Historicising Irma Bandiera and the women of the Resistance

Approaching official online sources – such as the Enciclopedia delle donne or the National Association of Italian Partisans (ANPI) website – to learn more about Irma Bandiera means confronting different narratives concerning her death: important details, such as the location of her body, the torture she experienced, and even the day of her murder contradict one another. This is because, as we shall see in this section, there is an essential tension in her story between presence and absence. Despite her continuous presence in commemorative efforts around the city, there are no archival materials or private sources that can shed light on her life and her thoughts during the Resistance, and no historical record of either her arrest or the tortures she endured before she was killed. The narrative instrumentalisation of her death has found in this absence and in the second-hand accounts of her life and her last days, fertile room to grow. This process was not unusual in the commemorative practices of the PCI during the war. The fates of other women partisans, such as Gabriella degli Esposti (1912–1944), who was tortured, maimed and killed at seven months pregnant after a reprisal in Castelfranco Emilia, were used to push women towards Resistance action. Though postwar Italy recognised degli Esposti’s death and work for the Resistance, her story remains deeply rooted in her role as a mother and a partisan, as emphasised by the citation for her Gold Medal of Valour. The specificity of degli Esposti’s story, the presence of her two daughters as witnesses when she was taken away and her execution with five other partisans, meant that the story of her death could not be shaped as freely as Bandiera’s. In the long run, this allowed the PCI and the UDI to centre around Bandiera the image of the ideal female (communist) partisan.

Political action on her behalf begun immediately after her murder, with the partisan brigade ‘1° Brigata Garibaldi “Irma Bandiera”’, beginning its operations in Bologna at the end of August 1944. Her centrality to the memory of the Resistance is primarily attributed to the way her death has been narrated and reinterpreted over the decades to align with the needs of various storytellers. This process has solidified her role in the perpetuation of Resistance memory, particularly in relation to themes of sacrifice. A distinction, then, must be made between the historical facts of Irma Bandiera’s death, her subjection to Fascist torture, of Bandiera as a person, as an antifascist, partisan woman, and what instead was done to her story after her murder. In other words, following Henrik Rønsbo and Steffen Jensen’s (Reference Rønsbo, Jensen, Jensen and Rønsbo2014) theorisation, there must be a distinction between the victim herself and the status of victimhood placed upon her by the political powers interested in her story. Without denying or questioning the experiential suffering of the victim, the narrative that emerged following Irma Bandiera’s death became immediately a political tool and, as such, must be questioned to see how it holds up against the historical record that is available.

Irma Bandiera was born in Bologna in April 1915, to Angelo Bandiera and Argentina Monferrati, the youngest of two sisters. Her father had fought in the Great War and had developed, during the 1920s, antifascist ideas that he then passed on to his daughters. Interestingly, according to Dino Cipollani (1924–2009), former partisan and Bandiera’s neighbour in Funo, these ideas resonated more with Nastia, Irma’s older sister, rather than with Bandiera herself (Arbizzanti Reference Arbizzanti1989, 133). Forced to evacuate from Bologna due to the Allied bombings of the city, Irma Bandiera relocated with her family to the nearby small communities of Funo and Argelato, where her uncle and aunt resided. It was there that ‘Mimma’ developed a close connection to the Resistance: she worked as Dino Cipollani’s liaison officer between October 1943 and March 1944 within the 7th GAP Brigade. When he switched divisions, the commander of the Brigade finally gave her the rank of active partisan, taking her on as his liaison agent (Arbizzanti Reference Arbizzanti1989, 140). Bandiera was arrested at her uncle’s house on the evening of 7 August following a partisan attack on the casa del fascio in Funo, with several other brigade members. The night after her arrest, the partisans set on fire the casa del fascio and, in the reprisal that followed, civilian houses were burned down and their inhabitants killed. While most of the partisan prisoners were killed at this time, Irma Bandiera was kept alive and brought to Bologna because, as a liaison agent, she held vital information on the locations of partisan bands. This recollection of events (Bergonzini Reference Bergonzini1980, 602; 877) is confirmed by the testimonies given during the 1947 trial of Pietro Torri (1901–?),Footnote ² a local Fascist leader from Bologna who stood accused of her murder and several other massacres in the area (Mandreoli Reference Mandreoli2017).

