin, because
Turin was going to be shut down, and the workers themselves, I believe,
had a different attitude toward work than a plant that has a future” (Lucia
Rossi); “In Terni there is a different attention [to safety] and more
investments; in Turin…because Turin was being dismantled, so they were
trying to squeeze it as long and as much as they could” (“Luciano Berni”).
“In terms of union action, there’s a big difference between Turin and us.
When magnetic steel closed, no such thing happened, because we nego-
tiated the cuts but we retained the organization, the structure, safety on the
job. The thing in Turin, in the process of closure, was that perhaps from all
354 A. PORTELLI
sides there was a degree of oversight, something was neglected. I think

both sides are responsible” (Gianni Sabatini). It is all very plausible, but I
heard these arguments over and over also as a kind of exorcism, a pas-
sionate denial of the inner awareness that no, it can happen here.
“It was sad, but after all it was an accident, and accidents can happen
anywhere. It was an error on all sides, from Espenhahn, who is the big
boss, to the one who tried to put out the fire and lost his life there”
(Daniele Tacconelli). In a way, trying to imagine that the tragedy might
have been avoided if all—including the victims—had acted differently
means imagining that one has still a degree of agency, that one’s life is not
entirely beyond’s one’s control. “It makes you think, about prudence,
because you know that danger is always around the corner and no matter
what started it, yet it still depends on us humans, negligence is always the
first thing, underestimating danger, so we ought to give some thought to
these things” (Pietro Marcelli). “It was bad, and it made me much more
careful on the job, I mean, I used to do things without much thought, now
instead I say, better be careful—I mean, sometimes the hard hat is a nui-
sance [and you take it off], but now you try to be more careful, to be a little
more mindful of safety rules” (Mihai Pop).
3 A ROMANIAN TEMP WORKER

“We worked on [safety] procedures at AST, with the help of the ministries
of Health and Labor, and we did it faster and probably more advanced than
elsewhere. Of course, the stimulus was the tragedy in Turin, yet not only
the company but other operators as well acted as if no such thing could
transpire in Terni, as if insisting on safety might damage the image of
Thyssen in Terni” (Lucia Rossi).
Umberto Alavoi was fifty-nine, born in Romania, living in Naples. He
had been hired as a temporary worker by a contractor working for, and at,
ThyssenKrupp. Ironically, on April 13, 2008, he was working on the new
safety measures: “They were digging a ditch for a fire extraction route at
the Thyssen cold-rolling mill. It seems that he was working under the
bucket of an excavator, and the final part of the excavator, the so-called
spoon, hit him in the chest, in the abdomen. He was taken to the hospital,
in intensive care, surgery was done, but six hours later he died” (Gianfanco
Fattorini). Maurizio Zannori, fifty, carpenter, also working for an AST
contractor, had died on July 7, 2007. “He was an expert welder, not a tyro.
He was welding a set of vertical plates; one, weighing almost two hundred
tons, fell and caused a domino effect and all the plates fell on him and
crushed him” (Fattorini).
There is another invisible massacre going on—invisible because it does
not happen in one day and in one place, but takes its toll throughout the
year and all over the province. They call these deaths “white homicides.”
There were at least six of those, in the space of a few months before and
after the fire in Turin. Angelo Nese, 25, house painter, also working for a
contractor, died on July 19, 2007, falling from a scaffolding; two days later,
Lanfranco Fausti, an employee of the municipal maintenance services, died
while trying to fix a lamp post. On April 6, 2007, Franco Mariani, 57, close
to retirement, a shunter at the Terni railway station, was crushed to death
by a wagon. Ferrero Grisci, 59, was crushed to death on September 13,
when the brakes of a truck he was unloading broke; six days later, Quinto
Boccanegra, 63, a self-employed building contractor, fell to his death from
the roof of a house he was restoring. “It may seem strange, yet the level of
attention to those deaths, I mean, it’s not as if we had got used to them,
but I mean, three years ago, when it happened, there was a reaction, right
away, and strong. Today, yes, it happened, you try to understand, but you
can feel from the way people talk about it that it is almost normal, taken for
granted. I mean it happened, it can happen, but it’s something you expect,
that someone may die” (“Luciano Berni”).
“AST is one of the most dangerous places, but it’s also one that pays
most attention” (Raniero Onori). After Turin, also due to union pressure,
there were improvements in the company’s safety policy: “Now we have a
high, very high level of safety. When machines are running, there’s a fence
around them, you can’t get close to them” (Daniele Tacconelli). The lesson
of Turin’s depleted fire extinguisher seems to have been learned: “I went to
the Pix, one of the stainless steel shops, and I saw very visible red signs,
with white lettering: empty extinguisher, full extinguisher” (Raniero
Onori). Workers recognize that “standards are high, the company has
invested much in equipment and information, and insists on the workers’
awareness and respect of safety procedures.”7
The company insists that many accidents are actually the workers’ fault:
“The company is supposed to give you the information, then it’s up to you.
The firm insists in vain, especially with the young newly hired workers, on
following certain basic safety rules. The company is to blame, but so are the
people” (Pietro Marcelli). “So now it’s turning against the workers,
because we’re being given responsibilities we didn’t used to have, you have
356 A. PORTELLI
to take courses and to do things in a given manner, so that if anything

happens, it’s your fault” (Anafreak). “They scold you if you don’t wear
your hard hat, but it makes me mad because this is just the tip of the
iceberg, a needle in a haystack, and they ignore other things…For instance,
if you were to check what substances exist in each work place—mineral oils,
dust—I don’t think many of the spaces in which we work are actually up to
standards” (Riziero Onori).
The environment remains a source of serious grievances. “Don’t look
only at accidents on the job, which happen in a moment; look at
[long-term] occupational health hazards,” says Marco Bartoli; and, turning
to a co-worker: “You’ve had lung surgery twice, you know you’ll bear this
stuff all your life, and instead of living to be seventy you’ll live only until
fifty.” “I work at the reduction oven; after the steel is worked and stacked,
the liquid dross turns into dust, a dust that hangs in the air. They say it’s
too thick to cause harm, but I don’t believe it” (Marco Allegretti). “Just
last week, we stopped everything and came down from the gantry crane
where we were working, because we couldn’t breathe. We dropped
everything, left the work unfinished, we came down, told the maintenance
manager that either he found a way for us to work in safety up there, or the
work remained undone. They’ve cut a lot of maintenance staff; contractors
used to come and help us, but now they’ve cut their hours. So the work is
the same and the people are fewer, and this translates into heavier work-
loads. Safety-wise, you can’t guarantee what must be done, because how
can you do that if you don’t have the staff? It’s the same as what happened
in Turin—they cut, cut, cut, production goes on anyway, but when the
disaster happens, it’s a tragedy” (“Luciano Berni”).
Claudio Cipolla. Our parents, or our co-workers, told us: first thing is,
don’t get hurt. We who came to work in 1999, 2000, 2001, were lucky in
that we had the guidance of the older ones, people of a certain age who—
beyond safety, beyond procedures, beyond what the foremen told us—they
taught us the unwritten rules of behavior that give you an idea of the
meaning and the danger of what you were doing.
“The old folks told us: You must have eyes in the front and in the back
of your head; don’t worry so much about what you do, as about what the
others are doing” (Gianni Sabatini). Yet, the old-time workers, who had
lived all their lives in the factory, had acquired, literally hands on, a reckless
familiarity with the machines and the environment, and did things that the
new generations find unimaginable: “I have seen the old ones do things
that made your hair stand on end, like bypassing all safety systems and
picking up the snippets, the shavings from the side of the plate, with their
bare hands. They pick them out, push their hands under the spools, wipe
them out with their hands” (Daniele Tacconelli).
The influx of younger workers—many with temporary contracts, or
working for outside contractors, or immigrants—changes the culture of the
factory. Many new hires are put to work without training and without the
assistance of more experienced workers. The repetitive jobs turn out to be
the most dangerous: “You learn fast, because it’s a rote thing, and once
you’ve learned you think you can handle it, you think you know, and that’s
when it hurts you, because you don’t know, you’ve only been there a year,
what the fuck do you think you know?” (Anafreak). Often, workers are led
to bypass safety measures in order to keep up with work rhythms and
power relationships that they are increasingly powerless to oppose.
Production must go on: Andrea Pagliarola, 25, a worker at the Meraklon
chemical textile plant, hurt his hand when he tried to pull out the thread
that had got caught in a mandrel, without stopping the roller. It wasn’t his
first accident, nor the worst.
Andrea Pagliarola. Oh, I forgot to tell you this. I went to work at sev-
enteen, I was seventeen when I started working. I’ve been working eight
years. My first job was at a small plant called Briotti, Oreste Briotti—have I
told you about this? I went to work there on the third of July; in
September, October, I was grinding and a sliver of iron flew into my eye.
I only had a temporary apprentice contract; I didn’t dare file for an injury
procedure [and compensation], I was afraid if I did they’d let me go, I was
young, my first job, just out of school—just dropped out of school, I mean
—I didn’t know what to do, or if I could find work elsewhere. So I held on
and kept working. I went to the hospital in the evening, after I got out of
work, they took the sliver out and that was it. But it wasn’t the end of it;
after a while, I couldn’t keep my eye open, I had tears in it all the time…
months, years and years and years, now eight years later I still have an
infection in this eye and can do nothing about it.
358 A. PORTELLI
4 CONTRACTORS AND IMMIGRANTS

When they were killed on the job, Umberto Alavoi and Maurizio Zannori
were working at TK-AST, but not for TK-AST. They were temporary
workers hired by some of the myriad contractor firms, large and small, that
carry out much of the work inside the factory. There had always been
contractors doing specific jobs inside the plant, but this practice had
reached new heights: “most of the time, one third” of the work force in the
plant is made up of contractors (Claudio Cipolla). They do the same jobs as
the regular employees, with lower pay and worse working conditions; most
of them are marginals, Southerners, women, immigrants.
Gianni Sabatini. Out of forty people in my shop, five are cleaners, and the
rest do all the other jobs, including those we used to do. They’re exploi-
ted…They have a storage room adjacent to our shop; we have heating,
they don’t. It took a year to get them a water faucet. Now we have women
in the factory, I had two women in my shop, so I got the firm to outfit a
women’s toilet, which is also being used by the contractors, because they
didn’t even have a toilet.
Claudio Cipolla. The maintenance people tell us, “let’s not do that job
ourselves, it’s too dangerous; let the contractors do it”—as it if wasn’t as
dangerous for them, too. It makes you mad because we are very close, we
work side by side, when you work on a machine you see them as
co-workers, just as they see you. So the shallowness of those who say, “let
the contractor do it” makes us mad, because it’s the same work, the same
job.
“It’s a fact that we do the heaviest work, because we are an outside firm
and they call us for the heaviest jobs” (Mihai Pop). Raniero Onori is a
skilled mechanic and a union representative at FIM, one of the largest AST
contractors. While he has a good relationship with his employers, yet inside
the factory “I feel discriminated, I feel, if I may say so, mistreated,
whenever I’m working side by side with someone who is a regular AST
employee; we do the same work, we work together, the same hours, and
get different pay. It’s frustrating, it makes you want to tell them, ‘go ahead
and do it yourself, you’re being paid more than me.’ It divides us.”
Anafreak. The outside contractors are another thing a human being can’t
stomach, seeing people working twenty meters from you, in dismal con-
ditions. I mean, there’s no talk of safety measures, they don’t get the right
clothes—things I take for granted, they don’t get them and have no way of
claiming them. If they get sick or hurt, they have to take a vacation day off.
This is ugly, bad, bad, bad, when you work with these people—all right,
“I’m not like them, mors tua vita mea.”8
Mihai Pop. When we started out safety was zero, getting the job done was
everything. You weren’t supposed to complain—“how come I haven’t got
a hard hat, I haven’t got a belt…” No, you were supposed to just do it,
period. So we have to get used and all, I at least have learned something
about safety and all. But the new ones coming in don’t get any information
about this. Don’t know their rights.
“When the second man died on the job, I was out passing out strike
leaflets. And I happened to be at the gate where most contractors come in,
and there were people of all kinds, every nationality, every country, and
they’re hard to…some didn’t even speak Italian, we had a hard time get-
ting them to understand that there was a strike on that day because a man
had died” (Lucia Rossi). “As far as we are concerned, we foreigners, some
of us say, I’m not striking, because I’m afraid, I do it once, twice, three
times, and when my contract ends they don’t renew it. This is the men-
tality” (Mihai Pop).
In 2007, almost one third of new hirings in Terni were immigrants (the
largest contingent from Romania), employed mainly in personal care and
construction. As many as twenty-eight percent of the students in vocational
schools came from immigrant families.9 Krishna Kumar, from Bihar, India,
explains: “When I came to Italy [in 2005] it was hard to find a job because
I didn’t know the language, so I stayed home for five or six months, then I
enrolled at the vocational school, to study the Italian language.” He did
occasional jobs, then was hired as a temporary worker by an AST con-
tractor and, in 2008, he finally obtained a regular contract.10 “Most
[Romanians] are masons, because it’s a job you can learn quickly, easily.
I trained as a mechanic, dropped out but I liked it and was lucky to find a
job as a mechanic. Other than that, the majority are masons, laborers, truck
drivers, those who don’t have many skills eke out by doing whatever they
can get” (Mihai Pop).
360 A. PORTELLI
The first child born in Terni on January 1, 2007, was the daughter of
Macedonian immigrants.11 A reporter that had come to Terni to cover the
ThyssenKrupp controversy was surprised to find “Corso Tacito invaded by
Polish and Russian housemaids and in-home caregivers enjoying a bit of
sun” on their free Thursday afternoon.12 “Thursday afternoons, from
Piazza Tacito to the Corso, all you hear is Polish, Ukrainian, there are no
ternani in sight because it is their day off,” Keji Adumno explains: “My
name is Nigerian, because my father is from Nigeria and my mother from
Terni. As a child I had a hard time, because twenty, twenty-five years ago
Terni was much more conservative, much more bigoted. I remember that I
was the only colored child in Terni…then, perhaps because people weren’t
bigoted enough they pretended it was normal, but…children can feel it
when something is amiss.”
Jamghili el Hassan. [I come] from near Fez. A town…kind of like Terni.

