Granai della Memoria

Enrica Morbello Core, a native of Casale Monferrato, never liked Fascism. She remembers when a friend of hers donated gold for the war effort in the form of brooch. The day after she saw the same gold brooch glistening on the bust of the wife of a Fascist party official in Casale Monferrato. "Serves you right!" said Enrica Core.

Her husband went to fight as a partisan in the lower Val di Susa. At Christmas 1944, he sent her a letter with his watch as a present, but the messenger delivered the watch without the lettera. Enrica Core took this to mean that her husband was dead and, as a result of the shock, lost the baby she was expecting. 

She decided to leave Casale and join her husband. Travelling with false documents, she settled in Condove, where she acted as a messenger and allowed herself to be courted by a German marshal to glean reserved information. On April 25 she set off with her partisan brigade for Turin to take part in the liberation of the city from Nazi-Fascist occupation. 

She speaks of factories defended by workers to prevent the German soldiers from destroying them during their withdrawal, of Fascist snipers on the rooftops and of her brigade’s defence of an electric power station. 

After the war she stayed with her husband for a few months in Condove, where they briefly ran a haulage company with unclaimed army horses and mules. After just less than a year, they decided to return to Casale Monferrato. Before doing so, they sold their remaining mules and used the proceeds to erect a monument memorial in Condove.