In the seven days that followed her capture, the partisans and her family made several attempts to locate her, but none succeeded; her body would be found on the morning of 14 August 1944. When she was brought back to the medical examiner’s office, the coroner – a friend of the Resistance – took photographs of Bandiera’s face, documenting the tortures she had endured. She was buried in the Certosa cemetery a few days later. The seven days from 7 to 14 August cannot be accounted for: this absence from historical record made possible many different versions of her end. The most quoted narrative, the one promoted by the PCI, sees her as a victim of constant, unimaginable tortures: ‘they had cut her breasts, burned part of her body, she was repeatedly raped, and they had entered her body with a long and sharp object, presumably the barrel of a rifle’ (Il costruttore, 1953, 20). The narrative continues by recounting that, before executing her, the Fascist squadron brought her outside her parents’ home and repeatedly demanded that she betray the partisans. When she refused, they first threatened her parents, then they blinded her and killed her, leaving her naked body under the surveillance of two guards as a warning to the population.

The records of the Torri trial, however, tell a different story. The first thing the investigators noted was that her body was clothed, with only underwear missing, and that it was left close to the Meloncello Arch, at least one and a half kilometres away from where her family lived. The police report records evidence she was raped before being murdered: she was shot five times, but no signs of torture were found. The only available copy of the autopsy, made by the city’s coroner, confirms that her body showed no signs of external, pre-mortem injury.Footnote ³ Her breasts were not cut, and the only burns on her body were those created by two point-blank shots to her head. While she undoubtedly went through psychological torture and suffering while under capture, evidence suggests that the PCI and the ANPI attempted to capitalise on her suffering and emphasise her martyrdom. This is evident from the fliers published by both the GDD and the PCI after her death and in the narrative that was promoted by Noi Donne between 1946 and 1948, which emphasised her stolen youth in order to encourage women to take part in political action. In her partisan biography, published in 1955 within Renata Viganò’s commemorative piece, she is characterised as a ‘little girl’: Viganò wrongly describes her as a 23-year-old and this emphasis, placed entirely on her youth, serves to infantilise her, thereby contrasting her perceived lack of agency with the brutality of the ‘monsters’ who tortured her (Viganò Reference Viganò1955 in Perry Reference Perry2001, 323–324).

John Foot (Reference Foot2010, 148) has shown that ‘Resistance memory is intimately linked to death, to sacrifice and to the places where “martyrdom” occurred’. This is why the Monumento alle 128 partigiane cadute stands in the Villa Spada park, just behind the place where Bandiera was killed, and why the road that bears her name starts from the same spot. However, even in death, no victim is remembered in the same way. This difference is starker when looking at how women are commemorated: if the men who died are remembered as heroes across the monumental landscape, the few women who emerge tend to be remembered for their suffering. Notably, when the partigiana veneta monument was rebuilt, following the 1961 bombing, Augusto Murer portrayed a dying, unarmed partisan woman, strikingly different from Leoncillo’s more combative and explicitly political version created ten years earlier. Pain is a vector that carries empathy for the victim, and this is exacerbated when this victim is considered an innocent – or ‘pathetic’, to use Diana Meyers’ (Reference Meyers2011) term. In the context of a war, a woman or a child being murdered will inevitably generate more empathy and anger rather than a man, due to their perceived status as harmless, innocent victims who had no agency in their own death. A significant factor contributing to Irma Bandiera’s recognition across Italy is her ability to embody an image of innocence through her story.

