Rina Chiarini (1909-1995)

Rina Chiarini was born in Empoli in 1909 into a working-class family: her father was a railwayman, while her mother was a home-based flask-stacker. She attended school until the third grade but then, for economic reasons, she first started working with her mother and was then employed in a small sorting warehouse. When her father Luigi Lionello – a convinced anti-fascist – was sentenced to three years in prison for having taken part in the strikes in the Tuscan city of Empoli, in which nine soldiers mistaken for fascists were killed (1st March 1921), Rina had to find work in a glassworks, thus beginning to experience factory life: there she had her first contacts with some communist workers and began to develop an independent aversion to fascism^[1].

Partly thanks to the influence of her maternal uncle, Pirro Bini, a railway worker who had joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI), she approached political discussion and began to take an interest in the Russian Revolution and the violence that the fascists were perpetrating in the city^[2].

When her father was released from prison in 1924 and the family’s conditions improved, Rina went back to working at home. During these years her younger brother Aldo, a carpenter registered with the PCI, introduced her to the Communist leader Remo Scappini, who became her fiancé^{[3] [4]}. The latter made her read some books and the Party press, introducing her to circles close to the Communist Party: on Saturdays and Sundays, together with her brothers, her fiancé and some young shoemakers, she would meet to discuss politics and read ‘L’Unità’, the newspaper of the Party. Through these contacts she became the person responsible for collecting money for those imprisoned for the strikes of March 1921 and a member of the Popular Committee that promoted actions in their solidarity^[5]. 

In 1926, she enrolled in the Communist Party, precisely at a time when the enactment of the “leggi fascistissime” (the set of law implemented to transform the State from democratic to fully fascist)  and the institution of the Special Court for the Defence of the State put the organisation into severe crisis and forced the most exposed comrades to emigrate^[6].

Rina was commissioned to carry out propaganda among the fascist women so that they would not join the fascist trade union (1928-1929), while in the following years she was involved in trade union agitation to improve their working conditions. On 1 May 1930, she organised a demonstration by the women workers of the ‘Dal Vivo’ flask factory, one of the largest in the city: the women were to go to the furnace wearing something red to celebrate Workers’ Day. Taking advantage of the fact that she also worked in the countryside seasonally, she also distributed posters and material among the peasant women^[7].

Scappini, who by then had become one of the leading communist exponents in Tuscany, needed to travel to different areas of the region, so Rina accompanied him, lending herself to transport the forbidden material, since women were considered less suspicious by the OVRA^[8], the secret fascist police. In the second half of 1929, she began to collaborate in the clandestine print shop of ‘L’Unità’ in Empoli and to contribute to its distribution^[9].

At the beginning of 1931, as she was about to get married, a wave of arrests hit the leaders of the PCI in Empoli: Remo Scappini was also spotted and sought after, but he managed to fortunately take refuge in Livorno and then expatriate, finding shelter, like many in his condition, in Paris^{[10] [11]}. Rina was questioned several times by the police even though she was genuinely unaware of her fiancé’s fate: only a few months later did she learn from other comrades that he was in the USSR to attend courses at the Leninist School in Moscow, where he remained until the end of 1932^[12]. 

In May 1933, she took part in the civic funeral of the communist shoemaker and friend of Remo Scappini, Domenico Maestrelli – known to everyone as “Disarmament” – which turned into a demonstration against the Regime: she was thus investigated and again interrogated by the OVRA^[13]. 

Her position worsened in October of the same year when she was taken first to the prison in Florence and then to that in Bologna to have a confrontation with her boyfriend, who had been arrested in Faenza: the police’s intention was to check whether the two had been dating during their absconding^[14]. In the absence of evidence, Rina was released, but nevertheless placed under close surveillance, while Scappini was sentenced to 22 years imprisonment by the Special Court^[15]. The management of the Civitavecchia prison always denied the two permission to have an interview and for nine years they only corresponded by letter^[16].

She remained on the sidelines for some time to disperse her traces until she got herself employed in a military backpack factory that had developed with the Ethiopian War (1935-1936): here too she carried out trade union agitation among the workers, but at the end of the conflict the workforce was reduced and Rina fired^[17].

