+-+Copia+-+Copia.jpg)
The Revolutionary Dream of Silvano Fedi,
libertarian communist and hero of the Resistance in Pistoia, remembered by his
friend and comrade-in-arms Artese Benesperi
Silvano Fedi is
without doubt the most popular and best loved Resistance figure in the eyes of
the people of Pistoia.(1)
Today there are schools, sports centres, exhibition
centres, swimming pools and, in the heart of the city, the Corso Silvano Fedi,
all called after him and looking down from Montechiaro hill where he and
Giuseppe Giulietti both met their ends is the monument dedicated to Fedi by
Umberto Bovi and created in 1979 with donations raised by a public subscription
sponsored by a committee set up by the Bonelle ANPI (National Partisans of Italy
Association).
One of the
features of the sculpture, the metal of which has been defaced by inane and
offensive incisions, is a quote from the cover of Leo Tolstoy’s Cruel Pleasures
reminding us of Silvano’s life experiences; following a difficult time unusual
for a young student of his day, it refers to a mankind freed from need in a
world without borders; he nurtured a deep-seated and consistent opposition to
fascist rule.
Thus, on 12
October 1935, aged 19, he was arrested with Fabio Fondi, Giovanni La Loggia and
Carlo Giovannelli, referred to the Special Tribunal and sentenced to a year in
prison.
When this was
commuted after a time, Fedi returned to Pistoia and once more threw himself
enthusiastically into the fight against fascism, confident in his anarchist or,
as he preferred to describe it, “libertarian communist” ideal. Remember that in
Pistoia anarchists boasted of a traditional presence dating back to when
Giuseppe Manzini, father of the outstanding authoress Gianna Manzini, had
started publishing L’Ilota in the late 19th century. In the 1920s, the only
ones to take the fascists on on their own terms were the small local chapter of
the Arditi del Popolo, made up chiefly of anarchists and inspired - as Alberto
Ciampi has recently reminded us in a priceless article - by Virgilio Gozzoli.
(2)
During the 1930s
and 1940s, in the course of its conspiratorial activities, the older generation
of anarchists in Pistoia (Egisto Gori, Archimede Peruzzi, Tito Eschini and so
on) came into contact with the group of young students that was gradually
building up around Fedi (people like La Loggia, Giovannelli, Filiberto Fedi,
Raffaello Baldi, the Bagellini brothers and so on) and who were later joined by
a few workers and technicians from the San Giorgio Works (people such as
Tiziano Palandri, Oscar Nesti, Giulio Ambrogi, etc.) plus the Il Bottegone
group (Sergio Baldelli, Francesco Toni etc.).
The presence of
high school students, injecting fresh enthusiasm and vigour into the multi-hued
social fabric underpinning Pistoian anarchism ensured that the movement, in
part through the launching of the FCL (Libertarian Communist Federation),
spread and was able to compete with the Communist Party which was emerging as
the most substantial underground antifascist force. Right after 25 July 1943,
Fedi who had been one of the prime movers behind a popular demonstration in the
streets of Pistoia was arrested by Marshal Badoglio’s police, only to be
released shortly thereafter in the face of the people’s anger.
After the Armistice,
and following some political and organisational squabbling with anarchists from
the “old guard”, especially Tito Eschini, Silvano launched his own partisan
unit, the Squadre Franche Libertarie (Libertarian Irregulars) in October 1943;
initially made up of about fifty men and with ties to the Action Party, this
unit claimed complete independence from the CLN (National Liberation Committee)
and was for the most part made up of anarchist militants or men of libertarian
mind. He chose not to take to the hills but to operate indiscriminately between
the city and the surrounding countryside where chances of getting fresh
supplies of arms and munitions were better and the unit ranged between the
Pistoia district and the Quarrata area and the Montalbano hills as well as in
Fuececchio and Lamporecchio and it showed itself particularly adept at mounting
spectacular raids capitalising upon the element of surprise. In fact, he
displayed great daring and recklessness in one operation that was reminiscent
of a practical joke: using only six men (Danilo Betti, Brunello Biagini,
Marcello Capacchi, Santino Pratesi and Giulio Vannucchi), between 17 and 20
October 1943 it mounted three consecutive raids on the well-armed fascist
headquarters in the Santa Barbara Fortress, making off with a large amounts of
weapons, munitions and food supplies, part of which was removed to the
mountains. After that, Silvano would always set aside part of whatever his
raids on fascist strongholds in the city and surrounding areas brought in (raids
often carried off without bloodshed) to bolster other Pistoian partisan units,
ranging from the “Pippa” (led by Manrico Ducceschi) to the Communist Party and
Action Party units.
