This Sunday it’s Italy’s liberation day. Liberation from five years of bloody war merging into even bloodier civil war and oppression by Nazi-Fascist terrorists, liberation from almost a quarter century of totalitarian government, liberation to regain the freedom to write a new Italian constitution for the emerging republic based on work and democracy.
It does not matter whether all that was promised by liberation has not been achieved but it is that hope which springs eternal which is the most important thing, especially now when the world is changed into a situation where a date B.C. now increasingly seems to stands for ‘Before Covid’…
One might well ask why Italy, which had fought so courageously on the side of the Allies in World War One decided to change sides in the second world conflict. I am no historian but I think I can figure out why. First was the introduction of a fascist dictatorship under Mussolini in 1922, a regime which was much admired by a later dictator, Mr Schickelgruber alias Hitler, when he came to power in 1933. Second was the disappointment of Italy at the 1919 Versailles peace treaty which did not give her the promised Dalmatian coastline and denied her mandates over colonial territories. Third were the League of Nations sanctions imposed upon Italy as a result of the Abyssinian war when Mussolini proclaimed Italy’s new empire (that is, of course, since the Roman Empire which the ex-socialist from Predappio was eager to emphasise). Fourth was the amazing success of the first two years of Adolf’s Blitzkrieg which conned Mussolini’s fledging empire in believing that he was joining the winning side.
Much has been written about the failures of Italy’s part in World War Two, ultimately dragging German advance down, especially as far as the Balkans was concerned. However, there were heroic lunacies too like the last cavalry assault in modern warfare at Isbuscenskij by the Savoy regiment as worthy as anything Tennyson wrote about in those immortal lines beginning “Half a league, half a league, half a league onward, all in the valley of Death…”
Most important in the downfall of that Dark Age was the resistance movement which is remembered throughout Italy, especially in our parts where partisans fought with British secret agents to break down the intransigent remains of Mussolini’s Salò repubblichini.
My Italian-born mum, who was a Red Cross nurse during this period of her life, remarked to me ‘you think war is bad? Civil war is a thousand times worst!’ With brother fighting against brother, with terrorist activities on both sides, with hunger, starvation, and a complete breakdown of any organised form of civil law and order these dreadful days are remembered today, not only by the survivors of those who took part in this national tragedy of cosmic self-harm but by their sons and daughters and their sons and daughters too. The second half of 1944 was perhaps the most unendurable part of the war for Italy. I have mentioned the horrific massacres of innocent civilians at places like Sant’Anna di Stazzema and Fucecchio in previous posts and do not wish to go through the repulsions of them now except to say that nothing seems to have been learnt by our animal species: just look at what is going on in countries like Myanmar, Chad, Yemen and Syria today. They are all reincarnations of those cataclysmic last months of World War Two that Italy had to suffer. And to think that a civil war has been going on in Syria for over ten years instead of ten months!!!
The other day I took a walk through the cemetery at Ponte a Serraglio, mainly to pay homage to a dear former neighbour Emilia whose funeral I have described in a previous post. Even in a relatively modest cemetery like the one here there are some very beautiful and moving gravestones and some interesting insights into how people looked like and what they wore in a previous generation. (I love that quote from Dante!)
The most moving monument, however, is the one at the cemetery’s entrance commemorating the murder of eight men from Bagni di Lucca at the hands of Nazi-fascist assassins in that awful month of July 1944 when crimes against humanity here reached an atrocious climax.
Looking at the monument and reading their names I was again reminded of why Liberation Day is such an important event in Italy’s national calendar and is solemnly commemorated especially in these times when an invasion from an invisible enemy is threatening this country, as indeed it is threatening the whole world, without any seeming respite… particularly in India where I can’t help thinking of the lovely times we have spent in that fabulous country and of the very kind people we have met and friends we have made there.
Nice one Francis.