[3] The home-schooling]régime that his parent organised for him enabled Duccio Galimberti to acquire a sound broadly based school education, above all through the commitment and skill of his mother.

One of his father's principal business interests involved ownership of the "Sentinella delle Alpi", an influential regional newspaper which the proprietor used to share his political opinions, which frequently coincided with those of his friend, the Piedmontese-born statesman Giovanni Giolitti.

[1][3] In 1922, having received his high school completion diploma from the Regio Liceo-Ginnasio Silvio Pellico while still aged just 16, he began contributing to his father's newspaper, the "Sentinella delle Alpi".

The essay was largely overlooked at the time, but it was published as a little book in 1963, long after Galimberti's death, in an edition which runs to 109 pages, including an introduction by the political journalist Oliviero Zuccarini and a short biographical note from the historian Vittorio Parmentola.

University graduates normally embarked on their military service with the rank of an army officer, but that would have involved enrolling in a special course which might have been construed as some form of personal endorsement of the Mussolini government.

At the same time there was, for Duccio, a strong sense of filial obligation to avoid openly coming out against the position of his father, whose own relationship with Fascism was more nuanced and, at least in public, unfathomable.

[1] In 1934 Galimberti undertook a visit to "Russia", which was still viewed among Italian anti-fascists with a combination of optimistic fascination and, as news of some of the downside of the Soviet experiment began to seep through to those in the west with ears to hear, horror.

[1][3] Another development, undertaken with friends and colleagues such as Spartaco Beltrand, Vittorio Isaia and Marcello Bianco, was the launch of a literary dinner club, which met at Galimberti's studio-offices.

Inevitably Galimberti's papers always involved Giuseppe Mazzini, an abundant producer of literature but also an inescapably political figure in any discussion among Italian intellectuals at the end of the 1930s.

Still fervent "Mazzinian", he had still not, at this stage, made a conscious decision to become a leader of contemporary anti-fascism, but he was already creating the network, both within the Cuneo district and further afield, that would facilitate the choice when the time came.

[1] When he became a "Giellista", many of these friend joined with him, including the academics Adolfo Ruata, Luigi Pareyson and Leonardo Ferrero, the mountaineer Edoardo Soria and Arturo Felici, a type-setter.

[1][3] Having joined GI during 1942, Galimberti moved during the next twelve months with remarkable energy and focus, becoming a leading recruiter-proselytiser among Cuneo's increasingly numerous and fearless anti-fascists.

By the start of 1943 Galimberti was the central personality in what can be seen, in retrospect, as the Cuneo-based nucleus of the "Action Party" which emerged as a powerful, if short-lived, political force in post-war Italy.

True, as ever, to his "Mazzinian" ideals, Galimberti foresaw a democratic republic founded on modern principles of economic structures and civil rights, underpinned by the "Action Party".

This, together with Galimberti's conscious originality in the context of the progressive "Mazzinianism" that was mainstream among resistance intellectuals, is apparent from the many qualifying phrases incorporated: "... very remote from the position taken by the 'Action Party', whether with respect to its 'seven-points' or its 'sixteen points' – that is, from both of its [two distinctive] souls".

There is also an underlying assumption of a rigidly corporate and socialist state which may appear prescient more than half a century later, but which could not be expected to appeal to the generations that had experienced and still hoped to outlive fascism.

On the morning of 26 July 1943 he appeared on the first floor balcony of his studio-office, which overlooked the main "Piazza Vittorio" (square) in Cuneo and addressed a crowd made jubilant by news of the dictator's fall.

Galimberti transformed his studio-office in Cuneo's "Piazza Vittorio" into the Operations Centre for organising the popular armed struggle against the expanding German military presence.

[1][11] Overnight on 11 / 12 September 1943 Duccio Galimberti, Dante Livio Bianco and ten other friends made their way up into the mountains of the Valle Gesso, directly to the south of Cuneo.

[12] A week later the recently dismissed was installed as the leader of the Italian Social Republic German puppet state in northern Italy, the territorial extent of which was progressively reduced, from the south.

[10] The University professor Aldo Visalberghi, who fought as a war-time partisan, and was for much of that time a member of the "Justice and Freedom brigades" based in the Valle Grana, sets much store by the sheer humanity of Galimberti's leadership, citing the ready grin and the wisdom, but also Galimberti's very obvious discomfort when confronted by the need to inflict acts of cruelty, such as the unavoidable reprisal actions against Nazi and Fascist individuals known to have inflicted acts of barbarism on civilian populations.

[15] The overall tactical strategy pursued by Galimberti's "Justice and Freedom brigades" was the traditional one dictated by the relative strengths and weaknesses of mountain-based guerrilla fighters confronting government directed conscript armies.

For the partisans, this meant learning to operate with maximum agility, speed and flexibility, and a preparedness to retreat at short notice back to their mountain hide-outs, where local knowledge became a particular benefit.

[1] Initial treatment for the injury was provided by a woman doctor of Polish-Jewish provenance who had recently escaped German captivity and sought (relative) safety among the partisans in the mountains.

[2] Once he could be moved he was loaded into an improvised stretcher and transported by comrades using a "safe route" to the home of a trusted farmer near Canale d'Alba, some distance away, and on the other side of Cuneo.

Despite the personal shame he clearly felt about Italy's role in the war against France, he was firm in insisting to his French interlocutors that the actions of the Mussolini regime could not reasonably be imputed to the entire Italian nation.

The city had been the centre of Italian opposition to Fascism since at least as far back as 1929, and had also long been a focus of attention for the forces now supporting the Mussolini puppet government and its German masters.

Galimberti took the usual precautions, such as never remaining at one address for very long, and identifying himself by a succession of Soviet-style pseudonyms including (but not necessarily restricted to) Garnero, Ferrero, Dario and Leone.

[1] It is presumed to have been following a denunciation that on 28 November 1944 Duccio Galimberti was located in a bakery in the Borgo San Paolo quarter of Turin and arrested by the police.

According to this alternative version of events, which seems to have originated with family friends during the 1950s, by the time Galimberti's body was dumped in the ditch between the road and the field at Tetto Croce he had already been killed.