Roberto Cicerone

A. Anzini, Roberto Cicerone detto Pazzone

Major Peter Hewitt, of the Allied Screening Commission, described Roberto Cicerone as “the greatest helper of Allied prisoners in the Sulmona area”. At the time of the events, Roberto was a middle-aged man, a farmer, father of three children, with a past as an emigrant to the United States. At seventeen, he took part  in the First World War; wounded, he returned home as a war-disabled veteran. He was known to everyone in the village by the nickname “Pazzone,” a name passed down from his father.

Starting on September 13, 1943, first acting on his own and later as part of the “Conca di Sulmona” organisation — a group that brought together many local helpers united by a spirit of solidarity — Roberto assisted more than fifty prisoners, many of them escaped from the Fonte d’Amore camp. He provided them with food, shelter, essential supplies, false documents, and safe hiding places with local families he contacted personally. He was also active as a guide, helping transfer groups of prisoners and he was in contact  with the Vatican Organisation. In his own home he hosted French second lieutenant Henri G. Payonne for several months; Payonne later took part in rescue operations for other prisoners scattered throughout the area.

When, after the Armistice, a group of twenty-eight escaped soldiers is recaptured by the Germans near Chieti and transferred to Sulmona to be imprisoned again in the camp pending transfer to the North, some injured themselves trying to jump out of the trucks. Roberto and other helpers in his “network” organized the escape of some of the prisoners, in agreement with the medical staff and despite the presence of German military police guards. Roberto himself sneaked into the hospital, wearing prisoner clothes under his own. This allowed the prisoners to swap their pajamas for civilian clothes and escape by lowering themselves from the windows using tied-together sheets. Fourteen of them managed to get away this way.

In January 1944, sixteen members of the group were arrested, some of them deported. After learning that the German police were searching for him, Roberto was forced into hiding. From April until June 1944, he took refuge in an attic with his wife and children, aided by local clergy and sympathetic members of the police.

Carlo Azeglio Ciampi^[1]—who, while in Abruzzo, first in Scanno and later in Sulmona, joined the anti-fascist resistance in an attempt to cross the front and reach the Allied lines to the south—mentions Roberto Cicerone in his diary from those days, describing him as trustworthy and courageous.

Major Robertson, of the Allied Commission, wrote about the man in September 1944:

It appears that Mr Cicerone has given hospitality to prisoners of war and has supplied them with food and clothes, spending all his own money and running into debts with the shopkeeper of hi own town. He went several times to Avezzano in order to accompany prisoners of war shelter there to Sulmona; he supplied them with false documents, accompanying many of them on the dangerous journey up to the Allied lines […] Pazzone carried out his activity with exceptional courage. Afterward the German police ordered his arrest, and promised a reward of 10.000 lire to whoever would supply information about him.

Note:

^[1]Carlo Azeglio Ciampi was President of the Italian Republic from 1999 to 2006.