The emphasis on the suffering of Irma Bandiera and on her status as a victim ensures an internal, moral transaction within the audience who is being told about her, where ‘the moral debasement of perpetrators corresponds to the moral strength of victims’ (Danneskiold-Samsøe Reference Danneskiold-Samsøe, Jensen and Rønsbo2014, 242). The moral strength attributed to Bandiera because of her silence in the face of brutality and her ensuing suffering were emphasised, if not exploited, in the postwar period, to promote an idealised version of the communist woman who fought in the Resistance. This became a necessity with the emergence of the Cold War political landscape, particularly in Italy, where the opposition between the PCI and the anti-communist bloc, led by the Democrazia Cristiana, was marked by intense and often violent conflict. Pro-communist propaganda compared her to the Catholic saint Maria Goretti (1890–1902) as they both were raped (Goretti Reference Goretti2012), and the two were heralded as key examples that young communist girls had to model themselves on for their impeccable morality and spirit of sacrifice. The origin of these narratives can be traced back to the detail that her death acquired through the communist press. In the 1946 special issue of Noi Donne dedicated to the institutional referendum (Noi Donne 1946), Irma Bandiera’s murder was described succinctly, noting only that her parents heard the machine gun fire that killed her. However, by 1948, accounts of her death had expanded to include her alleged last words, ‘in me you martyr all the women of Italy that, like me, hate and despise you’ (Floreanini Reference Floreanini1948, 6). By 1968, Irma Bandiera had even acquired a husband and children, with her entry in the Enciclopedia dell’antifascismo e della Resistenza, edited by PCI leader Pietro Secchia, defining her as a ‘caring wife and mother’ (Secchia Reference Secchia1968, 231). These narratives were perpetuated and popularised, in the city of Bologna, by events and public gatherings organised by the UDI, especially around key commemoration dates and mass mobilisations of women for peace campaigns, often accompanied by speeches by authors and politicians such as Joyce Lusso (1912–1998) or Nilde Iotti (1920–1999).Footnote ⁴

Commemorating the Resistance in the Municipality of Bologna, 1945–1975

Although Irma Bandiera is one of the best-known names of the Resistance, women struggle to find visibility in the Italian monumental landscape of works commemorating the fallen of the Resistance. When they are commemorated at all, it is most often through local topography, through street names and plaques in their honour. Bandiera became the first female partisan in Bologna to be commemorated in this way in 1947,Footnote ⁵ reflecting a functional and legitimising memory that also saw figures such as Vittoria Nenni (1915–1943) and a few other female Resistance and antifascist heroes recognised across the country’s topography (Zucchi Reference Zucchi2025). Of course, she also appears in the Sacrario dei Partigiani in Piazza Nettuno: what started as a moment of civilian commemoration and mourning was, quickly enough, placed underneath the aegis of the ANPI and of the Municipality.Footnote ⁶ Since its inception, the Sacrario is an example of what Peter Jan Magry and Cristina Sànchez Carretero define as ‘grassroot memorialisation’ and, as such, it can be said that the original monument had ‘the aim of changing or ameliorating a particular situation’ (Margry and Sànchez Carretero Reference Margry, Sánchez Carretero, Margry and Carretero2011, 2). Moreover, due to the intrinsically political nature of its timing and its position in the city, it represents an instance in which situational public art – art that depends on political intent and placement just as much as it depends on a community’s reaction to it (Young Reference Young2014, 8) – becomes inscribed within the legislated space of the city itself. As a shrine, it remained in its original location for at least a decade, with the city population periodically renewing it as the summer heat inevitably damaged the photographs, until the city council decided to establish a more permanent fixture on the walls of the Palazzo.Footnote ⁷

