Elena Anna Spagnuolo
Between 1945 and 1952, the Unione Donne Italiane (UDI) and the Italian Communist Party (PCI) organised the transfer of around 70,000 children from poor backgrounds, to save them from poverty and hunger. The operation started in Milan, when the female section of the PCI was visited by a woman called Daria Banfi, who requested help to find assistance for eight orphan children from her neighbourhood.
Teresa Noce, who was responsible for the female work, seized the opportunity to organise a bigger operation, that could include a higher number of destitute children living in Milan. The success of the first transfer motivated her to expand the initiative to other Italian cities: Turin, Rome, Cassino and Naples. After 1948, regions such as Puglia, Sicily, Calabria and Sardinia were also included. The children headed to Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Marche, Piedmont and Liguria, where they were temporarily hosted by local families and could enjoy a better standard of living. For instance, many children could go to school and discover new food items, such as ice cream and white bread.
The operation, known as Treni della felicità, has long been one of the most neglected incidents of Italian history, despite its importance within the context of Italy’s post-war reconstruction. In recent years, it has nonetheless gained attention in both literary and historical works, such as C’ero anch’io su quel treno (Rinaldi, 2021) and Il treno dei bambini (Ardone, 2019). The current project in which I am involved has originated against this backdrop. In 2022, I was awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant which, from 2022 to 2024, allowed me to visit 17 archives (of the UDI and Istituti Storici della Resistenza), in a number of Italian cities. I also met and interviewed sixteen people, both direct and indirect witnesses. They told me their personal stories and thus offered an additional perspective to my historical reconstruction, conducted mainly through official documents.
The outcome of the research has been a website, created using ArcGIS StoryMaps. The website, which is the first entirely dedicated to the story of Treni della felicità, is available at this link: https://arcg.is/00vySq0. It provides a comprehensive and easily accessible overview. Indeed, it aims to share part of the archival material, which is currently disseminated in several archives across Italy and is therefore hardly accessible to the general public. The website is a collection of several sources: archival material, photos and testimonies.
In addition, in April 2024, together with the UDI in Bologna, I organised a workshop in a local secondary school. This aimed to tell new generations the story of the Treni della felicita‘, connecting it with reflections on contemporary migratory flows, specifically addressing the challenges facing child refugees. Thus, the educational value of history was highlighted, making the connection between past and present clear and tangible.
The workshop has led to the creation of a handout, soon to be distributed in Italian schools and serving as a guide for teachers who want to share this story with their students. The handout will be supported by a bilingual podcast (Italian and English), which will be available on Spotify and will include ten episodes of 15 minutes each. The episodes will provide a detailed reconstruction of how the initiative was organised and conducted in each city, alongside more general topics, such as how the project rewrote the concepts of parenthood and solidarity, and how it contributed to unifying Italy.
Elena Anna Spagnuolo