[ad_1]
“If you ask me to tell you my life spanning more than 90 years, it would take a long time and it would be a disaster for you to listen to me …”. Lidia Menapace, who died at 96, still managed to talk about herself in her old age, with irony and a smile. For several days she was hospitalized for Covid in the infectious diseases department of the Bolzano hospital.
Lidia Menapace: “The Resistance taught me to live with fear and overcome it. Now let’s get rid of this virus.”
by GIOVANNA CASADIO
Small, very solid, brave. One of the last direct witnesses of the Resistance accompanies her. Born in Novara on April 3, 1924, Lidia Menapace, born Lidia Brisca, was partisan relief, early pacifist, militant feminist, senator of the Republic.
Passionate woman, tireless in her expenses. Aldo Garzia tells how the metropolitan legend circulated about her that he wanted her to be able to get off one train and immediately get on another, pursuing “public assemblies and meetings.” Where there were people, where there was real politics.
Menapace told the young people about the Resistance, his youth under the bombings, the escapes by bicycle, the fear of meeting Nazi-fascists on the road, the coded messages learned by heart, the books studied by candlelight. during curfew. She wrote a book about it, “Io, partisan”, which she presented to the last in schools, where she was invited. Getting on and off the train, starting from Bolzano, the city where Lidia the fighter has always lived and where she became, in 1964, the first woman elected to the provincial council and then also, in the same legislature, the first councilor (of Health). In 1969 he was co-opted into the first nucleus of the founders of il manifest.
Always feminist, solid theory and even irony. For her 90 years she explained her training as a free woman: “My mother taught two daughters a code of ethics. She told us:” Be financially independent and then do whatever you want, the husband will keep it or leave it or leave it to you. find another. The important thing is that you don’t have to ask him for the money for the socks. “
Senator elected in 2006, on the Communist Refoundation list (after Marco Ferrando’s expulsion), Lidia Menapace is about to know her moment of glory, proposed to the presidency of the Senate Defense Commission. But just on the eve of the elections, in an interview with Corriere he lashes out against the Frecce Tricolori which, he says, “are a waste and pollute.” With a very opaque operation, the then senator of Italy dei Valori Sergio De Gregorio will become president. Many years before Menapace, always direct, had made a brilliant university career at the Catholic University by declaring himself a “Marxist.”
On the occasion of the secret ballot for the election of the President of the Italian Republic in 2006, Lidia Menapace also received some votes, which flattered her. Then he ran for the European Championship in 2009 on the PRC-PDCI anti-capitalist list that did not pass the barrier. However, there was much to be done and she, a “partisan fighter with the rank of second lieutenant”, never stopped.
