Italy greets a war hero and the values ​​he fought for

ROME – Many were present at the wake and funeral of Mario Fiorentini, the most decorated resistance fighter in Italy, who died Tuesday at the age of 103, had stories to tell.

Among them was the elegant 102-year-old partisan, as the freedom fighters of World War II are known in Italy, who met “Mario” in 1944, when they helped free rome of the Nazi occupiers and never lost contact.

And the math teacher in awe of Fiorentini, who became a math genius and teacher after the war, to be able to make math fun for even the youngest minds.

And the postman who casually made friends with Fiorentini and ended up writing to Biography which coincided with his 100th birthday.

“He was a life teacher who changed mine,” said the author, Mirko Bettozzi, who still wonders they became friends.

“I was nobody,” he said. They had nothing in common, but that was Fiorentini: “open to meeting all people” and a source of inspiration for many.

Hundreds of people attended a wake on Wednesday and a funeral on Thursday with full military honors to celebrate Florentines and his heroic resistance against the fascist dictatorship.

For some, Fiorentini’s wartime exploits have resonated ahead of next month’s national elections, which according to polls will be won by a center-right coalition whose main candidate for the post of prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, descends from the post-fascist parties of Italy.

Those who met Fiorentini remembered his courage, his unshakable conviction and will to fight for the right to freedom, his insatiable curiosity for all kinds of things.

And they talked about their two great passions:

mathematics, “which he studied like a maniac,” his son Giancarlo said Thursday at Fiorentini’s funeral, and love for his wife, Lucia Ottobrini, who fought alongside him to free Rome.

they shared 70 years of marriage until his death in 2015.

“He was able to do what he did thanks to Lucia,” said his nephew, Suriel Capodacqua, in a public hearing.

A photo of the couple, taken in Paris in 1946, was leaning against the edge of the coffin.

They had married a year earlier, in August 1945, at the Municipality of Rome, where Fiorentini’s wake was held.

Her grandmother’s wedding dress had been made with a parachuteCapodacqua said, since “it was the single white cloth available at that time.

The medals, including medals of valor, were placed on a blue cushion in Fiorentini’s coffin, along with an Italian flag embossed with the logo of the National Association of Italian Partisans, or ANPI, of which Fiorentini had been an active member.

After Rome was liberated by the Nazis in June 1944, Fiorentini asked to be parachuted into northern Italy to continue fighting.

His family said he had been awarded the Donovan Medal for his work as Liaison Officer with the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA, as well as a British Special Forces Medal.

Fiorentini, whose father was Jewish, was one of the last survivors of the resistance groups that fought against the German forces that had taken control of northern and central Italy in 1943.

Some 2,000 guerrillas who fought the war are still alive, said Fabrizio De Sanctis, president of a local section of the Anpi, “but the pandemic and the heat of this summer have given hard blows“.

On Wednesday night, two supporters and old friends of Fiorentini, Gastone Malaguti and Iole Mancini, paid homage and for several minutes stood silent guard next to her coffin.

Like Fiorentini, Malaguti, 96, originally a member of a partisan group in Bologna, Italy, often visited schools before the pandemic to explain resistance to students.

Sometimes he talked so much that he lost his voice, he said, adding:

“They wanted to know many things: the details, my first actions, how I found the courage at 17”.

Earlier this year, 102-year-old Mancini published a book about his experience in the resistance, fighting alongside Fiorentini and Ottobrini.

Florentini had been best man at your wedding with another fighter, Ernesto Borghesi.

“So many memories, one lifetime, we’ve always been in touch,” he said.

Keeping the memory of the resistance alive was becoming more and more difficult.

“Young people today don’t understand the meaning of this simple word, freedom,” he said.

“But they have never experienced a dictatorship.

“Our resistance was born to free Italy from fascism,” he said.

“We have succeeded with many deaths; best friends, comrades died for this ideal: freedom of thought, freedom of action “.

He continued sadly:

“So, unfortunately, life has taught me that there are no common interests. Everyone thinks of himself. “The Italian politicians, he said, had forgotten what it meant” to fight for an ideal, for the common good “.

Recalling the many titles that marked his death – calling him “the last great partisan”, “symbol of resistance”, “a great Italian” or “the partisan professor” – Gianfranco Pagliarulo, president of the Anpi, said they were all true.

But he added that he preferred to see it through a lens that Fiorentini had used on himself:

an ordinary person who had brought out an extraordinary will and passion when the moment called for it.

And although his status as a hero of the resistance had made him nationally known, Fiorentini was much more proud of his rarer position as a prominent mathematician.

“Remember,” he told De Sanctis, a local Anpi official, “the resistance to Nazi-fascism is the most beautiful page of our history, but mathematics is more important ”.

The articles collected by Fiorentini were compiled by Paulo Ribenboim, a Brazilian-Canadian mathematician who specializes in number theory.

At the funeral, some speakers warned that freedom and democracy are hard earned values ​​that should not be taken for granted.

Capodacqua, the nephew who had lived with Fiorentini for 26 years, warned that fascism could still raise its head in Italy.

“We never forget who Mario Fiorentini was and what was in his heart,” he said.

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