No one knows it. Called Taza. Like Terni: ancient and unknown.
Throughout history it has always been against those who held the power,
because it bridges the north, the Rif, the real rebels of Morocco, and the
center of Morocco. The family…one of those huge Arabic families, we are
twelve siblings, three daughters and nine sons. I am the tenth. In Morocco,
we owned an auto workshop, so we were all mechanics, except me: I went
to the university, I studied biology. Five of us are out in the world. Two in
Terni, a brother and I. Three in Spain; they work as mechanics—all
undocumented. You’re out of a job, with a university degree…you are
forced to look for a boat, and [leave]. I looked for work for two years, then
my brother’s employer gave me a contract so that I could come here.
Mihai Pop. Terni, I have a cousin who works for the same firm, so I came
here and stayed at my sister’s. I came when I was young, maybe I didn’t
really need to, I only wanted to earn some money so I wouldn’t have to ask
my parents and could be independent, all right. So I left at sixteen and
came to Terni and worked as a mechanic in an auto repair shop, then I was
hired by this contractor. My sister came here because she had friends, then
her husband joined her, it was all a chain.
“The folks in Terni are easy-going, curious, they may be standoffish at

first but then they get to know you and become friends. I worked ten years
in a bar, and there were many foreigners that came around, working
people, peaceful, who had good relationships with the neighborhood. But
things have changed recently, because the town has become less secure and
this creates some tension” (Keji Adumno).
Nevio Brunori. There is some discontent, but I don’t notice much hos-
tility. In this building, we have two families—a Romanian family on the
floor above me, delightful people; a Peruvian family on the top floor,
they’re all right, too. The women in the Romanian family work as
domestics, house help, and the men work in construction. The Peruvians,
she also works as a domestic, and I think he works for an air-conditioning
firm in Rome. There’s a Romanian woman who assists an old lady in the
building. I always cite them as an example, if they were all like this there
would be no problems. I’m very pleased, as hospitable as can be: you come
here, you act right, no problem. But if you step out of line, you go to jail
here or back where you came from.
Back in 2000, quick interviews on Corso Tacito. I asked, what kind of

town is Terni? Andrea, 33, a self-employed building contractor: “Drugged.
Since the Albanians came.” 2007, I talk to Fabrizio Terranova, twenty-nine,
tourist agent and would-be theater director: “I don’t want to sound like a
racist, absolutely, all my friends know that I am very broadminded, but I
believe that these foreigners may be too many, I’m not saying we ought to do
like Hitler and kill them all, but perhaps we ought to go part of the way like
Mussolini, as long as they behave we let them stay in Italy, as long as they
work and don’t break our balls, don’t kill, don’t rape, don’t do pedophilia or
drugs they can stay, but as soon as they step out of line back home they go, like
they do in America, for good.” “Do foreigners rape, kill, in Terni?” “Not yet,
but if we keep going like this we’ll get there, because there are so many
foreigners here, too.” “Safety in Terni has become a problem, when really
there’s nothing at all going on. The other day a person was killed in a fight
between two foreigners—a Turk and a Tunisian—a quarrel, a head butt, a
knifing that ended badly, and right away, ‘emergency in Terni,’ whereas in
fact it’s all very tranquil, there is no emergency at all” (Marco Coppoli).
Jamghili el Hassan. You read the paper, hear the news on TV—it makes
me feel so bad! I [am treated all right] perhaps because they know I am
married to a woman from Terni. But the talk in the mess hall, before
starting work—if there’s anything in the paper about a foreigner…“these
Moroccans, these gypsies, these Albanians…” People call all foreigners
362 A. PORTELLI
“Moroccans”—Chinese, Senegalese, Moroccans, South Africans: all

“Moroccans,” you see?13 Even today I heard things…when they want to
insult a foreigner, they call him a Muslim. And I feel superior—a moment
of anger, then it passes and you begin to work. I have no problems prac-
ticing my religion in Terni; there’s a garage they call a mosque, but I pray
at home. I feel…more like myself, readier to pray.
Krishna Kumar: In 2010, my daughter Surbì was born. All the time when
I’m home she eats with me, sleeps with me, plays with me, she likes to do
everything with me, I’m always with my daughter. But even though she was
born here, she doesn’t have Italian citizenship. Maybe later, when she’s
eighteen, she can apply for citizenship, and we will see what happens then.14
At the public library, “the majority are immigrant children. They come
after school, do their homework, have fun with the PlayStation and com-
puter games, and socialize. The most is when you hear a child from
Morocco arguing with one from Romania or Senegal, and they cuss each
other in ternano” (Franca De Sio). Mihai Pop, Romanian, speaks Italian
with a thick Terni accent and vernacular phrasing. Jamghili El Hassan,
Moroccan, like a full-blooded ternano, says “scappare [escape]” for “going
out,” instead of the standard “uscire.” “On the internet, half of what I write
is in ternano…I only speak Arabic with my brother because he doesn’t speak
Italian much. His children only speak Italian because they’ve gone to school
and all. I speak Arabic when I call home, or with my brother. All my friends
are Italian, no Moroccans.” His wife is Italian, their first child was born a
week after the interview. Her name is Amina, and she is ternana.
5 END GAME
Taurino Costantini.35 [Portelli’s book] Biografia di una città makes sense

because this town had a character of its own, which was that of a
working-class, subversive town. If the town had been what it is today, I
doubt whether he would have written that book.
Marco Bartoli. We ought to look at what concerns not just you, but your
child tomorrow: what the fuck are you leaving him? Me, my father left me
the rights of working people and a house with a potato field, a vineyard,
and olive trees. Now I’ve lost the olive trees, the vineyard and the potato
field, what the fuck am I gonna leave my son? I leave him a world of
precariousness, I leave him a badly polluted world, with overexploitation of
nature, of people, of rights, here’s what the fuck I am leaving my son.
Emanuele Salvati. So, they’ve won. And the worst is yet to come. It’s
gonna be worse, it’s already worse, because now that they’ve won they’re
running the factory the way they want to. Labor relations have vanished,
they shift people around, they reorganize work, and don’t consult the
union. The union has lost credibility anyway—not because of the magnetic
steel affair, it had been losing credibility for a long time anyway.
The struggles of 2004–2005 were the crucible that shaped a new gener-
ation of activists (“We still have many comrades, young people who came
to us at that time,” Lucia Rossi), but the compromise with which they
ended left a sense of disenchantment toward collective action, a search for
individual solutions to individual problems. “It seems to me that the
steelworks have lost the humanity that used to be there” (“Luciano
Berni”). When he moved to Terni from Turin, Christian Rubino found
that the factory is “odd. I won’t say hard: odd, that is, they don’t even
know one another, even inside the same shop, and that isn’t good.”
Daniele Tacconelli also finds that relationships are “odd. There is solidarity
and non-solidarity, it depends on the situation.”
Anafreak. I worked at a number of jobs, including, say, laborer, barman,

house painter, lastly, before I started at the steelworks in 1999 I was a
gardener. I started in 1999, and it was my first real impact with the union,
with the working class, and with the factory. The impact was horrible,
really bad. Perhaps I still had too many ideals, too many ideas. I realized
immediately what the actual mentality is, the reality is dismal, dismal, a bad
place. Because, most people don’t realize it, but the human environment,
the human factor, is nonexistent. Practically, your death, my life.
A mindboggling egotism, each only tends his little garden, and it’s a chain,
it goes on like this.
“Luciano Berni”. They offered extra pay to anyone who would work on
April 25.15 You ought to have seen those people pushing and shoving at
the gates, for an extra 100, 150 euros. You can’t blame them. The same
with overtime. To me, work is to make a living, to give you an income, but
must not take up all your life, so I’m not much for overtime. Yet, there are
364 A. PORTELLI
people who rely on overtime for their lives, their budget, so when they no
longer have the possibility of working overtime everything falls apart,
shopping, mortgage, loan payments, and all. You know what you can see
every day [at the gates]? Loan agencies, there must be dozens of these
agencies in Terni, and they’re out there every day passing out leaflets.
Lately one is offering loans to retirees—“tell your grandfather.” After
you’ve nailed your father, your mother and everybody else in debt, now
you gamble on your grandfather’s pension, too.
In this context, for many workers the union “is only the agency that gets
you a job, that helps you change department, get a promotion, and all”
(Emanuele Salvati). “When we came here [from Turin] the union repre-
sentatives kept after us, they pressed you to join—are you FIOM? Are you
FIM? Are you UILM?—like vultures” (Christian Rubino). The unions are
perceived, at least in part, as another cog in the bureaucratic machine; thus,
some workers think that they will be served better by more moderate,
company-friendly unions.
Alberto Galluzzi. FIOM took a beating, so much that, when we voted for
the factory council, FIM took first place. After the closure of magnetic steel
there was a very delicate phase, which was the placement of the former
magnetic steel workers. People changed their union cards because they had
been promised they’d be moved to a better workplace or an easier job;
they’d go to FIM or FIOM or [other unions]—“Will you help me become
a janitor?” “There’s an opening, we’ll try.”—Those who succeeded, they
took their card.
“Everybody blames the union for everything that goes wrong,” says
Claudio Cardinali, secretary of the chemical workers’ union, musing on
the breakup and massive job loss in what used to be the other, flourishing
branch of Terni’s industrial life, the chemical plants of Nera Montoro,
Polymer, Papigno.16 “We all joined the union, but because of the problems
we’re having now, lay offs, cassa integrazione, many young men canceled
their union card. Out of fourteen, there are only three of us left” (Luca
Marcelli). “Those guys who cancel their card, they don’t know this isn’t
the solution to their problems. Older folks would never do that, they know
there may be all sorts of problems with the union, but they would have told
the young, look, this is the only instrument we have” (Claudio Cipolla).
Claudio Aureli. As long as people complain about the union, it’s all right,
because when they stop complaining to the union we may as well go home.
When people have a problem and don’t tell you about it but go on their
own to talk to the personnel office, then we may as well quit. As long as
they call you, excuse me, a son of a bitch because you didn’t do this, didn’t
do that, it means they want you to do it. But the day they tell you they took
care of it themselves, “I went and did it myself,” we might as well close
shop and go home.
Unions pay the price of their own failures and shortcomings, but also of
the gap between the historically rooted expectations and what is actually
possible given today’s imbalance of power. Unions no longer have the
power to make demands, to claim new rights and even fully protect existing
ones. As Emanuele Salvati says, capitalists have gained the upper hand in
what economist Luciano Gallino described as “class struggle after the class
struggle,” and Terni filmmaker Greca Campus called “struggle without
class.”17 Under the looming blackmail of closure, all the union can do is
“try to mollify the tough choices of the multinational” (Lucia Rossi). This
makes workers see it as an accomplice and mediator of the ever unsatis-
factory outcome. This is true for steel, but also for what remains of the
chemical industry.
Claudio Aureli. When a company like Basell18 tells me, “these are the
papers; either we do things this way or tomorrow we’re laying off 140
people,”19 all you can do is say, “wait a moment, [we’ll do what you say
but] instead of doing it your way, let’s try to do it a little better.” If Basell
says OK, then you’ve done all you could, you’ve done your best. Which is
why you have this feeling of malaise.
Yet, union membership remains high (“Ninety percent of the workers

