The Zamorani's. History and stories of a Jewish family
I will bestow My blessing upon you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands on the seashore; and your descendants shall seize the gates of their foes. (Genesis, 22,17)
Following the Zamorani’s story is kind of like following the story of many Italian Jews.
After departing from Zamora, the Spanish city from which their surname comes, in 1492, due to the expulsion of Jews by the catholic royals Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, the Zamorani’s arrive in Italy – precisely in Ferrara, where they find a tolerant environment which allows them to prosper and expand.
Over time, we see them interact with historical events, even important ones such as the Bondì case, which at the beginning of the 19th century represents the instances of the Jewish world in Paris in front of the new government established by Napoleon. The various mediallions of which this exhibition is composed of present various individuals, even important ones who left a mark in ther times: Amilcare, owner and director of “Il Resto del Carlino” for 25 years, creator of perhaps the most dazzling period of the Bolognese newspaper; his brothers, among the founders of the Agricultural Sugar Factory of Ferrara (Zuccherificio Agricolo Ferrarese) which was a point of reference for many workers in the Po Valley for many years; Maria, one of the first women doctors of Ferrara of her time; Mario, decorated with the War Merit Cross in the First World War and Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy, and many more.
Often, the Zamorani’s intertwine, between the 19th and the 20th centuries, with the Christian world, contracting mixed marriages, which anyway wasn’t unusual in that period, during the Napoleonic emancipation, when the Jews started to think of themselves as an integral part of Italian society and of its destiny as a Nation, as shown as well by their wholehearted participation in the Resurgence (Unification of Italy) and in the Great War.
Perhaps that’s also why, in many cases, they started to live their Jewishness only in a private form or in a dimmer way.
The racial laws of 1938 brutally intervene on this family as well as on all the Jewish Italian families, disrupting their existence and forcing their actions, crushing promising lives and fruitful presences for the social network in which they worked. Thus, a numeric contraction of this prosperous lineage is witnessed, reflecting the general decrease of Jewish people in Italy and Europe due to persecution, although even today the surname survives, a sign of a presence that has yet not subsided, and it’s possible to find it in other Italian regions as well.
The book “Gli Zamorani a Ferrara. Dall’editto dei re cattolici alla mia famiglia”, written by Gianni Zamorani and guide text of this exhibition, reconstructs the story and kinship ties among the various branches still alive and thriving of a big family tree with very long roots and a still open future.
Historical Context
In January 1492, with the fall of the Emirate of Granada, the Catholic royals Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile unified a huge part of Spain under their reign.
As long as it was Muslim, the Iberic Peninsula had represented a safe haven for the Jews, who had prospered here and had created important cultural centers.
The Catholic domain drastically changed the situation.
On March 31, 1492, Isabella and Ferdinand signed the Edict of Expulsion (also known as Alhambra Decree), with which they ordered the conversion or expulsion of Jews from all Spanish lands, and the prohibition of return for them and their heirs under the penalty of death and the seizure of all their property.
Tens of thousands of families were forced to abandon the lands in which their roots had been growing for centuries and to scatter to Flanders, Turkey, North Africa, the Balkans and in other domains of the huge Ottoman Empire, where they found favorable conditions and tolerance. Many fled to Italy, particularly in Livorno, Venice, Naples, Ferrara.
In the latter city, a Jewish community was already present since at least from the 13th century, and it was joined, with the favor and permission of Ercole I of Este, and most likely also through the intercession of his wife, Isabella of Aragon, by 21 families fleeing from Spain. Others arrived in the following decades.
In the city of the Este’s, Spanish Jews could practice any kind of art and crafts, except for money lending, and practice medicine; they were exempt from participating to religious ceremonies which “do not suit Jews” and they were exempt from paying certain taxes on property; they were allowed to leave the city how they pleased, and in the unlikely event they were forced to leave Ferrara, they would have a year to settle their affairs.
The Zamorani’s in Ferrara
In the papers that attest the presence of Jews coming from Spain in Ferrara, the surname Zamorani already appears in the first half of the 16th century. These were families that took their surname from their city of origin, Zamora.