The communion between the living and the dead, which culminates in the creation of the Sacrario, is a characteristic of all the monuments of the Resistance in Bologna. This is due to the shared rhetoric of the PCI and the ANPI surrounding the Resistance. Both institutions interpreted the Resistance ‘as a movement that united Italians from across the political spectrum … and that, above all, saw innumerable citizens offering their blood as sacrificial cement for the new Republic’ (Cooke Reference Cooke2011, 69). The use of the story of the Cervi family – seven brothers executed in 1943 for sheltering POWs and army deserters – illustrates how both these institutions sought to showcase the Resistance as a grassroots movement. This narrative is kept alive today through the annual pastasciutta antifascista, on 25 July, commemorating the pasta meal the Cervi family shared with their community following Mussolini’s fall. Continuing in this vein, in 1950, the City of Bologna initiated a public tender process for a monument that could ‘celebrate the sacrifice and gather the Remains of the martyrs of Freedom.’Footnote ⁸ This was to be erected in the Certosa Monumental Cemetery with the aim of housing at least 500 burial niches that would contain the ashes of partisans. Logistically and symbolically, this monument had to be erected in the newer part of the cemetery, the Campo degli Ospedali, and just a short, straight walk from both the monument dedicated to the fallen soldiers of the First World War and the one dedicated to the those who died in the Risorgimento. Two consecutive public tenders for this monument would remain unfulfilled, leading to its commission in 1954 to the architect Piero Bottoni. The monument, built in concrete, is a hollow cone that stands above the Ossario, which contains the remains of 500 partisans of Bologna, including those of Irma Bandiera and the women involved with the Resistance. Within the monument are three groups of statues of men and women gradually freeing themselves from the shackles of their torture, ascending from the shadows to the sky (Figures 1 and 2). Bottoni intended the monument to celebrate unity between the living and the dead that, through an act of evocation would give ‘new life to the dead: FREE THEY RISE IN THE SKY OF GLORY.’Footnote ⁹ This message is repeated across the upper end of the cone, right underneath the silhouetted figures of the partisans, ‘resurrected to fight for freedom, along with the living.’Footnote ¹⁰ Dominating the landscape around it, the monument depicts the partisans as larger-than-life figures, heroes to be admired and remembered: they might be next to the living, but there is no possibility of dialogue between the two.

Figure 1.

External view of the Ossario ai Caduti Partigiani; Cimitero Monumentale della Certosa, Bologna.

Figure 2.

Sketch of the interior of the Monumento Ossario ai caduti partigiani; Archivio Storico Comunale di Bologna, prot. 29200/58.

The unity between the living and the dead is intrinsically political. Opposite the lower group of statues – shapeless figures with vague human features emerging from the ground – an inscription reads ‘the tombs are uncovered; the dead are raised’. The first line of Garibaldi’s hymn connects the dead of the Liberation specifically to the Garibaldi (communist) brigades, clearly also an effort to reclaim the history of the Risorgimento from the Fascist regime (Pollini Reference Pollini1933; Fogu Reference Fogu2003; Baioni Reference Baioni2006). The monument does constitute a place of remembrance of all victims of the Liberation, with a child ‘representing [the memory of] all innocents who died in the reprisals against the partisans’.Footnote ¹¹ While these civilians were not directly involved with the Resistance and thus do not find a place for their remains in the tombs below ground, the monument provides a place for their sacrifice to be recognised in the official commemorative topography of the city. This monument also stands out as one of the first to represent women’s contribution to the Resistance: Bottoni worked with his wife, sculptor Stella Korczynska, until her death in 1956, and with sculptor Jenny Mucchi-Wiegmann (1895–1969) to create the statues within the monument. The statuary group of the Ossario includes two female partisans in the male-dominated group of partisans rising towards the sky – a vision of the Resistance that includes women in the struggle for Italy’s liberation. However, it is telling that the only figure who fully ascends ‘free in the sky of glory’ is male, thus reflecting a heroic narrative of the Resistance that, while inclusive to a degree, remains quite outdated.

The UDI, the Monumento alle Partigiane Bolognesi and the creation of collective memory

Commemorative art honouring women of the Resistance, primarily in the form of statues, had been created prior to the Ossario. Notable for their history are the two bronze statues, Il Partigiano and La Partigiana, sculpted by Luciano Minguzzi in 1946. These statues are renowned for being crafted from the molten metal of Mussolini’s equestrian statue, which once stood in front of the city stadium Dall’Ara (Caldarola Reference Caldarola2017; Guidotti et al 2021–Reference Guidotti, Sangiovanni, Pirazzoli and Nannini2022). It would be incorrect, then, to say that women were absent from public art: in the monumental landscape around Bologna, the Resistance was always understood as a communal effort, involving both men and women. It is, however, a presence that is understood to signify participation and does not place men and women on the same level in terms of importance and degree of active involvement.