are unionized, ours is an anomalous situation, very few factories in Italy are
ninety percent union,” Gianni Sabatini),20 and AST contracts are still
better than the industry average (“We have a contract that all Italy envies,
bonuses, extra pay for Sunday work, we get three, four hundred euros over
the basic contract. Plus the way work is organized, the in-house rules,
people would pay in gold to have a contract like ours,” Claudio Cipolla).
However, not everyone knows enough to make comparisons: “Those who
come to work at AST with no previous experience are dissatisfied, but
366 A. PORTELLI
those who’ve been through other, harsher, less protected experiences, they
know this is a different world” (Gianni Sabatini).
Raniero Onori. Once, you came to the union after you’d been involved in
some political organization, so you had a background; today, politically we
are virgins, and this is the way I feel. I mean, I don’t blame those who are
right-wing one day, left or center the next; if you believe in something,
either you stay out of it all and try to get the best from each, or you get
involved in an organization and try to lead it toward what you believe. But
you do get dirt on your hands—which is OK, because you have to get dirt
on your hands, otherwise what are hands for?
Claudio Aureli. I graduated in communication science and business

administration from Perugia university. Just before graduation, I heard that
they were hiring [at Meraklon] and I came here to work. Honestly, when I
started working I didn’t believe in the union, because I thought it was an
outmoded cultural relic. But one day Sergio Cardinali [the union secretary]
told me: come work with me, and if after you’ve worked two months with
me you still don’t believe in it, you are free to cancel your card and leave.
I blamed the union for all that was going on at Meraklon, because I
thought the union had sold out, had become corrupted. And I discovered
—and I dare anyone to prove me wrong—that the union had done
everything in its power. It isn’t true that the union is corrupt, the union
breaks its back to stay on top of things.
Lucia Rossi. Let me tell you my story. I began as a union representative at

the place where I worked, the Arsenal. The Arsenal is not a gratifying place,
I mean, the work you do—I don’t think repairing weapons is the top,
because you don’t even make the weapons for the army, you just fix them.
So this is not the top of personal ambitions. For a year, I honed bayonets,
an awful boring job, so being active in the union was a release, something
socially meaningful, so much that I joined the union first and only later
joined the [Democratic] Party. I was slated to become the secretary of the
Camera del Lavoro [Labor Exchange] after a series of men, which was
something new in itself; plus, the time I was in office coincided with the
affair at the steelworks, so I had a double load on my shoulders, I felt
woefully inadequate, there was no way I could succeed in this task at that
time. I would have needed some time, a time for dialogue, for personal
growth, for thinking of how to open a new path in the union, make a
different mark. So all this unsettled me, confused me, forced me to

accelerate the flow of ideas.
Claudio Aureli. Me and this guy from CISL, we were elected last March,
and people still trust us a little—they say, it’s only because of you, else we’d
have canceled our membership already. In this climate of distrust, they see
us as co-workers who are working as hard as they to achieve something, so
that perhaps fifty years from now, when we won’t be there anymore, or
maybe four years from now when the factory has closed, they can say at
least: when we had Claudio we did get our rights. So at least they can say
this.
October 18, 2008, an email from Claudio Aureli: “In spite of the
optimism I had shown during our interview in Terni, from October 1, at
Meraklon, 47 people (finishing department) are on cassa integrazione and
on October 27 they will be joined by fifty more (spinning department),
including myself. This is the reward for a month of record production and
promises of bonuses to the workers. If there is talk of disenchantment, it’s
only natural. Accept this as a friend voicing his emotions.”
6 NOT THE END

On January 31, 2012, ThyssenKrupp sold the Terni steel factory to the
Finnish conglomerate, Outokumpu. “Outokumpu had a development plan
for Terni. It would become the productive hub for the whole
Mediterranean area, leaving Tornio, a Finnish subsidiary, to deal with the
Northern European markets. A factory in Germany would be closed, and
the closing of another was being considered.” A few months later, how-
ever, the European Commission’s Antitrust committee vetoed the deal:
“the Finns had acquired a dominant position in the production of stainless
steel, breaking over the Eurpean production caps at a time when there was
already an overproduction of steel worldwide. They were therefore
requested to give up the Terni plant.”21
Outokumpu was given until April 2013 to find a new buyer, but no
satisfactory offers were forthcoming. On June 5 the workers, exasperated
by the long wait and the uncertainty of their future, called a strike and
occupied the railway station. Leonardo Di Girolamo, Terni’s mayor, was
on the front line of the march.22
368 A. PORTELLI
Leopoldo Di Girolamo. The marchers were trying to make a deal: let us

stay on the tracks ten, fifteen minutes when there is no traffic, just so that we
can get on TV and make the papers. It was a symbolic show, but the police
said no and the workers began to push the police line back toward the glass
doors of the station, so they attacked us and clubbed us. I was on the front
line, wasn’t wearing the red, green, and white mayor’s sash, and a policeman
hit me on the side of the head. I felt something dripping down my head and
realized it was blood. I began to scream, “are you out of your mind? What
are you doing? This is a peaceful demonstration…” And someone began to
shout, “they’ve hit the mayor, he’s bleeding…” So they let us through, we
stood on the tracks a few minutes, with the mayor’s bloodied face [on TV],
then I climbed on an ambulance and went to the hospital.23
On November 30, 2013, Outokumpu returned the plant to
ThyssenKrupp (part of the deal was the sale to Outokumpu of the famous
ThyssenKrupp factory in Alabama). “So, the Germans came back. And they
turned the Finns’ plan on its head: enhancing the German plants, down-
sizing Terni. In all this, Italy was only a passive spectator.”24 Terni’s his-
toric steel works, once the cutting edge of Italy’s industrial revolution, was
now a white elephant of sorts, bounced back and forth between owners
who didn’t know what to do with it, or didn’t want it at all.
So, on July 17, 2014, AST-TK announced an industrial plan that envi-
sioned a cut of 500 jobs, the turning off of one furnace, the cancellation of
company contracts. The workers again responded by striking and demon-
strating.25 Once again, they blocked the highway and, just like ten years
before at the Garden Hotel, invaded the AST office building and forced CEO
Lucia Morselli to escape under police protection. The summer months
brought an uneasy calm, and the controversy resumed in September.
On September 3, Pope Francesco Bergoglio spoke: “Jobs are not to be
trifled with; let those who, motivated by money or business, take jobs away
know that they are taking away the dignity of men.”26 Two days later,
negotiations resume. It takes a month for ThyssenKrupp to put forward a
proposal—290 layoffs and heavy contract givebacks—that the unions turn
down.
Demonstrations and protest return. The workers use all their traditional
forms of struggle and invent some new ones: they block roads and railways,
occupy the City Council, besiege the management association’s building,
travel to Rome, Brussels and Düsseldorf to demonstrate, stage night
marches through the streets of Terni. On October 17, a day of general
strike, thousands of people take to the streets; some workers booed the
union leaders, but the rally was impressive.
Andrea Corsetti. Far as I can remember, it was even bigger than [2004].
The whole town realized that the whole steelworks were at stake; you
couldn’t get a cup of coffee or glass of water that day because everything
was shut down. I saw grown-up women weeping as the workers marched
by, so you see that there is still a feeling toward the factory. After all, it’s
twenty percent of the region’s GNP, doing without it wouldn’t be easy.27
Claudio Aureli. There were twenty thousand of us in the streets, and no

one expected such a turnout, especially since for years there was talk that
Terni might do better without the factories because they’re bad for the
environment. But after all, when they touch them…we shut down every-
thing, from grocery stores to supermarkets to hairdressers. We’re talking
about 2014, we’re not talking about a century ago. We know about 1953,
we know about 2004; this is 2014, so the consciousness is still there.
Battista Garibaldi. They say that workers today are discouraged, demor-
alized, and yet that day the whole town was in flames, a huge square full of
people, who were no longer willing to delegate decisions to the unions, to
the institutions. You’re asking me about memories, feelings. Well, this was
it: the feeling that all our work was not in vain, that the baton had been
passed on to a young working class that still carried on the tradition of a
hundred years of working-class struggle in Terni.
On October 22 the workers blocked all the factory gates and started a
strike that will turn out to be one of the longest in labor movement history,
from October to December. On October 29, as the workers marched in
Rome, it was the turn of FIOM’s national secretary Maurizio Landini to be
clubbed and wounded by the police, along with four other workers. The
next day, the workers once again sat down on the turnpike and the highway.
November went by with failed attempts at mediation, rank-and-file
protests against union leadership, demonstrations, road blocks, attempts by
the company and by the institution to divide the unions, and even to start
an anti-strike movement among white-collar workers. On December 3 the
company and the government announced that an agreement had been
reached. AST announced a four-year industrial development plan; nobody
would be fired because at least 290 workers accepted the company’s
370 A. PORTELLI
financial incentives and resigned “voluntarily” (“Anyway, we gave them a

choice, whether to stay or to leave. There aren’t so many job opportunities
in Terni, so perhaps they had other things in mind—maybe they were fed
up, working at the steel mills is no pleasure walk,” Andrea Corsetti).
Once again, the agreement may have been the best compromise pos-
sible, but it left a bitter taste in many workers’ mouths. Once again, the
radical nature of the strike was sacrificed to inter-union harmony and to the
relationship with institutions, while the power relationship remained
unchanged. The industrial plan is vague and generic; the guarantees on
employment do not include the contractors’ workers, who had been in the
forefront of the struggle.28 The company retained control of the organi-
zation of work and industrial relations. A few months later the national
FIOM secretary noted that “critical conditions prevail, first of all those
concerning industrial relations.” Claudio Cipolla, whom I had interviewed
as a young rank-and-file activist in 2008 and who is now FIOM’s provincial
secretary, confirmed that the company does not talk to the unions about
such crucial themes as “contracting, organization of work, environment,
health, safety.” The rank-and-file factory representatives also find that
problems remain concerning “the workers’ safety, caused by the unilateral
reorganization of work carried out by the company and by the heavy cuts
in personnel…one wonders whether the company is really aiming to reach
the objective of one million tons of melted steel as provided by the
December 3 agreement.”29
Greca Campus chose a provocative title for her 2014 documentary,
filmed and shown while the strike was at its zenith, Lotta senza classe
[Struggle without class]. The history of three very different workers—an
Indian immigrant, a musician who only works at the factory to support his
art, and a union organizer—seemed to suggest that in today’s highly
diversified society, individual identities prevail over collective ones.30 The
intensity and duration of the workers’ resistance in 2014, however, seemed
to suggest that an idea of class, of solidarity, of collective action, of the
common good, was still real and feasible. Indeed, individualism or solidarity
are not immutable existential data; they are also functions of the shifting of
power relationships, of the possibility of change, of the feeling that, all
together, we may not be entirely powerless. A vision of a better world in the
near or distant future unifies; the feeling of defeat fragments. Out of all the
outcomes of the 2014 controversy, perhaps the saddest one was the choice
made by more than 290 workers, to accept 80,000 euros (around
US$90,000) to retire “voluntarily” from their jobs. It meant that these

workers no longer believed in their own and their town’s industrial future.
And yet. On July 3, 2016, as I complete and revise this manuscript, AST
workers are again on strike, for the renewal of the national contract. They
denounce “a barbarization of working conditions and of workplace
democracy.” This history isn’t finished yet.31
NOTES
1. Diego Novelli et al., ThyssenKrupp, l’inferno della classe operaia, Turin,
Sperling & Kupfer, 2008, pp. 46–53.
2. M. Cassi, “Thyssen, l’acciaio spezzato,” La Stampa, June 8, 2007.
3. Novelli, ThyssenKrupp, p. 83.
4. Novelli, ThyssenKrupp, pp. 174–177.
5. E. Mauro “Gli operai di Torino diventati invisibili,” La Repubblica, January
12, 2008.
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThyssenKrupp, retrieved August 1, 2016.
7. http://superabile.it/web/it/CANALI_TEMATICI/Lavoro/index.html,
retrieved October 3, 2008.
8. Latin: death for you is life for me.
9. Il Messaggero, July 24, September 7, November 27, 2007.
10. Interviewed in Greca Campus, Lotta senza classe (2014), https://
vimeo.com/108579387 accessed August 10, 2016.
11. Il Messaggero, January 2, 2007.
12. L. Griom, “Ma a Terni la Germania fa paura. ‘Qui la Thyssen vuole
smantellare tutto’,” La Repubblica, February 4, 2005.
13. The use of “Moroccan” as a generalized ethnic slur goes back to World
War II, when the Moroccan troops that were part of the French army were
allowed by the Allied command to go on a rampage that resulted in a wave
of mass rapes after breaking through the Cassino front.
14. Italian citizenship depends on the parents’ citizenship. Italy-born children
of foreign parents may apply for Italian citizenship at the age of eighteen, if
they meet a set of very strict requirements.
15. The anniversary of liberation from Fascism, a national holiday always dear
to the Left, the unions, and the working class.
16. Provincia di Terni, Servizio Sviluppo Economico, Situazioni aziendali del
comparto chimico della conca ternana, http://www.provincia.ter-ni.it/
provincia_terni/portaldata-/UserFiles/File/Situazione_chimica/allegato_
situazioni_chimica_01_01_2006.txt.
17. Luciano Gallino, La lotta di classe dopo la lotta di classe, Bari, Laterza, 2015;
http://tuttoggi.info/terni-e-la-classe-operaia-di-ast-nelle-immagini-di-
372 A. PORTELLI
lotta-senza-classe/255164/, accessed August 6, 2016; Greca Campus,

