Irma Bandiera

Irma Bandiera
Died 1944 Edit this on Wikidata
Occupation Resistance fighter edit this on wikidata

Irma Bandiera (1915–1944) was a member of the seventh Gruppo di azione patriottica. In 1944 she was captured, blinded, and killed.[1] Enrico Berlinguer, of the Italian Communist Party, held her in high esteem.[2] A via in her native Bologna is named for her[3][4] and the song Mimma e Balella relates to her.[5]

Biography

Irma Bandiera was born in 1915 in a well-off Bolognese family; his father Angelo was a construction master builder, who got closer to anti-fascism during the dictatorship; the mother is Argentina Manferrati, and she has a sister, Nastia.[6]

Irma's boyfriend, a soldier, is taken prisoner by the Germans in Crete after September 8, 1943, and remains missing after the ship on which he was embarked for the transfer to Germany was bombed and sunk off the port of Piraeus. His research remains unsuccessful.[6]

Irma Bandiera begins to help the disbanded Italian soldiers after the armistice and to take an interest in politics, by joining the Communist Party. In the village of Funo, where she used to visit relatives, she met a medical student, Dino Cipollani from Argelato, the partisan "Marco". Irma thus joined the Resistance, at the time very active in the Bolognese plain, with the name of battle "Mimma" in the VII GAP brigade Gianni Garibaldi of Bologna.[6]

On 5 August 1944 the partisans kill a German officer and a commander of the black brigades, which triggered the next day a reprisal in Funo. Three partisans are arrested and imprisoned in the schools of San Giorgio di Piano.[6]

On 7 August 1944 Irma Bandiera had been carrying weapons to the base of her group in Castel Maggiore.[7] In the evening she is arrested at her uncle's house, along with two other partisans. Also locked up in the schools of San Giorgio, but separated from her companions, she is then translated to Bologna, where the Fascists hoped to obtain further information on the Resistance from her.[6]

While her family was looking for her in prisons and barracks, for six days and six nights Irma Bandiera was being tortured by the fascists of the Special Autonomous Company, led by Captain Renato Tartarotti, [7] who came to blind her, but Irma resisted without speaking, thus preserving her fellow partisans. According to Renata Viganò, "the most ignominious defeat of their bloody profession was called Irma Bandiera".[8] Finally, the Fascists shot her with point-blank shots at the Meloncello di Bologna, near her parents' house, on 14 August.[6][9]

On 14th August Irma's body was found on the pavement near the ICO sanitaryware factory, where her torturers had left her in full sight for a whole day, as a warning. She was then taken to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in via Irnerio where a guardian, a friend of the Resistance, took pictures of her face devastated by torture. Irma was finally buried in the monumental cemetery of the Certosa di Bologna, accompanied by family and some friends.[6]

The Bolognese federation of the Italian Communist Party on 4 September 1944 circulated a clandestine paper in which they recalled the patriotic sense of the sacrifice of Irma, inciting the Bolognese to intensify the partisan struggle for liberation from Nazi-fascism.[6]

In her honor, in the summer of 1944, a group of partisans operating in Bologna took the name of First Garibaldi Brigade "Irma Bandiera".A SAP brigade (Patriotic Action Team) operating in the northern suburbs of Bologna was also named after her, as well as a GDD (Women's Defense Group).[6]

Honours and memory

Gold Medal of Military Valour

At the end of the war Irma Bandiera was decorated posthumously with the Gold Medal of Military Valor, along with 18 other women partisans. The justification mentions how

"First among the Bolognese women to hold arms for the fight in the name of freedom, she always fought with a lion's courage. Captured in combat by the German SS, subjected to fierce torture, she did not say a word that could compromise her comrades. After being blinded she was barbarously slaughtered and the body left on the public street. Pure heroine, worthy of the virtues of Italian women, she was the beacon of all the patriots of Bologna in the war of Liberation".[10]

Irma Bandiera is remembered in the Shrine of Piazza Nettuno and in the Monument to the Partisan Falls in Villa Spada.[6]

A street is named after her in the municipalities of Bologna, Argelato, Castel Maggiore, Castelnovo di Sotto, Cattolica, Copparo, Crevalcore, Granarolo dell'Emilia, Malalbergo, Molinella, Pieve di Cento, Sant'Ilario d'Enza, San Giorgio di Piano in Emilia-Romagna, as well as Rovigo, Terni, Civitavecchia, Ribera (in the province of Agrigento), Gonnesa, Sant'Arpino (in the province of Caserta) and Valenza (in the province of Alessandria). A large housing complex also bears her name in Frattamaggiore.

In Bologna, the road named after her starts from the Arco del Meloncello, the place where she was murdered. There is a memorial plaque there to her memory: [11] [12]

Irma Bandiera
National heroine
1915 - 1944
Your ideals were able to overcome torture and death
Freedom and youth you offered
For life and the redemption of the people and of Italy
Only the immense pride attenuates the fierce pain
Of the comrades of struggle
Those who knew you and loved you
In the place of your sacrifice
For perennial memory
Put

On the occasion of the 72nd anniversary of the Liberation, Bologna paid tribute to her in the neighborhood where she was born and where she was then killed.[13] The association CHEAP Street Poster Art and the duo of street artists of Orticanoodles (pseudonym of duo of Italian artists composed of Wally (born in Carrara) and Alita (born in Milan),[14] have chosen for this the facade of the Bombicci, the school that claims a "democratic and anti-fascist vocation" on purpose, also to express how Irma Bandiera was a national heroine and also daughter of the same district.[15] A large mural was created with the technique of dusting, reproducing her smiling face, as she was immortalized in one of her most famous photographs.[16]

References

  1. ↑ Rinaldina Russell (1997). The Feminist Encyclopedia of Italian Literature. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 87. ISBN 978-0-313-29435-8.
  2. ↑ "A Communist pioneer," from the Rome correspondent of the Tablet on the 16th of June 1984
  3. ↑ Lapide di Irma Bandiera from Bologna page (Italian) Archived 2013-08-23 at the Wayback Machine.
  4. ↑ Scheda di Irma Bandiera in Chi era Costui (Italian)
  5. ↑ Magazzini Sonori
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Storia e Memoria di Bologna
  7. 1 2 Radio Città del Capo
  8. ↑ Renata Viganò, “Donne della Resistenza”
  9. ↑ Il Martiro di Irma Bandiera
  10. ↑ "Awards: Irma Flag". Presidency of the Republic. Retrieved 8 May 2015.
  11. ↑ "Lapid of Irma Bandiera". Municipality of Bologna. Monuments that speak: resistance in Zaragoza. Archived from the original on 23 August 2013. Retrieved 18 July 2014.
  12. ↑ "Card of Irma Flag". chieracostui.com, Who was this?. Retrieved 18 July 2014.
  13. ↑ "Resistance, the face of Irma Flag on the wall of a school in Bologna". Repubblica.it. 15 April 2017. Retrieved 27 April 2017.
  14. ↑ "Orticanoodles nell'Encyclopedia Treccani". www.treccani.it. Retrieved 27 April 2017.
  15. ↑ "Resistance, Irma Flag on schools Bombicci". Corriere di Bologna. Retrieved 27 April 2017.
  16. ↑ "Partigiana Irma Bandiera, inaugurated the murals at the Bombicci schools | Radio Città del Capo". Radio Cape Town. Retrieved 27 April 2017.


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