Her political activity revived with the outbreak of the Spanish war (1936): she disseminated ‘L’Unità’, ‘L’Avanguardia’, organised the clandestine ‘Radio Barcellona’ listening groups that informed anti-fascists about the fate of the conflict and collected money in support of the volunteers^[18]. 

In July 1938, her brother Aldo was arrested along with about thirty Tuscan communists on charges of belonging to a vast anti-fascist organisation^[19]. In May 1939, the Special Court sentenced him to six years’ imprisonment: he kept up a dense correspondence with his brothers and, probably worried about his family’s condition, in June 1939, he applied to the King for a pardon, which was rejected^[20]. Aldo’s imprisonment, her other brother Rino’s call to arms and her father’s chronic illness decreased her family’s economic income so she was forced to take a job as a worker in a glassworks, with the help of some comrades. When Aldo was released from prison (1942), she returned to stuffing flasks at home with her mother and doing some work in the countryside^[21]. 

At the end of October 1942, Scappini was also released from prison thanks to the amnesty and the two were able to see each other again after years of distance^[22]. Rina commented in her autobiography: “In the twelve years of our forced separation I had suffered a lot, my life had not been normal. I had always hoped to be reunited with him to live a serene existence, after so many renounces of all kinds, as you can imagine, for a woman no longer young (when Remo left I was still 21; when he returned I was 33) and accustomed to a simple, countryside environment”^[23]. 

Scappini, anxious to resume contacts with the Party, accepted an assignment in Milan, with the promise that he would be able to move with his fiancée. However, in February 1943, he was drafted to Florence and the project was put on hold^[24]. It was only when Umberto Massola, a national PCI leader, became interested that it was possible to organise the transfer: Rina pretended to be pregnant and with a false medical certificate went to the barracks to apply for a marriage licence^[25]. The two got married in April 1943 in church, so as not to arouse suspicion, and immediately went to the Lombard capital, pretending to go on their honeymoon. However, on the instructions of the Party, which considered his presence dangerous, Rina returned to Empoli while Remo left on his own^[26]. She knew nothing about her husband until the fall of Fascism (25 July 1943), when her comrades let her know that she would soon be able to join him^[27].

During the forty-five days, under the direction of her brother Aldo, she distributed the clandestine press helped by other communists with whom she organised a large demonstration in Piazza Farinata degli Uberti. After 8 September, she helped Aldo – who had been in charge of organising the first ‘sports teams’ – to collect weapons and find hiding places^[28].

On 2 November 1943 she was finally able to reach Milan, while on 13 November Pietro Secchia ordered the couple to go to Genoa. They provided her with a false identity card made out in the name of Antonietta Bianchi and began to ensure the liaison between the Genoa Federal Committee and the so-called Military Triangle, a body directly dependent on the Communist federation, which was responsible for directing and guiding the development of the armed struggle in the province^{[29] [30]}.

Under the nom de guerre of ‘Clara’, she was in charge of clandestine press distribution and also became one of the trait d’union between the GAP, the communist formations that acted in the city, and wider Party organs. The mixture of tasks made her role very precarious as she was aware of all the bases, weapons depots and, above all, the headquarters of the Military Triangle: a potential confession from her would have brought down the entire organisation^[31].

This responsibility, of which she was aware, also emerges from her writings in which she recalled: “The system of the rigorous conspiracy demanded a lot of attention, one had to keep everything in memory (appointments, addresses, etc.) and this for me, who was not used to it, was very difficult at first, almost a torment. I often found it hard to fall asleep at night because of the effort of thinking and remembering everything. Remo helped me a lot and continually gave me instructions on how to behave in carrying out activities, particularly in the case of arrests, interrogations and confrontations with arrested comrades”^[32].

Following the attacks on the Germans by the Genoese Gap, led by the engineering student Giacomo Buranello, the Genoa Police Headquarters tightened their surveillance and managed, in March 1944, to break up this first military organisation by arresting its main members^{[33] [34]}.

Rina thus became an easy bait for the police who, using informers and spies, tried to trace the military leaders of the Resistance: the fact that she moved by bicycle or public transport and made contact with many people at different addresses made her the link in the chain most vulnerable to capture. 