Apropos of these
raids of Silvano’s we recently had the good fortune to record a lengthy chat
with Artese Benesperi. Benesperi, born on 19 August 1915, made Fedi’s
acquaintance in November 1943, through Tiziano Palandri and some other friends
from Bonelle and from then on Artese was at Silvano’s side in the armed
struggle during every one of the crucial and spectacular operations in his
extraordinarily intrepid fight against the fascists and the Nazis. “Silvano” -
Artese assured us - “had a great head on his shoulders and he proved this on
many occasions, as in the incident in which I was wounded, when that German
officer was killed in Valdibrana and when Silvano handled things in such a way
as to ensure that nobody was shot for it.”
Artese was
referring to what happened on the night of 29 March 1944 when he, Silvano,
Tiziano Capecchi and another comrade ventured out to recover some weapons and
victuals and stumble across a German officer out courting, leading to an
exchange of gunshots. The object after that was to avert reprisals by the
Germans who already had plans to shoot ten people and, after ensuring that
Artese received medical treatment, Silvano sprang into action to pre-empt this,
making his way the following evening to Serravalle, to the villa where the
celebrated playwright Giovacchino Forzano was living and successfully
persuading him to use his friendship with Mussolini to avert the massacre.
Artese
remembered how Silvano later decided to approach the Pistoian Licio Gelli (more
widely reported in the Italian press recently in relation to the P2 scandal), a
25 year old lieutenant serving as liaison between the Pistoian fascists and the
German command; Gelli had offered his services to the resistance some time
earlier. Gelli, who by then was seriously compromised in the eyes of Pistoia’s
antifascists and facing the prospect of the inexorable Allied advance through
Italy, was keen to earn himself some “partisan” brownie points with the local
CLN so as to save his own skin, as later he did: Fedi on the other hand was on
the look-out for a front man who might allow him to carry out further
spectacular and daring operations in the very near future.
Actually, during
this time, Silvano and his men successfully pulled off an attack (attack No 4!)
on the Fortress before disarming police at the Salò Republic’s police
headquarters in the Piazza S. Leone and finally raiding the Ville Sbertoli
prison.(3) On this last raid Licio Gelli was directly involved; together with
partisans Enzo Capecchi, Giovanni Pinna, Iacopo Innocenti, disguised as
fascists, they had the doors opened for them by pretending that they were
bringing in Silvano and Artese who appeared as if they were handcuffed. The
partisans then promptly produced their guns and disarmed the guards and
released 54 prisoners, including two Jews; the remainder were almost all
political detainees.
