Albergo Vittoria
The Vittoria Hotel Restaurant, active since the 1920s and equipped with fourteen rooms, was managed by Mrs. Concetta Nereo in Gialleonardo, who had long been widowed and was supporting twelve children. Between 1940 and 1943, it was used as a hotel and restaurant to accommodate, at its own expense, numerous internees and political detainees present in the city.
It hosted nobles, diplomats, managers, parliamentarians, and entrepreneurs—all, both Italians and foreigners—interned for their political ideas, their race, or for suspected espionage activities. Among them were Bernardo Marchese, director of Italy’s largest oil company; Enrico Viglia, an internationally renowned dancer; as well as foreign Jews and important figures of the Slovenian resistance, along with prominent figures in Italian political life, such as the honorable Aldo Finzi and Dino Philipson. Many of them, like Barone Giovanni Fatta, the partisan Ernesto Milano, and Aldo Finzi himself, did not survive the war years; others narrowly escaped arrest thanks to forged documents provided by the Municipality of Lanciano.
Photo gallery
Insights
Remembrance Day. "Interned in Lanciano... Between rain of bombs and suspicions of espionage"
Recommended book
"Albergo Vittoria" - or the Internment of High Society between 1940 and 1943
During the Second World War, a small provincial hotel was used to house high-society internees and confined people. Nobles, diplomats, managers, former parliamentarians, entrepreneurs and wealthy merchants. As in a novel, the hotel rooms gradually open up, stories of espionage and counterespionage, secret services and partisan struggle come to life, telling the drama of war and fascist dictatorship.
“Katyusha’s shoes, like Van Gogh’s, were not just shoes. They told the story of her entire life, of walking along the dangerous and impervious roads of the front crossing, of the suffering of her foot growing in her too-short shoes, of imprisonment, of the war, of the beautiful friendship with a Jewish family lost forever, without even having had the chance to know their fate. Those old shoes evoked endless stories of war and internment. On the laid table, among the remains of bread and half-broken glasses of wine, they represented for us that food of memory that from then on we would have kept, together with Katarina, as a precious element of our moral and civil conscience.”
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Tito Grauer
