Joanna Roman

Alfredo Malgeri was the commander of the Guardia di Finanza (Financial Guard) in Milan. He played an important role in the Italian resistance movement and the liberation of Milan.  

Alfredo Malgeri was born in Reggio Calabria on 14 August 1892. In 1912 joined the Guardia di Finanza (Financial Guard). He had a successful career with many prestigious jobs around Italy.  

In July 1942 Malgeri was assigned as commander of the Guardia di Finanza in Milan. After the Nazis occupied northern Italy the Guardia di Finanza was not disbanded like the other armed forces of the Italian government and Malgeri and his men remained in Milan.  

Malgeri managed to secretly make contacts with partisan commands and the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia (National Liberation Committee of Upper Italy) and decided to help them. Under the command of Malgeri the Guardia di Finanza helped Italian and Allied soldiers who had escaped from prison camps and also allowed Jews to cross the border into Switzerland when they could. The organisation also protected partisans and Jews against round-ups and persecution. Malgeri would also organise fake actions against partisan bands in which he did not attack them but instead brought the money, weapons and information.  

In April 1945, Malgeri made arrangements with general Raffaele Cadorna of the Corpo Volontari della Libertà (Freedom Volunteer Corps) to support the partisans in a general insurrection. The Guardia di Finanza numbered less than 450 soldiers against an estimated presence of tens of thousands armed fascists.  

The local resistance leadership in Milan ordered Malgeri to take possession of the Prefecture of Milan and to seize several other important buildings and factories throughout the city. Malgeri and his men left their barracks to carry out the order. At 06:00 on 26 April, the Prefecture was taken over and at 08:00 Malgeri sounded the air-raid alarm three times to give the signal that Milan had been liberated. 

In 2007, Malgeri was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal for Valour of the Guardia di Finanza with the following motivation: “In an extremely difficult political-military situation […] he decisively and at great personal risk opposed the republican fascist government’s intentions to use the Guardia di Finanza against the clandestine expatriation of Jews and persecuted persons and in anti-guerrilla operations against the Resistance”. 

Validio Mantovani was a factory worker and a member of the Milanese Gruppi di Azione Patriottica (Patriotic Action Groups). He was executed by the Nazis for his role in the resistance alongside five other partisans in 1944.  

Validio Mantovani was born in Ariano Polesine in Veneto on 20 October 1914 into socialist family. After the rise of the fascist movement the family was faced with intimidation and violence. In 1924 the Mantovani family moved to Milan. Validio found a job in the Pirelli Sapsa factory and came into contact with the communist party which was popular in the industrial regions of northern Italy.  

After the German occupation of northern Italy in 1943 Validio became an important member of the Gruppi di Azione Patriottica (Patriotic Action Groups: GAP). The GAP carried out risky tasks such as attacks on enemy units and headquarters, and assassinations of German and Italian Social Republic officers, fascist leaders or spies.  

One of the first actions Validio took part in was an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Gino Gatti on 20 October 1943. Gatti was a captain of the Guardia Nazionale Repubblicana (Republican National Guard) and had a reputation for torturing partisans. Validio was then promoted to command the Gramsci detachment, a smaller group within the GAP, and took part in numerous actions in Milan, including the successful assassination attempt on Aldo Resega, a Milanese fascist official on 17 December 1943. Because of his actions, Validio was transferred to Genoa to serve as the deputy commander of the local GAP.  

On 26 July 1944 Validio was captured because of his alleged participation in a series of attacks in Genoa. He was sent to the San Vittore prison in Milan where his father, Rottilio, was also being held for his involvement with the resistance. On 31 July 1944, Validio, Rottilio and four other partisans, including a seventeen-year-old boy, were executed near Milan. In total, seven members of the Mantovani family were executed for their involvement with the resistance. 

Ferruccio Parri was a key figure of the Italian resistance movement. As the Deputy commander of the Volunteers of Freedom Corps, he played an important role in the liberation of Italy from Nazi-Fascism.  

Ferruccio Parri was born in Pinerolo on 29 January 1890. He graduated from the University of Turin with a degree in literature and afterwards began to work as a teacher. Parri was called up for service in the First World War in 1915. After the war he became politically active and began a career as a journalist and newspaper editor. 

The assassination of Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, an anti-fascist and socialist politician, marked the beginning of his militant anti-fascism. He left his job as a newspaper editor and dedicated himself to spreading the clandestine anti-fascist press. He also helped anti-fascists that were in danger from the fascist regime to flee abroad. In 1926 Parri was sentenced to ten months in prison and ​​​​​​​​three years in confinement for helping the socialist Filippo Turati escape to France. Despite all this, Parri managed to establish connections between the various clandestine anti-fascist groups in northern Italy.  