Lotta senza classe, (English), (Italian), accessed August 10, 2016.
18. Basell controlled Meraklon, an offshoot of the breakup of the former
Montedison chemical plant, Polymer (a cutting-edge establishment, where
Giulio Natta did the work on polymers that earned him a Nobel Prize in
1963).
19. F. Zacaglioni, “Meraklon Yarn, il giorno più lungo. C’è il rischio di chiu-
sura: 140 lavoratori col fiato sospeso,” Corriere dell’Umbria, Terni edition,
June 3, 2008.
20. Italy does not have the closed shop system, so joining the union (and which
union) is each worker’s personal choice. On the other hand, one does not
have to be a union member to be covered by the national union contract.
21. Roberto Mania, “Landini: “Ma se va avanti l’attacco ai diritti la Fiom
occuperà le fabbriche,” La Repubblica, October 13, 2014.
22. http://www.corriere.it/cronache/14_ottobre_29/roma-operai-ast-terni-
feriti-gli-scontri-la-polizia-da0e7084-5f6e-11e4-a7a8-ad6fbfe5e57a.shtml,
accessed September 9, 2016.
23. http://www.corriere.it/cronache/14_ottobre_29/roma-operai-ast-terni-
feriti-gli-scontri-la-polizia-da0e7084-5f6e-11e4-a7a8-ad6fbfe5e57a.shtml,
accessed September 9, 2016.
24. Mania, “Landini: “Ma se va avanti l’attacco ai diritti la Fiom occuperà le
fabbriche”.
25. http://www.huffingtonpost.it/2013/06/05/leopoldo-de-girolamo-
manganellato-terni-thyssen_n_3388589.html, accessed September 9,
2016; http://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2014/07/18/thyssenkrupp-
annunciati-550-tagli-tra-gli-operai-di-terni-lavoratori-in-sciopero/
1065526/, accessed September 9, 2016.
26. ThyssenKrupp, il Papa: “Non giocate con il lavoro,” http://www.
affaritaliani.it/economia/thyssenkrupp-030914.html, accessed September
9, 2016.
27. For visual documentation of the episode and of the whole struggle, see the
DVD La battaglia di una città, produced by Terni FIOM-CGIL, 2015.
28. Emanuele Salvati, La vittoria dei servi sciocchi, December 13, 2014,
http://www.cobaspisa.it/la-vittoria-dei-servi-sciocchi-analisi-di-un-
operaio-sulla-vertenza-thyssenkrupp-ast/, accessed September 9, 2016.
29. Fabrizio Ricci, AST Terni: a sei mesi dall’accordo tante criticità, May 20,
2015 http://www.rassegna.it/articoli/ast-terni-a-sei-mesi-dallaccordo-
tante-criticita, accessed September 9, 2016.
30. Greca Campus, Lotta senza classe (2014).
31. http://fiom.telpress.it/html/viewTextByEmail.php, accessed September
9, 2016.
CHAPTER 16
Epilogue: Working-class Sublime
Di liquefatti massi
E di metalli e d’infocata arena
Scendendo immensa piena…
[A huge flood of liquefied rocks
And metals and burning sands…]
(Giacomo Leopardi, “La Ginestra”)
Giovanni Pignalosa You walk by a factory wall, you look at the wall, you
see this wall of red bricks and you say, this is a factory, I wonder what they
do in there, I wonder what’s in there. When you start working inside, later
on, you realize that you’re in a situation where you understand what it’s
like to be an ant. Why do I make this analogy? Because if you identify with
the ant, the ant sees these huge human beings walking—boom, boom,
boom—and the moment I started in this cold-rolling mill—because we are
the last department in the factory, the cold-rolling mill; thermo-chemical
treatment, cold-rolling and finishing department—and so, there at the final
stage, you realize that you are in a situation where you understand how the
ant sees us. You walk up to these machines and you stand next to them like
the ant stands next to us, scale ten to one, a hundred to one, a thousand to
one. But then you live the factory, you live inside the factory and you
discover that the factory is a world that gives you a reward inside you that is

374 A. PORTELLI
beyond all imagination, because you are a modest, humble person, you are
content with small rewards, and then you realize that through that factory,
through that finishing, cold-rolling mill, you help keep this country run-
ning, which by the way is in the hands of people who don’t know what the
fuck to do with it, that don’t know how to run it, how to make it work.
From the beginning in 1885, the Terni steelworks were a source of

wonderment. Umberto Martinelli recalled the young man born in 1864,
who amazed the folks of his village by telling them that “‘where I work,
iron drips, it drips like wax, they destroy it’. And they wouldn’t believe
him.” In time, for a time, the sense of wonder faded away. The factory
became the center of the town’s life, a dominant presence with which all
were familiar or at least acquainted. “In the square, people talked about
what was going on the factory—look, my grandfather owned the biggest
tavern in Terni, a wonderful place, I spent my childhood there among
people who talked all about the steelworks” (Fabio Fiorelli).
Then, as deindustrialization took its toll from the 1970s on (and
employment fell from 15,000 to 2,500), the factory seemed to lose its
place as the primary subject of the town’s conversation. So, while past
generations had grown up hearing about the factory and knew what to
expect when they started working there, the newer generations may have
been more educated but knew much less of what awaited them beyond the
factory gates. So the old sense of surprise, of wonder and amazement
returned. In 2008, Daniele Tacconelli, 28 years old, echoed the same
image as Umberto Martinelli’s ancestor of 120 years before: “Melted steel,
it’s awesome, the way they shape it, they bend it, they mold it, it’s fasci-
nating, really.” To them, the factory appeared—as in Giovanni Pignalosa’s
description—as something awesome, a bit mysterious, frightful and beau-
tiful: a city of fire, of epic size, in which huge machines move fantastic
objects between iron and fire, and where fear, beauty and wonder weave
into a modern form of what Romantic poets and philosophers, from Kant
to Blake, called “the sublime.”
Claudio Cipolla. Well…my first day at AST, you are faced with a city within
the city, another city of streets, lights, crossroads, roundabouts, trucks,
trains, train tracks, and you see these huge sheds and you don’t know
what’s in them. My first day in there, beside these huge buildings that filled
you with terror, somewhat, because one of the first shops you encounter is
the forge, the press bearing down on this huge ingot—if you have only
16 EPILOGUE: WORKING-CLASS SUBLIME 375
heard about [and never seen] them, you have no idea. I mean, you walk
in—let me give you an example: I’ve been to New York a few times, the
moment I got off the plane I stood there an hour gaping at these huge
skyscrapers; and in the factory it’s the same, all is big, all is huge …Once I
got lost in there, I couldn’t find my way out, it’s so vast, so huge, the
overhead cranes are as tall as two-story buildings, you stand there gaping for
hours, and you say, it’s beautiful, because you’re in a world of technology,
automated systems, organized work, you see machines that move huge
pieces…The casting of steel is beautiful, it’s a fantastic process, I mean there
are things in it that are also beautiful to look at. The line, the hot rolling mill,
the slab becomes a coil, a fiery tongue that winds around a reel and is made
into a coil, I mean it’s a process that fills you with terror.
“It fills you with terror” and is “also beautiful.” Many young workers
share this image of fascination and awe, of fear, beauty, and power com-
bined. “The first time I saw the furnaces, it was awesome. And yet, fasci-
nating, because I saw the casting, which is a fascinating sight to see, though
I don’t think it’s a very pleasant place to work at, you’re up to here in
dust—I mean, the casting department can’t be [as clean as] a chemical lab”
(Emanuele Salvati). “The impact with the factory, honestly, frightens you.
You’ve never been there, you don’t know where to step, you don’t know
where to walk, it’s a whole city in there, understand? Plus, they started me
at the workshop where they make the slabs, gigantic pieces, if you’re not
used to it, I mean, you’re awed” (Emanuele Albi). “When you walk in, it
awes you because everything is gigantic, you see things that you think are
impossible and yet they can be done, what strikes you most is the size and
the power of the machinery, it’s fascinating” (Daniele Tacconelli).
“The furnace is like hell, steel squirts splattering all over the place, I
didn’t know where to hide” (Alberto Galluzzi). “Sure, you talk about hell,
someone may have said this about the furnaces, because [it is] an eternal
combustion, noise, pieces moving overhead, you have to be on the look-
out, it does give you a bit of apprehension” (Valerio). From the very
beginning of the industrial revolution, the factory’s world of fire has been
likened to traditional images of hell: “a city of fires…in every horrible
form…wild cauldrons filled with boiling fire…like a street in Hell…t’
Devil’s place” (Rebecca Harding Davis).1
There is, however, a difference. Traditional sublime derives from a sense
of our limitations, ants facing giants, puny human beings faced with the
immensity and power of nature (Giacomo Leopardi’s “huge flood of
376 A. PORTELLI
liquefied metals” is the eruption of Vesuvius),2 that fills us at once with

terror and fascination. Working-class sublime is more complex: fascination
and fear are the result of a relationship with a technological entity that is,
after all, a product of human knowledge and labor. Steel work may be, in
Bruce Springsteen’s3 words, “a job that’d suit the devil as well.” Yet, “my
daddy worked the furnaces/Kept “em hotter than hell” (my italics): it
wasn’t natural or supernatural forces, but human labor, the work of the
steel workers, that kept this hell burning.
This is what working-class sublime is about. The factory dwarfs you, and
yet it empowers you, because in the end it is you—“a modest, humble
person” (Giovanni Pignalosa)—who dominate and run this immensity of
man-made power. You are the one who liquefies metals, makes iron drip,
molds steel, orders that hell of iron and fire, runs those huge machines and
keeps the country and the world running. And more: it is not just you as a
solitary individual, but you as a conscious part of an organized social whole.
Taurino Costantini. If you ever saw how steel was handled, it’s no com-
mon thing, it’s something that changes you inside. When you see how rolls
come out of the furnace, two meters wide and fifteen, twenty meters long,
white-hot, and they’re picked up by the press like twigs, hammered,
molded, I mean, the man who holds in his hands the power and the ability
to shape steel, it’s something that goes beyond class conflict because it
shapes your consciousness inside, and those who have taken part in this
process are like those who have been to war and tell about it. Those who
have done that kind of work, they dominated the forces of nature, and they
feel they have something in them that gives them an intensity, an
experience.
Claudio Cipolla and others go on to say that, after that first impact, “you
live the factory,” “you get used to it.” The wonder/ful becomes familiar
and yet it stays wonderful. Ultimately, it’s the essence of what theorists of
literature called “estrangement,” the ordinary gaze on the wonderful and
the amazed gaze on the ordinary. Wonder becomes pride, and pride is
shared, by telling the story but also by means of new (amazing?)
technologies.
Claudio Cipolla. I have a friend who works in another department, and

often at night we exchange video calls on our cell phones. And there are
guys in his department who never saw the casting of steel, so I show them
on my cell phone this rolling fiery tongue, as if to tell them, look what we
are working on.
I have spent a lifetime working with the immateriality of words, so I

