the «yellow» of the safety pin in piazzale Loreto-Corriere.it

A safety pin hastily inserted to secure the edges of a skirt and cover the nakedness of a lifeless woman’s body: a small gesture of pity amidst a wild display of death. It is ten o’clock in the morning in Milan on Sunday 29 April 1945. The body hanging from the trellis of a petrol pump in piazzale Loreto is that of Claretta Petaccithe lover of Benito Mussolini
. Their bodies are hung by their feet together with those of other hierarchs in what Ferruccio Parri, then deputy commander of the Cln Alta Italia, called a “Mexican butcher”.
Petacci is wearing the clothes she was killed in the day before: a black suit and a white silk blouse that now has a large red spot of dried blood in the center of the chest. Her skirt, with gravity, slid down her thighs and revealed that she no longer has panties. Nudity is just one of the obscenities suffered by those bodies: and someone wants to spare the only woman in the scene the further humiliation. Fixing a safety pin, and covering it, in fact. Someone who?

On the detail of the safety pin over the years a small historical thriller has been built: a testimony tells another version of the facts with respect to the vulgate and introduces two new protagonists in the event that marked the end of fascism: Carla VoltolinaAt that time partisan relay and future wife of Sandro Pertiniand a partisan of the Garibaldi Brigade, William Pacini, one of those who, in the photos of the time, are perched on the trellis of the square and who participated in the liberation of Milan. Pacini disappeared in 2009 on the Island of Elba, where he lived, and his testimony has always been considered reliable by the National Association of Italian Partisans (Anpi). A year before his death we met him to hear from his voice the story of that day. It would have been Voltolina, he recalls, in the midst of the confusion of the square, who pointed to Petacci’s body and shouted: «Shametake it down, let’s cover it, find a pin!».
At that order, Pacini instinctively decided to move: «I took two edges of Petacci’s skirt and held them in place while Carla joined them with the pin». And every time the old partisan told it, he mimicked the gesture with his hands, as happens when you revive a memory well impressed in his mind. It would therefore have been Voltolina herself who asked and then put on the brooch.

In the recurring historical reconstructions, on which much has been written and much has been fictionalized, it would have been a partisan relay, nom de guerre «Carla the blonde» who, together with the partisan priest Don Giuseppe Pollarolo, he allegedly decided to pull Petacci’s body down from the trellis and cover it. Carla would hide behind it Piera Baraleactually present in piazzale Loreto, while don Pollarolo was a priest following the partisan brigades that came from Val d’Ossola and his presence in Milan in those days is also confirmed.

Perhaps the coincidence of the name, Carla, meant that the responsibility for the gesture was attributed to the wrong person? Not Piera Barale, therefore, but Carla Voltolina, also a young partisan relay. Turinese, 24 years old, Voltolina chose to join the Resistance, in the Matteotti formations, defying the opposition of her parents. Her bosses sent her to Milan still occupied by the fascists, following Pertini, one of the heads of the Cln Alta Italia, almost 50 years old, who knew the fascist prisons. The two they would get married a year later. Pacini, on the other hand, is in Piazzale Loreto because he is part of the partisan team that guards the bodies of Mussolini, Petacci and the other 17 executed, who arrived on a truck from Lake Como to Milan.

«That Sunday morning my companions and I were in the Ettore Muti barracks in via Rovello, waiting to receive instructions. At one point a team of comrades arrive, tired and hungry: they tell us they have transported the bodies of the duce and hierarchs in piazzale Loreto, in the same place after 15 partisans were killed. Then Pertini came to us and ordered us to go and garrison the bodies. When we arrived they were still on the ground, but shortly after it was decided to hang them on the trellis». In the meantime, an enormous crowd has gathered in the square and is invading the corpses: some kicking, some spitting. Someone even shoots him. Having them hung serves to make them visible from afar and keep them away from the fury of the people. “We climbed the pylon, but I felt uneasy. Partly out of fear of the fascist snipers, partly because of what was happening. Enemies deserve respect, even when dead. Even if they, the fascists, hadn’t had any for us. But that was a crazed crowd. You will never forget a woman dressed in black: she approached Mussolini’s body when she was still on the ground and from under her skirt she pulled out a revolver. He managed to fire three shots at him before one of our men stopped her. “This is for the three sons you killed me in the war,” she said », Pacini still recalls. Once the bodies are hung, the screams don’t stop. There are fingers that point to Petacci’s stripped body, mouths that scream “whore”. It is at that moment that, according to what the partisan from Elba tells us, Voltolina intervenes.

