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Oral history recording with Neda Renzi. Recorded as part of the Italian Memories in Wales project (2008-10), delivered by ACLI-ENAIP and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Part 3 of 7 (AV 11462-11468)

00.00 Neda explains how the SS and he Wehrmacht were different. Neda believes there may have been SS in the area but her family didn’t see them. Her father was called up to fight in the war but as he was injured during the First World War and so was consequently let go. A lot of Neda’s friends were called up as it was obligatory to fight from the age of twenty one. She didn’t meet Italian soldiers during the war as they were all elsewhere. The one escaped soldier who was living with them left the army; he had been at the airbase near their house, after the 8th of September: the fall of Mussolini and break-up of the Italian army. After that time German soldiers occupied Italy and many Italian soldiers escaped so as not to be captured by them. Some hid and some joined the partisan groups. Neda didn’t meet the partisan groups as they were mostly in hiding in the mountains. She had one friend who was a partisan but only discovered this after the war.

During the war Neda and her friends would meet at each other’s houses, play records and dance. Dancing was prohibited by Mussolini so it had to be done in secret with quiet music; people had to act in an austere way during the war. The cinema and cafes were open until where they lived became the front line. After that they couldn’t go out at all for a month. Neda recalls that the Germans bombed the bridges of Florence: they didn’t want to destroy the city but needed to make it difficult for allied forces to take it. They destroyed every bridge in Florence. The famous Ponte Vecchio was saved only because a road leading to the bridge was destroyed instead. However there was a hidden passage from Palazzo Vecchio to Palazzo Pitti (which were joined by the bridge) through which many partisans were able to travel unseen.

13.32 Neda recalls free time during the war: she recalls the films they would watch and the songs they would sing. After the war Neda got married to an English airman who she met when the English and the Americans took over the air base. She moved to Wales in 1946.