The scouts of Belluno, born twice from the ashes of wars: a history spanning one hundred years

In 1921 the “Asci” group formed in the capital, made up of males only, then the stop for fascist intimidation. The groups of the Duomo, Santo Stefano, Capuchins and Salesians led the rebirth. In 1974 the debut of Agesci

BELLUNO. Born from the ashes of two wars and stopped only by fascism. The century of Belluno scouting was education and growth for entire generations.

Catholic scouting was born in Italy in 1916, in the middle of the Great War, as a response to the militaristic and secularist turning point that had invested the CNGEI, that is the first Italian scouting born in 1910 as a premilitary education, in line with the movement created by Baden-Powell in 1907 in Brownsea. Belluno in 1916 was at the rear of the Dolomite front and in the aftermath of Caporetto it had suffered the Austro-Hungarian invasion from October 1917 to November 1918. The first post-war period, then, placed the city and the church in front of the tragic damage count and to the material and moral reconstruction of the community, which was also wiped out by the “Spanish” pandemic.

In the whole province of Belluno, normalization required a long and troubled process and for this reason the birth of the ASCI (Italian Catholic Scout Association) in Belluno could only take place in July 1921 (before any other provincial institution, both in the diocese of Feltre as in the Belluno parishes of the diocese of Ceneda). The first scout group was born in the parish of the Duomo, proof of the symbolic but fundamental role that this institution represented for the Belluno church.

These were years of great social tension, between the end of the “red two-year period” and the first organized violence of the nascent fascist squads. In this climate, the role assigned to Catholic explorers in Belluno was twofold: on the one hand the integral education of the children, on the other the formation of a real order service to physically defend Catholic and parish activities, in particular the public ones such as the processions, violently opposed both from the right and from the left. For this reason, the life of the newborn Scouting in Belluno was immediately troubled, even if in the city the fascists did not reach the real punitive expeditions carried out with truncheon squads against the scout departments, as happened instead in La Valle Agordina or Fonzaso. Belluno was too exposed and therefore the methods used were other, with pressures and intimidations that went in parallel with the progressive affirmation of the new fascist regime.

In 1926, fascism created the national opera balilla, allowing only the Asci groups in the capitals to survive as a rib of the Onb. In Belluno the leaders of the Asci preferred to close all activities, as evidenced by the flame of the allotment, still preserved by the Belluno scouts, which does not have the obligatory bundle to be embroidered next to the lily. The last scout assistant, the Salesian Fr Mario Signorini, was sent by his leaders to be the first chaplain of the Balilla and the last scout leader, Nino Tomaselli, in January 1928 sent his membership fee again to Rome. He was the last voice of Belluno scouting before the total silence imposed by fascism.

At the end of the Second World War the many seeds thrown in first post-war period they sprouted vigorously. In the city of Belluno alone, by the end of the summer, four scout groups were opened in the Duomo, in Santo Stefano, by the Salesians and the Capuchins, while the rest of the province was equally lively, where by 1945 groups were born scouts in Feltre, Pieve di Cadore, Auronzo, Fonzaso and Lentiai.

The movement suffered a new block with the onset of the Cold War, a situation that for over a decade, until the second half of the 1950s, saw the presence in the province of only the scout groups of Belluno and Feltre, which it joined in the first the sixties that of Mel, in the diocese of Vittorio Veneto.

The new spirit that animated the Catholic world in the years of the Second Vatican Council produced some innovations also within Scouting. In the educational field, the female group breaking latest news (Association of Italian Guides) was finally born in Belluno in 1964, founded by Licia Chierzi with Don Attilio Giacobbi as first assistant.

The presence of both associations, together with the new cultural climate that reigned in those years, also initiated a dialogue in Belluno that crossed and deeply shook male and female scouting, called to an increasingly close and constructive confrontation that will lead to the fusion of two associations in 1974, giving life to the Italian Catholic Guides and Scouts Association (Agesci).Fabrizio Ruffini