Gabriella Romano - Il mio nome è Lucy

2009, Gabriella Romano, Italian, Lucy Salani,

Original title: "Il mio nome è Lucy. L'Italia del XX secolo nei ricordi di una transessuale" (My name is Lucy. Italy in the twentieth century in the memories of a transsexual)

"The short century with different eyes: those of Luciano, born in 1924, first a restless child from the Piedmontese province, then a "different" teenager in fascist Bologna, and immediately after being a deserter on September 8, deported to Dachau and freed by the allies, and after the war migrated to Turin on the wings of the economic boom, where she changed sex in the eighties and then returned, as a mature woman, in the house and in the neighborhood that knew him as a boy.

An eighty-year-long history that is intertwined with that of our country and its social, cultural, and political turns, and sheds light on its most shadowy sides, on the expedients, places, languages, transformations of sexual diversity, always poised between secrecy and exhibition, between insecurity and the full claim of a conscious otherness."

"Today's Lucy, now eighty years old, tells the Luciano of the past and the middle age with the serenity of those who, with great tenacity, have been able to carve out a corner of the world in which to cultivate the joys and sorrows of a life lived against the current. The hypocrisy of the small province, the regime, the war, the deportation, the post-war period, the struggles to survive, the travesti cabarets, the nightlife, prostitution, the parties, the loves, the arrests, and then the encounter with the nascent movements of sexual liberation."

According to Wikipedia, Lucy Salani (12 August 1924 – 22 March 2023) was an Italian activist, known as the only Italian transgender woman to survive Nazi concentration camps. Lucy Salani was born as Luciano Salani and raised in Bologna as a homosexual man. Anti-fascist, after deserting both the Italian and Nazi fascist armies, she was deported to Dachau in 1944, where she remained for six months, until the liberation of the camp by the Americans in 1945. Later, she lived in Turin, working as an upholsterer and frequenting the Italian and Parisian transgender environment. Back in Bologna in the 80s, she settled there after retirement. Her story became known in the years after 2010, thanks to the work of the writer and director Gabriella Romano, who dedicated two works to her. Salani is considered by the Trans Identity Movement to be the only Italian transgender person to have survived fascist and Nazi persecution.

Available via ibs.it

Photo via dagospia.com.