cannot help feeling a little intimidated by the materiality of steel and steel
culture. This is even more true inasmuch, from my very earliest encounters
with working-class culture, I realized that often those who know how to
shape steel also know how to shape language. I recall Pietro Farini’s 1903
description of a worker talking about what they do at work: “His deep
knowledge of his subject, the ease with which he talked, made his language
warm, fluent. I was reminded of Benvenuto Cellini’s description of [the
creation of] his Orpheus in his memoirs.”4
The old generations drew eloquence from their oral culture, from dialect,
from their rural roots. The later generations are more educated, they went to
school and sometimes even to university, and they speak very much like me.
The older generations of workers grew up listening to steel mill talk, and
learned its language even before they entered there. To the younger ones, it
was all new, amazing, frightening, beautiful, and they must endeavor to find
new words to convey that feeling. Their stories are a profusion of metaphors
—the ant, the city, the skyscraper, hell, jail, tongues of fire (are they quoting
the Bible, Pentecost, Acts 2–3, or are they reinventing it?). The factory is
made of machines, of people, and of words; it exists in the eyes, in the words,
in the remembered experience of those who narrate it.
Giovanni Pignalosa. My son, he’d ask me, “Dad, what work do you do?”
“Ciro, I work in the factory, I make steel.” My son, when he talked to his
little friends at school, woe to anyone who said anything about his dad’s
work. I produce steel, I create steel—my son is proud of the work his dad
used to do. Today, when he asks me “Dad, what work do you do?” “Well,
Ciro, dear, I’m on cassa integrazione.”
So one wonders: wasn’t this, isn’t this still, an extraordinary cultural

resource, a well of creativity, of imagination, of passion, for a town that is
trying, and failing, to do without it? Isn’t there a cadre of politicians, artists,
intellectuals, writers, cultural operators, capable of using (also) these
resources not to recreate the past, but to invent a new town that, without
being chained to its past, can find in its history the imagination and the
discipline, the passion for a work well done, the skills, and the knowledge
that may help it shape another meaning for itself?
378 A. PORTELLI
Greca Campus. This is a whole new chapter, because I don’t see a break
from my grandfather. The work I do [filmmaker] for me is a continuation
of my grandfather’s, it’s an evolution but not much of a change. Some of
my contemporaries see it as a total break, they see the past of their family,
tied to the factory, as a burden. They associate the worker’s job, the life of
the factory, to cultural backwardness, a negation of all that is intellectual.
My grandfather was the opposite of all this, he had phenomenal technical
skills, I was fascinated, he had a wonderful cellar where he kept all his tools,
I spent so many hours of my childhood there.
Luciano Berni. If you have a certain kind of world view, the steelworks was
a myth, really; for those who hoped to change the relationships between
human beings, for those who struggled to change the world, the factory
was the university of those who worked for change, a laboratory of the
most active, the most conscious part of the working class. To me it was the
tops, it was like flying to the moon, beautiful. I don’t know if one can really
convey the passion, the tension, the motivation that you derived from that
place, because it is so powerful, so beautiful, so intense that it is hard to
describe, it’s something you feel inside, that if you are not inured to a
certain type of sensibility you can’t appreciate it. Beyond the hardship of
work, the need to save your job and all, it was a chance you were taking: to
work in the factory is to bring money home, but also to try to be active
politically, because politics used to mean everything to us, from family
relationships to all social relationships, politics was a way to change this
state of things that we didn’t accept.
Taurino Costantini. In the end, the fact remains that the worker is
exploited, exploitation exists beneath whatever sky, under whatever form.
It’s not only the surplus value that is extracted from labor, but also the fact
that in some room thousands of miles away decisions are made that blot
you out in a minute. The toil of purely manual labor is much lighter today,
because the worker now controls the rolling mill by pushing buttons from a
booth, but the basic state of things remains: the forces of production
change, but social relationships remain the same. Man, mankind, isn’t a
metaphysical, abstract idea: human kind is the concrete beings that are the
result of the forms of production and the forms of society. We are the
history that is behind us, we’re not vague, abstract things. We are history,
we are what we have been made by our lives, our culture, our forms of
production, and the memory of what we’ve been through.
NOTES
1. Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills (1861), New York,
Feminist Press, 1985, p. 20.
2. Giacomo Leopardi, “La Ginestra” (1833), from Canti (1845).
3. Bruce Springsteen, “Youngstown”, in The Ghost of Tom Joad, CBS, 1995.
4. Pietro Farini, In marcia coi lavoratori, pp. 110–111.
INDEX OF NAMES
A Bertillo, Antonio, 190

Abba, Marta, 127 Bertinotti, Fausto, 292
Accattoli, Luigi, 308 Bertoni, Giovanni, 334
Adams, Brent, 331 Bezza, Bruno, 86, 110
Alavoi, Umberto, 354, 358 Bianchi, F., 147
Almeida, Paulinho, 325 Biancifiori, Spino, 134, 149
Alterocca, Virgilio, 89, 161, 162, 288 Bier, Vladimiro, 250
Angeletti, Cesare, 170 Bigiaretti, Libero, 149
Antonelli, Nicola, 54 Binda, Alfredo, 145
Antonioli, Maurizio, 86, 110 Bistoni, Ugo, 110
Blake, William, 374
Boccanegra, Quinto, 355
B Bocciardo, Arturo, 61, 127, 141, 160,
Badoglio, Pietro, 175, 189 161, 184, 185, 228
Bakunin, Mikhail, 24, 84, 91, 94 Boccoleri, Cesare, 137, 138, 146
Bardino (Umberto Fiorelli), 200 Boccuzzi, Antonio, 349
Bartali, Gino, 145 Bogliari, Francesco, 31, 48, 49, 148,
Baum, Willa K., 8, 9 245
Bazzani, Cesare, 125, 136, 149 Böll, Henrich, 10, 13
Begliomini, Lina, 87 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 33, 179
Bellavigna, Alberto, 150 Bon, Cassian, 51, 52, 54, 77, 85
Bellini, Caterina, 76 Bonelli, Franco, 85, 86, 111, 150, 172,
Benassi, Memo, 127, 148 190, 231, 234, 238, 245, 246
Benigni, Roberto, 288 Bordiga, Amedeo, 121, 169, 173
Benjamin, Walter, 12, 13 Bordoni, Otello, 148
Bergoglio, Mario José (Pope Francis I), Borzacchini, Baconin (later, Mario
368 Umberto), 25, 31, 84, 104, 145,
Berlusconi, Silvio, 299, 308 294, 318
Bertarelli, F., 110 Borzacchini, Remo, 24, 25, 31
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 381

in Oral History, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-50898-6
382 INDEX OF NAMES
Bosio, Gianni, 13, 111, 173, 308 Clair, René, 127, 148
Bovini, Sergio, 146 Cloes, Maurice, 85
Bracci, Carlo, 166, 173 Cocchi, Luciano, 27, 28
Breda, Vincenzo Stefano, 53, 74, 86 Colarieti, Arnaldo, 123
Bresci, Gaetano, 22, 30 Conrad, Joseph (Józef Teodor Nałęcz
Briccialdi, Giulio, 149 Konrad Korzeniowski), 10
Brin, Benedetto, 51 Conti, Riccardo, 198
Brini, Dante, 166 Cooper, James Fenimore, 208, 220
Brogelli, Renato, 149 Coppi, Fausto, 145
Bryan, William Jennings, 333, 345 Coppoli, Marco, 288, 290, 336, 361
Butera, Francesco, 87 Coppo, Massimo, 89, 148
Buttarelli, Dante, 85 Corradi, Alessandro, 213
Covino, Renato, 29, 49, 86, 110, 148,
172, 275
C Craxi, Bettino, 271
Caffarelli, Enzo, 245 Cremaschi, Giorgio, 340, 345
Cafiero, Carlo, 91 Crisi, Francesco, 239
Cagli, Corrado, 124, 140
Camerini, Mario, 127, 148
Campetti, Loris, 307, 330 D
Campofregoso, Luigi, 85 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 115, 147, 152
Camus, Albert, 250 De Felice, Renzo, 172
Cannafoglio, Augusto, 59 Della Croce, Gian Filippo, 173
Carafa D’Andria, Fabio, 119 De Masi, Giuseppe, 349
Carloni, Maceo, 213 De Nicolò, Felicita, 72
Carnieri, Claudio, 307 De Sica, Vittorio, 127, 148
Cartoni, Giacinto, 114 Diaz, Armando, 99
Casagrande, Alessandro, 136, 149 Di Blasio, Paolo, 345
Castronovo, Valerio, 87, 245 Di Girolamo, Leopoldo, 367, 368
Cattani, Filippo, 30 Dini, Cinzia, 266
Cellini, Benvenuto, 63, 377 Donzelli, Carmine, vii
Centofanti, Augusto, 213 Dos Passos, John, 10
Centurini, Alessandro, 67, 87
Cerroni, Enzo, 208, 209
Cesaretti, Rosina, 212 E
Chiaretti, Concezio, 212 Eboli, Mariella, vii
Cianetti, Tullio, 142, 160, 172 Eco, Umberto, 321, 330
Cimarelli, Germinal, 193, 218 Eleodori, Angelo, 104
Cimini, Albino, 265, 276 Enzensberger, Magnus, 5, 13
Cittadini, Mariano, 115, 118 Espenhanh, Harald, 281, 342, 352
INDEX OF NAMES 383
F Giani, Gisa, 30, 89

Fabbri, Alessandro, 93, 94 Gigli, Vasco, 214, 215, 219, 221
Farini, Carlo, 121, 228, 245 Ginzburg, Carlo, vii
Farini, Pietro, 41, 42, 48, 49, 63, 74, Giolitti, Giovanni, 75
75, 77, 78, 87, 88, 93, 94, 98, Giorgini, Michele, 89
102–104, 110, 119, 147, 377, 379 Girolamini, Ada, 284
Faulkner, William, 11 Goering, Hermann, 220
Fausti, Lanfranco, 355 Goia, Maria, 67, 87
Faustini, Pietro, 17, 19, 92–94, 110, Gori, Pietro, 172
115 Gorky, Maksim, 165
Faustini, Vittorio, 74 Gramatica, Emma, 127, 148
Fermi, Enrico, 140, 149 Gramsci, Antonio, 169, 194, 219
Ferraris, Galileo, 53 Gravino, Michele, 307
Filati, Natale, 59 Grisci, Ferrero, 355
Fioretti, Teresa, 205 Gubitosi, Giuseppe, 146, 147
Fornaci, Libero, 190 Guerra, Learco, 145
Fornarola, Marco, 308 Gunning, Sara Ogan, 48
Fossatelli, Bobò, 199 Guthrie, Woody, viii
Franchetti, Paolo, 34, 35, 140
Francis, Saint, 16, 295, 303
Frascarelli, Luigi, 104 H
Fratini, Federico, 17, 20 Harding Davis, Rebecca, 375, 379
Froscianti, Giovanni, 17, 19, 117 Henriques, Rosali, vii
Fusacchia, Costantino, 74, 76, 77, 88, Hitler, Adolf, 139, 140, 202, 361
93 Hugo, Victor, 77, 165
G I
Galassi, Carlo, 121 Inches, Vincenzo, 190, 193, 224
Galeazzi, Vincenzo, 120, 121, 154 Ingrao, Pietro, 246
Galli, Gino, 42, 48, 49 Innamorati, Francesco, 170, 173
Gallino, Luciano, 365, 371 Italo, Ciaurro, 29
Gallo, Giampaolo, 29, 85–87, 110,
148, 246
Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 19 J
Garibaldi, Menotti, 19 Joyce, James, 9
Gasperone (Antonio Gasbarrone), 27,
31
Gazzoni, Fortunato, 83 K
Gazzoni, Giuseppe, 82, 83 Kerouac, Jack, 250
Gerlo, Umberto, 224 Khouri, Yara, 330
Ghini, Celso, 166, 203, 204, 218, 220 Khrushchev, Nikita, 270
384 INDEX OF NAMES
L Meazza, Giuseppe, 144