The earliest known family unit was made of Abraham Zamorani, who died in 1539, and his children Simon, Salomon, and Isaac. Of the last two, we also know that they ran an apotheca, which means a store with an adjoining workshop.
In January 1598, Ferrara got under the direct control of the Pope and, as consequence, in 1627, the Jews of Ferrara had to move “in a part of the via de Sabioni and in the streets of Vigna Tagliata, Gatta Marcia, and other alleyways”. That means, a ghetto was established.
Over the course of the century, two censuses were made inside the Jewish community. In 1630, 1719 people were counted, 868 of which were men and 851 women, divided in 367 households, 57 of which had a female head of the household. In this first census, two Zamoran families appear, that of David with his wife Ester and their children Rachel, Angelo, and Moisè with their aunt Vittoria, and that of Laudadio with his wife Beatrice and their children Sarra (or Sarrola) and Isaac.
In 1692, the total of Jews in the city fell to 1651, of which 818 were male and 833 female. There are four households with the surname Zamorani or Zamorano: that of Isach, that of Iseppe, that of Salomon, and finally that of Gentila Zamorana, widow of Silvio d’Ascoli.
During the 18th century, numerous documents mention the surname Zamorani, and it’s possible to reconstruct a reliable family tree.
Bondì
Bondì Zamorani was a prominent figure of the Jewish community of Ferrara at the beginning of the 19th century. As a representative of the “Basso Po” department, he participated in the general Assembly of the Notable Israelites of France and Italy, convened in Paris by Napoleon’s decree of May 30, 1806, to answer a series of questions addressed to the Government at the Assembly. These questions were related both to matters of Jewish religion and morals and especially to the relationships that were to be established between Jews and non-Jews inside the Empire. Napoleon, satisfied with the responses gained at the Assembly, decided, in February 1807, to convene an Israelite Grand Sanhedrin, appointing it the task to convert these answers in official decisions with a legislative-religious value. On that occasion, Bondì composed an ode in Hebrew, with a Latin and Italian translation, to give thanks to the Almighty and in praise of Napoleon.
After coming back to Ferrara, Bondì continued his active participation in the life of the town’s Jewish community. He was a highly respected physician, among the founders of the Medical-Surgical Academy of Ferrara and a corresponding member of the Société Médicale d’Émulation de Paris.
In 1832, as Rabbi, he had the Assembly approve the Regulations of the Great Italian School of Ferrara, compiled by Salvatore Anau, Laudadio Zamorani, and Moisè Finzi Contini, which mentioned the rights and duties of all the members of the School, established the rules of its operations (assemblies, religious services) and the duties of the commissaries, arbitrators, collectors, and the secretary chancellor.
Bondì Zamorani died in 1838.
Amilcare
Amilcare Zamorani was born in Ferrara in 1855 to Amadio and Elena Sanguinetti.
Even though he was a brilliant lawyer, he’s remembered for his long and brilliant editorship of “Il Resto del Carlino”.
Having moved to Bologna following his marriage with Emma Sanguinetti, Amilcare bought the newspaper for 210,000 liras at the end of 1885, becoming its only owner and devoting himself to it body and soul.
“Il Resto del Carlino” was founded a few months prior, on March 29, 1885, by four young journalists: Chiusoli, Padovani, Carboni and Tonolla. The name derived by the fact the newspaper was given as change to people who bought a cigar worth 8 cents and paid with a 10 cents coin, which in the popular usage was still called a “Carlino”, a coin of the Papal State minted until 1796.
Promoter of important technological innovations, Amilcare had the first real rotary press capable of pulling ten thousand copies in an hour installed. Furthermore, he authorized correspondents to make regular use of the telegraph without regard to expense, securing himself the best Bolognese and regional talents. Giosuè Carducci, with whom he had an intense and friendly relationship, often wrote on the “Carlino” in the form of open letters.
