On January 19, 2025, at the age of 87 (she was born on October 18,
1938), Carmela Concetta Maria Di Marca concluded her life cycle at the«Garibaldi» hospital in Catania. A proud, courageous, sensitive woman,
invariably dressed in black, she would deserve a long and accurate
biography if the few lines at my disposal allowed it. I will limit
myself to extracting a series of fragments from my personal memory. ----
November 16 or 17, 1979 - vico Rao n. 8. In this corner of the immediate
outskirts of Catania there existed a small urban commune dedicated to
the development of new theories and practices of anarchist struggle. It
was composed of Alfredo Maria Bonanno, director of the magazine
«Anarchismo» and of the editions with the same name, who lived on the
ground floor together with his new partner, the Scotswoman Jean Weir,
and Melina Di Marca, Alfredo's ex-wife, who lived on the upper floor
with her second husband, Salvo Marletta, a typesetter, and their two
children, Antonio and Tatiana. The members of the tiny «direct action
committee» that, for a few weeks, has been carrying out activities to
denounce the living conditions of the flood victims of Fortino and of
the evicted from other popular neighborhoods of Catania - about 3,000
people -, relegated to the cold in hotels and bungalows owned by the
magnates of the Municipality, come to knock on the door of this cenacle
of subversives. They ask for support for the struggles that they will
organize with the evicted in the coming weeks (processions, occupations
of vacant houses, of the cathedral, etc.) Melina immediately offers her
unconditional support, dragging along with her the entire editorial
staff of «Anarchismo». There will follow days of «all-round commitment»,
as she defined them, culminating, on January 28, 1980, in a series of
clashes in the streets, in the assault and occupation of the Town Hall
of Catania. That event will remain impressed in the collective
imagination of the Catania sub-proletariat to the point of being
repeated or attempted by subsequent protest movements. The evicted will
obtain council houses and Judge Gennaro will arrest the members of the
Catania municipal council, accused of having speculated on the skin of
so many poor wretches. The anarchists, who had carefully prepared that
day, will instead be among the 39 reported by the police who, later,
also using this as a pretext, will accuse them of nothing less than
organizing and participating in an armed gang ... On March 23 and 26,
1980, they will in fact be arrested and taken to the prison of San
Giovanni in Monte, in Bologna. Melina will remain there until June 30,
when she will be released with Alfredo, Salvo and Jean for non-existence
of a crime.
March 4, 1982 - Mirone cinema. Another battle day. The anarchist
deserter Orazio Valastro should turn himself in after having read his
statement in public. To support this choice, a "Catanese antimilitarist
committee" was formed which, from February 15, 1982, was based at the
anarchist group "Rivolta e Libertà", in via Gesuiti n. 28. This is the
beginning of that uninterrupted activity of opposition to the structures
of war, the army and militarism that has since characterized Sicilian
anarchism. Arriving a few steps from the cinema, Orazio is arrested, not
agreed with the police, by some plainclothes carabinieri. A scuffle
ensues involving the carabinieri and the police, armed against each
other, and several dozen comrades from the radical left who attended the
demonstration. Melina will be reported and arrested on March 10, with
other anarchist comrades, and released four days later. Orazio will be
sentenced to 5 months in prison for desertion. The trial for the events
at the Mirone cinema, held a good 9 years later, will end on November
21, 1991 with nothing done.
November 20-21, 1982 - headquarters of the "Coordination of self-managed
leagues against the missile base of Comiso", in via Conte di Torino n.
