Florence News - Oscar Cipriani is Arrested
The same age as the century, he gave his life for anti-Fascism, freedom
Florence News 8th March - Oscar Cipriani is Arrested
Today, 8th March 1944, the Florentine anti-Fascist and worker organiser Oscar Cipriani was arrested in front of number 67 Via Romana. He was transported to Mauthausen with hundreds of workers and activists who took part in the huge strike earlier that week. At Ebensee 31st March 1945, he was murdered by the Fascist regime inflicting malnutrition and extreme labour.
An only child, Oscar Cipriani grew up in a family of small-business people who were strongly pro-worker and anti-Fascist. His uncle was kicked to death by Fascist Squadristi in Lastra a Signa, just outside Florence. (If you’ve taken the bus from Florence to Pisa airport, you’ve passed the village.) A known agitator and ‘troublemaker’, Oscar himself was regularly detained and brutalised at Le Murate prison for his anti-regime activities.
No surprise then that 67 Via Romana, the home of his relatives Bruno and Emma Sardelli, was packed with anti-Fascist material. Since Via Romano is narrow, Oscar’s only escape would have been to make a run for it through their apartment, with a bit of luck, maybe even scaling the wall to the Boboli Gardens. But to do so would have exposed Bruno and Emma.
Every time I pass number 67 (it’s on the left on the way to Porta Romana, a brass Stumbling Stone on the pavement), I imagine Oscar realising he is caught, turning to run into the hallway, then thinking ‘no’; being loaded onto trucks long with his fellow workers and activists from San Frediano and Santo Spirito, their families distraught.
Anti-Fascism was strong in that area called Oltrarno. Despite the toxic gentrification and the plague of the AirBnB, mercifully, it still is. The labour arrests and deportations, remembered every year in the official anti-Fascist commemorations at Piazza Tasso, are alive in community culture. A handsome Santo Spirito local tells me his mother had to feed them on rabbits and vegetables spirited from their cousins in the Valdarno, his mother refused and refusing the Fascist party card for rations. He shows me the point on the claustrophobic stone stairs from the 1400s, where his anti-Fascist father was lifted by the Gestapo, taken with his uncles for torture at the dreaded Villa Triste.
As tourists sip their drinks, eat their gelato, queue for the Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli, today of all days, they might consider that on that same Via Romana, Oscar Cipriani faced arrest and deportation. Born in 1900, he had missed by a hair’s breadth, the disastrous call-up to WWI of i Ragazzi del ‘99 – The Boys of ‘99, a loss which shook Italian society and still resonates. Today, in 1944, the same age as the century, he gave his life for anti-Fascism, for freedom.
