Lucia Ottobrini (1924-2015)

Thanks to some contacts who used to get her books, she became passionate about literature and she met mathematics student Mario Fiorentini in January 1943, who became her boyfriend^[8]. It was him who introduced her to Rome’s intellectual and anti-fascist milieu, thus initiating her political and cultural commitment. Together with Laura Lombardo Radice she collected material for political prisoners and, at the same time, she devoted herself to civil theater with the best actors and directors of the new generation together with Mario^[9]. Lucia recalled these early months of 1943 as a stimulating period: “That was a splendid time, Mario and Plinio De Martiis had formed a theater company wanting to introduce the classic authors of prose theater to the people, avoiding the performances of so-called bourgeois authors. This was done in suburban cinemas, in order to reach a popular audience that until then had been excluded from theater. We started at the Mazzini cinema but immediately had financial difficulties; neither the proletariat nor the middle class ran to our shows. Actors and directors reduced their pay and some gave up. We did only one performance at the Theatre of the Arts. We had planned for Gassmann to jump over a table and sing the Internationale anthem in French. The directors of our company were Luigi Squarzina, Adolfo Celi, Gerardo Guerrieri, Vito Pandolfi, Mario Landi, the actors were Gassman (wonderful for his class, his ardor, his culture), Lea Padovani… and many others. I’ve forgotten a lot of their names, but they were all young, enthusiastic and anti-fascist”^[10].

With the occupation of Rome by the Germans, Lucia, who remembered the Nazi invasion of France with horror, decided to get in touch with the first military organizations. Fiorentini himself claimed that: “On September 10, Lucia and I were in Via Zucchelli and we saw German tanks going up Via del Tritone in the direction of Piazza Barberini. I took Lucia’s hand and told her, ‘Nous sommes dans un cul-de-sac!’ At that very moment we understood that we had to act fast. Those tanks made us think of the occupation of France, of the terrible triumphal parade on the Champs-Elysées. Because you have to know that Lucia lived in France, it is her second homeland. We immediately set out in search of weapons”.^[11] Even before July 25, 1943, he was connected with a large group of intellectuals close to the Action Party, of which Franco Calamandrei and Vasco Pratolini were also sympathizers^[12].

These young people, who came from groups of different cultural backgrounds, began to collaborate with the PCI, which proved to be more decisive and abler at intercepting their aspirations^[13]. The communist universe in the capital was, given the still weak structure of all the anti-fascist parties, very fragmented. In addition to a group of Catholic communists and Bandiera Rossa – of Bordighist inspiration – there were some groups formed in the universities and in the best Roman high schools: some members of the Gum (Group for the Marxist Unification) a Trotskyist-inspired university grouping of about twenty students, joined the PCI precisely thanks to Fiorentini^[14].

Together with other young intellectuals, Lucia and Mario helped to form the central Patriotic Action Groups (Gap) in Rome: Fiorentini repeatedly claimed that the first nucleus of Gap was precisely the “Gramsci” he directed, composed by Franco di Lernia (Pietro) and Lucia Ottobrini, although he often acted in collaboration with other groups, also formed by young students^[15].

Lucia’s role was decisive for the developments of this formation since in the early days actions were designed so that the gappists would always act in pairs – a boy and a girl – since they would surely arouse less suspicion during stakeouts, as they could easily pass themselves off as a couple in love^[16]. The ploy, tested precisely by Lucia (Maria) and Mario Fiorentini (Giovanni), proved to be so effective that it prompted the reluctant Antonello Trombadori, the formation’s founder and commander, to also welcome three other girls into the formation: Maria Teresa Regard, Carla Capponi and Marisa Musu^[17].

Among the first organized actions was the one on November 22, 1943 when Franco di Lernia, Rosario Bentivegna, Mario Fiorentini and Lucia Ottobrini attacked a group of fascist militant men at gunpoint near Palazzo Braschi – the headquarters of the Roman federation of the Republican Fascist Party^[18].

However on December 17, they attacked the Germans for the first time: “Once, together with Mario, Sasà [Rosario Bentivegna] and Carla we went to do an action in Via Veneto. It was winter, around seven in the evening and it was raining. Our target was a Nazi officer. He was walking down the street alone, going down toward Piazza Barberini. He was handsome and elegant in his black leather uniform. He was advancing happily and buoyantly with a bag in his hand. Perhaps he had just arrived in Rome and was happy. All four of us approached armed with guns. Mario and I pulled the trigger first. Our guns, as it happened often, did not work. Sasà and Carla intervened and shot. The Nazi, mortally wounded, started screaming. All the windows opened and then the shutters closed quickly as we shuffled among the people. When I think back I still hear the words of that man calling for help, desperately. It was a terrible thing. Blessed Lord! Over the years I have asked myself many times: was it me the one who was shooting in cold blood? The one who let a man, even if an enemy, a German, die on the street in the rain? I often feel as if the Lucia of those years had been someone else. But no, that was me. And I had to have the courage to do certain things”^[19].

