Giorgio Marincola (1923-1945), Gold Medal of Republic of Italy, was the son of an Italian military and a Somali woman.
His dad recognized both children (Giorgio and Isabella), bringing them to Italy, where he married an Italian woman (having two more children.)
Giorgio started schools in Calabria, but soon his dad called him to Rome, given Giorgio's excellent school results.
In Rome, Giorgio studied with Pilo Albertelli, an antifascist professor later murdered in the Fosse Ardeatine massacre.
In 1943, Giorgio joined a group of partisans, and in June 1944 joined the Special Operations Executive being sent first to Southern Italy for training, and then to Northern Italy.
Here Giorgio Marincola got to know Edgardo Sogno, a monarchist and anticommunist partisan, who in his memoirs defined Giorgio simply as "the mulatto".
Giorgio Marincola was killed by nazis on May 4th, 1945 (together with other 25 people, both partisans and civilians), in Trento province.
His story is detaild in the book Razza partigiana.
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more pics:
His mother, Ashkiro Hassan:
As a kid:
Giorgio & his sister Isabella:
Giorgio's dad new Italian family:
His high school pic in Rome:
As a young adult:
http://www.razzapartigiana.it/?p=71GIORGIO Marincola, twenty-two partisan "dark-skinned" is killed by the Germans on the run in Val di Fiemme, Trentino, in May 1945, in what is perhaps one of the last Nazi massacres on Italian soil. Born in Somalia, from Calabrian father and African mother, Marincola has arrived at his last appointment with the lives of Molino di Fiemme after an intellectual and political system that has progressively moved away from fascism, like many other young men of his generation. IN ITALY racial laws, his is a story about which gather many of the contradictions of the regime. In his own death, the young medical student received an inheritance to not be "recognized" there was talk of a medical officer in South Africa. then a black, then a mulatto inmate of the camp in Bolzano. In short, everything except what it actually was: Marincola, an Italian of Somali origin. A character, however, "no less inexplicable to live," as his true identity, at least in the memory of friends and comrades, is that "offal of all of mixed blood of the past and present, who does not belong to a part because it belongs to more than one. " Marincola choose the anti-fascist militancy as a young Italian, membership of the Faculty of Medicine and specialist in tropical diseases because he wants to return one day in Somalia. His torturers Villa Schneider in Biella, where it was closed, before the final outcome, he said: "I feel the nation as a culture and a sense of freedom, not as any color." So the story of the young partisan "exemplary" for its time, but also - in the preface says Alessandro Triulzi - to today's Italy who "lack of self-awareness and its values, constantly threatened by a new wave of racism and securitarian of obsessions. " The life of Marincola It combines the history of colonialism, the flagship of fascism and the Resistance, founding republican ideal of the nation rose from the ashes of the regime. A crossroads of fate that make us think even more about what was inconclusive from the ideological point of view (not as however in practice) the racial politics of fascism. The fact is that the young partisan choice could not have seemed to be forced and is related - the two authors write - "its different" crossings "" between identity and the other to his being at the same time, Somali and Italian " in a continuous reference to these two polarities. " A complexity and versatility totally out of sympathy for the racist fascism and Nazism: Marincola was a challenge. In 1953 the Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi era signed the decree that assigned to Marincola the gold medal for military valor.
