TRENTO. The story of Valeria Valentin returns to light, the former nun of Val Badia who in 1973, during the Pinochet coup, rescued hundreds of persecuted by the regime.
The story re-emerges in an interview by the journalist Paolo Tessadri to Mauro Battocchi from Trentino, who has been ambassador of Italy to the Republic of Chile since 2018. The interview will become part of a documentary film that the Fondazione Museo Storico del Trentino is producing on this great South Tyrolean woman.
«Valeria Valentin is one of the heroic Italians who during the 1973 Chilean coup acted to help people in difficulty and subject to repression. His is a beautiful story, one of sacrifice, of help, born among other things in the context of a Catholic Church that has earned a reputation on the ground for being close to the people in a situation of great difficulty ».
Thus began the Italian ambassador to Chile Mauro Battocchi in remembering the figure of the South Tyrolean nun Valeria Valentin, born in Val Badia, but who had chosen Chile for her mission. In 1973, during the days of Pinochet’s coup, he was in Santiago and managed to rescue hundreds of people persecuted by the regime: poor, workers, students. In a 1999 testimony, Valentin – who in the meantime had abandoned monastic life and married the man with whom she had defied the regime in Chile – recalled that “I was calling our friends who were inside the embassy and they told me “two Marlboros, three Hiltons …”; the figure indicated the number of those we could have escaped ».
And it is Battocchi himself who reminds us that in those years the Italian embassy experienced a very noble moment because “in the absence of the ambassador who was in Italy due to a serious illness of his son, the charge d’affaires Pietro De Masi opened wide the doors to people who were persecuted and hunted down by the regime’s secret police. By opening the doors he made the embassy a point of reference for many opponents of the regime. Between 1973 and 1975, hundreds of people passed through the Italian embassy, lived there and were then transferred out of Chile with diplomatic safe conduct made available by our diplomacy. Today the Chilean people remember that page of our history with great affection, sympathy and gratitude ».
All this will become part of a documentary that the Trentino Historical Museum Foundation has decided to dedicate to this great woman who saw the horrors of the Chilean dictatorship and risked her life herself to save hundreds of people from death.