Under his editorship, the paper became a real daily newspaper, taking on the tone of the major national newspapers and with a political line inspired to the one of the Democratic Association, a federation of radicals, republicans, and legalitarian socialists. Amilcare and his newspaper fought for the improvement of the country’s sanitary conditions, the secularity of the State and School, the literacy and the cultural promotion of the people, the approval of divorce, the suppression of the death penalty, the economic empowerment of Bologna and the Emilia region and the collaboration of all productive forces as the only viable way towards the democratic growth of the Nation. Amilcare was convinced that the emerging social forces could be integrated into the system, and that the workers’ fights, as long as they were contained within the bounds of legality, helped stimulate the Country’s economy.
An ardent anticlerical, he was often at odds with Cesare Algranati, editor of the Catholic newspaper “L’Avvenire d’Italia”, who brought him in count on a charge of defamation for which he was sentenced to four months and twenty days of imprisonment in addition to the payment of a fine of 776 liras.
Also as a result of this fact, but especially due to health reasons, Amilcare left the editorship of the newspaper at the end of 1905.
He died a few months later, in April 1907, aged 52. The Carlino announced his death with the first page lined in mourning, and his successor at the editorship of the newspaper, Pio Schinetti, wrote a moving remembrance: “He was a simple and straightforward man, intelligent and modest […] Of his wealth he gave liberally, without any notice. He loved righteousness, equity, and mildness of feelings above anything else […]”.
A huge crowd took part in the funerals.
The body was cremated and the urn was buried in the Israelitic cemetery of Bologna. The project drawings of his grave show a slab with a reproduction of the page of the Carlino that announced his death, but there is no trace of it today. We don’t know if it was ever actually made, or if it was, willingly or not, destroyed. Surrounded by a single grate, in the same place one can find the graves of his wife Emma Sanguinetti and of their children Gino (1881-1898), Aldo (1885-1923), Angelo (1888-1939), and that of the latter’s first wife, Jela Segre Zamorani (1894-1926).
The Agricultural Sugar Factory of Ferrara
In the 19th century, Ferrara was purely a city with an agricultural vocation and it was only towards the end of the century that the first industrialisation of the Ferrara countryside was born, with the spread of sugar beet and the founding of Sugar Factories that processed its pulp.
The farmers of Ferrara were convinced to adopt the new beet crop by an intense campaign launched in local newspapers and periodicals. In 1899, two factories were born on the Po, strategically located to allow the rapid influx of thousands of quintals of beets to the factories. In September 1900, after only nine months after construction began, a new factory, the Agricultural Sugar Factory of Ferrara (Zuccherificio Agricolo Ferrarese), began its activity, built right outside of the city walls and near the railway station. Eliseo and Guglielmo Zamorani, Amilcare’s brothers, were among the major shareholders of the Anonymous Society that promoted it. The company was a cooperative, founded with the farmers’ own capital, and it processed beets that were produced exclusively by its members. Beet and sugar would be part of the agricultural landscape of the province of Ferrara throughout the 20th century.
Gino, Elsa, Aldo, Angelo, and Mario
Amilcare and Emma Sanguinetti had five children: Gino, Elsa, Aldo, Angelo, and Mario.
The first, Gino, born in 1881, died when he was only 17 years old.
Elsa, born in 1883, married Achille Guglielmi, an obstetrician and gynecologist physician and landowner from Ancona. Founder and director of the Villa Bianca nursing home, Achille Giuglielmi was president of the Medical Association of Ancona from 1931, but after the enactment of the racial laws he was expelled from the Association. Reported as a “Jew, carries out defeatist propaganda” by the Prefect of Ancona to the Ministry of the Interior, he was interned from June 1940 to July 1942, first in Camerino, then in Montefalco, and finally in Fano. On July 24, 1942, after he was declared unfit for internment due to health reasons, Achille Guglielmi had his internment revoked by an act of mercy by the Duce. In 1943, he moved with his wife and children Gustavo, born in 1908 and a Medical graduate, and Gino, born in 1911 and a Law graduate, to Castiglione dei Pepoli, where he bought a villa. He died there on December 4, 1943, either from a heart attack or suicide, in the imminence of his expected arrest. His wife Elsa and his son Gino were arrested on January 3, 1944, and on January 7 they were brought to the San Giovanni in Monte prison in Bologna. On January 10, Elsa petitioned to be allowed to use the 4392.15 liras she had on her at the time of her arrest to purchase super-board groceries. On January 22, they were transferred to the concentration camp at the prisons in Ravenna and, three days after, to the prison of San Vittore in Milan. They were both deported to Auschwitz with convoy No. 6 departing from Milan on January 30, 1944, and they never came back. Elsa’s other son, Gustavo, was perhaps spared because he was married to an Arian woman.
