Va’ Pensiero

Think free and live free - this could be the motto of the life of Sergio Giovannelli, an Italian worker and Swiss citizen, socially committed free thinker and alert political spirit, who has been searching for a fairer life for all since his earliest youth. Growing up in the difficult war and post-war years in a Ligurian working-class family, he came to Switzerland in 1963 in the hope of finding work and a better life - not just in a material sense. But the ‘Swiss paradise’ is different from what he dreamed of: in the 1960s and 1970s, foreign workers are counted ‘by the piece’, employers interfere in the private lives of their foreign employees as a matter of course, and one ‘foreign infiltration initiative’ follows another. The fear of being sent back is omnipresent.

But instead of conforming and keeping quiet, Sergio Giovannelli is committed to fighting xenophobia, campaigning for the networking and integration of Italian migrants and participating as much as possible in political and trade union life in Switzerland. What helps him is his independent thinking and his power to imagine the world differently than he finds it: From his earliest youth, he wrote poems, later articles for newspapers, he read, took photographs and acquired an immense amount of self-taught knowledge. Switzerland slowly became a new home for him, not least thanks to the convictions shared by and the cross-border Italian-Swiss partnership with his wife Judith. Nevertheless, Italy remains the important root of his life, a point of reference to today.