“Infoibati” by Guido Rumici, published by Mursia in 2002, was the first scientific publication that specifically dealt with the foibe. Already in this circumstance the terrible death of Norma Cossetto left the memory of the Istrian, Fiume and Dalmatian exiles, who had guarded it for decades, and was presented in a documented and appropriate manner.

The special commission, which prepares the investigation to assign honors to the descendants of the victims of the foibe and the deportations carried out by Tito's communist partisans, worked scrupulously before the President of the Republic and former partisan Carlo Azeglio Ciampi awarded Norma Cossetto the Gold Medal for Civil Valor. This award took place on February 10, 2005, the first time that the Day of Remembrance established by Law 92 of the previous year took place.

It was not by chance that Norma's sister was among the first to receive this moral recognition, but precisely because Norma represented the symbol of a community, of an offended, violated and made to disappear into the abyss of a foiba Italianness. On the other hand, immediately after the war, the University of Padua, with the consent of Prof. Concetto Marchesi, a founding father and communist parliamentarian, awarded the honorary degree to the student Cossetto, who was killed in such a cruel way.

Yet in the toponymy commission of Reggio Emilia there are those who refuse to name a street after a Gold Medal of the Italian Republic as requested by the city council of a city where there is instead a street dedicated to Josip Broz Tito, an acknowledged and recognized massacrer of Italians in the lands of the eastern border. A few days after the World Day against Violence against Women there were those who found something to object to the story of a girl raped and thrown into a sinkhole while still alive. A writer from those parts defined these characters as “three-nosed” who evidently still characterize the provinces of what was the sadly famous Red Triangle.

Renzo Codarin