February 28, 1943 is a spring Sunday in Cagliari; in the area of via Roma many people walk after mass. Among these, Giampaolo Dessì, who was 10 years old at the time. “My mother was preparing lunch, a penne type pasta, which was black, made of bran, because in wartime there was no white flour. Suddenly, around noon, the bombs began to 'rain' on our city: we ran in a hurry to the refuge which was located 500 meters from our house. Dozens of bombs dropped in three waves from the airplanes, which as they came and went away ”.
The memory is clear, for Giampaolo Dessì, born in 1933, who remembers how those terrible days were yesterday. "Once we returned to our home, those in the pot were no longer pennines, but had more than doubled, and my mother - she tells the Unione Sarda with a smile - commented with a 'better way, at least there is some more for everyone ". In order not to waste time at the moment of the alarm, there was the habit in the evening of going to bed dressed, “but without shoes. And if the emergency was triggered when it was already dark, I would ask my mother: 'What time is it?', Because if it happened after midnight, the next day you would go to school later ”.
In the family they were father, mother and three children: “Three days later we were displaced; we took some makeshift luggage and carried the suitcases on our backs; by train we reached Abbasanta and then Norbello. My parents were asking for a home and so they went to the Fascist political secretary. In the end we found hospitality from a lady who, as my mother saw, said she did not want a 'pintada' woman ”. What do you mean? "With lipstick. Let alone in a country how incomprehensible city fashion could be. However, we stayed there for a year and, despite the first feeling of aversion, the owners of that house have become for me 'grandfather' and 'grandmother' ".
It was the period of Carnival, “and the lady made donuts using the funnel, therefore large; we children widened our eyes, we had never seen them before ". In Norbello there were only two radios, “ours and that of a priest. The farmers came to us, at the end of their work in the countryside, around 5 pm, and asked my mother: 'Mrs. Rita, can you listen to the radio?', She would sit at the window and together they listened to the war bulletin ".
The school was then another chapter: “There was no heating, you went with a kind of can of preserves with embers and ashes inside, you shook it and you warmed yourself up. On Saturday, however, there was the fascist day: Mussolini had abolished the boy scouts and we had to wear uniforms, we were militarized children, they made us march to lead us to war ”.
The thought cannot fail to go to the many Ukrainian children who today deal with the great fear they see in their parents, with the alarms that resound in their cities, the escapes in shelters, life that takes on another rhythm, punctuated by those sirens . As in Cagliari, 79 years ago, it was for Giampaolo.
From that day of February 28, 1943, it retains “a fragment of one of the 12 250 kg bombs, the load of each of the 46 super-fortresses that bombed Cagliari. At 13.30 the massacre was already over ”. From February to June the bombings were repeated several times, destroying the city and causing hundreds and hundreds of victims, without considering the missing who were never found.
But apparently history has taught nothing.