“The seeding days” is the great title of the book that the partisan writer Nino Chiovini dedicated to the Nazi-fascist sweep, which, in June 1944, destroyed Val Grande’s mountains: a piedmont part of the Upper Eastern Piedmont, near the region of the Insubric lakes (Maggiore, Lugano, Como), whose strategic importance is remarkable.  

The Verbanese Mountain was the closest and quickest lodge and passage between Milan’s plain and the Helvetian Confederation. 

Why was the Sweep of Val Grande an incredible dramatic event in the history of the Liberation Movement? There are many reasons: the violence of the war events, the social consequences that assaulted and devastated the rural and civil communities, the historical and political developments, which transformed that defeat in the exceptional democratic experience of the Partisan Republic of Ossola.