As the record
shows and as everybody appreciates, Silvano’s flirtation with Gelli was plainly
a circumstantial one, but it is worth noting that, initially, it had created
quite a bit of puzzlement in some resistance circles in Pistoia, misgivings
being dispelled only after “Pippo” spoke up to confirm that he trusted Silvano
implicitly.(4) However, something went sour in relations between Fedi and some
of his dearest comrades (including Panconesi, Giovannelli, Nerozzi and Brunetti
and, above all, Tiziano Palandri, who left Silvano and headed up into the hills
to join the “Pippo” unit, of which he went on to become effective
second-in-command). Here, however, Artese stresses everything that he said at
the time to the historian Renato Risaliti and as is borne out by a similar
revelation made to Risaliti by Palandri himself, to the effect that the
differences of opinion between the pair essentially arose from the fact that
“in keeping with his beliefs” Silvano had indicated his intention of carrying
on the armed struggle in pursuit of a new world…” on behalf of the people’s
freedom … even after the Anglo-Americans arrived.”(5)
Fedi’s
far-fetched dream of revolution which would probably have stayed precisely that
(a dream), viewed with some detachment by Artese today. (“Silvano had great
ideals which would probably have been very hard to achieve, and great
organisational ability too, but great things require great means: the Americans
won the war because they had the capacity to build themselves a ship a day,
whereas we, with our few pistols and the odd machine-gun, could not have
achieved a lot.”) was abruptly interrupted on 29 July 1944. In the early
afternoon on a country lane near Croce di Vinacciano, as Silvano was waiting
with some of his friends for a few thieves who had been misusing the name of
the “Fedi” unit to return to the unit stolen goods for restoration to their
rightful owners (as laid down a couple of days earlier by a Pistoia CLN court
sitting in Ponte alla Pergola), he walked into an ambush set for him by the
Germans and in the ensuing fire-fight he and Giulietti lost their lives. Also
wounded was Marcello Capecchi who, like virtually all of the other partisans
with Fedi, managed to survive, except for Brunello Biagini who was captured and
shot on 1 August. The presence there of a large contingent of soldiers,
deployed in hidden ambush positions, in that place and at that hour, is even
today something not quite easily explained away for those who reckon that
Silvano had been betrayed. Artese is one such person, but as to the identity of
the supposed informers, he is not forthcoming. The following day ” … there was
a swoop on Colina de Pontelungo; those arrested were hauled away to the
one-time GIL premises in the Piazza S. Francesco for questioning.”(6) Among
these were Artese and Enzo Capecchi who pulled off a spectacular escape.(7)
Between them they assumed command of the “Fedi” unit up until the liberation of
Pistoia, the unit entering the city after occupying, one after the other,
Vinci, Lamporecchio and Casalguidi after hard fighting with the Germans and
sustaining several losses.(8)
.jpg)
Carlo Onofrio Gori
Notes
1
C.O. Gori, “Arrivano I partigiani, Pistoia e libera” in Microstoria, No 35
(May-June 2004)
2
A. Ciampi “Virgilio Gozzoli, vita requite di un anarchico pistoiese” in
Microstoria No 37 (September-October 2004)
3
S. Bardelli-E. Capecchi-E. Panconesi Silvano Fedi. Ideali e coraggio (Pistoia,
Nuove experience 1984) pp. 45-68
4
G. Petracchi Al tempo che Berta filava. Alleati e patrioti sulla linea gotica
(1943-1945) (Milan, Marcia 1996) pp. 89-91
5
R. Risaliti Antifascismo e Resistenza nel Pistoiese (Pistoia, Tellini 1976) pp.
213-214
6
Marco Francini (editor) La Guerra che ho vissuto. I sentieri della memoria
(Pistoia, Unicoop Firenze-Sezione Soci Pistoia, 1997) p. 364
7
R. Corsini “Le tappe della vita di Silvano Fedi” in Bollettino Archivio G.
Pinelli, No 5 (July 1995)
8 Besides the
materials cited above, for Silvano Fedi, see R. Bardelli-M. Francini Pistoia
e Resistenza (Pistoia, Tellini 1980) pp. 59-62; I. Rossi La ripresa del
Movimiento Anarchico e la propaganda orale dal 1943 al 1950 (Pistoia, RL, 1981)
pp. 26-30, 133-143: P. Bianconi Gli anarchici italiani nella lotta contro il
fascismo (Pistoia, Archivio Famiglia Berneri, 1988), pp. 83-97; A Rivista
Anarchica, No 20 (1973) and La scuola nel regime fascista: il caso del Liceo
classico a Pistoia (Pistoia, Amministrazione comunale, 1977) pp. 51, 55
Artese Benesperi and Carlo Onofrio Gori
Translated by:
Paul Sharkey.
.JPG)
.jpg)
+-+Copia.JPG)