Lakovic, Svetoazar, 194 Melani, Rodolfo, 149
Landini, Maurizio, 369 Melis, Ernesto, 194
Laurino, Angelo, 349–351 Menotti, Ciro, 19, 24
Lembke, Jerry, 147 Merli, Stefano, 88
Lenin (Vladimir Il’ič Ul’janov), 168, Meschiari, Gino, 103
170, 217, 233 Metelli, Orneore, 136, 149
Leopardi, Giacomo, 275, 375, 379 Micheli, Filippo, 208, 247
Liberati, Libero, 230, 240, 294, 318 Micheli, Silvio, 202, 220
Lloyd, Harold, 128 Minasi, Santi, 308
Locchi, Tarquinio, 87 Minella, Massimo, 345
Lollo, Vincenzo, 59, 60 Miselli, Furio, 69, 80, 81, 87, 89, 92,
London, Jack, 165 110, 133, 149, 160, 172, 273
Lotman, Jurii, 6, 13 Misuri, Alfredo, 113
Lucchini, Lamberto (a.k.a. Occhialino), Monacelli, Teodoro, 74
263 Monteforte, Roberto, 308
Lufrani, Giacomo, 115 Montesi, Pietro, 202
Lufrani, Oscar, 115, 117 Monticone, Alberto, 149
Luna, Arturo, 24, 143 Morais, Sergio Paulo, 331
Moretti Antonucci, Tina, vii
Morganti, Metello, 85, 89, 94
M Moro, Aldo, 256, 275
Magrelli, Mario, 199, 219 Moroni, Cesare, 147, 148
Magrelli, Romeo, 24 Morselli, Lucia, 368
Malatesta, Errico, 91, 96 Muratore, Giorgio, 275
Mania, Roberto, 372 Musil, Robert, 9
Manni, Giovanni, 58, 119 Mussolini, Arnaldo, 143
Marcomeni, Angelo, 59 Mussolini, Benito, 36, 52, 85, 116,
Marconi, Paolo, 276 117, 136, 138–142, 161, 169, 172,
Marcucci, Agostino, vii 173, 176, 177, 184, 189, 202, 218,
Margheriti, Daniela, 49 220, 361
Mariani, Franco, 355
Maroni, Roberto, 335
Marx, Karl, 93, 94, 165, 217 N
Marzo, Rocco, 175, 347, 349, 351 Nelson-Gabriel, Melissa, 331
Masetti, Albertino, 243 Nenci, Giacomina, 173
Matteotti, Giacomo, 147 Nese, Angelo, 355
Mattioli, Giovanni, 149 Nieftagodien, Noor, vii
Maurizi, Oscar, 13 Nobili, Tito Oro, 42, 86, 94, 118, 120,
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 17, 20, 24, 30, 93, 148, 228, 233, 245
94, 115 Nocchi, Primo, 121
INDEX OF NAMES 385
Novelli, Diego, 330, 371 Pirandello, Luigi, 127, 173

Pirani, Mario, 290, 308
Pisanò, Giorgio, 220
O Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli), 240
Olmi, Francesco, 104 Pontecorvo, Bruno, 140, 149
Orlandi, Roberto, 118, 119, 147 Porcaro, Maria Rosa, 88
Orsini, Carlo, 213 Portelli, Alessandro, 13, 87, 111, 148,
Ottaviani, Ezio, 207, 208, 220 190
Portoghesi, Paolo, 249, 274, 307
P
Pabst, Georg Wilhelm, 127, 148 R
Pace, Furio, 95 Rademacher, Michael, 334, 335, 344
Paglia, Vincenzo, 335 Raffaelli, Filippo, 122
Pajetta, Giancarlo, 4, 13 Raffaelli, Paolo, 235, 281, 283, 284,
Palla, Lelio, 104 304, 320
Pallotta, Carlo, 91, 101 Raggi, Moreno, 318
Pal, Somendra, 323 Rampini, Federico, 308
Pannaria,Bruno, 206, 208, 209 Riccardi, Luigi, 91, 93, 94
Paoloni, Francesco, 42 Ricci, Fabrizio, 372
Papuli, Gino, 86 Ricci, Marcello, 264
Paranjape, Anita, vii, 325 Ridolfi, Mario, 248, 289
Paranjape, Nitin, vii Rinaldi, Tobia, 59
Parisella, Valentina, 128, 276 Roasio, Leonardo, 223
Passavanti, Elia Rossi, 30, 116, 141, Rodinò, Rosario, 349, 351
147, 190 Romani, Domenico, 250
Patalocco, Walter, 345 Roncone, Fabrizio, 307, 308
Patrizi, Porzia, 33 Rosengarten, Theodore, 9, 13
Paulus, Friedrich von, 189 Rossi, Cesare, 116, 147
Pazzaglia, Fabio, 89 Rossi, Fabio, 180
Pazzaglia, Spartaco, 85, 273 Rossi, Giovanni, 345
Pennacchi, Loreta, 205 Rossi, Raffaele, 4, 13
Pennacchi, Pino, 120 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 165
Pepoli, Gioacchino, 85 Ruggeri, Ruggero, 127, 148
Perasso Giovan Battista (Balilla), 150
Perinovich, Bruno, 266
Pernazza, Carla, 49 S
Perona, Battista, 121 Sabatini, Levante, 123
Perona, Guido, 229 Sacco, Nicola, 171
Piccard, Auguste, 243 Sacconi, Riccardo, 98
386 INDEX OF NAMES
Salvati, Giuseppe, 37, 117 Tacitus, Marcus Claudius, 89

Samuel, Raphael, 111, 221, 276 Taddei, Isidoro, 104
Santino, Bruno, 349, 351 Tavani, Ugo, 212
Savioli, Arminio, 246 Tedlock, Dennis, 9, 13
Scaramucci, Gino, 193, 218, 219, 228, Terracini, Umberto, 169, 173
245 Thompson, Paul, 111, 221, 276
Scelba, Mario, 231, 233, 245 Tittarelli, Luigi, 86, 110
Schiavone, Antonio, 349 Tobia, Osvaldo, 123
Schröder, Gerhard, 299 Togliatti, Palmiro, 12, 14, 192, 217,
Sciotto, Antonio, 308, 345 218, 221, 233, 245
Scola, Egla, 351 Togni, Giuseppe, 247
Scola, Roberto, 349 Torquemada, Tomás de, 73, 88
Sebastiani, Angelo (a.k.a. Longhi), 27 Tortel, Jean, 14
Secchia, Pietro, 219 Trastulli, Luigi, 12, 87, 148, 223, 232,
Secci, Emilio (historian), 49 237, 241, 245, 246, 313
Secci, Emilio (steel worker, poet), 54, Trippa, Vincenzo (a.k.a. Cincittu), 7,
134, 160 15, 64, 79, 81, 152, 153
Secci, Sergio, 267, 276 Trommer, Wolfgang, 284
Secci, Torquato, 86, 150
Sereni, Emilio, 48
Shakespeare, William, 162, 173 U
Siliato, Leonardo, 224 Umberto I, King of Italy, 22, 30
Sinigaglia, Oscar, 249
Sorel, Georges, 78, 88
Spadoni, Amilcare, 74, 83, 88, 89 V
Spadoni, Tranquillo, 82, 83, 89 Valenti, Monte dei, 21
Springsteen, Bruce, 376 Valentine, Saint, 44, 143, 279, 294,
Stalin, Iosif (Iosif Vissarionovič 295, 301
Džugašvili), 139, 219, 241, 271 Valeri, Mino, 149
Starnari, Antonio, 91 Vanda [textile worker], 22, 31, 71
Steinbeck, John, 165 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 171
Suatoni, Ettore, 170 Vasio, Pasquale, 190
Suriano, Maria, vii Venanzi, Marco, 220, 221
Verdi, Giuseppe, 85
Vernaccioni, Luisa, 55, 242
T Versins, Pierre, 14
Tabarrini, Sara, 72 Viccaro, Ulrike, 308
Tacitus, Cornelius, 81, 89 Vicentini, Giovanni, 59
Tacitus, Florianus, 89 von Braun, Wernher, 140, 150
INDEX OF NAMES 387
W Zamberlan, Alfredo, 105

Worcman, Karen, vii Zanetti, Bernardino, 59
Wojtyla, Karol, 305 Zannori, Maurizio, 354, 358
Zelli, Giuseppe, 220
Zola, Emile, 24
Z
Zacconi, Ermete, 127, 148
SUBJECT INDEX
A Modernissimo, 258
Agriculture, 40, 43, 173, 324 Moderno, 128
Albania, 102, 288, 291, 361 Post-Modernissimo, 256
Anti-clericalism, 15, 21, 25, 91 Radium, 128
Antisemitism, 140 Venezia, 128
Aristocracy, 8, 16, 21, 115 Clubs
Art, 8, 9, 11, 36, 63, 135, 295, 324, Circolo dei Signori (Gentlemen’s
370 Club), 79, 102
Drago, 128
Company town, 54, 142
B Consumerism, 251, 294
Bombardments, 180–185, 188, 189, Contadini (peasants, farmers, farm
215, 224, 237 hands), 38, 41, 43, 45, 80, 115, 116,
Boom, economic, 247, 250, 251 188
Contract firms, 347, 358
Cost of living, 91, 101, 151, 175, 177,
C 225
Carabinieri, 76, 103, 119, 136, 140,
197, 201, 215, 216, 227, 235, 236
Cassa integrazione (redundancy D
payment), 336, 338, 364, 367, 377 Dancing, 84, 120, 134, 202, 225, 229,
Children 243, 349
child labor, 24 Drinking, wine, 46, 317
Cinema, movies Drugs, 126, 260, 262–264, 266, 269,
Lux, 128 316, 317, 361

390 SUBJECT INDEX
E 315, 317, 319, 321, 323, 326, 329,

Education, 7, 22, 33, 38, 63, 72, 94, 338, 357, 363, 374, 377
129, 137, 145, 168, 177, 195, 226, Ghosts, spirits, 183
247, 255, 268, 270, 301, 310, 324, Great drop hammer (grande maglio),
325 52, 54
Electricity, 54, 77, 100, 120, 161, 162,
249
Environment, 20, 47, 56, 84, 94, 125, H
126, 242, 250, 256, 259, 269, 293, Health, 51, 66, 69, 97, 142, 265, 266,
325, 356, 363, 369, 370 300, 309, 327, 354, 356, 370
Exceptionalism, Terni, 51, 84, 328 Homosexuals, 141
Hospitals, 58, 81, 82, 104, 119, 158,
159, 181, 183, 184, 203, 249, 263,
F 268, 269, 272, 274, 299, 354, 357,
Family, 19, 20, 23–25, 29, 33, 34, 368
36–38, 45, 46, 52, 56, 58, 69, 70, Houses
72, 81, 84, 85, 91, 92, 98, 115, 118, self-built, 51, 56, 57
120, 126, 128, 134, 139, 141–143, Hunger, 15, 16, 33, 39, 40, 78, 97,
145, 152–154, 159–162, 165–167, 100, 166, 187, 191, 195, 197, 220,
178, 179, 186, 187, 195, 200, 205, 226, 268, 269, 272
212, 224, 226, 229, 235, 239, 240,
251, 252, 259–261, 267, 269–273,
291, 311, 313, 315, 318, 323, 324, I
326, 333, 344, 347, 350, 360, 361, Immigration
378 Albania, 291
Fashions, 124, 273 India, 370
Feudalism, 33, 320 Morocco, 360
Food, 8, 42, 48, 97, 101, 141, 143, Nigeria, 360
160, 162, 164, 175, 177, 179, Perù, 361
186–188, 204, 216, 225, 227, 252, Poland, 196
292, 293, 299, 301, 316, 336 Romania, 359
Russia, 196, 233
Tunisia, 361
G Turkey, 176
Gardens, 28, 29, 45, 52, 97, 120, 122,
136, 143, 161, 201, 252, 279, 284,
294, 296, 298, 322, 323, 363, 368 J
Generations, 11, 54, 121, 137, 153, Jail, 17, 18, 20, 29, 30, 73, 76, 82, 83,
155, 203, 224, 241, 243, 244, 247, 100, 123, 130, 132, 162, 165,
250, 252, 253, 268, 269, 291, 294, 167–171, 173, 175, 176, 178–180,
299, 303, 305, 309, 311, 312, 314, 194, 196, 199, 205, 213, 217, 239,
SUBJECT INDEX 391
254, 261, 263, 265, 297, 316, 319, N

321, 337, 352, 361, 377 Narni (Terni), 44
L O
Language Oral history
Dialect, vernacular, 6, 7, 73, 117, dialogue, 5
362 imagination, 377
Layoffs, 160, 231, 233, 237–239, 251, interviewing, 3
253, 256, 264, 283, 284, 319, 338, montage, 9
347, 368 transcribing, 8
Lockouts, 24, 28, 47, 51, 61, 73, 74, Orphans, orphanages, 48, 266
77, 78, 83, 94, 118, 122, 273 Outlaws, 15, 26–31, 146, 204, 208
Love, 22, 40, 52, 60, 70, 74, 80, 96,
98, 119, 127, 130, 131, 133, 135,
139, 144, 160, 164, 206, 230, P
272–274, 287, 291, 290, 294–296, Periphery, 42, 247–250, 302
298, 314, 324, 340, 349, 352 Pickets, 76, 242, 277, 297, 300, 304,
305, 332, 335, 336, 338, 339, 341,
350
M Poetry, 9, 24, 80, 131, 178, 191, 230,
Martin open-air furnace, 55, 154 249, 289
Memory, 11–13, 15, 18, 21, 29, 38, 46, Police, 41, 61, 72, 76, 77, 84, 92, 95,
47, 72, 73, 108, 133, 143, 146, 158, 96, 102, 103, 105–107, 119, 122,
168, 192, 195, 218, 237, 241–243, 129, 130, 132, 143, 145, 151,
253, 271, 272, 289, 313, 317, 321, 154–156, 160, 162, 164, 167, 168,
353, 373, 378 171, 180, 183, 187, 200, 206–208,
Multi-sector company model, 54, 228, 215, 223, 224, 226, 227, 230, 232,
247 235, 237, 238, 242, 254, 261, 262,
Music 265, 272, 284, 297, 298, 301, 303,
folk, 23, 80, 209, 217; organetto, 313, 316, 318, 322, 336, 368, 369
39, 80, 143, 167, 168; stornelli,
4, 40
heavy metal, 265, 266 R
Jazz, 134, 135 Railroads, trains, 42, 51, 53, 55, 56, 75,
Opera, 85, 127, 133 79, 83, 84, 95, 117, 123, 128, 129,
Punk, 291, 313 166, 182, 186, 223, 231, 249, 254,
Rock, 135, 248, 313, 352 286, 293, 298, 305, 334, 337, 342,
Serenades, 135 374
392 SUBJECT INDEX
Refugees, 187, 188, 317 T

