💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › stuart-christie-goliardo-fiaschi-anarchist.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:52:59. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Goliardo Fiaschi, anarchist Author: Stuart Christie Date: 31 January 2019 Language: en Topics: biography Source: Retrieved on 16th May 2021 from https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/7m0dt8
Goliardo Fiaschi, anarchist, born August 21 1930; died (aged 69) July 29
2000, was one of the youngest of the generation of anti-fascist
partisans who resisted Mussolini’s Fascist regime in Italy and Franco’s
dictatorship in Spain. (He left me his Lavallière knot floppy necktie —
shown here — in his will.)
In 1943, the young Italian anarchist, Goliardo Fiaschi, falsified his
birth certificate — to make himself appear older than his 13 years — and
joined the wartime Italian partisans. Armed with a captured rifle almost
as big as himself, he accompanied the women who regularly crossed the
Apennines on foot carrying food from Parma, Reggio or Modena, some 150
miles away, back to the starving inhabitants of his Tuscan birthplace,
Massa di Carrara. In 1944, he was adopted as a mascot by the Costrignano
Brigade, and, in that role, entered Modena as standard-bearer on its
liberation in April 1945. The natives of Carrara, the Carrarense, are
reputedly descendants of Phoenician slaves who quarried marble for Rome.
The city is also the cradle of Italian anarchism and a historical centre
of rebellion. The fascist years in Italy, from 1922 onwards, were
particularly bitter in Carrara. The city itself was twice liberated from
the Nazis by anarchist partisans prior to the arrival of allied troops
After the liberation, Fiaschi returned to the quarries, where he had
worked alongside his father and uncle from the age of eight. By the
early 1950s, he was involved with the Spanish refugee committee and
became friendly with Jose Lluis Facerias, a veteran Spanish anarchist of
the Ascaso column in the Spanish civil war, who had been freed from a
Francoist jail in 1945 and had lived illegally in Carrara since 1952,
making regular guerrilla forays into Franco’s Spain. In August 1957, the
two men crossed the Pyrenees (with bicycles) to embark on a new
guerrilla struggle against Francoism. They were betrayed and detected
within a fortnight; Fiaschi was arrested in a forest hideout and
Facerias murdered in a security services ambush in the Barcelona
suburbs. After beatings and torture, Fiaschi was brought before a
military court in August 1958, where he was sentenced to 20 years and
one day in jail. For more than a decade, in 40 Spanish prisons, Fiaschi
sent thousands of postcards, decorated with precisely detailed
paintings, to friends and acquaintances. I met him first in one of those
jails, and I was to receive those cards throughout the 35 years of our
friendship, the last of which arrived only a few weeks before his death.
With amnesties, he was released in 1966 and deported to Italy where he
was immediately arrested and taken off to serve a 10-year prison
sentence — passed in absentia, without his knowledge, and without any
notification of the charges and without representation in court. This
conviction was for his alleged involvement in a 1957 bank robbery in
Monferrato with Facerias. Following an international campaign, he was
released from prison in March 1974 after serving 17 years behind bars.
Fiaschi became a key figure in the Carrarense anarchist movement. He ran
a bookshop and cultural circle, and was a prime mover in the occupation
of the Germinal Centre located, embarrassingly for the city fathers, in
the most prestigious building in Carrara’s main square. Occupied by
anarchist partisans during the liberation in 1945, the building was the
defiant focus of anarchist activity until 1990, when the local authority
finally wrested it back.
After the 1999 May Day celebrations in Carrara, which he had always
helped organise, Fiaschi announced that he was terminally ill and was
preparing to end his life. Persuaded to shelve this plan, instead he
went into hospital saying: “There was a time when suicide would have
been the right thing. I could have left my body to science and for the
advancement of medicine. Now, I must surrender myself alive, so they can
study me. I realise they will carry out all sorts of experiments on me,
but, since my death is inevitable anyway, I will try to be equal to the
task.” Brought home after 14 months in a cancer ward, Fiaschi died the
following day. His coffin was borne around Carrara on the shoulders of
friends, followed by a band, and anarchists from all over Italy carrying
red and black flags. His remains were laid to rest beside those of Gino
Lucetti and Steffano Vatteroni, both would-be assassins of Mussolini,
and of Giuseppe Pinelli, defenestrated from police headquarters in Milan
in 1969.
Such was the esteem in which Goliardo Fiaschi was held that even the
ranks of Tuscany, in the person of the mayor of Carrara, could scarce
forbear to cheer with a farewell eulogy, which ended with the words:
“Thanks, Goliardo!”