Religious Affiliations
Young Fritz, as Gino was known as a child, studied with a local Jewish master, Gerolamo Navarra. When Navarra moved to Venice in 1895, Parin headed to Munich.
Two years later, on June 11, 1898, he was baptized a Catholic in the city’s Capuchin Convent of St. Anthony. Later that year, he married Ella Auler, an American Catholic from St. Louis. They had two children, Edgar and Marietta. The marriage lasted eight years.
Parin remained a Catholic for the rest of his life, and during the first three decades of the 20th century, he created a number of Catholic-themed paintings that were exhibited throughout Italy.
In a 1939 letter, written less than a year after Mussolini proclaimed Italy’s new racial laws, Trieste’s Police Commissioner describes him as di razza ebraica e di religione cattolica (of the Jewish race and Catholic religion).
A pamphlet created on the 20th anniversary of his death in 1964 indicates that he also regularly attended the city’s German-speaking Catholic church.
Necki Springer’s sister, Magda, attended the same church. Their close friendship may have contributed to Parin’s reluctance to leave Nazi-occupied Trieste in 1943 to seek safety in Switzerland. Perhaps he believed that Catholicism and his Swiss nationality would protect him.
