Marcella Ficca Monaco (1915-2001)

Marcella Ficca was born in Rome on September 10, 1915, to Carlo Ficca and Lavinia Mannucci. The first of three children, she attended elementary school and then enrolled at the Vincenzo Gioberti Commercial Institute in Corso Vittorio Emanuele II. At the age of seventeen she met Alfredo Monaco, a twenty-two-year-old student at the Faculty of Medicine and son of Magistrate Beniamino Monaco, to whom she became engaged in 1933 and married in 1937^[1].

Shortly after the marriage the couple had to move away from Rome because Alfredo had attempted to participate in a hospital competition by showing a false GUF (Fascist University Groups) membership card, since for ideal reasons he had always refused to join the Fascist Party. Returning to Rome, he took service at the Carlo Forlanini Hospital, which specialized in the treatment of pulmonary diseases. He later changed locations many times, continuing his career between Perugia, Turin and Cagliari^[2].

In 1938 Alfredo Monaco became the night doctor at the Regina Cœli Prison and moved to Via della Lungara 28B, an apartment made available inside the penitentiary, which soon became a center for spreading anti-fascist material^[3].

Together with his friend Mario Fioretti and his brother Aldo, both magistrates, Alfredo Monaco participated in the founding of the “Movimento di Unità proletaria” (Mup), headed by Lelio Basso: this political formation was formed in Milan in January 1943 by some militants of the PSI and PCI. Basso, who was aligned on leftist positions, believed that the Mup represented an attempt to overcome the past divisions in the labor movement between socialists and communists^[4].

In August 1943, after Mussolini’s ousting, the Mup joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), forming the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity (Psiup)^[5].

The battle for the defense of Rome on September 9-10, 1943 saw the involvement of all the major Psiup members, organized under the orders of Sandro Pertini. After the final defeat of the army and the Nazi occupation, the Monacos became major components of the Psiup Military Center that was being organized in the city. In mid-September they began to host some of its most important exponents: Giuseppe Gracceva, Giuliano Vassalli, Oreste Lizzadri, Mario Fioretti and Massimo Severo Giannini. The two spouses then put their unsuspected apartment at the organization’s disposal as a weapons collection center and kept in touch with partisans in San Cesareo^[6]. The Socialist organization, largely composed of prominent figures already on file with the Police and well-known professionals, was immediately hit by a series of excellent “falls”: on October 15, 1943 Sandro Pertini and Giuseppe Saragat were arrested at the end of a meeting held in the office of Doctor Giovanni d’Eltore on Via Nazionale; Pietro Nenni was also with them, but he managed to escape in a daring manner^[7].

Mistakenly believing the Allies’ arrival in the capital to be near, Pietro Nenni gave orders immediately after the Anzio Allies’ landing to free Sandro Pertini, Giuseppe Saragat, Luigi Andreoni, Carlo Bracco, a Trastevere partisan, Torquato Lunadei, Ulisse Ducci, and Luigi Allori from Regina Coeli Prison^[13].

These detainees were first locked up in the third wing of the prison, which was exclusively German, and to which Alfredo Monaco had no access. It was thanks to the interest of Giuliano Vassalli and Massimo Severo Giannini, both lawyers, that they were moved to the sixth wing, under Italian jurisdiction, so that Monaco could tell them about the plan and warn them of the moves of his comrades. Vassalli and Giannini had until September 8 been officers at the military tribunal in Rome and had procured stamps and release forms. Marcella Ficca, finally, had been in charge of filling out these forms, thanks to her friendship with Carretta, and because of finding a secret place where the escapees would be hidden if the coup was successful.

Collaborating with her was Filippo Lupis, a young lawyer who, because of his profession, could circulate around the prison undisturbed. Vito Maiorca, a socialist militant, was a lieutenant at the office of the Police of Italian Africa (PAI) where the prisoners were to pass when they were released. Alfredo Monaco, the prison doctor, could control any movement within the penitentiary and arranged to warn Pertini to fake an appendicitis attack on the evening of January 23 so that as a doctor he could inform him of developments in the operation^[14].

On Jan. 24, 1944, the plan was put into action; however, it had not been calculated that political prisoners, had first to go to the Police Headquarters before being released: it was the prison director, Donato Carretta, already in agreement with Marcella, who suggested that they make a phone call on behalf of the Police Headquarters to allow their release. However, that very afternoon the outside phone lines were down. Until five o’clock in the afternoon, the plan seemed to be blown up until Marcella came up with the idea of going to her brother Luciano, who had infiltrated the PAI in Piazza dell’Arco di San Callisto in Trastevere. It was from that barracks, with internal telephone lines, that Filippo Lupis, pretended to be a police officer and phoned Regina Coeli, ordering the immediate release of the prisoners^[15][16].

The prisoners were asked by German officers to pack up their stuff, but one of the seven men claimed the gold cufflinks that had been confiscated from him: it was Pertini who made it clear to his friend that this was an escape and not a regular release^[17].