Between April and June 1944, the Gap, also thanks to Rina’s support and liaison activities, managed to reorganise themselves and carried out a series of striking actions: on 15 May 1944 they placed an explosive device in the Cinema Odeon, a place frequented by German soldiers; on 19 June they fired several deadly shots at the prefectural commissioner Silvio Parodi; in the late afternoon of Sunday 25 June 1944 they detonated a bomb inside the Bar Olanda in Via del Campo, a place frequented by Germans and prostitutes, causing six deaths and many injuries^[35].

On 6 July 1944, due to a stakeout by the Investigative Political Bureau at an address reported by one of its trustees, she was the first to be caught in the house in Via Paride Salvago, one of the addresses where she was preparing to collect copies of the clandestine ‘L’Unità’ in place of another courier girl, who had been given another job^[36]. 

The police could not identify her because she only had a false identity card made out in the name of Antonietta Bianchi, so they took her to the police station for further investigation: she was asked to confess her true identity and, faced with her repeated refusal, she was taken to the torture room, where she was tortured and beaten for eight days^{[37] [38]}. The soldiers, unable to extract any information from her, took her to the Marassi Prison, where she realised she was pregnant. A few days later she was taken to the so-called ‘Casa dello Studente’, the Gestapo headquarters, for a final attempt to obtain a confession of her Communist Party membership, once again through torture: “As you can easily imagine, I no longer understood anything and was only able to think of one thing, which I always kept in mind: not speaking, not answering questions, always repeating what I had said at the police station and in the first interrogations. One day they took me to a small room that looked like an infirmary. They made me sit on a chair, tied my hands behind my back and my ankles, then with a syringe they gave me an injection in the vein of my arm. […] When I woke up I saw Veneziani and two Germans in front of me. One of them, in a confused Italian, said to me in a soft voice: ‘Good, you finally told us what we wanted to know. You could have done it straight away so we wouldn’t have mistreated you’. I was bewildered and almost paralysed, fearing that I had really spoken, that I had revealed Party secrets, names and addresses of comrades”^[39].

Despite this further psychological violence, Rina revealed nothing but paid a heavy price for her unyielding attitude, as the beatings she suffered caused her to miscarry^[40]. Her behaviour had been in line with the directives the Party had issued: officially the way forward for every communist militant, who had a duty to put the survival of the Party before his own, remained ‘absolute muteness’. To reveal any information about the organisation to the enemy meant placing oneself outside its perimeter and being considered a traitor, an informer to be confronted with one’s responsibilities. 

Five communist partisans arrested on the same occasion were shot, while ‘Antonietta Bianchi’ was subjected to a trial on 25 August 1944 in which she was accused of conspiracy against the State and sentenced to 24 years in prison to be served in Verona prison^[41].

Actually, in mid-September, she was taken, together with other political prisoners, to the transit camp in Bolzano: “They made us work outside the camp, we went to clean the buildings and residences of the German officers, we were guarded by German sentries and women; there were Kapos in the camp, Italian deportees for non-political crimes, who were often worse than the Germans”^[42]. 

In March 1945, she managed to make contact with the Bolzano CLN and attempt to escape: on March 23rd, before going out to carry out her assigned duties, she managed to distract a sentry and escape together with Angela Moltini, a 19-year-old girl from Genoa. 

Thanks to the contacts she was given, she reached Verona and then on March 25th arrived in Milan: she decided not to march to Genoa but to go to the address she had been given in Bolzano. However, it was very risky to stay in the city without a ration card, so she and Angela Moltini were taken to the Institute for the Protection of the Young, run by the nuns who, seeing them in bad shape, fed them but also began to ask a lot of questions about where they came from.

Very cautiously and after several attempts she tried to get back in touch with the PCI in Milan, trying to reach the comrades she had met during her stay in November 1943. She stayed in Milan for a month: the Party provided her with lodgings to sleep in, a false identity card and employed her in the Relief Committee that was responsible for bringing food parcels to the political prisoners in San Vittore Prison^{[43] [44]}. 

She only managed to set out for Genoa at the end of April, during the course of the uprising, at the risk of being captured by the retreating Wehrmacht: she arrived in Sampierdarena on April 26th and did not see her husband, who had become president of the CLN, until April 27th 1945^[45].