Paolo Bonomi: the trade unionist who changed the lives of Italian farmers

'I still keep an article from L'Unità which said that my father was the greatest trade unionist Italy ever had in the 1940s and 1950s'. His father, however, is not a socialist leader, but Paolo Bonomi: a deputy for eight legislatures in the ranks of the DC and founder, in October 1944, of Coldiretti. The main Italian association of small agricultural entrepreneurs.

These days Coldiretti celebrates its first 80 years and Paolo Bonomi's daughter Miriam, now 75, happily opens her scrapbook of memories. 'My father was a partisan, but he told us little about the Resistance. After all, he was always very reserved about the things he did, he preferred to highlight the people he had around him. What I know about that period was told to me by some family friends. One of them was the director of the Borghese Gallery: hers was a family of Jews, and my father rescued them as he did dozens of other people in Colleferro, near Rome. At the time he worked at Bombrini Parodi-Delfino, which produced munitions. He was wanted by the SS for what he did'.

Una delle tante manifestazioni - allo stadio Palatino a Roma - della neonata Coldiretti, che portarono alla Riforma agraria del 1950. Coldiretti

Bonomi, however, was not Roman. He was born in Romentino, a small town in the province of Novara, a few steps from the Ticino river and the border with Lombardy. "He came from a humble family of farmers,' Miriam Bonomi recounts. 'When his sister, who was seven years younger than him, was born, his mother died and his father, who needed arms, wanted at all costs to take him to work in the countryside. It was the parish priest who insisted, to make him study'. Bonomi must have been born under a lucky star: that parish priest was the future Cardinal Ugo Poletti. He also had another famous parish priest: his name was Giovanni Battista Montini, who became Pope Paul VI. When you say destiny.

Paolo Bonomi parla agli agricoltori. Coldiretti

The rest of his life is written in the books of Italian history. Member of the Constituent Assembly. Founder of Coldiretti. As a member of the DC parliament, he signed several reforms that coincided with important social achievements in our country: the agrarian reform of 1950 that redistributed land to farmers, the pension for farmers, the health insurance fund for those who fell ill in the fields. "Granting a pension to farmers was perhaps his most cherished battle," recalls his daughter, "He couldn't bear the fact that old people in the countryside were no longer taken into consideration by their families because they could no longer help. With the pension, however, they could continue to contribute'. And his greatest frustration? 'He had always been a man loyal to the DC,' Miriam Bonomi premised, 'but within the party he suffered from the lack of consistency of some people around him who seemed to favour their personal interests.

Coldiretti

For some Paolo Bonomi, even before being a politician, was a great trade unionist who worked for the redemption of those who then worked in the countryside and had nothing. 'When he made the agrarian reform,' recalls his daughter, 'someone accused him of being extreme left-wing. I say he was a man of the social left. I cannot call my father a man of the right'. Paolo Bonomi also talked to the left, at times: 'When there were serious decisions to be made, representatives from all sides, including the left, would come to my parents' house. I remember it well: at the time we lived in Rome on Via Aventino, they would pass through the garage so as not to be seen'.