In Ventotene the first memorial on confinement: the memory of the Sardinian Sisinnio Mocci
2,300 exiles passed through the island: from Pertini to Spinelli, from Terracini to Di Vittorio, all opponents of the fascist regime
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Not to forget a page of history that is an integral part of the "black" twenty years in Italy. The first Memorial on political confinement has just been inaugurated on the island of Ventotene. A 14 meter long wall with the names of the prisoners. It is a tribute to the 2,300 exiles who passed through the island: great figures such as Sandro Pertini, Altiero Spinelli, Umberto Terracini, Giuseppe Di Vittorio, all opponents of fascist totalitarianism.
«It is not for nothing that the anti-fascists defined, with a touch of joke and a touch of profound seriousness, the government of Ventotene the group of confined people», wrote Luigi Longo, one of the founders of the communist party, an exile in France, a fighter in Spain, before being arrested and segregated there. The history of this political confinement colony begins in 1930, when for security reasons the Ministry of the Interior (General and Reserved Affairs Division) decided to close the colony of Lipari, also following the sensational escape of Carlo Rosselli, Emilio Lussu and Fausto Nitti. The commemorative work is located in the area that once housed the "Border Citadel" and aims to remember the thousands of women and men who were transferred to that island. There were politicians and intellectuals but also - as Patria Independent recalls - «workers, artisans, farmers, believers of faiths other than the Catholic one and anyone who was reported for harmless acts such as telling jokes about the Duce or failing to participate in the celebrations of the fascist calendar. The confinement was regulated by the Special Court for the Defense of the State and was a preventive measure established without resorting to a trial. And above all without the presentation of evidence."
Sisinnio Mocci
Among those confined in Ventotene also the Sardinian Sisinnio Mocci, originally from Villacidro, communist and anti-fascist, to whom the researcher Martino Contu dedicated a dense biography. An exemplary story. To spread the ideas he believed in he went around the world: Argentina, France and Russia. Upon returning to Italy, he was sentenced to five years of confinement in Ventotene. «From confinement – explains Martino Contu – he sent his elderly mother, who was widowed, and his sister Giovanna some model airplanes which were sold and the proceeds used by the mother herself to feed the family». Then he was again on the front line in the fight against Nazi-fascism, before his capture by the SS and his death, at the age of 41, in the Fosse Ardeatine massacre.