Aldo, born in 1885, participated as a volunteer in World War I with the rank of second lieutenant in the infantry force. He died in 1923.
Angelo, born in 1888, married Jela Segre in 1912, and they had a son, Amilcare, born in 1913. After Jela’s death (1926), in 1930 Angelo married in a second marriage the Czechoslovakian Jewess Valeria Geduldiger. He participated in the Great War with the rank of artillery complement lieutenant and was awarded the Military Cross. In 1932, he attained the rank of major and in the same year was made Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy. A Law graduate, Angelo worked as a clerk for the Banca Commerciale Italiana for a few years, first in the Venice office from May 1922 to October 1927, then in the Bologna office until June 1932; later he was a lawyer in a law firm in Bologna. The fascist police kept him under strict observation, as he was considered a dangerous antifascist. On March 1, 1939, Angelo shot himself in his office. Hospitalized, he remained in a coma for two days before dying. His suicide caused a stir in Bologna, and the fascist police tried to show that it was due to personal reasons and not, instead, related to the racial persecution.
Mario, born in 1892, married Teresa Comelli in 1925 and they had a son, Aldo, born in 1925. He pursued a military career and took part in the Libyan War, World War I, and the Eritrean and Ethiopian Wars. He was multi-decorated and appointed Knight of the Kingdom “in consideration of long and good services”. Despite these honors, in 1939 Mario was placed on absolute leave from the army. In April 1940, after being baptized, Mario married Teresa also by the Catholic rite. In September 1941, they moved to Udine, where Mario died in August the following year.
Aldo, Mario and Teresa’s son, joined the partisans of the Osovanian Unions of the Eastern Hills in April 1944, and at the end of the year he joined the Guastatori Battalion of the Osoppo-Friuli Brigade. Wounded twice during clashes with the Nazis, despite his young age he was given the command of a group of partisans; he was always on the forefront of sabotaging operations and the last to retreat. On March 11, 1945 some commanders of the Osoppo Brigade were arrested by the Germans and locked up in the prison of Udine. To try to free him, an operation was organized in which a considerable amount of explosives were to be used. Aldo died on March 22, as a result of the most likely accidental deflagration of the TNT he had offered to retrieve from a warehouse in use by the Brigade.
In 2009, Aldo was awarded the gold medal for military valor in memoriam.
Arrigo and Anna Maria
Benedetto Zamorani, son of Pacifico and Consolina Foa, and Amilcare’s cousin, just like his brothers, Giuseppe and Federico, was a wealthy landowner. Married to Rita Bianchini, he moved to Bologna from where he kept dealing wisely with his properties in Ferrara. He died in 1911. Benedetto and Rita had two children, Arrigo and Anna Maria, born in Ferrara in 1890 and 1897.
In May 1915, Arrigo enlisted as a volunteer motorist and participated in the 1916-1918 war campaigns as a second lieutenant in the artillery corps. At the end of 1938, he applied for discrimination and almost simultaneously donated 25,000 liras to the Fighting Band of Tamara, a fraction of Copparo, as a contribution to the expense for the construction of a Casa Littoria. After a long procedure, he was awarded the discrimination only on June 22, 1940, as a volunteer of war entitled to the War Cross.
In 1917, Anna Maria married in both civil and religious marriage Antonio Bagnoli, a professor of the dermosyphilopathic clinic of the Sant’Orsola hospital in Bologna, a Catholic and member of the National Fascist Party since 1929. They had a daughter, Rosa, born on August 12, 1929 and baptized on the 27th of the same month. Anna Maria was never a member of the Israelite Community of Bologna, she had been professing the Catholic religion since 1928 and was baptized in December 1938.