Pacini has never heard of Don Pollarolo: “I didn’t know him and I don’t remember any priests there.” Most likely, Don Giuseppe, a fighting priest, even in this circumstance he does not wear the cassock and mingles with the other partisans. How did things really go? Perhaps, Pacini’s testimony does not contradict the other, but helps complete a picture so far partial. Revealing that behind the gesture of the brooch there was a choral enterprise. As he explained, at the time of him, too Edgarda Ferriauthor of “The Dawn We’ve Been Waiting For”, a book that reconstructs the last days of fascist Milan: «I have collected the testimony of Piera Barale’s daughter, who says that her mother provided the brooch, but I know for sure that Voltolina was also in Milan in those days. She was staying at the Touring hotel with Pertini. So it is plausible that it was in Piazzale Loreto and that it was she, perhaps together with Don Pollarolo, who clamored for a brooch for Petacci and acted personally: it is in line with her character who was generous and passionate ». Furthermore, Ferri explains again, «it must not have been an easy undertaking get a safety pin: it was one of those objects that are difficult to find during a war». In short, it is likely that it has tripped a kind of word of mouth among those present – «A brooch! Someone find a brooch!” -, and that this blessed brooch has passed from hand to hand. From those of Barale to those of Don Pollarolo, finally arriving between those of Voltolina and Pacini.

After Piazzale Loreto, Pacini remained in Milan for a few more days. Then, like so many others who arrived from afar, he asked the command to return home, to San Piero, to the Island of Elba. But that month in the city he remains and will remain imprinted in his memory for the rest of his life. So much so that when he saw himself in the photographs of the time, on top of the pylon, he shook his head: «Mussolini should have gone to trial before the whole world. But there had been too much hatred, too much malice…». When, at the end of the 90s, Voltolina, already Pertini’s widow, went to the Island of Elba and was received by the mayor of Marina di Campo, Guglielmo Pacini, with the socialist coat of arms pinned on the lapel of his jacket, she approached and recognize: «I am one of the partisans of Piazzale Loreto, the one who pinned the pin». He replied, “And I was the one who helped you do it.”

Voltolina died in 2005 without leaving a testimony of this last act of mercy. She wasn’t the type to brag about her gestures. Feminist, journalist engaged in social work, immediately after her husband’s election as President of the Republic, she said: “I have no intention of following him to the Quirinale decked out like a Madonna”. A lifestyle to which she always remained faithful, continuing to live in the house of 35 square meters at the Trevi Fountain and considering the rooms of the Quirinale as Sandro’s office. In 1983, Pertini, speaking of Petacci and his end, said: «His only fault is that he loved a man». Surely he could have saved himself. According to the reconstructions considered official, the commander “Valerio”, the battle name of the partisan who, materially, carried out the death sentence of the Duce, before aiming the machine gun would have said to her: “Get off if you don’t want to die with him”. She didn’t do it: she chose to stay close to Mussolini of whom she had been the secret companion for 13 years and to share his fate.
It is probably not even entirely true that loving the Duce was his only fault: one of the last biographies on the figure of Petacci “Claretta l’itleriana, storia della donna che non die per amore di Mussolini” by Mirella Serridismantle the legend of innocent martyr and tells of a cynical woman, who was able to take advantage of her position of power, plotted, asked for money and favours, even did business with property confiscated from Jews and maintained confidential relations with the leaders of the Reich in Berlin.
None of these atrocities, however, gives a justification to that ending: the horror of piazzale Loreto and the destruction of his body. A mess to which, a safety pin and someone’s pity, they tried to put a piece.