May Day in Pienza

On the morning of May 1st, Carol and Roger were awakened by the sound of a marching band.

A marching band in Pienza?  

Yes.  It was the town marching band…and they were playing “Bella Ciao”…the anthem of the WWII partigiani (partisans).

To listen to the song “Bella Ciao,” click on this link: https://youtu.be/55yCQOioTyY

We hurriedly dressed and headed out to Corso Rossellino only to see a parade of tractors following the band down Pienza’s main street…all carrying red banners of some sort.

We soon realized that it was May Day, a national holiday in Italy.  But what was the link between the partisan anthem and May Day?

When the Allies entered Rome in 1943, the Mussolini government fell, but it was far from the end of WWII in Italy.

The Germans took over everything north of Rome, set up the Gothic Line, and temporarily stopped the Allied advance northward.

The previous winter the Germans had sent ill-equipped Italian troops to Stalingrad to be used as cannon-fodder.  When the Mussolini government fell, the Germans decided to send much of the Italian army back to the meat-grinder of the Eastern Front.  Soldiers deserted en-masse.

These men formed the core of the partigiani.

The Gothic Line was just south of Tuscany, so Pienza was right behind “enemy lines.”  Roger asked his friend Valario about local partigiani activity around Pienza.  Valario said almost everybody supported the partisans.  He spat when he said the local fascists were “maiali, prepotenti, e vigliacci" (pigs, bullies, and cowards)…who only wanted the 5,000 lira they could get from the Germans for informing on their neighbors.  Valario told Roger a famous battle was fought in Monticchiello, the village on the next hilltop, 6 km away. 

In April 1944, an informant told local authorities a band of 75 partigiani was hiding out in the forest just outside the village.  The authorities sent 450 Republican Guards (Fascists) to wipe them out.  Instead, the partigiani routed the Republican Guards.  The next day, April 7th, the Germans sent a division to Monticchiello.  They broke into homes and rounded up all the inhabitants, threatening to shoot them unless the village told the Germans where the partigiani were hiding. 

The town priest and the German wife of a local landowner sent the Germans off in the wrong direction, and the town was spared. 

A few days later, as Roger was riding his bicycle on the road to Radicofani, he noted a partially obscured sign just off the road.  It read, “Place of Massacre of the Partisans V. Tassi & R. Magi.”

How could he resist?

He walked the 150 meters alongside a stream until he came to this:

The headstone reads: “Here on June 17, 1944, the German barbarians murdered our comrades, the patriots Vittorio Tassi and Renato Magi."

The story is Vittorio Tassi, a policeman in the town of Radicofini, was the leader of the local band of partigiani.  He got word that a German SS Brigade was on the way to his town to root out his partisan band.  He told his friends to flee, that he and Magi would hold off the Germans.  The SS Brigade surrounded the town and tightened the noose until Tassi and Magi were captured...but not before their companions escaped.

The two partigiani were taken out and machine gunned without benefit of trial.  The Italian government posthumously honored Tassi the Gold Medal for Valor and Magi the Bronze Medal.


In all, the Germans committed 229 such massacres in Tuscany, killing 3,800 people...many of them retribution killings of women and children.

The most complete account of the partisan guerrilla war in this part of Italy is Iris Origo’s memoir War in the Val D’Orcia.  [Iris Origo was an American who married Antonio Origo, and together they turned the Val D’Orcia from a poverty-stricken, over-worked land into the lush green farmland you see in all our blog photos]

Carol has read the book and recommended it to many of her friends.

The most organized and best led of the partigiani factions were the Garibaldi Brigades…who were an arm of the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano...the Italian Communist Party).

After the war, the PCI was a major force in Italian politics.  But the brutal Russian suppression of the Hungarian revolt, the building of the Berlin Wall, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia turned many on the political Left away from the Communists, and support for the PCI dwindled.

Which brings us back to this year’s May Day Parade in Pienza.

Those red flags on the tractors and the green and red flag in the photo below are the flags of the PD (Partito Democratico), the successor to the old PCI.

The newly named Partiti Democratico, trying to separate itself from its Communist past, has re-branded itself as the rightful heir to the Partigiani. 


Thus, the reason the marching band was playing “Bella Caio” that May Day morning. 

And lest you think, the PD has lost its influence, this man… 

...the party leader...



…Matteo Renzi…

is the current Prime Minister of Italy.

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Post Script:  The other side of WWII in Pienza

In June of 1944, the German army occupied Pienza. 


Brigade headquarters were in this house, just across the Piazza Dante Alighieri from Porta Murella, the city’s main gate.

On June 15th, the RAF staged a bombing raid on Pienza, targeting this house.

They missed.

Instead, the bomb hit just inside the Porta Murella, at this spot.

Twenty-two local residents died in the explosion.  

A local artist, who lived at the time of the bombing painted this picture of the scene.  

A marble plaque at the Porta Murella commemorates those who died.

The British military remains unpopular in Pienza.