Giovanni Orcel.
On 14 October 1920, in the historic center of Palermo, Giovanni Orcel, communist printer, general secretary of the Fiom of Palermo and protagonist of the first historic occupation of the Naval Shipyard, was stabbed to death.
Son of an employee and a housewife, raised in a family that was neither rich nor poor, but dignified and cultured, Orcel was considered a legend by metalworkers and other categories of workers.
His murder went unpunished and was also accompanied by one of the first major institutional misdirections in history. The judiciary discovered neither the instigators nor the executors, while the police forces of the time attempted, in vain, to delegitimize that tenacious and reckless trade unionist, misleading him through imaginative and unfounded “passionate leads” or “internal leads to the union”.
In truth, the motive was clear from the beginning: Orcel had denounced the exploitation of workers and the links between the mafia, capitalism, landownership and politics.
During the so-called “red two years”, together with his great friend Nicolò Alongi, a courageous socialist trade union leader murdered in the months preceding Prizzi, Giovanni Orcel had theorized for the first time the unity between city and countryside, between workers and peasants, preceding the intuitions of Antonio Gramsci. Orcel’s funeral was the first massive anti-mafia demonstration in Sicily, with the procession of thousands of people crossing the streets of central Palermo.
A year after the murder of Giovanni Orcel, his sister Maria also died a natural death. The son Salvatore Giuliana was only three years old when his mother died, but for many years he was convinced that his mother was his father’s second wife, Celeste Calabrese, who raised him lovingly.
«However, they completely erased the memory of my grandmother Maria Orcel – says Miriam Giuliana, great-granddaughter of the trade unionist killed 105 years ago, speaking at a recent debate in the Regina Margherita high school in Palermo -. The bond with my great-uncle Giovanni Orcel and the discovery of our kinship was born following a non-historical, but a personal, or rather family, research. I had been trying for some time to clarify what had always been a sort of mystery in our family, a secret that concerned my paternal grandmother, Maria Orcel.”
As narrated by Miriam Giuliana, «my father studied and graduated in Literature in Palermo where he lived until he was thirty. After winning the competition, he entered customs and moved to Ventimiglia, in Liguria, for work. There he met my mother, who lived in the house across the street. As was the custom in the past, he asked her in marriage and, with the approval of his parents, the wedding was prepared. However, when the marriage banns were posted, it was discovered that the mother’s name was not that of Celeste Calabrese, whom her in-laws had known, but Maria Orcel. It was 1958. My maternal grandfather, who was a veterinarian known in Liguria, then turned to the fastest and most informed channel for the times: the Church. The bishop of Ventimiglia asked the cardinal of Palermo and the answer was that his daughter could get married. At that point the wedding was celebrated regularly. Subsequently, with my brother Piero and my sister Lucia, we always tried to understand who this grandmother was, who her ancestors were and why every reference to her and her relatives had been removed in such a radical way.”
Miriam Giuliana.
The discovery of the link with the proto-martyr anti-mafia trade unionist occurred by chance less than twenty years ago:
«After my father’s death in 2007, one evening, surfing the net out of curiosity, I typed Orcel/Palermo and discovered that a book written by the scholar Giovanni Abbagnato on the trade unionist who was a victim of the mafia had been published. His mother’s name, Concetta Marsicano, was the one my father mentioned to me and I discovered that Giovanni Orcel and my grandmother Maria were brothers. I wrote to Abbagnato and at the first opportunity I went to visit him in Palermo. It was truly a good meeting, like the one later with the trade unionists of the CGIL, the Fiom and with the people committed to keeping the value of Giovanni Orcel’s political and social work alive and current.”
Among these, there is also Francesco Foti, secretary of Fiom Sicilia:
«Today, like 105 years ago, we are immersed in a situation of precariousness, fragile work and exploitation. We want to remember the secretary of the metalworkers killed on 14 October 1920, because his mission is our mission. To protect work that is either absent or poor.”
According to Serafino Biondo, of Fincantieri’s joint trade union representation, «Orcel has committed itself to improving not only the prohibitive conditions of Palermo’s metalworkers, from printing plants to shipyards. The goal of his struggles was a more just society. He was the precursor of unity between workers and peasants and this made him dangerous.”
A concept taken up by Dino Paternostro, head of Archives and Memory of the provincial CGIL, and by Mario Ridulfo, secretary of the Chamber of Labor of Palermo and its province:
«Intransigence on principles, combined with pragmatism and the search for workers’ unity, were his guiding star, even during the season of the two red years and the historic occupation of the Palermo shipyard. On the eve of the First World War, Giovanni Orcel highlighted that workers and the weakest social classes had every interest in opposing the arms race and militarism.”
105 years after the murder, the CGIL and the Fiom are promoting a conference on Orcel, scheduled for Tuesday 14 October at 9.30 am, in the Cantieri Culturali della Zisa in Palermo, followed by the screening of the docufilm by the Palermo director Ottavio Terranova, dedicated to the figure of the trade unionist murdered in 1920.