1. General Assembly of the Leagues: the timing and methods for carrying
out the occupation of the base are discussed. Since the previous March,
the anarchist group «Rivolta e Libertà» had "moved" to this town and
other centers in the Ragusa area where, together with local comrades,
they put up posters, distributed flyers, promoted demonstrations, held
meetings and public gatherings to prevent the installation of
nuclear-tipped "cruise" missiles. Melina had been «directly and totally»
absorbed by the struggle, she spoke on the radio and television, wrote
articles, held rallies in Comiso in the poorest neighborhoods and among
the women of those neighborhoods. On September 11, the headquarters of
the «Coordination» of the leagues that were springing up in various
locations in Sicily had been opened. The work of involving the
population is far from being completed but it already has the creation
of two leagues and a radio in Comiso itself; the adhesion of various
antagonistic groups, including pacifists and conscientious objectors;
the spontaneous strike of the ANIC workers in Gela on 7 October, during
which Melina was stopped with other comrades and held for a day in the
police station; and above all the city strike of the students of
Vittoria on 21 October, mainly promoted by her, with the following
complaints and a solidarity campaign that will lead, some time later, to
the council proclamation of Vittoria as a "denuclearized city", the
first in Italy. There are essentially two theses that are compared in
the November assembly: the "more political" one by Alfredo Bonanno who
contests the strategy of "intermediate objectives" and the slow
proliferation of the leagues, and aims instead at the immediate
occupation of the base with the direct intervention of the anarchist
movement; and that of Melina who prefers, on the contrary, the
«exquisitely social» commitment and the «organization of the occupation
with at least a part of the population of Comiso, Vittoria and also with
some significant elements belonging to the unemployed strata of Gela,
something that in fact and from my personal experience I think would
have been possible» (cfr. Melina Di Marca, Comiso: pianeta Terra,
«Anarchismo», n. 41 of October 1983). The two positions, revealed to be
irreconcilable, will lead to a painful break within the «Coordinamento»
and the anarchist group «Rivolta e Libertà» itself, to the defection of
the most socially active comrades and of the leagues, and to the
disastrous demonstration of July 23, 1983, promoted by Bonanno with the
intent of occupying the base with groups of punks and anarchist
comrades. The No Muos movement will be able to take advantage of the
teachings of Comiso, and in recognizing its errors, thirty years later.
18 June 1988 - former Esperia cinema, in via Plebiscito n. 782. With the
birth of the Experia Self-Managed Social Centre, another cycle of
struggles ended, which had begun in January 1984 with the resistance to
evictions and the evacuation of council houses, illegally occupied by
dozens of families, in via Capo Passero in San Giovanni Galermo (partial
assignment of the houses to the squatters was obtained) and continued in
1986 on the two terrains most congenial to Melina: abstentionism and
antimilitarism. The abstentionist campaign, conducted with the new
«Catania anarchist group» through an intense activity of leafleting and
rallies in the working-class neighbourhoods in order to form a citizen
"abstentionist movement", ended in a flop due to the need, felt
especially by Bonanno, to seek a purely political solution to the social
problems that afflicted those neighbourhoods. The antimilitarist
commitment was more successful. In January 1987, with the opening of the
Circolo libertario in via San Vito, the "Catania antimilitarist
committee" was refounded: first it dealt with Orazio Valastro (arrested
again on 22 January 1987 and sentenced to another 8 months in prison)
then with Giuseppe Coniglio, an anarchist total objector. By Melina's
express wish, the pro-Giuseppe committee opened up to all forms of
protest against the military (tax objection, conscientious objection,
total objection, desertion, etc.), organized well-attended citizen
assemblies on 13 and 24 March 1987, and a procession, with a thousand
comrades, which had not been seen in Catania since the early Seventies.
After the conviction of Coniglio (arrested on August 25, 1987, he was
sentenced to 14 months in prison), the committee, adhering to a
particularly widespread need among the younger comrades, was joined by a
"committee for the occupation of social spaces". The Experia, occupied
ten months later, included an internal stall and a large arena outside,
abandoned for a long time and a place of drug dealing. Having
immediately started fighting "against the intersecting interests of
criminals, drug dealers, speculators, cops and clerical-fascists", once
reclaimed and returned to the city, it will take on that "open and
popular" characterization that will attract wide sympathy especially
among the inhabitants of the neighborhood, who will make it their main
meeting and socialization point. In this way, it will also arouse the
wrath of the "Antico Corso" mafia, which will attack its structures
several times, leading to its temporary closure, with the burning of the
stalls, in October 1988. Experia is the first experience of its kind in
Sicily, an incubator and model for many others that followed.
After the closure of Experia, Melina withdrew from militant life and
returned to cultivating her old passions for written propaganda (the
first issue of «Apolis» appeared in April 1985), publishing (EdiAnLibe
and Centrolibri: about ten titles from 1983 to 2001), painting,
sculpture and creative writing (three literary "tests": Lo spazio della
libertà in 1991, L'occhio sociale in 2001 and Un attimo di vita diversa
in 2021). She left her books to the Historical Archive of Sicilian
Anarchists with the promise of equipping future anarchist offices in
Catania with them.
Natale Musarra
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
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