After 8 September 1943, Parri worked in parallel with the Italian communist movement to form the first armed resistance groups in Nazi occupied Northern Italy. Parri helped to smooth over the relations between the different anti-fascist political forces. In 1944 Parri became the deputy commander of the Corpo Volontari della Libertà (Freedom Volunteers Corps). The goal of this organisation was to coordinate the efforts of the various partisan groups active in Northern Italy.  

Parri was captured by the Nazis in January 1945. He was released in March after negotiations by the Allied Forces. After his release Parri formed an important link between the Allies and the various resistance movements during the last phase of the war.  

On 25 April 1945 Parri was appointed to lead the first post-war Italian government with the support of the majority of the political factions of liberated Italy. Parri also played an important role in safeguarding the memory of the Italian resistance. In 1949, he founded in Milan the National Institute for the History of the National Liberation Movement in Italy, today Istituto Nazionale Ferruccio Parri, with the aim of defending and preserving the heritage of the resistance. 

Enrichetta Alfieri was a nun who worked in the San Vittore prison. After the German occupation she helped the political prisoners and Jews incarcerated in the prison.

Maria Alfieri was born in Borgo Vercelli on 23 February 1891 into a Piedmontese peasant family. As a young girl, she joined a Sisters monastery under the name Enrichetta. She studied education and became a kindergarten teacher before a serious illness forced her to quit.

Enrichetta recovered from her disease and in 1923, she was assigned to serve in the San Vittore prison in Milan. Sister Enrichetta immediately created a dialogue with the female prisoners and instituted workshops, schools and nurseries for their children. She was in San Vittore at the outbreak of the Second World War and in August 1940 she was formally appointed as mother superior.

Due to the large-scale bombing of Milan, the prison was evacuated in August 1943 and prisoners and nuns were transferred to other prisons. After the Nazi occupation, the Nazis took control of San Vittore, which became a place of imprisonment for political opponents and Jews before they were deported.

In February 1944, the nuns were also transferred back to San Vittore. Sister Enrichetta and the other sisters began to secretly help the prisoners. The nuns had contacts with the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia (Upper Italy National Liberation Committee, CLNAI) and helped to smuggle messages, money, food and other materials in and out of the prison.

On 23 September 1944 a clandestine message directed to Enrichetta was intercepted by the Nazis. They were already suspicious of the nuns’ activities and arrested Sister Enrichetta on charges of espionage on 23 September 1944. Enrichetta was taken to the cells of San Vittore and sentenced to death. The intervention of Cardinal Schuster managed to overturn the death sentence into a prison sentence. After the Liberation,. Enrichetta returned to duty at San Vittore.

Ada Buffulini was a doctor and anti-fascist. She was interned in the Nazi camp in Bolzano where she managed to set up a resistance movement.

Ada Buffulini was born in Trieste on 28 September 1912 into a well to do family. In 1930 she moved to Milan to study medicine at the university. It was here that Ada came into contact with life in the big city and she became involved in the anti-fascist movement.

In 1943, Ada met Lelio Basso, secretary of the Socialist Party, and from this moment her active involvement in politics and anti-fascism grew. Her activities mainly took place in the university environment. She distributed leaflets, translated documents, and attended meetings. She also edited an underground socialist newspaper for women.

In November 1943 she was forced to go into hiding: “From then on I had no home, no relatives, no work; I no longer even had a name […] So began that terrible and magnificent time, at times haunting like a nightmare, at times splendid like an epic; that time when everything was forgotten, of all that had formed my life up to then, to remember only one thing, the political passion for which I lived and for which I knew I could die every day”.

On 4 July 1944, she was caught by the fascists and taken to San Vittore prison in Milan. On 7 September 1944, she was deported to the Nazi camp in Bolzano together with other prisoners. Among them was Carlo Venegoni, a communist leader, whom Ada would marry after the war. Political prisoners were marked by overalls with a red triangle and prisoner number sown on to them. Ada thus became number 3795.

Because she was a doctor and spoke German, Ada was assigned to the camp infirmary. Inside the camp she managed to continue her resistance activities. She coordinated the resistance in the camp, kept in contact with a group outside the camp which aided the prisoners, kept them in contact with their families and sometimes organised escapes.

The SS-guards suspected that Ada played a role in the resistance movement in the camp and imprisoned her in the Cell Block from February 1945 until the liberation of the camp.

After the war, she returned to Milan where she continued her political commitment in the ranks of the Communist Party and where she dedicated herself to the memory of the resistance in the Bolzano camp by being a member of the Associazione Nazionale Ex Deportati Politici Dai Campi Nazisti (National Association of Former Political Deportees from Nazi Camps).