Women do not feature in Italy’s commemorative landscape until the 1970s. In Rome, for instance, in 1973 an area began to form around a street dedicated to Irma Bandiera with nearby streets named after other female partisan martyrs, including Garbiella Degli Esposti, Lidia Bianchi and Norma Pratelli Parenti (Zucchi, Reference Zucchi2025, 133). In Bologna, the first monument erected to the women of the Resistance was built thanks to the action of the UDI in 1975. The UDI’s early commemoration efforts were, at first, closely aligned to their broader political agenda of enfranchisement and social emancipation, as evidenced by the rallies for peace and social justice held in the city between 1948 and 1955, which explicitly called on women to unite ‘in the name of Irma Bandiera and the 128 heroines who fell’ during the Resistance.Footnote ¹² In 1956, with the publication of Nikita Khruschev’s On The Cult of Personality and its Consequences – the report that exposed Stalin’s crimes – a crisis engulfed the Italian Communist Party, also impacting the UDI. The soul searching that ensued led the UDI to conclude that, from a political standpoint, the organisation had failed to connect the challenges women faced to the patriarchal structures of Italian society and to a broader agenda of emancipation (Riviello Reference Riviello, Bonacchi and Novelli2010, 238). This, in turn, changed the way the organisation approached the Resistance and its memory, and emphasis began to be placed on the role of women in the Resistance.

In Italian literary studies, the question of a ‘gendered Resistance’ (Cooke Reference Cooke2011, 73), had been raised when Renata Viganò published L’Agnese va a morire (1949), a fictional account of some of Viganò’s experiences as a partisan in the Comacchio valleys. This aspect of the Resistance movement gained further visibility with the publication of Ada Gobetti’s Diario Partigiano (1956). The twentieth anniversary of the Resistance brought attention back to the role of women: in 1964, an interview with four female members of GAP brigades appeared in Il Contemporaneo (Tagliabracci Reference Tagliabracci1964). The following year, renowned film director Liliana Cavani produced a documentary for the Italian broadcasting agency RAI, titled Prima Pagina: La donna nella Resistenza. Through testimonies and interviews, Cavani brought for the first time to the general public the experience of women during the Resistance. The memory of the Resistance took on a new meaning during the 1970s thanks to the convergence of the advocacy of the feminist movement and the emergence of internal terrorism, where women played a huge and visible part in the armed struggle. In this context, the Resistance and Liberation gained renewed attention and significance, especially from the younger generation, while women begun to emerge in the historiography dedicated to the period (Bruzzone Reference Bruzzone and Farina1976; Guidetti Serra Reference Guidetti Serra1977; Vaccari, Bortolotti and de Biase Reference Vaccari, Bortolotti and de Biase1978).

The Monumento alle 128 partigiane cadute provides the opportunity to examine the convergence between national public memory and the evolution of historiographical thought, which Caldarola (Reference Caldarola2017, 41) finds fundamental to analyse Resistance monuments effectively. The monument marked the thirtieth anniversary of the Liberation, and was the result of the combined efforts of the Municipality of Bologna, the provincial section of both ANPI and UDI, alongside the active participation of the local community, led by the women in the Saragozza neighbourhood. The local women’s groups had campaigned since the Liberation to have such a monument built and it was probably the rise and influence of second-wave feminism that contributed to a response from city and other local authority institutions. This was not a coincidence: 500 metres from the park stands the Meloncello Arch, the place where Irma Bandiera’s body was found, and the street that carries her name. This made Saragozza an epicentre of women’s collective memory of the Resistance in Bologna. The architect tasked with the design of the monument, Letizia Galli Mazzuccato – who had previously worked at the Monumento ai partigiani di Sabbiuno (1973), in the hills outside Bologna – was clearly aware of this history. In the pamphlet published for the inauguration of the monument, Mazzuccato wrote that for the previous 30 years, ‘it seemed as though the Resistance should only be within the purview of those who worked with it’.Footnote ¹³ Now, instead, there was a fundamentally new, and widely shared, need to change the way Bologna collectively approached its past.

