WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY SICILIA News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria, July: Emanuele Granata, a native of Marsala in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Emanuele Martino Granata, was born in Marsala on May 5, 1906 to Domenico

and Francesca Diana in via Domenico Guerrazzi n. 6 (almost certainly the
current via Sanità). His father Domenico, a carter, had expatriated in
Tunisia, when little Emanuele and his wife joined him. ---- As a young
man, Emanuele worked in Tunisia as a laborer and embraced anarchist
ideals. Persecuted by fascism and the police, expelled from all European
countries, he was forced to flee Tunis and take refuge, under false
names, in the places where his 'comrades' were, often as an illegal
immigrant. ---- he Takes refuge first in Spain and then in France; here
he was arrested in the early 1930s in Briançon with the anarchists
Edmondo Lelli, Ulisse Merli and Amleto Lippi: they were in fact
surprised with 38 kg of explosives contained in a suitcase. Tried for
speed, Emanuele Granata is acquitted but expelled and forced to take
refuge in Spanish Morocco. He was arrested in Melilla during the
revolutionary uprisings of April 1932 and, detained for 26 days, was
transferred to Malaga, Spain; then from here expelled from the country.

Reported in Tunisia, in 1935, he frequented the anarchists Giovanni
Puccioni and Vincenzo Mazzone and at the beginning of 1936 he was
imprisoned in Marseilles, for having violated the provision of expulsion
from France. Released after a few weeks, in the summer of '36 he was in
Algiers, where - according to the spies of the OVRA ("Opera Vigilance
Repression Anti-Fascism") - he prepared an attack on the Duce, Benito
Mussolini, with other anarchists.

On 12 August 1936, just under a month after the outbreak of the Spanish
Civil War (19 July 1936), the anarchist from Marsala arrived in
Barcelona with the help of Giuseppe Pasotti and enlisted in the Italian
column (national section of the column ' Ascaso') which was formed in
Barcelona on 17 August of the same year. The 'Ascaso' Column was
immediately used in favor of the Spanish Republic in the fighting at
Monte Pelato on 28 August 1936, where the Commander of the column Mario
Angeloni and other comrades fell.

Subsequently, the Column occupies Tardienta and Almudévar, the latter
homeland of the 'Ascaso', cutting communications between Huesca and
Zaragoza. On September 2, 1936, Emanuele Granata fights with his own
soldiers in Huesca and will find himself on the Aragonese front until
February 1937, when the news - completely unfounded - of his death in
battle spreads.

The Trapani Police Headquarters, on 17 October 1936, reported him as a
resident of Spain, an "anarchist to be arrested". In May 1937 he was in
Barcelona during the "Tragic Days" with Corrado Perissino and his
Argentine companion Juan Verde, where they took refuge at the Comité di
Sanz in Piazza di Spagna. Together with the insurgent people, the
anarchists supported the resistance against the attempted communist
coup, which failed but ended with the assassination of the Italian
anarchists Camillo Berneri, Francesco Barbieri and 500 other anarchists
and revolutionaries of the POUM, the Marxist Workers' Party .

Back in France at the end of 1938, Granata then moved to Belgium where
he was arrested and imprisoned in Luxembourg. Returning to Brussels in
October of the same year, he enlisted in the French Army until mid-1940,
when he escaped to Tunisia where he was arrested and interned in October
of the following year in the surveillance camp of Le Kef, together with
other comrades including the future mayor of Naples Maurizio Valenzi.

In March 1942 he was still a prisoner in Tunisia. He will participate in
the resistance in the ranks of the 28th Garibaldi Brigade "Mario
Gordini" in the Ravenna area. After the Liberation, on 4 December he
joined the local CNL (Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale) on behalf of
the anarchists in the newly established Movimento Comunista Libertario.

Years later, in 1947, Granata was in Milan in the FAI (Italian Anarchist
Federation) and was a protagonist of the Lombardy Anarchist Movement,
collaborating in the libertarian press and participating in the 3rd
Congress of Livorno of the FAI in April 1949; with 30 other anarchists
he is among those who intervene on "Anarchism and the workers", a study
conference on the relationship between the Anarchist Movement and the
Workers' Movement. The proceedings of the conference will be published
in 1950 by the Gruppo Milano 1 publishing house.

In Milanese circles she frequented the anarchists Marco Pirelli, Alberto
Moroni and Ernesta Sacchi whom she married in Milan on 8 August 1953.
Umanità Nova, the prestigious anarchist weekly founded by Errico
Malatesta in 1920, dedicates an article to Emanuele Granata in which it
recalls his figure of militant: "Comrade Emanuele Granata, after
atrocious sufferings, due to the disease that tortured him, relieved by
the care of his companion, left us on 13 April last (1966).
The funeral, in strictly civil form, took place the next day in Milan,
followed by his companions and friends and his body cremated. With
Emanuele Granata disappears a good companion, linked to anarchism since
his youth, persecuted by fascism and by the police[...]his life belongs
to a glimpse of the history of militant anarchism, intensely lived by
him, which deserves to be remembered and pointed out especially to young
people, as an example of militant rectitude, tolerance and passionate
fidelity to the ideas that he propagated and defended with dignity and
courage" (Umanità Nova - 30 April 1966, page 4).

Emanuele Granata, born on May 5, 1906 in Marsala, thus died in Milan, on
April 13, 1966, a few days after his 60th birthday.

Giovanni Marchetti, Hispanist

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