She was subject to severe nervous breakdowns that sometimes caused her to lose consciousness. For this, her husband asked and obtained permission from the quaestor to make use of a driver, a cook, and a maid assigned at his wife’s care in his household. By ministerial order dated July 31, 1940, Anna Maria was granted discrimination.
Despite this, both of Benedetto’s children were arrested in Milan on March 24, 1944, and transferred to the assembly camp in Fossoli. Arrigo was deported to Auschwitz with Convoy No. 9 departed on April 5, 1944. His registration is dubious, his place and date of death are unknown. Anna Maria, as a spouse in a mixed marriage, baptized and not a member of a Jewish community, stayed in the camp for longer and left with Convoy No. 14, dated August 2, 1944, the last one to leave the Fossoli camp, which was abandoned shortly thereafter. Anna Maria’s place and date of death are also unknown.
Benedetto, his wife Rita and, ideally, their son Arrigo are buried in one of the monumental tombs of the Jewish Cemetery of Bologna, consisting of a marble structure and three bronze steles, decorated in bas-relief, and the work of sculptor Saverio Montaguti. The central stele shows a portrait of Benedetto Zamorani, in full figure, with a hat and his hands in his pockets, while he walks out of a Chrysanthemum hedge, perhaps to remember the walk in which he was bitten by a hydrophobic dog that transmitted him rabies and brought him to death.
Guelfo and Ilda
Guelfo and Ilda were the two lastborns of Giacomo and Elena Barzilai, born in Ferrara at the end of the 19th century.
After graduating from the Ariosto Classic High School of Ferrara in 1897, Guelfo enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of Ferrara. After three years, he moved to the University of Turin, where he graduated on July 23, 1902, discussing a thesis titled “On the color of the nucleus and cellular protoplasm” (Sulla colorazione del nucleo e del protoplasma cellulare). He was a generous and esteemed doctor. At the outbreak of World War I, Guelfo actively participated in the great debate between interventionists and neutralists that animated the radical party of which he was a member; he then joined the interventionist cause by serving as a medical lieutenant during the Great War. In 1938, he was exonerated from practicing and in 1940 he was struck off the medical register (where he was later readmitted in 1945). After the 1942 bombings, Guelfo and his daughter Angela fled from Milan and had the luck to be hosted by engineer Elvezio Coduri and his wife Olive Cosgrove, one of Guelfo’s patients, in their villa in Suna on Lake Maggiore, where they stayed until the end of the war. For the help given to Guelfo and Angela, as well as to other Jews, Elvezio and Olive, on March 7, 1983, were recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
Tragic was instead Ilda’s destiny. In 1902, she married Alessandro Colombo, who worked in Monza for the Congregation of Charity that directed and administered the city hospital. Alessandro was director of the Hospital of Monza for 26 years, from 1901 to 1927, while in the following years, he focused full time on teaching, his true passion. Alessandro and Ilda had two children, Giorgio, a lawyer, and Piero, an engineer. In 1938, Alessandro was forced to stop teaching and his children were expelled from the registers and prevented from continuing to practice their professions.
Alessandro, almost incredulous in the face of what was happening, filed an appeal to the Ministry of the Interior to be discriminated by the Racial laws, appealing to his unwavering commitment to civic and professional matters and only asking one thing: to be allowed to be considered what he was and felt: an Italian. In this letter he writes: “I don’t have a patrimony to save and I do not expect, from the measure I invoke, any material benefits; my only motive is to be equated to the other Italian citizens as I feel deeply, sincerely Italian. My ancestors’ residence in Italy is lost in the mist of time.” His appeal was not accepted.
During those years, Alessandro took over a small ceramic switch and insulator factory in Carnate, which he administered by commuting between Monza and Carnate.
