Thematic sites - Municipality of Milan

In his long career he achieved an unparalleled celebrity. First in popularity among television presenters, undisputed king of quiz games, Michael Nicholas Salvatore Bongiorno, born in New York to a Turin mother and an Italian-American father, grew up and trained between Italy and the United States, becoming the great and unforgettable Mike Bongiorno.  
Today in the presence of the Councilor for Culture Tommaso Sacchi, the president of Municipality 8 Giulia Pelucchi, his wife Daniela Zuccoli, his sons Michele and Nicolò and many citizens, the plaque in his honor was unveiled: "In this house he lived Mike Bongiorno, detained in his youth in the San Vittore prison in Milan because he was anti-fascist, was a historic television presenter and among the founding fathers of Italian television. Tied with love to the city of Milan". 

His life is a story that starts from afar and touches various cities, from New York to Turin to Milan, where he arrives at the age of 20 and where he is imprisoned in the San Vittore prison. His US passport has just saved him from being shot by the Gestapo in Cravegna, a small village in the Ossola Valley where he is together with other young Resistance fighters. Mike is a partisan and thanks to his knowledge of English, he is used as a relay to carry communications to the Allies across the border, in Switzerland. Locked up in San Vittore, where his mother was also imprisoned, after seven months he was transferred first to the transit camp in Bolzano, then to the Austrian concentration camp of Spittal an der Drau, in Carinthia.  
He was freed in February 1945, thanks to an exchange between American and German prisoners and brought back to the United States, where his life began again.  

Today Milan, the city of the Resistance, remembers one of the founding fathers of Italian television and, together, the young anti-fascist partisan Mike who together with many others fought to free Italy from Nazi-fascism. The plaque, placed in via Giovanni da Procida where he lived, represents a recognition and thanks proposed and wanted by the family and condominiums and welcomed by the municipal administration through the Milan is Memory committee. 

"Milan has remembered Mike Bongiorno in many different ways - stated the Councilor for Culture, Tommaso Sacchi - celebrating his extraordinary career and the popularity achieved through radio and television. An unforgettable face, voice and style that truly made part of the life of each of us. Today, however, we want to bring to mind the years that preceded all this, when Mike Bongiorno was still just a young Italian American who at 19, like many of his peers, took to the mountains to take part in the war partisan against Nazi-fascism. He still doesn't know that he will become one of the most famous men in the country he is fighting for but with the spirit of that time and the desire for freedom, he goes through capture, prison and the extermination camp. He will return to Italy ten years later to become the undisputed king of the small screen. Today Milan remembers him like this, the young partisan Mike". 

Among the numerous Milanese awards received by Mike Bongiorno are the Civic Merit awarded on 7 December 1987 and the naming of via "Mike Bongiorno - Protagonist of the history of Italian Television" in the Porta Nuova district in 2015 (the pedestrian parallel to Viale della Liberazione ). The name of Mike Bongiorno was finally inscribed in 2009, the year of his death, among the illustrious and deserving Milanese in the Famedio of the Monumental Cemetery.