A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  71 G. Gentile and A. Omodeo, Carteggio, ed. S. Giannantoni, Florence: Sansoni, 1974, p. 167. Remember, here, the contrary position of Croce, according to which war was a merely practical matter that should not interrupt the conversations between erudite types on the opposing sides. There was thus something of a division of the two greatest idealist philosophers into different camps: but the real war was not fully reducible to either of their two positions.

  72 Ugo Machieraldo, from Vercelli, shot by the Germans in Ivrea on 2 February 1945, and Pedro Ferreira, from Genoa, shot by the Fascists in Turin on 23 January 1945. See the letters to the wife of the former and Action Party comrades of the latter (LRI, pp. 123, 83).

  73 However, in the Risorgimento-era song inspired by the flag given to the departing soldier by his weeping loved one, red was ‘all the fire of my love’.

  74 Bernardo, Il momento buono, p. 126.

  75 Letter from Vito Severgnini, born 1904, later an RSI combatant, shot on 30 April 1945 (LRSI, p. 6).

  76 On the persistence of this theme, see Revelli, Panorama editoriale e temi culturali.

  77 LRSI, p. 48. On Resega’s ‘moderate’ role, see Ganapini, Una città, la guerra, pp. 109–11.

  78 Letter by the Milanese Lorenzo Malingher, an officer in permanent active service and a combatant in Spain, to his wife, 29 April 1945, written when his ultimate execution was still in the balance (LRSI, p. 233).

  79 Letter by the Turin engineer Lorenzo Viale, shot by the Fascists in Turin on 11 February 1945, to his loved ones (LRI, p. 239).

  80 Letter by the Turin teacher Renzo Scognamiglio, GL, to his mother. Shot by Folgore parachutists at Rivarolo Canava on 22 March 1945 (LRI, p. 206).

  81 Letter from Rovigo mechanic Amerigo Duò to his Action Party comrades. Shot by the Fascists in Turin on 23 January 1945 (LRI, p. 75).

  82 See the Bataille quotes and associated comments by C. Ginzburg in his ‘Mitologia germanica e nazismo. Su un vecchio libro di Georges Dumézil’, in Quaderni storici 57 (December 1984), pp. 857–82; and his Miti, emblemi, spie, Turin: Einaudi, 1986, pp. 210–38 (see, in particular, p. 230).

  83 Portelli, Biografia di una città, p. 212.

  84 Fussell, La grande guerra, pp. 345ff, draws our attention to the words ‘assault’, ‘impact’, ‘push’, and ‘penetration’.

  85 Editors’ presentation, with the title ‘Vita!’ in L’Avanguardia fascista, ‘Paper of the Bologna vanguard’, 7 May 1921; P. Giudici, Reparti d’assalto, Milan: Alpes, 1928, p. 23, cited in Rochat, Gli arditi della grande guerra, p. 15.

  86 Letters published in the paper Folgore, the second one on 15 January 1945 (cited in M. Di Giovanni, laureate thesis).

  87 Mazzantini, A cercar la bella morte, pp. 52, 97.

  88 For example, A. Tamaro, Due anni di storia 1943–1945, 3 vols, Rome: Tosi, 1948– 50, vol. III, 1950, p. 49, supplies figures on the number of Fascists fallen in the battle over Rome in early June 1944 that it is difficult to consider anything other than excessive: according to his claims, out of 980 Folgore parachutists, ‘only thirty were still alive’ after four days.

  89 I recall the lucidity with which this argument was developed by Giuseppe Lopresti, later shot at the Fosse Ardeatine.

  90 Mazzantini, A cercar la bella morte, p. 136. ‘I went for the sake of experience … to know what I would have to endure … to make myself a man’, said another Fascist, volunteer in a firing squad (p. 93).

  91 Letter from Primo Pata, 17 November 1942, to his mother. He would later fall on the Nettuno front, on 16 February 1944 (LRSI, p. 7).

