Roccastrada

Roccastrada was born on a hilltop as a possession of the Aldobrandeschi, and from the fourteenth century it passed to the Sienese, who began working the nearby copper and silver mines. Its character, though, was formed much later. At the end of the nineteenth century the local parish doctors carried on a long and hard dispute for freedom of thought. At the beginning of the twentieth the people went to law over the usi civici — the right to use the woods to live on — and won in 1904: to the two lawyers who had defended them the town gave a street and a gold medal for civil valour. In those same years Benigna Nativi, sister of the socialist leader Dante Nativi, went about lecturing against militarism: the local sources call her the first feminist in the history of the Maremma.

On a Sunday in July 1921 seventy fascists led by the secretary of the Grosseto fascio came here on a punitive expedition; on their way back one of them, Ivo Saletti, was killed, and the reprisal that followed cost the lives of ten innocent people. They all have names: Tommaso Bartaletti and his son Guido, and then Angiolo Barni, Vincenzo Tacconi, Francesco Minocchieri, Luigi Nativi, Ezio Renato Checcucci, Giuseppe Regoli, Antonio Fabbri and Giovanni Gori. The trial of 1923 found two communists of the town guilty of Saletti's death, and they had fled to France; the fascists had been amnestied by Mussolini in 1922, and when in 1946 the trial was reopened and the chief authors of the expedition were convicted, they were amnestied again. And in a hamlet of this comune, at Roccatederighi, from November 1943 to June 1944, the summer house of the episcopal seminary of Grosseto was used as a concentration camp for the Jews of the province: thirty-eight of them were taken from here to Fossoli in two groups, and from Fossoli to Auschwitz.