The situation precipitated after September 8, 1943. The family split up. On of his children, Giorgio, moved with his family in the Marche region, in a safe place, while Alessandro and Ilda, with their other son, Piero, sought shelter in the crowded Milan, because too many people knew them in Monza. And the bounty for a Jew was five thousand liras. At the beginning of November, Piero left Milan on a bicycle to visit his brother. That’s when Alessandro committed a most serious imprudence: he returned to Monza to retrieve the photographs of his beloved grandchildren. He couldn’t even get into his old home that, following a tip from a neighbor, he was arrested by the Black Brigades and brought first in the prison of Monza and then to San Vittore in Milan. His wife Ilda turned herself in shortly after, so not to leave him alone. On December 6, they departed with Convoy No. 5, from platform 21 of Milan’s train station. On December 11 they arrived in Auschwitz and there they were killed in the gas chambers.
Mario
Davide Solomon, “shopkeeper”, was one of the first Zamorani’s to get a house outside of the ghetto of Ferrara after centuries.
The son Zaccaria, brother of Giacomo, continued and expanded their activity with success, becoming a trader of “drugs, colognes, flours, cured meats, salted meats, cheeses, oils, colors, and national and foreign paints”. In 1876, he married Eugenia Padoa and together they had five children: Carlo, Mario, Vittore, Emilio, and Maria. When Zaccaria died, three of his children, Carlo, Mario, and Emilio, carried on the store in Via Mazzini.
In particular, Mario, who was nominated president of the Traders Federation of Ferrara, was nominated Knight of the Crown of Italy in 1931, and, from 1935 to 1938, held the position of president of the provincial Union of Traders of drugs and colognes.
After the publication of the Manifesto of Race on the “Giornale d’Italia” in July 1938, Mario - who in 1908 had married Giannina Bertoni, a Catholic girl, with whom he had four children - decided to have his children be baptized (September 29, 1938) and, after the enactment of anti-Jewish legislation, he decided to shut the family company, the Eredi Zaccaria Zamorani, and to transfer the properties to a new firm run by his children, who were recognized as Catholics and not belonging to the so-called ”Jewish race”: the Fratelli Zamorani.
In December 1943, the head of the province of Ferrara ordered that “the revision of all transfers of property between Jews or from Jews to Aryans shall begin from January 1st, 1937…”, and he established a practice aimed at the eventual seizure of the “Jewish firm Fratelli Zamorani (groceries)”. The seizure was not put into practice only because the appeal filed by the brothers Mario, Franco, Giorgio, and Carlo Zamorani was granted.
Despite his discrimination and the declaration of “aryanity” of his children, Mario and his son Carlo were arrested together with other citizens of Ferrara following the murder of the federal of the Republican Fascist party Igino Ghibellini, on the night between the 14th and the 15th of November 1943. Luckily, they weren't selected among the eleven who were shot in retaliation on the dawn of November 15 next to the castle, and at a later date, they were released.
Maria
If Carlo, Mario, and Emilio Zamorani dealt with the success of their father Zaccaria’s firm, Vittore and Maria studied medicine instead and they both became esteemed pediatricians.
Maria, the youngest of Zaccaria’s children, was born in 1893. After graduating the Ariosto Classical High School of Ferrara with the highest grades, in 1911 she enrolled in the course of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Bologna and graduated in Genoa with a grade of 110/110 cum laude in 1918. Motivated by a great passion for the medical profession, Maria was one of the first female doctors of Ferrara.
With the enactment of the anti-Jewish laws, she was shunned from the Academy of Sciences of Ferrara, from the Italian Society of pediatrics, and she had to leave her workplace inside the Sant'Anna Hospital. So, Maria put her profession to the service of the Jewish community, with clandestine visits to the houses of Jewish children for whom it was risky to abandon their home.
After September 8, 1943, Maria became a wanted person. In the documents from the police headquarters read: “...Zamorani Maria previously Zaccaria already living here in Via Montebello n.38 is evicted and the address is unknown”. “Issued searches […]”. Maria hid herself first in an agricultural fund of her property close to Bondeno, hosted by the family of the tenant farmer, and then in a place she knew well, the Hospital.