Religion, 18, 21, 22, 336, 362 Taverns, 17, 21, 42, 81, 98, 243, 317
Revolution, 12, 91, 92, 100, 102, 106, Technology, 54, 251, 288, 305, 311,
218, 236, 237, 258, 270, 368, 375 343, 344, 375
Rituals Television, 243, 251, 262, 267, 351
Baptism, 23 Temporary workers, 98, 283, 347, 358
funerals, 23, 59, 351 Ternitudine, 290–292
holidays, 16, 324 Theater, 85, 127, 128, 141, 164, 230,
naming, 23, 24 235, 254, 258, 288, 352, 361
Tobacco workers, 35
Tram, 47, 71, 76, 160, 167–169, 233
S
Safety in the workplace, 159, 347,
353–356, 359, 370 U
Shepherds, 27, 36, 44 Uchronia, 12, 108, 217, 274
Sports Unemployment, 54, 117, 162, 257,
auto racing, 25 271
boxing, 152
cycling, 143, 240, 318
Football. See Soccer W
gymnastics, 152 Wages, 45, 47, 53, 97, 105, 107, 125,
hunting, 33, 46, 106, 122, 126, 154, 160, 161, 184, 225, 231, 252,
199, 235, 293, 315 271, 300, 311
motorcycle racing, 230, 240, 314 Women
skateboarding, 318 in the family, 19, 71, 239, 324
soccer; Italy vs. Germany games, in the Resistance, 237, 321
321; soccer riot, 255; stadium, sexual harassment, 62, 115, 139,
144, 294, 321; Ternana soccer 152, 228
team, 230, 264, 291, 295, 299, textile workers, 60, 75
317, 336; ultras soccer fans, 264, Work
265, 316, 317, 319, 320, 322 learning the job, 93
Steel, 51, 52, 56, 58, 99, 131, 249, resistance to overwork, 310
254, 278, 280, 284, 288, 304, 320, taylorism, 229
326, 342, 374 work ethics, 51, 81, 133, 288, 309,
Stornelli, 4, 40 312, 313, 323
Strikes, 40–42, 53, 61, 71, 98, 102, work skills, 64
117, 257, 261, 302–304, 307, 314, Work casualties, 59
327, 334, 339, 375 Working-class culture, 33, 133, 247,
Symbols, 10, 11, 15, 142, 265, 271, 289, 377
289 Youth cultures, 289, 292, 314, 317
INDEX OF PLACES AND NOTABLE THINGS
A Brazil
Abhyviakti (media cooperative, Nashik, Ibirité, 326, 327
India), 322, 325 Minas Gerais (state); Belo
Abruzzi (region), 98, 169 Horizonte, 325, 326;
Acquasparta (Terni), 181 Uberlândia, vii
Afghanistan, 259 Porto Alegre, 325, 326
Africa, 58, 139, 175–177, 288, 362 São Paulo, 325
Albaneto (Rieti), 200 Briccialdi Music School, 241
Albania
Tirana, 291
Alexandria (Egypt), 180 C
Amelia (Terni), 226, 227 Calabria (region), 91
Ancona, 95, 102 Calvi (Terni), 212
Anti-Fascism/Anti-Fascists, 130, 133, Camera del Lavoro (Labor Exchange),
137−139, 143, 145, 146, 154, 155, 60, 71, 72, 74–76, 94–96, 101, 102,
164, 167, 204 105, 113, 120, 366
Anzio (Rome), 194, 198, 214 Campania (region), 91
Arditi del Popolo (People’s shock Canada, 235
troops), 116, 120, 121 Cantamaggio (spring parade), 80, 113,
Army, 12, 19, 36, 52, 79, 91, 93, 115, 133, 134, 143, 160, 225, 230, 273,
119, 136, 163, 177, 179, 185, 192, 286, 337
194, 204, 216, 230, 232, 241, 265, Caporetto (battle), 23
366 Caprera, 17
Arrone (Terni), 43, 114, 165, 198, 200, Carnival, 79, 84, 127, 134, 143, 301,
233 305, 321
Cascia (Perugia), 198, 199, 202, 203,
212
B Cassino (Frosinone), 194, 198, 211,
Belgium, 250 214
Borbona (Rieti), 198 Castagna (mountain pass), 27, 28

394 INDEX OF PLACES AND NOTABLE THINGS
Castelchiaro (Terni), 193 Disperatissima (Fascist storm squad),

Castiglioni (Terni), 194, 201 113, 114, 120, 128
Catholic Church Dopolavoro (after-work club), 142,
Stati pontifici (Papal States), 15 143, 145, 164
Cecalocco (Terni), 214 Drago (club), 128
Cesi (Terni), 193
China, 309, 320, 329, 339, 344
Christian Democracy (Democrazia E
Cristiana, DC), 330 Elba (Island), 53
Circolo Gianni Bosio, 13 Enel (Ente Nazionale Energia Electrica,
Cittareale (Rieti), 196 National Electric Power Agency),
Civita Castellana (Rome), 37 249
Civitavecchia (Rome), 53, 169, 188, England
342 London, 133, 165, 212, 260
Collescipoli (Terni), 17, 19, 46, 55, Ethiopia, 145, 175
116, 117, 142, 226, 236, 272 European Recovery Plan (ERP), 229
Communist Party (PCI, Partito
Comunista Italiano), 4, 20, 23, 25,
46, 121, 151, 156, 164, 165, 168, F
169, 192, 193, 204, 212, 225, 253, Factories
255, 264, 271, 287, 292, 312 Acciaierie (steel works) ; Bulloneria
Communists, 4, 23, 25, 64, 96, 119, (nuts and bolts shop), 60; Martin
123, 139, 141, 151, 154–156, 163, furnace, 55, 61, 64; Rolling mill,
166, 170, 171, 193, 195, 214, 218, 59
226, 238, 273, 323 Alcantara (textile plant), 336
Corsica, 177 Alterocca (printing house,
Cremona Combat Group (Gruppo di bookstore), 53, 84, 122, 153,
Combattimento Cremona), 216, 159, 160, 254, 286
241 Bosco (mechanical plant), 47, 53,
Croatia, 291 59, 99, 101, 105, 111, 149, 153,
Cumulata (Rieti), 212 160, 179, 183, 188, 234, 254,
Czechoslovakia, 65 286
Czech Republic, 291 Carburo (chemical plant). See
Papigno
Centurini’s (jute mill), 47, 53, 58,
D 60−62, 66−69, 71−73, 75, 76,
Democratic Party (Partito 95, 98, 152, 159, 253, 269, 271,
Democratico), 312 286, 338
INDEX OF PLACES AND NOTABLE THINGS 395
Cervara (power plant), 54 Florence, 254, 293

Elettrocarbonium (chemical plant), France
106, 107, 256 Paris, 24, 72, 92, 96, 124, 125, 133,
Arsenal. See Fabbrica d’Armi (Army’s 166, 280
Weapons Factory), 52 Strasbourg, European Parliament,,
Galleto (power plant), 125, 185 336, 337
Grüber’s (wool mill), 58, 60, 61, 68,
70, 72, 76, 105, 159
Linoleum (textile plant), 256 G
Lucovich Iron and Steel Company, Genoa, 74, 141, 157, 258
51 Germany/Germans
Meraklon (chemical plant), 355, Duisburg, 283, 320
364, 365 Essen, 283, 320
Nera Montoro (chemical plant), 42, Giuncano (Terni), 98
54, 61, 100, 105, 157, 286, 362 Greccio (Rieti), 212
Papigno (chemical plant), 23, 42, Greece, 177, 189
54, 55, 65, 71, 105, 111–113, Guardea (Terni), 226
119, 121, 133, 149–151, 156,
159, 161–163, 168, 169, 176,
179, 192, 211, 212, 253, 286, H
362 Hungary
Polymer (chemical plant), 43, 238, Budapest, 125, 254
242, 254, 267, 286, 362
Sit-Stampaggio (steel mill), 256
Terninoss (steel mill), 256 I
Tubificio (pipe mill), 327 India
Fascism/Fascists, 6, 25, 37, 40, 45, 47, Arcelor (steel conglomerate), 328
54, 62, 64, 65, 72, 85, 94, 102, 105, Igatpuri, 322, 326
113–119, 121–125, 127, 130, 132, Maharashtra (state), 323
133, 136–144, 151, 152, 154–158, Mumbai, 322
160–164, 166, 170, 171, 175–180, Nashik, 322, 324
191, 192, 194, 197, 199, 200, Iran
202–214, 216–218, 228, 233, 252, Teheran, 260
255, 260, 265, 267, 271, 272, 313 Isonzo (river), 116
Ferentillo (Terni), 43, 47, 168 Istituto Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI,
Fiat (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Institute for Industrial
Torino, Italian Automobile Factory, reconstruction, 161
Turin), 55, 240, 249, 251, 253, 255,
256, 326, 347, 348
Finsider (State industrial J
conglomerate), 223, 280 Japan
Fiume, 115 Morozof (confectionery), 295
Japan (cont.) May Day, 3, 23, 92, 143, 158, 170,

Nippon Steel (steel conglomerate), 171, 247, 315
328 Mentana (Rome), 19, 23
Osaka, 295 Mexico, 309, 320, 321, 325, 329, 339
Sumitomo Metal (steel Miranda (Terni), 7
conglomerate), 328 Montefranco (Terni), 17
Montelibretti (Rome), 19
Montenegro (former Yugoslavia), 194
K Monterotondo (Rome), 19
Katmandu (Nepal), 291 Montoro (Terni), 33, 42, 288
Kosovo, 291 Morro (Rieti), 212
Mucciafora (Perugia), 213
Museo da Pessoa (São Paulo), 331
L
Labro (Rieti), 171
La Previdente (cooperative), 94 N
La Spezia, 99 Naples, 15, 16, 348, 352
La Strada (youth cooperative), 79, 275 Kingdom of Naples, 15, 16
Latium (region), 27, 33, 40 Narni (Terni), 3–6, 11, 12, 15–21, 23,
Leonessa, 197–201, 203, 204, 212 26–28, 33, 34, 37, 39, 41–44, 81,
Libya, 175, 189 98, 106, 107, 129, 143, 144, 193,
Cyrenaica, 175, 176 195, 256, 274, 293
Livorno, 169, 218 National Association of Italian Partisans
(ANPI), 241
National Association of Persecuted
M Anti-Fascists (ANPPIA), vii
Marche (region), 35, 169, 191, 194, National Liberation Committee (CLN,
202, 211 Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale),
Marmore, 27, 55, 114, 115, 121, 152, 193, 197, 212, 214, 216
161, 164, 167, 171, 198 Navy, 51, 52, 77, 99, 176, 249
Marmore waterfalls, 133, 198, 294, Nazis (National Socialists), 202, 203,
299 321
Martignano (Perugia), 202 Nera (river), 27, 33, 42, 52, 142, 155,
Martinrea International Inc. (steel 194
company), 327 New Left, 247, 253, 309
Massa Martana (Perugia), 51 Avanguardia operaia, 140
Matese (mountains), 91 Democrazia Proletaria, 309
Lotta continua, 253, 257, 258 P

