Monument to the partisan

Since the 1950s, the Monument to the Partisan stands proudly in Piazzale della Pace in Parma, as a tribute to the Italian resistance movement and in memory of the fight against Nazi-fascism. Its construction was proposed in 1951 by the Partisan Associations. The leader of the promoting committee was Piero Campanini, the last president of the local CLN (Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, National Liberation Committee). It was essential to narrate the importance of the value of freedom, and to remember the victims of the partisan struggle. It was decided to build it in an area of the city very damaged by the conflict and where the wounds of the war were still open.

A competition was launched for its realization, eventually entrusted to the sculptor Marino Mazzacurati and the architect Guglielmo Lusignoli. The jury, made up of prominent personalities from the world of culture and local administrations, unanimously decided that only that project, among the forty-nine proposals presented, "brought together the qualities necessary to be carried out in a central area of a city with a high artistic tradition such as Parma ".

The chosen place for its construction was very important and of strong symbolic value: it stands in front of Palazzo della Pilotta, in the heart of the city. It is in front of the current provincial administration building, just where the monument to Vittorio Emanuele II was found, destroyed by a TNT charge on the night of 5th July 1946, a month after the referendum that had sanctioned the republican victory.

The official inauguration took place on 30th June 1956, with a great ceremony before the president Giovanni Gronchi and other state authorities, with the blessing of bishop Evasio Colli and in the presence of tens of thousands of people.

The work consists of two statues: the first is the lying figure of a dying partisan. He is barefoot, his shirt is open and his hands are tied behind his back. In the background, the wall of his execution, built with the bricks of a house destroyed by the bombings of 1944. The second statue represents a triumphant partisan, standing upright, armed with Sten. The pedestal is carved out of a large block of stone from Sarnico. In the images of the two partisans, two representative moments of the Resistance are perfectly highlighted: the struggle and the martyrdom.

In November 1961 the statue of the lying partisan was maliciously damaged by a time bomb. The hip was torn, the left arm broken and the right one compromised. The entire monument was raised from the ground and unhinged by the explosion. Such event caused great indignation amongst the whole population. The President of the Republic Gronchi and the Anpi (Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d'Italia, National Association of Italian Partisans) offered 10 million lire as a reward to anyone who found the perpetrators. After about a month, Ettore Napoli, an 18-year-old “Maria Luigia” high school student, who had been expelled from the Italian Socialist Movement for "unworthiness" months before, was arrested.

On 31st October 1968, the restored statue of the lying partisan was placed in the Villetta Cemetery, in the atrium between the North Gallery and the North Field, in front of the fallen partisans of World War II. The one here is a copy.

In 1966 the work won the national sculpture prize of the San Luca Academy in Rome.