The story of Renzo Giua , who died at the age of 24 on the front of the Spanish civil war. He was there to defend the Republic with the anti-Franco formations. An instinctive anti-fascism breathed in the family. His father Michele, born in Castelsardo in 1889, approached socialism after the massacre of striking miners in Buggerru. He graduated in chemistry. Later, with the move to Turin, together with his son, he embraces Justice and Freedom.
To Renzo and Mario Levi, his friend and fellow democratic and libertarian militant, the historian Cesare Panizza (professor at the University of Eastern Piedmont) dedicated “Friendship and politics. Mario Levi and Renzo Giua in the anti-fascist conspiracy" (published by Pacini): "Renzo Giua, with strong Sardinian roots, in his letters to his family from his Parisian exile, highlights the political and ideal bond with Emilio Lussu, another irreducible defender of freedom lost. Lussu, in Paris, has always been his point of reference."
The portrait
Renzo Giua's portrait of his friend Ursula Hirschmann remains: «He was a handsome boy with steel gray eyes, short eyebrows and shiny teeth. He laughed at everything: at my questions, at the
my pronunciation, my shyness... Everything about him was gratuitous: his life, his action,
his death…He had risen into the sky riding on a cloud that was a little too pink
showy, laughing forever now, his heart torn apart by a Phalangist bomb." In the video the interview with the historian Cesare Panizza.