When they were finally freed they were hidden in the Monacos’ apartment and later moved by Luciano Ficca to the apartment in the PAI barracks in Trastevere, belonging to a marshal who was on leave^[18]. On January 28, the voice of Paolo Treves announced during the broadcast “The Voice of Italy”: “This is Radio London. An Italian patriot has helped to escape Pertini and Saragat, top leaders of the Italian Socialist Party and leaders of the Italian Resistance, from prison. Tonight the usual column will not take place because our hearts are moved by the escape from Regina Coeli of Sandro Pertini and Giuseppe Saragat who were sentenced to death by the German war tribunal. Our two comrades have resumed their place of struggle in Rome”^[19].

Giuseppe Gracceva (Red Marshal) had by then become commander of the Matteotti Brigades in Central Italy: he was one of the most important military leaders and had participated in several armed actions. The most sensational was the one he carried out with Cosimo and Edoardo Vurchio on February 18, 1944: thanks to a load of dynamite that Luciano Ficca and Vito Maiorca had procured for him from the Trastevere barracks of the PAI, he blew up a German convoy on the tracks of the Ostiense station in Rome. From that moment on he was constantly sought by the German Police who showed up at the door of his house in Piazza Vittorio on the evening of April 3, 1944: pretending to have to get dressed, he descended from the balcony but was hit by a hail of bullets and was seriously wounded. Late at night, he staggered to Marcella’s house, who opened the door for him: having understood the gravity of the situation, she immediately called her husband and, with a coded message, asked him to return home with extreme urgency.

Alfredo Monaco extracted the bullet from Gracceva’s lung but understood that the partisan commander needed to be hospitalized. On his way to Fatebenefratelli hospital to ask for help from some colleagues, the SS located the apartment on Via della Lungara and began to break down the door. Marcella was forced to escape via the attic, which had direct access to Carretta’s apartment, while her children were taken elsewhere by the nanny. Once they were safe, the woman dragged Gracceva to the main exit of the prison and mingled with the crowd protesting the killing of Don Morosini, which had taken place that same morning at Forte Bravetta, and then led her friend to an address at a pastry shop where he could remain hidden while recovering^[20].

From this point on, Alfredo and Marcella were forced to go into hiding and to separate from their children, who were left with relatives and then in extraterritorial Vatican residences.

They hid momentarily in a house on Ulpiano Street and later decided to contact their cousins Tullia and Angelo de Paolis, who housed them in Sommelier Street, not far from Villa Wolkonsky, the headquarters of the German embassy. Together they considered that the best hiding place was the De Paolis film establishments, owned by Angelo, located on Tiburtina main road. However, this was an area battered by bombing and Marcella, wanted and identified as a partisan, was forced to live absolutely in hiding, supplied by relatives and totally detached from the military organization. Because of the events, she was hidden in a religious institute of nuns on Via Palestro^[21].

On April 10, 1944, Gracceva was detected again by the SS, and as a result of this operation Luciano Ficca was also wanted. The latter turned himself in to the German Command, which had threatened reprisals against his sister Clara. Incarcerated and tortured in Via Tasso, he never revealed the hiding place of Marcella and Alfredo although he knew it^[22]. On the night of June 3 to 4, German and Fascist commands began to abandon Rome to escape the arrival of the Allies. The German police command in Via Tasso, at dawn on June 4, loaded two groups of prisoners onto two trucks to take them to the north, Luciano was among them. One of the two trucks had a breakdown and had to stop. The second one drove away but, after a few minutes of travel, stopped on the Cassia road, at the 14 kilometer mark, in the locality of “La Storta”. Here, the prisoners were locked up in a shed on Count Grazioli’s estate and in the afternoon, for no clear reason, they were shot in the back of the head. The bodies were abandoned^[23].

Marcella would learn only after the liberation of Rome (June 4, 1944) that her brother had fortunately escaped the massacre, finding himself in the broken-down truck. He arrived at the Tempelhof concentration camp where he remained thirteen months, until the arrival of the Soviets^[24].

At the end of the war, the International Red Cross contacted the Monaco family to return Gertrude to her mother, who had escaped the extermination of the Jews. Marcella never saw Gertrude again^[25].

In February 1948 she was awarded the Silver Medal for Military Valor for her intense activity as a partisan fighter^[26].

After the end of the war Marcella remained a socialist but was no longer involved in politics, devoting herself to raising her children. She always maintained a strong bond of friendship and a close correspondence with Sandro Pertini, by then a leading institutional member of the Socialist Party, who wrote to her both on the occasion of his election as president of the Chamber of Deputies (May 25, 1972) and on the occasion of his election to the highest office of state: that of President of the Republic (July 9, 1978)^[27].

In 1965, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Liberation, she was one of the witnesses interviewed by Liliana Cavani for the documentary film “La donna nella Resistenza,” produced by Rai. This was one of the first occasions in the postwar period when the essential role of women in organizing the armed struggle during the German occupation was publicly discussed^[28].

Marcella died in Rome in 2001 at the age of 86^[29].