Notes from Bella Ciao, clenched fists, and togas. The scarfs of the ANPI, the banner of Freemasonry, and the banner of those deported to the Nazi camps. This is how Turin said goodbye to Bruno Segre, the 105-year-old lawyer, politician, and journalist who died last Saturday. Hundreds of people attended the burial to say their final farewell to "Elio," his Resistance alias. "He was a free thinker since he was a boy, and he fought all his life in the name of the values of the Resistance and the Constitution," his son Spartacus said at the cremation. Segre, a partisan known as 'Elio' in the formations that helped liberate Caraglio and Cuneo, was born in Turin on September 4, 1918, and graduated from law school in 1940. He was arrested in 1942 and jailed for a few months in Turin's Nuove prison before being imprisoned again in 1944 in the barracks in Via Asti, Turin, which served as the headquarters of the Republican National Guard's political investigation office. In August 1949, he defended the first conscientious objector in Italy, Pietro Pinna, before the Military Court of Turin, resulting in a historic judgment. From 1975 to 1980, he served in the city council and was the leader of the Socialist Party. Among his many political and judicial battles for civil rights was one in support of the divorce statute, for which he chartered a plane and launched thousands of propaganda posters throughout the city.
|