Irma Bandiera was born in 1915 in a well-off Bolognese family; her father Angelo was in construction, who became anti-fascist during the dictatorship; her mother was Argentina Manferrati, and she had a sister, Nastia. Following the armistice, Irma's boyfriend, a soldier, was taken prisoner by the Germans in Crete after September 8, 1943, and was lost at sea after the ship he was on was bombed and sunk off the port of Piraeus. Irma Bandiera begins to help the demobilised Italian soldiers after the armistice and takes an interest in politics, by joining the Communist Party. In the village of Funo, where she used to visit relatives, she met a medical student, Dino Cipollani from Argelato, the partisan "Marco". Irma joined the Resistance, at the time very active in the Bolognese plain, with the name of battle "Mimma" in the VII GAP brigade, Gianni Garibaldi of Bologna. On 5 August 1944 the partisans kill a German officer and a commander of the SS, which triggered the next day a reprisal in Funo. Three partisans are arrested and imprisoned. On 7 August 1944 Irma Bandiera was carrying weapons to the base of her group in Castel Maggiore. In the evening she is arrested at her uncle's house, along with two other partisans. Also locked up in the schools of San Giorgio, but separated from her companions, she is then transferred to Bologna, where her captors hoped to obtain further information about the Resistance from her. While her family was looking for her in prisons and barracks, Irma Bandiera was tortured for a week by the fascists of the Special Autonomous Company, led by Captain Renato Tartarotti, who came to blind her, but Irma resisted without speaking, thus preserving her fellow partisans. According to Renata Viganò, "the most ignominious defeat of their bloody profession was called Irma Bandiera." Finally, the Fascists shot her point-blank at the Meloncello di Bologna, near her parents' house, on 14 August. On 14 August Irma's body was found on the pavement near a factory, where her torturers had left her in open display for a whole day, as a warning. She was then taken to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in via Irnerio where a guardian, a friend of the Resistance, took pictures of her face devastated by torture. Irma was finally buried in the cemetery of the Certosa di Bologna, accompanied by family and some friends. The Bolognese federation of the Italian Communist Party on4 September 1944 circulated a clandestine paper in which they recalled the patriotic sense of the sacrifice of Irma, calling on people to intensify the partisan struggle for liberation from Nazi-fascism. In her honor, in the summer of 1944, a group of partisans operating in Bologna took the name of First Garibaldi Brigade "Irma Bandiera". A SAP brigade operating in the northern suburbs of Bologna was also named after her, as well as a Women's Defense Group.
Honours and memory
At the end of the war Irma Bandiera was decorated posthumously with the Gold Medal of Military Valor, along with 18 other women partisans. The justification mentions how
"First among the Bolognese women to hold arms for the fight in the name of freedom, she always fought with a lion's courage. Captured in combat by the German SS, subjected to fierce torture, she did not say a word that could compromise her comrades. After being blinded she was barbarously slaughtered and the body left on the public street. Pure heroine, worthy of the virtues of Italian women, she was the beacon of all the patriots of Bologna in the war of Liberation".
