Partisans Shelter Paraloup

Benvenuto Revelli, nickname Nuto (born in Cuneo, 21 July 1919 – died in Cuneo, 5 February 2004), was an officer in the Italian army, later turned partisan, and a writer. In 2006 his family and some friends started a foundation with his name, aimed at preserving history of both the partisan movement and of the rural life in the higher Italian Alps.
One of their projects was the restoration of the Alpine huts where the partisans of Cuneo had a base and a political training center.

The place is called Paraloup and can be visited all year round, access permitted.
At an altitude of 1360 meters, in the province of Cuneo, there is a place that is both a history of rebellion and sustained economy. It is a place capable of mending ties, of saving voices and ruins. A place where it is possible to listen to speeches on the resistance and on the alpine architecture that resonate in the stone and wood of a hut sheltered from the wolves. This place is called Borgata Paraloup, in the municipality of Rittana, in the Stura Valley.

Alessandro Coltré, an Italian journalist, describes Paraloup as follows:

"Paraloup (in Occitan dialect "shelter from the wolves") is the highest settlement of Rittana and in its many lives this village has long had the function of "Maggengo", that is, of refuge during the months of summer pasture, from May to September. For centuries, the Paraloup huts have shared their existence with snow, hay, cows and generations of farmer families. An environment that has always been harsh and difficult, which during the Second World War would become the political formation center of the partisan gangs of the Cuneo area."

"Between September 1943 and spring of 1944 these mountains hosted the first headquarters of ‘Giustizia e Libertà’ (Justice and Freedom), one of the many communist partisan organizations in Italy, and among others that were based here were Duccio Galimberti, Giorgio Bocca and Nuto Revelli. More than two hundred young people passed through Paraloup, in that dozen stone huts. Students, farmers, mountaineers, craftsmen and breeders destined to combat Nazi fascism and to build a changed, democratic, free country. "

So, in less poetic words, Paraloup was a communist hide-out during part of World War 2, that has been re-discovered by a foundation that honours one of the former communist heroes, Benvenuto Revelli.
Today it has been restored and made into a somewhat idealistic place to honor both the partisans of the old Italy and the farm life of those days. It is now a tourist attraction and consists of a group of restored mountain huts that were used as temporary shelter for the farmers when the cows are up in the mountains in summer.

Italian WW2 history is complicated, what with part of the war and part of the population being supportive of the Germans, who were partners first and occupiers later in the war, after the Italians secretly closed a deal with the allied forces.

One also has to bear in mind that the partisans or freedom fighters of Italy were a little like those of Tito in what would become Jugoslavia, an idealistic bunch of communist oriented people, that felt oppressed by Mussolini who basically founded fascism to battle the communists in Italy. It is with these things in mind that one must visit Paraloup, and indeed, since Italy is still pretty much divided between left and right, many Italians will not visit it for exactly these reasons.

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Source

• Text: Francois Dumas
• Photos: TracesOfWar.com