Ventotene, where from 1926 a confinement zone was established, in 1940 there were 900 political prisoners – anti-fascist leaders and militants, from Sandro Pertini to Luigi Longo, from Giorgio Amendola to Umberto Terracini, from Altiero Spinelli to Lelio Basso – and life prisoners, and it was certainly not a vacation. Bologna, where Edera De Giovanni (in the photo), a miller, was the first female fighter, tortured for an entire day and then shot against the wall of the Certosa cemetery. Carrara, where Francesca Rola and other women refused to evacuate and chose to stay and resist, assisting evacuees and victims, families of deportees and patriots, collecting food, clothing, medicines, weapons and ammunition, and supplying partisans in the mountains.

Ventotene, Bologna, Carrara, but also Rome and Milan, Alba and Domodossola, Prato and Fossoli, Capanne di Marcarolo and the Marmi bridge in Vicenza, Bassano del Grappa and Sabbiuno di Paderno. A resistant tour of Italy, by bicycle. Because the bicycle symbolizes partisan couriers, but also because it is such a silent and ecological instrument, so slow and human, ideal for understanding. Paolo Pezzino wrote "Traveling through the Places of Resistance" (il Mulino, 168 pages, 14 euros). On the cover, a red background, a woman on a bicycle, an image of that period between September 8, 1943 and April 25, 1945 when Italy was broken, split, torn apart (and as written here as well).

It is not a guide or a manual, but it is nonetheless a travel book, a journey through memory and consciousness, a stage-by-stage journey through acts of hidden and remote heroism, often anonymous and always fundamental, basic, constituent, which still deserves to be discovered or remembered, passed down and valued. Like the heroism on the slopes of Maiella, in a small house "clinging to a rocky spur in the municipality of Taranta Peligna", the shrine dedicated to the fallen of the Maiella Brigade, a formation of patriots first aggregated among the allies – the British – then in the reconstituted Italian army until Liberation. Or like the heroism testified by Don Ugo Zani, an anti-fascist priest from Attimis, in Friuli, who noted in his diary the presence in Attimis of Osoppo partisans with red scarves and in Faedis of the red Garibaldini. Or like the heroism of Paolo Braccini, a university professor, of Giustizia e Libertà, in Turin, who wrote a letter to his daughter: "I will be shot at dawn, for an ideal, for a faith that you, my daughter, will one day fully understand". And it is especially women who are illuminated by heroism: 35,000 fighting partisans, thousands of women's defense group members, 4,600 arrested, tortured and convicted, 2,750 deported to Germany, 623 shot or fallen in combat, 512 partisan formation commissioners.

Unfortunate is the land that needs heroes, wrote Bertolt Brecht. But peace passes through heroes. Even on bicycles.