📚 FROM OUR ARCHIVE
Some people enter history through an extraordinary deed. Others enter it in a way that is perhaps even more genuine: by being there, year after year.
On 28 October 2007 his Alpini friends turned up with a cake: Ernesto Barattin was eighty. The Col Maòr printed the photograph with an affectionate caption, “Grandpa” Ernesto cutting the cake, and for once his name was in the middle of the page.
Usually it was not. Leafing through old issues of the Col Maòr, you meet Ernesto’s name again and again, but nearly always off to one side: in a piece of family news, in a list of volunteers, among those who supported the newsletter. It is from these scattered lines, laid side by side, that MEMORIA tries to piece together the man many simply called “Nòno Ernesto” (Grandpa Ernesto).
Ernesto and the Alpini Group of Salce
In the newsletter’s pages, the bond between Ernesto and the Alpini of Salce does not look like a membership card in a wallet. It looks more like an extended family, one that notices when one of its own is going through a hard time.
In 1987 Ernesto lost his mother, and the Col Maòr offered its condolences, also on behalf of the members of the Salce Group. In 1990 there were two short notices: first his admission to hospital and an operation, then his convalescence. Both times the newsletter sent him the good wishes of the Board and the members. Just a few lines, the kind one reads in passing; reread today, they show what it meant to belong to a village Alpini Group.
Ernesto and Lidia: forty years together
In 1994 his family made its way into the Col Maòr. Ernesto and his wife Lidia were celebrating their ruby wedding, forty years of marriage, with their three children and a little grandson beside them. The Board and the newsletter joined the celebration with their good wishes.
A tiny item of news, but thanks to it Ernesto stops being just a name in the Group’s lists and becomes a husband, a father and a grandfather too. Perhaps that is also where the nickname so many remember him by comes from.
When there was work to be done, Ernesto was there
In 1997 the Col Maòr reported on a job the Alpini had done as volunteers, and it gave precise figures: seven members, 175 hours of unpaid work in all. One of the seven was Ernesto Barattin. The newsletter described them as few, but efficient and willing men, pleased to have done something “for our people” and for the good name of the Group. That name, in a list of seven, is enough to picture him with the tools in his hands.
His name is in the Col Maòr too
His name also appears in the lists of those who contributed to the Col Maòr. The newsletter born together with the Group has come through decades of life in Salce partly thanks to readers like him, who supported it because they felt those pages were their own. Today it is the Col Maòr itself that gives Ernesto back to us: the paper he helped keep alive has kept the traces of his life.
2007: a thank-you that lasts
A month after the eightieth-birthday cake, on 25 November 2007, the Group held its annual general meeting, its forty-third. The day began with the flag-raising, Mass celebrated by the parish priest, don Tarcisio Piccolin, and the honours to the Fallen; then the Alpini gathered at the Group’s headquarters. Group leader Ezio Caldart read his report and, in front of everyone, handed Board member Ernesto Barattin a parchment and a gold medal.
The photograph shows him with the parchment and the medal, between the deputy mayor and the provincial councillor, in front of his Group. What the Col Maòr had told piece by piece, year after year, can be seen all at once in that picture.
The traces that remain
The Col Maòr followed him to the end. In its issue no. 4 of 2016 it reported his death, which came “a few days before his 89th birthday”.
The documents give us only fragments of Ernesto Barattin’s life. But that is how MEMORIA works: a name in an old caption leads to another page, the page to a photograph, the photograph to a memory; and the memory, sometimes, to the voice of someone who really knew him.
Help us tell the story of Nòno Ernesto
If you knew Ernesto Barattin, if you remember his military service, the unit he served in, his work, the years he spent in the Alpini Group of Salce, an episode, a saying, a photograph or simply why everyone called him “Nòno Ernesto”, tell us.
And if there is a photograph of him in a drawer somewhere, it may not be just a family snapshot: it could be the next piece of this story. Perhaps even one from that October day in 2007, with a cake and his Alpini friends around him.
