He procured false identity cards for the boys of Nonantola so they could emigrate to Switzerland and offered similar help to many others, including the priest Don Leto Casini and the entire clandestine DELASEM Committee of Florence.
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He was directly involved in the Villa Emma experience at Nonantola, where hundreds of Jewish orphans from Germany and the Balkans were finding shelter.
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Finzi was the one to welcome at the Venice station, the first train of young refugees coming from Croatia, then preparing their billeting at Nonantola.
Nonantola Abbey, dedicated to Saint Sylvester, is a former a Benedictine monastery and prelature nullius in the commune of Nonantola, c.
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Pope Pius VII restored it as a monastery on January 23, 1821, with the provision that the prelature nullius attached to it should belong to the Archbishop of Modena, into which the exempt territory was finally absorbed in 1986 to form the Diocese of Modena-Nonantola.
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In that year the famous monk Placidus of Nonantola wrote his De honore Ecclesiæ, one of the most able and important defences of the papal position that was written during the Investiture Conflict.