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Categoria: Chi siamo
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Pubblicato Mercoledì, 17 Giugno 2026 08:49
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Scritto da Super User
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Visite: 13
Towards a Museum of Memory. Not just virtual.
A kind of virtual museum. That, in short, is what we set out to create with our website "Memorialcumiana". So that we never forget. The massacre of 3 April 1944, but also all the other victims who fell in the partisan struggle. In total, almost one hundred men and women who died between the autumn of 1943 and the spring of 1945.
But that is not enough. We must also safeguard the memory of the many anti-fascist residents of Cumiana who were persecuted during the twenty years of fascist rule. The website, valuable in itself for preserving memory, is not an end point but a necessary step towards the creation of a true museum that Cumiana will sooner or later need to establish.
It is precisely in this direction that, in 2024, the Documentation Centre "MemorialCumiana" — sharing the name of this website — took its first steps, with the aim of enhancing awareness of the local territory and the events of the Resistance. In this regard, the Piedmontese Institute for the History of the Resistance and Contemporary Society is conducting in-depth research and recovering the trial records of military tribunals, including those relating to the perpetrator of the Cumiana massacre, SS Lieutenant Anton Renninger, indicted on 23 December 1998 for war crimes but who died on 6 April 2000 before the proceedings could fully begin.
The Cumiana Documentation Centre will also broaden its scope to encompass the events that unfolded in the Cumiana area between September 1943 and April 1945. These include, in particular: a British mission led by Captain Pat O'Regan; acts of sabotage on local roads and along the Turin–Pinerolo railway; a permanent garrison of five hundred Italian SS men between March and May 1944, and three hundred German Wehrmacht soldiers between February and April 1945; an aircraft crash on the slopes of Monte Freidour in which eight British airmen died while preparing to drop supplies to the partisans; the history of the Catholic Band founded by Silvio Geuna; the profiles of forty patriots who fell in the town (among them Giorgio Catti, to whom the eponymous Turin study centre is dedicated) in the course of numerous armed clashes; the role of the Provana di Collegno countesses as partisan couriers for the Autonomous Division Adolfo Serafino; the memory of more than fifty military internees who refused to enlist in the Army of Salò, and of the twenty fallen of the Second World War; the contested memory of the post-war years.
Also to be documented are the stories of dozens of anti-fascist political persecutees — prisoners, those sent into internal exile, and those placed under police supervision — whose histories are virtually unknown to the people of Cumiana.
The Documentation Centre will become part of the Ecomuseum proposal presented to the Municipality of Cumiana in November 2023. The project is open to contributions from the "Integrated Network of Sites of the Resistance and the War" promoted by the Piedmont Region (led by the Associazione Memoria della Benedicta, in the province of Alessandria, site of another massacre that was the subject of two war crimes trials), from historical institutes, from local ANPI sections, from individual researchers and enthusiasts, and from ordinary citizens.
The Documentation Centre "Memorialcumiana" is already active at the ANPI premises on the first floor of the town hall, and is open by appointment by writing to:
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— Do write to us.
The website is curated by Marco Comello, journalist and local history enthusiast, and Alberto Maccario, teacher and curator of the exhibition on the deportation of Sergio Coalova to Mauthausen. The graphic design is by Giuliana Barberis, also a teacher and IT expert, and Cecilia Comello, expert in design and visual communication.