In April 1944, quaestor Visioli gave the order to arrange the transfer of six people - Bruno and Giulio Conegliano, Edgardo Finzi, Mario Ravenna, Maria Zamorani, Emma Zevio - to the Fossoli concentration camp of Carpi. On May 8, 1944, the Republican police confirmed to the Police Headquarters of Ferrara that the six persons named had been handed to the National Republican Guard.
Maria was deported to Auschwitz on May 16, 1944. The train arrived at its destination on the 23rd; it was the Convoy that took the absolute longest to travel that route. We don't have any more news about her; she doesn't appear to have been registered in Auschwitz and it's possible that she took her life before the arrival at the camp with a poison capsule that it seems she always had on herself in the last period before the arrest.
On March 8, 2021, the city of Ferrara dedicated her a plaque in the internal central avenue of the ex-Arcispedale Sant’Anna, a place very dear to her and where she had searched, uselessly, her last refuge.
Emilio and Massimo
Emilio was the youngest among Zaccaria’s male children, born in 1890. Just like his brothers Mario and Vittore, he had married a Catholic girl, Maria Rossi, and with her and her child Massimo, he had moved to Castel San Pietro, in the province of Bologna.
On August 28, 1944, Emilio and Massimo were arrested in Villa Vezzano, province of Ravenna, by twelve fascists of the black Brigade of Riolo; at their head was Raffaele Raffaelli, secretary of the fascist party of Faenza. From there, they were transferred to the prison in Forlì awaiting for deportation.
A few days later, on the night between the 8th and the 9th of September, a German corporal, Walter Muller, was seriously injured following the explosion of a mine that had been placed on the road between Branzolino and San Tomè, close to Villa Belli in Forlì. In the afternoon of the 9th, nazists and fascists started rounding up civilians in retaliation. About 200 people were gathered on the farm behind Villa Belli. Then arrived Heinrich Nordhorn, a second lieutenant who had already directed another retaliation a few days prior in Branzolino, and six Italian prisoners, their hands tied behind their backs, taken from the Forlì prison. Among these were Emilio and Massimo. With them, Michele Mosconi, Celso Foietta, Antonio Gori nicknamed Natale, and Antonio Zaccarelli, four partisans who had been arrested by fascists between July and August, were murdered by hanging. Emilio, almost 54, was the oldest of the six by a long shot all the others had less than 40 years, and Antonio Zaccarelli was only 19. As had been the case with the Branzolino massacre, the bodies were left hanging on the gallows for almost two days, then a few locals were forced to dig a mass grave and bury the bodies, without caskets.
With the Liberation, the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Forlì and the British Army’s Special Investigation Department investigated the massacre of San Tomè, by meticulously reconstructing the events and acquiring documents, witnessings of the massacre, and details that could’ve allowed the immediate instruction of a trial which, however, wasn’t held at the time. As with many other documents pertaining to investigations of war crimes, these documents disappeared for decades. Only in 1994 were the documents found again, together with many more relating to war crimes committed in Italy, in the so-called armadio della vergogna (the closet of shame), found in a storage room in the chancery of the military prosecutor general’s office in the Cesi-Gaddi palace in Rome, and only in 2006 Nordhorn was tried in absentia and sentenced to life in prison but the military court of La Spezia.
The sentence, later upheld by the Military Court of Appeals and the Court of Cassation, was never carried out because Nordhorn was never extradited to Italy, continuing to live freely in Germany, where he had become a successful construction contractor.
