Lidia Menapace, partisan relief and former senator, died. She was hospitalized for Covid

Bolzano, December 7, 2020 – E. Lidia Menapace died, 96 years old, partisan relief and former senator of the Communist Refoundation. Had been for a few days hospitalized for Covid in the infectious diseases department of the Bolzano hospital.

At Lidia Brisca, she was a historic voice for feminism and pacifism. Great protagonist of the 20th century, Menapace was in 1964 the first woman elected to the Bolzano provincial council (along with Waltraud Deeg) and the first woman on the provincial council (as health councilor).

The president of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, remembers her as “a particularly intense figure of intellectual and political leader, expression of the authentic debate that crossed the 20th century”. “The values ​​that he has cultivated and sought in his life – antifascism, freedom, democracy, peace, equality – are those guaranteed by the Italian Constitution and constitute a lesson for the younger generations,” the head of state wrote in a message addressed to ‘National association of Italian supporters.

Lidia Menapace, a life dedicated to civil commitment

Very young, he participated in the partisan resistance as a relief, with the battle name “Bruna”, obtaining the rank of second lieutenant that he will reject after the war, along with the economic recognition: “I did not go to war as a soldier and what I did is not monetizable.” At the age of 21, he graduated with honors in Italian literature from the Catholic University of Milan and participated in Catholic movements, in particular in the Fuci (Federation of Italian Catholic Universities), and later in the Christian democracy.

She moved to Bolzano in 1952, after her marriage to Trentino doctor Nene Menapace (who died 2004), where I will be elected to the council. Professor at the Catholic University of Milan with the position of professor of Italian language and methodology of literary studies, she was not renewed in 1968, after the publication of a document entitled ‘For a Marxist choice’. In that year he abandoned the Christian Democrats, whose political line he no longer shares. Sympathize with him Italian communist party and in 1969 he joined the group of communist heretics that founded the magazine ‘Il Manifesto’, with Rossana Rossanda and Luigi Pintor; in the monthly that later became a newspaper that he wrote regularly until the mid-1980s. provincial.

Since the 1970s, Menapace has been active in politics in associations, movements, institutional positions. At the beginning of the eighties he was a councilor in Rome on the lists of the Democratic Party of Proletarian Unity. In 2006-2008 she was a senator elected on the communist lists of the People’s Republic of China. Proposed to the presidency of the Defense Commission of Palazzo Madama, his candidacy was rejected due to his irreducible pacifism, in fact “antimilitarism”, according to the interested party.

In 2007 she was elected president of the parliamentary commission of inquiry on depleted uranium. In 2009, she ran for the European elections on the Prci-PdCI anti-capitalist list of the Northeast constituency without being elected due to not having reached the threshold established by the electoral law. In 2011 he joined the Anpi National Committee., which today says “it is a mourning for the country” and “you will remain in the conscience and commitment of everyone and everyone”. In 2018 he agreed to run for the Senate with Power to the People! even knowing that she would not be chosen. In 2019 he received the Margherita Hack Award – Lay Person of the Year.