Her relationship with weapons was highly controversial since Lucia was fervently Catholic and abhorred the use of violence. Cold-blooded killing opened up the ethical problem of breaking the fifth commandment and, more generally, contravened the Gospel call to love even one’s enemies. Although understood by her as a necessary step, the use of weapons was experienced at the same time as a constraint and disturbed her thoughts and her relationship with faith in the postwar years, as she confessed to the historian Alessandro Portelli: “During the resistance I thought: it’s as if I transgressed, I was ashamed to turn to Him. It was a different time. If I think back on it I say, what an oddity, but was this really me?”^[20].

On March 10, 1944, Lucia, Mario Fiorentini, Rosario Bentivegna, and Franco Ferri attacked the procession of the Honor and Combat groups parading down Tomacelli Street with machine gun fire and hand grenades^[21].

Lucia participated in the preparation of the Via Rasella attack, which, in the intentions of the Commands, was supposed to be an unprecedented strike, but did not take part directly because she was ill^[22]. After this episode (March 23, 1944) and the following reprisal of the Fosse Ardeatine (March 24, 1944), Gappist Guglielmo Blasi, captured by the Police following an armed robbery, yielded to Pietro Koch’s offers of money and put himself at his service. The pact stipulated that Blasi would accompany the Fascists to agreed appointments and would receive a substantial sum for each arrest^[23].

The first to fall under the blows of the delusions were Carlo Salinari, Franco Ferri, Franco Calamandrei and others. Calamandrei managed to escape through the window of the cabinet of the Jaccarino boarding house, used as a prison, and gave the alarm to his comrades and lived in hiding until the liberation of Rome. A few days later, Capponi and Bentivegna also risked capture, as did Fiorentini and Ottobrini. Blasi gave an accurate description of the organization and the objectives it had planned, and Its main components were put out of action: the police now knew how the organization worked, who the leaders were, where the depots were, and what the new objectives would be. The Gappists were sent to the main consular routes with orders to attack the retreating German army to the north. The purpose of this different deployment was to form and lead new partisan formations to support the advance of the Allies-landed at Anzio on January 22 – in the direction of Rome^[24].

In reality, operations on the front stalled and did not spring the expected results: the initial optimism soon turned into concern, especially in the face of the crackdown the Germans gave once they saw the Allies’ difficulties in moving quickly toward the capital. The most exposed partisans thus found themselves in grave danger: wanted but without safe lodgings^[25].

Lucia Ottobrini and Mario Fiorentini, operated for a month in the Quadraro and Quarticciolo areas, then they were moved to Via Tiburtina, in Tivoli area: here the organization was weak and the two were forced to take shelter in improvised places such as caves or cottages abandoned by peasants after the bombings, with scarce food supplies and equipped with light armament not adequate to attack entire columns of German soldiers: “For seven days we ate only fresh cherries and fava beans… then only chicory. I remember Mario’s face one day when he boiled chicory and ate it like that, even without salt, and he repressed his disgust and said to me: “Eat it’s good, you know?”… It was festive when the peasants gave us some potatoes and flour”^[26].

From Tivoli, Lucia often walked along the Via Empolitana to Rome to maintain contact with the Regional Command, or to transport weapons, often at the risk of being strafed by Allied planes. She often had to take cover among the natural ruts in the ground to escape the bombing: “Even today during May evenings, when the sky is clear, I seem to hear the roar of the bombers,” she recalled^[27]. One day during one of those missions Lucia passed a column of Germans singing from a distance: “Once I burst into tears when I heard very young soldiers singing a nostalgic ‘Let’s go home, where we’ll be all right’ in their language, which I spoke and understood. It was a hymn I had heard sung in Alsace”^[28]. That song in German suddenly awakened her nostalgia for France, where she had left her memories as a child and teenager. After the bombing of Tivoli (May 26, 1944), she was sent to direct a partisan nucleus charged with preserving a hydroelectric power plant from German attacks, blowing up a military truck, with the rank of captain^[29].

After the liberation of Rome, Lucia Ottobrini married Mario Fiorentini and returned to work at the Ministry of the Treasury[30]. In 1953 she was awarded the Silver Medal for Military Valor. At the awarding ceremony, Defense Minister Paolo Emilio Taviani, surprised to be in front of a woman, asked her: “Are you the widow of the decorated person?”. Ottobrini replied: “No, the decorated person is me!”^[31].  In the following years she gave many interviews about her experience as a partisan: in 2014 she contributed to a short documentary, made by Claudio Costa, entitled “Lucia Ottobrini, from Alsace to the Partisan Struggle,” which was released as a supplement to the film “The Man of Four Names,” about the life of her husband Mario Fiorentini^[32]. She died in Rocca di Papa on September 26, 2015^[33].