Palazzo Sanità occupation, 262, 265 Pakistan, 260
Potere operaio, 253, 255 Papigno (Terni), 23, 42, 54, 55, 65, 71,
Student movement, 247, 253, 255, 105, 113–115, 122, 123, 151, 153,
286 158, 161, 163–165, 170, 171, 176,
Newspapers and journals 179, 193, 198, 213, 214, 234, 255,
Acciaio, 133, 158, 160 288, 364
Avanguardia, 35 Pazzaglia (café), 79, 85, 102, 125, 258
Avanti!, 76, 77, 93 Perugia, 23, 39, 91, 106, 113, 115,
Cronache Umbre, 48, 49 117, 120, 260, 262, 272, 288, 293,
Il Banderaro, 21, 54 304, 309, 350, 366
Il Maglio, 54 Piediluco (Terni), 7, 47, 94, 114, 121,
Il Messaggero, 22, 55, 73, 75, 76, 129, 136, 165, 171, 193, 194, 231
82, 104, 128, 140, 160, 247, 263 Piombino (Livorno), 12, 74, 206,
Il Radicale, 54 208–211, 273
Il Veritiero, 54 Poggio Bustone (Rieti), 209
Indagini, 29, 30, 48, 86, 111, Poland, 196
148–150 Polino (Terni), 4, 39, 198, 210, 212
La Biella, 54 Ponza (island), 132
La Repubblica, 223
La Sommossa, 22, 76, 84, 97, 101
La Turbina, 53, 54, 63, 69, 70 R
Lo Sborbottu, 133 Radio Evelyn (local station), vii
L’Unione Liberale, 56, 81, 92 Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse), 256
L’Unità, 25, 33, 35, 60, 83, 229, Repubblica Sociale Italiana (Italian
230, 241, 274 Social Republic, Fascist puppet
Norcia (Perugia), 23, 39, 91, 106, 113, state), 218, 220
115, 117, 120, 198, 260, 262, 272, Republicans, 20, 21, 92–94, 100, 193
288, 293, 304, 309, 350, 366 Resistance, 5, 46, 61, 65, 74, 77, 113,
North Atlantic Treaty Organization 122, 163, 164, 166, 168, 172,
(NATO), 232, 237, 313 191–193, 202, 204, 205, 210, 211,
215–217, 223, 231, 237, 254, 318,
321, 370
O Rieti, 16, 27, 198, 206, 211, 214
Orte (Viterbo), 27, 42, 59, 254, 298 Rifondazione Comunista (New
Orvieto (Terni), 212 Communist Foundation Party), 312
Oslo (Norway), 325 Risorgimento (Italian wars for
Outokumpu (Finnish steel unification and independence), 15,
conglomerate), 328, 367, 368 16, 19, 24, 25, 91, 93, 133
OVRA (Fascist political police), 151, Roads
160, 171 Autostrada del Sole (A1 Motorway),
290
Roads (cont.) Spain

Superstrada Terni-Orte (Terni-Orte Spanish Civil War, 65, 171, 175
highway), 332 Spoleto (Perugia), 27, 181, 186, 194,
Via Flaminia, 15, 16 203, 228, 262, 273
Via Salaria, 15, 16 Stalinism, 255
Romagna, romagnoli, 19, 27, 28, 44, Stroncone (Terni), 43, 98, 193
56, 75, 82, 89, 92, 243 Sweden, 250
Rome, 19, 21–23, 30, 33, 37, 39, 40, Switzerland, 235
52, 72, 77, 84, 95, 98, 104, 107, Syndicalism, Syndicalists, 22, 72, 74,
108, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125, 127, 78, 88, 94–96, 98, 102, 120, 155
137, 143, 145, 146, 152, 161, 177,
178, 185, 193, 240, 253, 254, 258,
276, 292, 293, 298, 305, 309, 320, T
321, 334, 339, 345, 350, 361, 368, Tata Steel (India), 290
369 Teheran, 260
Rome, Fascist March on, 172 Teksid (Fiat subsidiary), 251, 256
Russia, Russians Ternana (football team), 135, 230,
Leningrad, 179 264, 291, 295, 299, 315, 317, 318,
Moscow, 179 322, 336, 362
Stalingrad, 179 Terni (company)
Centro Sviluppo Materiali (CSM,
Center for Development of
S Materials), 288
Sabra and Chatila (massacre), 140 Società Altiforni, Fonderia e
Salerno, 218, 318, 319 Acciaierie di Terni[Terni
Salò. See Repubblica Sociale Italiana Company for Blast Furnaces,
Salto del Cieco (Terni), 15, 199 Foundries and Steel Mills], 52
Sangemini (Terni), 41, 200 Terni Società per l’Indusria e
São Paulo, Brazil, 325 l’Elettricità, 150, 172
Savoy (French region), 177 Terni (town)
Sibillini (mountains), 211 Borgo Bovio, 76, 78, 113, 128, 162,
Singapore, 180 234, 235, 313
Slovakia, 291 Città Giardino, 124
Socialism/Socialists, 22, 84, 91, 94, Corso Tacito (strada nôa, New Main
191, 192, 197, 217, 218, 321 Street), 22, 79, 102, 121, 136,
Società Valnerina, 57 146, 164, 177, 182, 183, 214,
Somalia, 175, 176 232, 235–238, 247, 249, 258,
Somma (mountain pass), 98 260, 273, 286, 360, 361
South Africa Corso Vecchio (Old Main Street),
Capetown, 325 79, 129, 182, 183, 186
Witswatersrand University, Cospea, 27
Johannesburg, 325 Garden Hotel, 279, 299
Le Grazie, 116, 180, 181 Villaggio Italia, 234, 248, 273

Palazzone (skyscraper), 57, 120, Villaggio Matteotti, 248, 252
143, 181 ThyssenKrupp (TK)
Passeggiata, 18, 224 EBG India Electrical Steel (Igatpuri
Piazza Clai, 56, 57, 79, 82 India), 322
Piazza Corona, 101 ThyssenKrupp Acciai Special Terni
Piazza dell’Olmo, 129 (TK-ST), 279, 280
Piazza del Popolo, 79, 102, 184, ThyssenKrupp Bilstein (Brazil), vii
244, 251, 265, 286, 293 ThyssenKrupp Budd (Kentucky,
Piazza Europa, 304 US), 327
Piazzale dell’Acciaio, 290, 294 ThyssenKrupp Electrical Steel, 280,
Piazza Tacito, 79, 124, 127, 145, 282, 344
177, 223, 257, 262, 304, 360 ThyssenKrupp Electrical Steel
Piazza Valnerina, 83, 193 GmbH, 344
Porta Romana, 16 Torre Orsina (Terni), 250
Railroad station, 30, 55, 75, 79, 82, Tremiti (islands), 132
83, 107, 117–119, 130, 144, Trento, 24, 99, 144, 233
183, 221, 284, 332, 353, 365, Trieste, 59, 99, 243, 248
366 Tunisia, 175, 361
Sabbione, 334, 337, 340 Turin, 55, 75
San Giovanni, 21, 269, 273, 316 Ferriere Piemontesi, 347, 348
Sant’Agnese, 56, 58, 76, 120, 138, ThyssenKrupp-AST steel plant, 280,
151–153, 182, 270 350
San Valentino (basilica), 78, 79, 294, Turkey, 39, 176, 265
295 Turkish-Italian war, 99
Serra (creek), 151, 154, 183, 293
Strada noa (New Main Street. See
Corso Tacito) U
Terni Vecchiu (Old Terni), 57, 58, Umbria (region), 4, 5, 33, 34, 41, 47,
80–83, 124, 133, 164, 182, 229 122, 127, 169, 170, 191, 194, 202,
University, 253, 288, 292 211, 212, 255, 264, 295, 304
Verdi municipal theater, 85 Unions
Via Battisti, 129, 265 Confederazione Italiana del Lavoro,
Via Carrara, 56, 167 Italian Labor Federation (CGIL),
Via Cavour, 214 102, 335, 339–341
Via dell’Ospedale, 56, 82, 129 Confederazione Italiana Sindacati
Via Garibaldi, 45, 79, 120 Lavoratori, Italian Fderation of
Viale Brin, 45, 58, 120, 235–237 Workers’ Unions (CISL), 335,
Via Roma, 79, 184, 214 339, 367
Via Sant’Andrea, 57 Federazione Impiegati Operai
Villaggio Cianferini, 234 Metalmeccanici, Federation of
Metal Workers and emplloyees Valnerina (Nera River Valley), 40,

(FIOM), 335, 339, 340, 364, 42–44, 47, 114, 164, 167–169, 193,
369 196, 237
Unione Italiana del Lavoro, Italian Vatican, 17, 25, 305 See also Catholic
Labor Union (UIL), 335 Church
Unione Sindacale Italiana (USI), 48 Velino (river), 52, 100, 142
United Nations Relief and Recovery Venice Film Festival, 127
Administration (UNRRA), 229 Vicker Terni, 99
United States Vienna, 125
Alabama, 327, 368; Calvert, 331 Villa Pulcini (Rieti), 199, 200, 204
Kentucky; Hopkinsville, 327; Vindoli (Rieti), 197, 199
Lexington, 325; Louisville, 327; Visso (Macerata), 198
Shelbyville, 327 Viterbo, 27, 59
New York (city), 375
West Virginia, 325
U.S. Steel, 251, 256 W
World War I, 24, 54, 67, 73, 96–99,
136, 152, 180, 273
V World War II, 45, 160, 175, 325
Valentine, Saint
St. Valentine basilica, 295, 296
St. Valentine Foundation, 295 Y
Valentine’s Day, 294–296 Yugoslavia, Yugoslavs, 194, 196,
Valenza (Terni), 120 198–200, 204, 211

Portelli, Biography of An Industrial Town

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Portelli, Biography of An Industrial Town

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

BIOGRAPHY OF AN

More information about this series at

Palgrave Studies in Oral History

English language rights only

Cover image © Paolo Carnassale/Getty

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

This book is a condensation and rewriting of two earlier books: Biograﬁa di

an earlier, pioneering time—which is why I retain, almost unchanged, the

I owe Gisa Giani a wealth of material, sources, literature ideas—and an

Part I Biography of a Town

1 Introduction: Speaking, Writing, and Remembering 3

2 The Red and the Black: Rebels, Patriots, and Outlaws 15

3 How Green Was My Valley: Feudal Landlords and

4 How Steel Was Tempered: The Making of a Working

5 Rebels: Socialists, Anarchists, and the Subversive

6 The Iron Heel, or, We Didn’t Have Any Trouble:

7 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Surviving

8 Apocalypse Now: War, Hunger, and Mass Destruction 175

9 Red Is the Color: The Gramsci Brigade

10 The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: Economic

11 Staying Alive: The Rise of Alternative Cultures 247

Part II Specialty Steel

12 David and Goliath: The Town, the Factory,

13 The Workers and the World: Terni Steel in the Age

14 The Empire Strikes Back: The Town, the Factory,

15 A Tale of Two Cities: Death, Survival,

16 Epilogue: Working-class Sublime 373

Index of Names 381

Subject Index 389

Index of Places and Notable Things 393

Unless otherwise noted, the quotes from the newspapers Il Messaggero

Keji Adumno (1983), translator; 7.15.2008 Rome

Guerriero Bolli (1915, Montoro),Terni ofﬁce employee; local historian;

Giovanni Catoni (1908), upholsterer; Terni steel worker; 5.26.1979

Ezio Di Loreto (1928),Terni steel worker, 3.11.2008

Vittorio Giantulli (I937), Terni steel works specialist; 5.3.1983

Marisa (1925), textile worker; 3.24.1984, Rome

Alfeo Paganelli (1908), Terni steel and foundry worker; musician;

Remo Righetti (1901), Terni steel works, Centurini, Arsenal, Salit

Guglielmo Vannozzi (ca. 1915, Onelli [Perugia]), farmer, miner, parti-

Introduction: Speaking, Writing,

Bruno Zenoni. I mean, workers—back then, when the workers had a

On May Day, 1973, in a tavern just outside of Terni, Amerigo Matteucci

Adesso che mi trovo qui presente

© The Author(s) 2017 3

Saluto chi ci sta sulla mia mente.

Amerigo Matteucci was following the traditional custom of asking per-

Discourse from below is thus relegated either to an imperfectly mastered

In one interview, Russian semiologist Jurij Lotman says, “the self is

Elchide Trippa. I say “Piedilugu” not “Piediluco”. Why, if I’d say

In a poem, Dante Bartolini apologizes (in ungrammatical spelling) for

in clothing, food, furniture: the wrong make-up of many young women;

Castelli’s “existential doubt” is not unlike oral discourse: an immaterial,

Oral history is a tapestry of tales, a weaving of traditionally shared forms of

based on an associative logic of synchronic fragments interwoven with the

4 MEMORY AND IMAGINATION

The Red and the Black: Rebels, Patriots,

When Elchide Trippa’s ancestor arrived there in the mid–1830s Terni

© The Author(s) 2017 15

of the people.” In 1816 Terni was ravaged by a typhus epidemic, only

Arnaldo Lippi. My grandmother, to get a kilo of bread—back then, they

Around 1830 Terni was a tangle of narrow alleys, orchards, a few