Bidoli, Giovanni (1902-1944) aka Nini

Giovanni Bidoli was born in Banne in the Trieste area of Italy on 26th April 1902. Forced to seek work outside Italy, he moved to Paris between 1922 and 1924.

In 1924 he joined the Unione Sportiva Metallurgica which the police considered a front for subversive activity by workers.”. He was sacked from his railway worker job. He carried on correspondence with the anarchist Alpinolo Bucciarelli, then resident in France, and with Giuseppe Zuder, a metalworker and communist unionist confined to Ustica, considered “linked to the anarchists” as he was a companion of the anarchist Giovanna Montani.

At the end of 1927 he was formally reprimanded by the fascist authorities. He was designated as a "dangerous communist" and a member, for an unspecified period, of the Italian Communist Party(PCI) possibly mistakenly, as anarchists, Communists and republican operated together closely in Trieste against the fascists, and engaged in joint direct actions.

In spring 1928, he smuggled himself across the border to Yugoslavia in a wagon transporting wine. From there he travelled to Paris. There he took part in the work of Italian anarchist exiles, especially those from the Trieste region. In August 1929 it was reported that he had engaged in a fund-raising campaign for Vittorio Reppich, arrested in Paris for theft.

In February 1931, he was expelled several times from France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, but always returned to Paris, where he operated in semi-clandestinity. He was arrested again in 1931 for ignoring the expulsion decree, and was found in possession of multiple identity cards with different names. In summer of that year, he was in Barcelona, where he took part in the work of the CNT, and collaborated with Luigi ‘Gigi’ Damiani (see his biography here at libcom).

He took part in the general strike of 3rd September 1931, called by the anarchists in response to the imprisonment of some of their comrades in the Modelo prison, who were on hunger strike. He defended the headquarters of the CNT builders’ union from the attacks of the police, and after a firefight, was arrested with six other Italian anarchists, including Egidio Bernardini and Nicolò Turcinovich. They were imprisoned in the hold of the steamer Antonio López as the prisons were completely full.

In mid-October he was expelled to Portugal, with Giuseppe Volonté and Cesare Cuffini Arriving later at Palermo in early November, he was arrested . At the end of the month, he was reclassified as a “dangerous anarchist” and “terrorist” while waiting, in prison in Rome, for a decision on his confinement: he was sent to the island of Ponza for five years. Here he took part, in June 1933 and February 1935, in two collective protests and received sentences of five and ten months in prison. In April 1937 he was transferred to the Tremiti prison Islands, where, in July of the same year, he was arrested for refusing to give the fascist salute.

In January 1938 he was sentenced to another five years of confinement as “an irreducible element”, and sent to the island of Ventotene where he met up with comrades who, after Spain, War, had taken refuge in France and had been handed over to the Mussolini regime. In March 1943 the fascist prefect declared himself against a possible pardon because Bidoli had shown solidarity with another prisoner by trying to get him a sum of money collected by the movement. In September 1943 he was released and was able to get to Trieste, where he joined a formation of Communist partisans and commanded an autonomous anarchist platoon. Arrested by the Nazis, and after some time in the Coroneo prison in Trieste, in June 1944 he was deported to the Dachau concentration camp. Giovanni Bidoli died between 13th and 23th April 1945 during the evacuation from the Zwickau auxiliary camp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp to which he had been deported, towards Nuremberg.

In 2006 Luisa Nemez published the biography Zio Nini, o La rivoluzione umana. From fascist confinement to Nazi concentration camps.

Nick Heath

Sources:

https://www.bfscollezionidigitali.org/entita/13091-bidoli-giovanni
https://www.estelnegre.org/documents/bidoli/bidoli.html