1943: The sound of shrieking shells, exploding bombs, and collapsing buildings accompanies the wailing sirens filling the evening sky. Night after night, dozens of women and children flee to Lucia Braccini’s home, race down the hard-packed slope, and crowd into the cellar that serves as a makeshift bomb shelter. There, the women pray, or cry. And wait for the devastation to stop

Six decades after the conclusion of World War II, Braccini still cannot tolerate the sound of sirens.

This is the reality that the women of Cagli endured during the period of German occupation and eventual Allied liberation from early 1943 until late 1944. When Italy severed its ties with the Axis forces in 1943, Germany invaded Italy and occupied town after town, including Cagli.

In 1944, American, Canadian, British and Indian forces marched north through Italy and began to liberate the country. Bombing was constant, and Italy suffered terrible losses. Cagli saw extremely fierce fighting; the front line was mere kilometers away from the center of the city.

A narrow entrance leads down to the bomb shelter.

The basement of Lucia's house was used as a bomb shelter.

Braccini, Guida Provinciale, or town historian, has extensively studied La Regione Marche’s involvement in la Seconda Guerra Mondiale, or World War II. Born December 6, 1941, just one day before Pearl Harbor, she speaks as both an historian and a Cagliese whose life was indelibly altered by the war.

Braccini describes occupied Cagli as a city almost entirely filled with women. “The men were either fighting for the Fascists or they were hiding because they were Socialists,” she says.

The town was known as a harbor for left-thinking Socialists. Therefore, Braccini says that when the German and Fascist Italian troops occupied Cagli and found a town full of women, they demanded the surrender of the men. For each day that the town refused, the troops would either execute or cut off the hands of one local prisoner of war. Fascists killed any opponents of the regime swiftly.

Braccini recalls the stories of Fascists torturing townspeople by force-feeding them laxatives through a tube for days at a time. Then they dismembered and killed their victims.

Throughout all of this terror and confusion, the women of Cagli fended for themselves. In the 1940s in Cagli, there was no running water or indoor plumbing. Women carried their drinking and washing water home from one of the many local fountains. They washed their clothes either in a separate fountain or in the river.

Braccini says that the Cagliesi women had to walk past leering soldiers, through the rubble of their deteriorating city and under constant threat of bombs, to the fountain, merely to bring drinking water to their families.

Many fountains were destroyed, including the fountain on Via Fonto di Duomo, nearest to her home. This meant the women had to venture even further from their homes. Clean water also became increasingly rare.

In addition to these hardships, Italy enforced heavy rationing. Everything imaginable was rationed: clothes, food, water, medicine. Cloth was nearly impossible to find, so the women of Cagli joined together and made their own cloth communally. The women shared their rations when needed and conserved everything.

The women provided emotional support for each other through harrowing nights in the bomb shelter, days when no food would be available, and when there was no news of their men. She remembers her mother crying during every air raid and being comforted by the other women in the shelter.

Braccini contends that this bond between the women has never truly dissolved and that the war created “a generation of strong, independent women.”

Handmade cloths were made during the war.

The garden in Lucia's backyard was used often for cookouts during the war.

Video by Katie Daily

Pictures by Missy Lane

Web Design by Alexis Turro

Story by Victoria Woods

Braccini’s father, a well-known Socialist, fled Italy to work in France, because the Fascists would have killed him. Her grandmother wept for him every night of the war. Her only solace came from her daughter-in-law and granddaughter. Braccini recalls an aunt who came to stay in their home, after her factory was bombed. She says that family was essential during the war.

When the Allied forces arrived in Cagli, they brought relief and the potential for freedom, but also more hardships for the Cagliesi. Braccini says that the heaviest fighting and greatest destruction occurred immediately after the Allies’ arrival, because the two forces clashed very close to Cagli. Cagli lost its only train station (which was never rebuilt), a factory, a medieval building in Piazza Matteotti, and several dozen homes and buildings in town.

Braccini fondly recalls the American soldiers who quartered in her spacious back yard and garden. The GIs cooked behind her home, fashioning a makeshift canteen and decorating her staircase with painted crosses. She remembers the GIs who gave her their chocolate rations and playfully tugged the ribbons in her hair.

In 1945 when the war ended, the men who had survived the Fascist regime returned to Cagli to find a city in ruins, but the women stronger than ever. While there was initial resentment over the women’s new attitudes and power, Braccini speaks of the men and women eventually beginning to rebuild Cagli, together.

It was at this time that the construction of New Cagli began to replace the homes that had been destroyed during the bombing.

Reflecting on the involvement of the Cagliesi women in World War II, Braccini says, “Women--mothers!-- don’t start wars. This war was not started by women.” She continues by quoting Hobbes, “Homo Homini Lupus,” men are wolves for other men.

Braccini says that many Italians who suffered through the war are hesitant to speak of it in detail, if they speak of it at all. She herself is most comfortable discussing it from a historical perspective. However, she says that she feels it is essential to speak to the present generation about her real experiences, the truth of the war.

Braccini says, “The young must understand the history, circumstances, and effects of totalitarianism. It is important to understand the value of democracy, to be able to have your own thoughts and words.

“You need to be aware that this can still happen, today.”

Click here for WWII video.