Giorgio
Following the example of his uncle and aunt, Vittore and Maria, Giorgio, Mario’s son, studied medicine and graduated in Pavia in 1937. On March 30, 1938, Giorgio was admitted as a trainee officer to the Florence Military Health Application School, health service, medical specialization. Because of the outbreak of the war and because he was recognized as “Aryan”, his military service lasted almost continuously for over seven years. On June 28, 1940, he was assigned to the 2nd Infantry Regiment 146 “Re”, stationed in Udine. With this regiment, Giorgio participated in war operations on the Italian-Yugoslav border and then in the Balkans. On December 20, 1940, he left for the Russian front where he was aggregated Gassed Reclamation Section, which was part of the medical service of the Italian Armada in Russia. On January 15, 1943, the Russians started the third phase of their great offensive. Thus began the disastrous retreat of the Alpine Army Corps as well. Giorgio managed to come back to Italy in April 1943, where he re-joined the 2nd Regiment Fanteria “Re”, taking service at the Military Hospital of Udine. On September 12, four days after the announcement of the armistice between Italy and the Allies, Giorgio, just like over 700,000 Italian soldiers, was captured by the Germans and brought to a prison camp at Markt Pongau (Stalag XVIII C), close to Salzburg, in Austria. In April 1944, he was transferred to another camp not very distant from the border between Germany and Poland (Stalag III C), close to the alt Drewitz village, near the city of Kustrin (now Kostrzyn nad Odra in Poland), 80kms east of Berlin.
In his year and a half of imprisonment, Giorgio had two great fortunes. The first was that the Germans, despite his surname, didn’t realize his Jewish origins. The second was that, as a medical officer, he was treated much better than other soldiers, and, even with almost non-existent means, he was allowed to practice as a doctor in the camp. On January 31, 1945, the Russian Army entered the camp, but this didn’t mean a rapid return to Italy. Giorgio came back to Ferrara only in September 1945, after a long odyssey of hundreds of kilometers by foot or in wagons.
1. Fur Jacket, Attilio Gatti via Bagutta
Perfectly in line with the design and fit trends of the time, the champagne fur outwear with light-colored lining made of damask satin was tailored by Attilio Gatti via Bagutta 14.
In the Milan atelier, the jacket’s material was styled on a warm and refined white leaning on gold and then enriched by a major embroidery at the sleeve height that defines the cuffs. The precious design inspired by the period’s fashions defines an embroidery over the whole length of the garment, while the pinces on its shoulders add a soft detail and define the wearable nature of the jacket in line with the rules of fashion in that period. The collar with its revers has an almost masculine cut but it’s made coquettish, and clearly refined, by the full-length embroidery and by its black buttons, which have a quite big diameter and are chromatically in contrast with the rest. The back of the garment represents perhaps the most interesting part, due to the small double tails (also made of fur, with two parts that slightly overlap) put on the lower part which, again, takes a detail from the man’s wardrobe fashion and reinterprets it for her wearability.
The first part of the 20th century was, as much in Italy (particularly in the Milan fashion district in which Attilio Gatti’s atelier was located) as in France the moment in which fur affirmed itself in the more refined feminine wardrobe. Due to the stylistic influence tied to the increasingly frequent economic and cultural exchanges with Russia, between the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the next century fur manufacturing in Europe experienced a never-explored-before success, enriching garments with many other stylistic details (such as embroidery, prints, workmanship) which were present both on the garment itself and on the lining.
2.Two-piece black velvet dress with trimmings
The two-piece black velvet dress consists of a flared, floor-length skirt and a rather slim-fitting jacket characterized by a substantial length. The two pieces that make up the dress, probably part of the afternoon wardrobe, are both lightly iridescent due to the texture they’re made of and are both in excellent condition. The row of press studs on the back of the skirt is particularly interesting because the concealed buttoning echoes a fashion introduced in France in the first half of the 20th century, when the presence of decorative buttons was juxtaposed with the invention of rows of concealed buttons imagined to improve the fit of garments. The lower hem of the garment is also interesting; it features a plissé flounce at the edge made of taffeta and it’s designed to present itself as shorter at the front, to then open at the back into a small trailing train with a slightly rounded cut.
The true star of this total black two-piece is however the trimmings, which are enriched by a small embroidered frieze and ornamental decorative buttons closed by metal hooks. Trimmings also return on the sleeve by drawing symmetrical details on the upper silhouette. The jacket’s inner lining, made of a horizontally striped pattern, is stunning.
This winter outfit strictly sticks to the female fashion scheme of the time, which imagined the clothed body divided into two parts (upper and lower) in clothing designed for the daytime wardrobe.