r/italy • u/Magistar_Idrisi • 17h ago
Storia & Cultura Italian Communists Anton Ukmar, Ilio Barontini and Domenico Rolla in occupied Ethiopia (1940) - guerrilla instructors for the Ethiopian resistance movement during the Fascist occupation
Three interesting life stories from the Italian 20th century:
Anton Ukmar: born in Prosecco in 1900 to an ethnically Slovenian family, railway worker, member of the PCd'I since 1926. Fought with the International Brigades in Spain (1938-1939). Following his short internment in France, he was sent to Ethiopia as part of a group of guerrilla instructors for the Ethiopian partisan movement. Following his return to Europe, Ukmar fought in the Italian partisan war (1944-1945).
Post-war he became a leading member of the Communist Party of the Free Territory of Trieste. He was one of the main organizers of the 1946 general strike in Trieste, after which he had to flee to Yugoslavia. Ukmar picked Tito's side in the Tito-Stalin split of 1948, and permanently moved to Capodistria/Koper. Elected deputy to the parliament of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. Died in 1978.
Ilio Barontini: born in Cecina in 1890. Joined the Socialist Party of Italy as a young metalworker, and was one of the founding members of the PCd'I in 1921. Barontini fled Italy in 1931 - at first to France, and then to the USSR. In the mid-1930s the Comintern sent him on a mission to China, where he joined the Chinese Red Army (led by Mao Zedong) and learned the ropes of guerrilla warfare. Barontini volunteered for the International Brigades in Spain, and remained with them until 1938. Following the Spanish Civil War he went to Ethiopia as a guerrilla instructor and returned to France in 1940.
Barontini was an active member of the French and Italian resistance movements during World War 2. Following the war he became a member of the Central Committee of the PCI and a deputy in the Senate. Died in a car crash in 1951.
Domenico Rolla: born in Arcola in 1908. A mechanic by trade and a communist by political orientation, he fled Italy in 1931 and joined the International Brigades in Spain in 1936. Following the defeat of the Spanish Republic in 1939, he was sent to Ethiopia as a guerrilla instructor. Detained in an internment camp upon his return to France in 1940, he managed to join the Italian resistance movement after the fall of Mussolini in 1943.
Rolla remained an active member of the PCI after the war. Died in 1954.
Ukmar, Barontini and Rolla spent approximately one year in occupied Ethiopia, helping organize partisan resistance units and publishing a bilingual resistance newspaper: La Voce degli Abissini. Following their return to Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1940, the trio was praised for their actions by British general Harold Alexander.