The community became involved in every stage of the creation of the monument, from planning to construction, in what was a first instance of participatory practices for the city of Bologna. The intention of Mazzuccato, and also of the ANPI, was for this monument to be a space for dialogue between people, where memories could be passed on from one generation to the next, so the community could ‘learn to express itself, to become aware of its own political and social practice’.Footnote ¹⁴ The decision was therefore made to involve teenagers from the local art high school: after studying the Resistance, they were asked to write a plaque to introduce the monument and produce artwork on wooden slabs to be affixed to its wall. The children of the neighbourhood elementary school, in their turn, were tasked with writing the names of the 128 women on bricks that would be used to erect this wall. In proposing the project to the schools, the committee overseeing the celebrations for the 30th anniversary of the Resistance sent a pamphlet to the classrooms, which described the purposes and characteristics of the monument:

The monument, conceived as a place to bring together the generation that had fought in the Resistance, their children, and grandchildren, had the explicit purpose of acting as a barrier against oblivion and as an educational tool. In the pamphlets aimed at the schoolchildren, it is not surprising to see mention of Irma Bandiera, remembered for her torture and her steadfast protection of her comrades. However the cultural barriers that the women who joined the Resistance broke were also acknowledged, noting that ‘the contribution of women is fundamental, because it breaks centuries-old habits; it creates a new mentality’.Footnote ¹⁶

The monument, built by and for the community, was to be an instrument to be used: throughout the documents, the phrase mentioned most often is that it was to give people ‘the right to make culture’,Footnote ¹⁷ to embody, in art and sculpture and even theatre, the collective history and spirit of the community. The location for the monument was determined by necessity, dictated by the geographical constraints of the Villa Spada park, which was hilly and small. Mazzuccato decided to embed the monument within the natural landscape. It was to be a wall – representing the wall against which most partisans were executed (Figure 3)Footnote ¹⁸ – snaking around the side of the garden. On the wall, 128 bricks would bear the names of partisan women (point B in Figure 3), embellished by art created by the high school students (Figure 4). As the wall becomes embedded into the hill, a series of big steps, not unlike the seating in an ancient arena, provide space for people to gather, think, and reflect. The lawn encased between the wall and the steps, in the original plans, was to become a theatre stage to allow freedom of expression within the community.

Figure 3.

Project plan of the Monumento alle 128 partigiane cadute: UDI Bologna.

Figure 4.

First section of the Monumento alle 128 partigiane cadute, Villa Spada, Bologna.

In June 1975, representatives from all branches of the ANPI in the province, the living relatives of the 128 women and former partisans themselves participated in the inauguaration of the monument.Footnote ¹⁹ There is no record that determines whether the theatre stage built in the monument was used in this instance. What it certain, however, is that as an example of participatory architecture, it continues to evolve and to be a place of education: despite the ground around the monument being now unkempt and wild, and the wall in places marred by graffiti, the monument attracted the exhibition of further student art on the 50th anniversary of the Liberation in 1995 (Figure 5). In 2015, the local elementary schoolchildren created a mosaic to add on to the end of the wall (Figure 6). Graffiti depicting women riding bycicles with red handkerchiefs around their necks and the names of some of the partisan women adorn the building that houses the neighbourhood library (the L-shaped building in between A and B in the map, Figure 3) and the wall now boasts a QR code next to every name on the wall, so that every visitor can learn the history of its protagonists.

Figure 5.

Section of the Monumento alle 128 partigiane cadute, Villa Spada, Bologna.

Figure 6.

2015 addition to the Monumento alle 128 partigiane cadute, Villa Spada, Bologna.