by Marcello Veneziani

At every May Day parade my old aunts remembered with horror themassacre of the Porro sisters in Andria in their family palace. In reality it had happened on the occasion of the first Women's Day - which therefore began with a double "progressive" femicide - but the workers' march, Peppino Di Vittorio's CGIL, the communists, they aroused that frightened memory in the homes of the lords and owners. I remember a slogan I heard as a child in Piazza Catuma, ad Andria: “Not even a master will be saved”. Nicola Porro will have a more direct family memory than the two young ladies murdered by the "blind perverted plebs", as it was written in the funeral manifesto. It must also be said that after the war the conditions of the laborers in Puglia were infamous, exploited and treated like slaves by the corporals, sometimes forced to muzzle themselves so as not to eat the harvested fruits...
For decades that massacre was removed or considered an inevitable tribute to social progress or an example of class struggle, appetizer of the revolution. Luciana Castellina and Milena Agus dedicated a book to that massacre – Beware of hunger – understanding both towards the two sisters, who considered social injustice as a natural fact, a fate, both towards the angry crowd that killed them. The world has changed, the new gentlemen are now radical chic and the new hungry are the migrants who disembark. And in any case the poor are with Salvini or with the 5 stars. But killing two defenseless and devoted women, just because they represented the hated class, it remains a vile barbarity and a communist crime. It is worth using the definition of feminicide even if the two ladies were not emancipated feminists but old-fashioned old landowners?
MV