Elda Morelli (1927-2023)

After completing her studies at the Filippo Corridoni elementary school she decided with the support of her parents to enroll in the Gian Domenico Romagnosi Classical High School, one of the oldest and most prestigious in the city, generally attended by the children of the wealthier classes: “For me it was not traumatic if I have to tell the truth,” she recounted, “I still have my closest friends, who were my schoolmates, as it is usually the case. I almost never felt this marginalization.^[7]

She started in 1937 and attended Course B, where she got to know several professors who, though not openly expressing it, were pleading the cause of anti-fascism^[8]. The best known of these was the Greek and Latin professor Ferdinando Bernin. He was already on file with the Police in 1914, because he was believed to carry out anti-militarist propaganda and having a great deal of influence on the workers of San Secondo, a town in the Parma lowlands in which he resided. Belonging to the reformist wing of the socialists, he had been in close correspondence with Ferdinando Bernini -then editor of “L’Avanti” and a revolutionary socialist-regarding Italy’s participation in World War I^[9]. In 1916 he became the provincial secretary of the PSI and was an active militant until the November 1920 municipal elections, when he was elected opposition councilor in the City of Parma^[10]. Starting in 1923, with the final establishment of Fascism, he retired to private life, showing apparent indifference to the Regime^[11]. After a brief teaching experience in Arpino, in the province of Caserta, from the 1923-1924 school year he served as a full professor at the Liceo Romagnosi^[12] Here – some of his former students recalled – he used to use classical texts to lecture against tyrants who exercised power arbitrarily or against war, arguing that “men are less wise than ants, who, when they find an obstacle they scan it, unlike human beings who fight against each other with increasingly destructive weapons”^[13].

Instead, Elda Morelli recalled that: “This Ferdinando Bernini wrote  Latin vocabulary and taught Latin and Greek. When I first met him he was a rather disliked man, however he had also been nice, very good, his daughter had told me later that he was very bitter: he had always been a socialist, but he was an intelligent man, a bit transgressive, done in his own way, even in the way he taught, a man of value without a doubt, however he no longer cared to arouse sympathy. He was a bit disheartened: when things became denser he had to run away, he was known as an anti-fascist and so were the others.”^[14]One of the others was liberal Francesco Franco, professor of history, Catholic close to the DC Olimpio Febbroni, professor of literature and later a member of the provincial CLN, and substitute teacher of literature, Gavino Cerchi, a communist, killed by the Nazis in the Colorno massacre on March 28, 1945^{[15] [16]}.

However, professors loyal to fascism were also by no means absent: “The only ones who were fascists, ridiculous, were the gymnastics teachers and professors, but they were pitiful because they were just so at a fanatical level, I remember. There was Archilluzzi who also did some propaganda and then the art history professor, was also a fascist, her name was Giovannini and she also knew very little about art history.”^[17]

When the armistice was signed (September 8, 1943), with the resulting German repression, the Morelli family was displaced near Sant’Ilario, in the Reggio Emilia area. The temporary house began to turn into a refuge for straggling men and a place for nightly meetings with the usual comrades, friends of her father. Elda soon realized that a real clandestine activity was being organized and asked if she could do something, but received a very unenthusiastic answer from Giovanni Morelli: “now we’ll see!” Nevertheless, secretly, together with some friends she began to do some “girl’s” work i.e. liaison for the partisans, strictly by bicycle, because “it was all a climate, I don’t know for example you had two or three guys who would stay two days because then they had another address.In the house there were meetings, you couldn’t remain a stranger.”^[18] Elda’s father was a real clandestine person.

When she returned to Parma, presumably in October 1943, Elda got in touch with the Communist Party’s Agit-Prop, a branch of political work at which her father’s friends, leaders such as Bruno Longhi (Fulvio) and Edgardo Carli (Sandro), the deaf partisan, worked: “They sent me to this Sandro who lived on Via Milazzo with his pregnant wife, to learn how to use the mimeograph and to learn how to draft manifestos to throw. And so he taught me how I had to do it, because the first experiment was this. He said, “Come on! Stand there and write down what country it is!” So I was a sophomore in high school and I wrote. I was writing some wrapping paper, he was walking around, hustling with his wife. Finally when he read this little work he said to me, “No! You’ve got it all wrong! Homeland is a rip-off!” He taught me to be a little more succinct. These were very crude things, in short appeals, buzzwords and that’s it to be thrown around like that.”^[19]

After learning the writing technique and the use of the mimeograph, the reams of paper, typewriter and cliché were moved to Edgardo Carli’s in Via La Spezia so that Elda could do the work during her free time from the studio in her room. In the small makeshift workshop she thus printed the official sheet of the communist federation of Parma, “La Riscossa,” as well as leaflets calling out workers to go on strike “against the German occupation,” “against the embezzlement of resources,” and “against the massacres of civilians” that were taking place in the province^[20].

Once ready, the materials to be distributed were circulated in the addresses provided by “the Deaf” and delivered by Elda as if they were simple packages. If they were instead posters to be pasted, she would go to the agreed meeting place of the Church of the Annunziata and deliver them to other girls who would then each post them in a different sector of the city^[21].

Beginning in early 1944, the activities of Giovanni Morelli – who had become one of the leaders of the PCI in the city – intensified and it became very risky to keep that compromising equipment at home. Hence Elda moved the mimeograph first to the cellar of one of her classmates on Pomponio Torelli Street, then, she placed it on Mazzini Street in the bombed-out house of an old monarchist lady, “l’Angioletta”^[22][23]. When the latter realized the type of leaflets printed and the danger she was facing, she decided to revoke her availability and the mimeograph found another permanent location. Elda dragged the heavy contraption, hidden in a wood sack, together with the very young partisan Maria Bocchi “Kitty,” along the Lungoparma and crossed the entire historic center patrolled by the Black Brigades, to the Palazzo della Pilotta where the Palatine Library was located^[24][25]. Her classmate Edoarda Masi, daughter of the director, opened the door for her. She also  hid the mimeograph among the books banned by Fascism that, Elda together with her father was trying to save from destruction in order to preserve t the cultural heritage of the prestigious library intact^[26].