All I Saw. Maria Pasquinelli Speaks. 1943-1945 mass graves, sinkholes, sea

This is the title of the book just off the press, published by Oltre Edizioni, edited by Rosanna Turcinovich and Rossana Poletti, two journalists who need no introduction, so well-known is their work on “our” newspapers, especially the former, with a curriculum of other books regarding our history and, more generally, our world. Rossana Poletti, although a long-time professional, we met her, at least the writer, more recently, at the last gathering of the people of Fiume, in 2019, on Lake Garda, where, both at the Vittoriale degli Italiani and in Padenghe, she organized, in her role as Organizational Director of the International Operetta Association Friuli Venezia Giulia, two extraordinary mini concerts with operetta arias that enraptured the audience. All right. But the question remains: who is this Maria Pasquinelli who wants to talk to us and have her say on topics also at the bottom of the cover: 1943-1945 mass graves, foibe, sea? For those who don't know, let's say right away that she is the woman who on February 10, 1947 in Pola, to protest against the victorious countries that had signed the Peace Treaty in Paris that handed over Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia to Tito's Yugoslavia, killed General Robert De Winton, commander of the military garrison of the city which until then had been under the control of the Anglo-Americans. He did so, of course, not because he had anything against the general himself, but because of what he represented in that context: the representative of the signatories who were handing over to a foreign nation a land that had seen the Italian population, as Ezio Giuricin writes in the introduction to the book, “protagonist of a two-thousand-year-old presence”. Giuricin then frames everything that we are going to read, and they are all pages of great interest, almost 400, which can really be read in one breath, explaining: “Mary did not want to strike a man, but a symbol. She was moved not by the will to commit a crime, but by the desire to express, with her gesture, an act of protest against an injustice inflicted on her people. She was guided by a deep, common, universally shared feeling: the love for her homeland." How to judge his gesture? Did she do well, did she do badly, was she a fanatic? Can everything be explained by love for one's homeland? This may seem like an ancient, Risorgimento sentiment in our times, but love for one's homeland is one of those values ​​that, unlike various forms of nationalism, is not fueled by hatred for others, but rather by respect for other peoples and countries in a reciprocal relationship thanks to which one demands, equally, respect for one's own country. It is a concept that, at the time of Pasquinelli, fascism - of which her detractors judge her to be a fanatic due to her participation in the school of Fascist Mysticism - certainly polluted a lot by manipulating the Risorgimento itself which, with Garibaldi and Mazzini, was opening up to the constitution of the unity of the homeland Italy, but in an ideal key that was based on the values ​​of internationalism, of respect between nations and peoples. The question is: did Pasquinelli refer more to this concept in a Risorgimento key or rather to the nationalist one, learned from fascism? Or was it all just the gesture of a madwoman, a fanatic? The book by Rosanna Turcinovich and Rossana Poletti provides an answer to these questions, meticulously analyzing the many papers that Pasquinelli left behind during her long life (she was born in 1913 in Florence and died a hundred years later in Bergamo), all of which, until their opening, were kept secret and kept in a bank in Trieste, after being entrusted to Monsignor Santin, bishop of Trieste, in the early XNUMXs, and with which every historian and scholar of that complex period will necessarily have to deal. As for the woman's love of country, beyond its nature, her constant desire to sacrifice herself for Italy is there to testify to it. Already in 1941 she did not hesitate to enlist in the Red Cross to bring comfort to our soldiers in Africa, and then, by teaching in institutes in Dalmatia with attitudes that all the depositions of the witnesses questioned during the trial confirm to have been those of a very upright woman, of great kindness, disinterested. As for her fascist education, which is undoubted, it is worth underlining her ideological overcoming to the point of turning to exponents of the CLN of Friuli, now convinced of the fact that the partisans, those of Osoppo evidently, had a greater chance of saving the fate of Venezia Giulia. There are various testimonies in this regard that the reader will see contained in the book in the part where the witnesses called to testify at the trial against Pasquinelli speak about the entire war period preceding the attack on De Winton. From these witnesses, including Scipio Slataper's brother, Guido, of the Giuliani Volunteers Association, and Raffaele Valente, member of the CLN of Gorizia or Guido Bracchi of the CLN of Udine and others, it appears clear that for Pasquinelli that was her only interest, or, if we want, more precisely her obsession, without any kind of fascist contamination as one is prejudicially led to believe. Actually. In this regard, Raffaele Valente, questioned about the Pasquinelli trial, when asked by the Defense whether the woman had seemed “animated by some faction or partisan idea” had replied: “I wouldn’t have even spoken to her. I wouldn't have even spoken to her if I had understood that she was a partisan, especially a fascist." It is worth saying, however, that, beyond Pasquinelli's fate, the papers she kept and the curators' ability to accompany them by inserting them with great lucidity and breadth into the context of the time, make this book particularly precious, certainly illuminating also on a historical level in order to make clear and incontrovertible the great difference, for example, between the Italian Resistance to Nazism, which saw the equal participation of all political forces in the CLN, and the Yugoslav Popular Struggle, dominated exclusively by the Yugoslav Communist Party, which aimed more at the occupation and annexation of the entire Venezia Giulia (up to the Isonzo) rather than just liberation, ready to eliminate anyone who did not share the objective. As Ezio Giuricin recalls in this regard, later describing the individual, but many tragic episodes, "there are numerous examples concerning the elimination, even physical, of the Italian leaders of the Resistance and of the liberation movement in the Isonzo, in Trieste and in Istria" by Tito's partisans. And also about this, but not only “Maria Pasquinelli speaks”. Many of those thrown into the sinkholes by Tito's followers, aside from personal vendettas and actual war, were victims of this plan, even if they were anti-fascists. Reading the book we will realize this, since it contains in the appendix the detailed list of Istrian Italians massacred by Tito's followers in Istria in the months of September and October 1943. A document that speaks for itself.

Diego Zandel

Rosanna Turcinovich – Rossana Poletti, All I Saw. Maria Pasquinelli Speaks, Oltre Edizioni, Sestri Levante 2020, page 386, € 21.

[article taken from “La Voce di Fiume” November/December 2020]