  92 I take this information from the laureate thesis of M. Di Giovanni, cited above, in which he speaks of the first jump as symbolic of a challenge to death, itself victorious even before the fight has begun. Not for nothing did a chaplain of the Tarquinia college say to the parachutist cadets: ‘You are already heroes!’

  93 Undated poster in Piscitelli, I bandi, p. 191.

  94 Letter from the Sicilian Oscar Lo Surdo to his mother, ‘17.VI.XXII’ (17 June 1944, as rendered in the Fascist calendar starting from the 1922 March on Rome). Enlisted in the Italia Division, he fell at Pontremoli on 23 April 1945 (LRSI, p. 127).

  95 ‘Spiritual testament’ of Crisostomo Ceragioli, a.k.a. ‘friar Wolf’, shot near Montepulciano on 24 May 1944 (LRSI, p. 117).

  96 Siena’s Fernando Mugnaini, in a letter to his mother of 9 August 1944. He fell on 18 April 1945 in Mirandola, fighting against partisans. In the letter he wrote: ‘Now for the first, and perhaps for the last time, I at least feel that I am a somebody’ (LRSI, p. 140).

  97 Letter by Sara Corsellini, 14 March 1945, quoted in Fraddosio, Donne nell’esercito di Salo’, p. 73.

  98 INSMLI, CLNAI, envelope 8, folder 12 (March 1944?).

  99 See the article ‘Fiaccola di vita’, which took up this theme, quoted in Gorrieri, La Repubblica di Montefiorino, p. 306.

  100 Laqueur, On Terrorism, p. 73.

  101 Simmel, La moda, p. 41.

  102 A letter to his wife on 23 September 1945 (LRSI, p. 301). Vezzalini had a Garibaldian grandfather, and his father was a volunteer in the First World War.

  103 The phone call was intercepted by the information office of the regional military command of the CVL: reported in Vaccarino, Gobetti and Gobbi, L’insurrezione di Torino, p. 215.

  104 Twenty-four-year-old Dante Corti in a letter to his mother, dated 2 April XXII (1944). A Lombard, later killed by partisans, he tried to finish his letter on a positive note – ‘one consolation is left to me’ – invoking the fatherland and Fascism (LRSI, p. 91).

  105 Mazzantini, A cercar la bella morte, pp. 168, 172. Life is defined as ‘something great and trivial’ on p. 95.

  106 Gobetti, Diario partigiano, p. 125 (6 April 1944).

  107 Chiodi, Banditi, pp. 137–8 (17 April 1945).

  108 Ibid., p. 108 (12 January 1945).

  109 Letter from an unknown man to his father, and from the priest Aldo Mei to his parents (LRI, pp. 35, 143).

  110 Letter from captain Franco Balbis to his father, and from the worker Quinto Bevilacqua to his parents (LRI, pp. 41, 48).

  111 Letters from the student Achille Barilatti to his fiancée; from the trader Arturo Cappettini to his mother; from the student Bruno Frittaion to his fiancée; and from the accountant Fabrizio Vassalli to his parents, adding ‘When you can, put a notice in the papers. Viva l’Italia!’ (LRI, pp. 44, 63, 92, 236).

  112 Letter from Vittorio Tassi to his wife (LRI, p. 218).

  113 T. Mann, in the Preface to LRE, p. xii.

  114 As it was described, with rather overwrought stress, in ‘Né a destra né a sinistra’, Risorgimento Liberale, Rome edition, 15 April 1944.

  115 Lyttelton, Fascismo e violenza, p. 983.

  116 Canfora, La sentenza, pp. 150–4, and as an appendix (pp. 315–18), the text by Marchesi, in the form of an ‘open letter’ to Gentile, appearing in the Lugano Socialist daily Libera Stampa on 24 February 1944. Spriano’s interpretation of this in his Storia del Partito comunista italiano, vol. V, p. 209, seems rather reductive, defining it as a ‘paean to the GAP militant’.

  117 See, among many others, Chiodi, Banditi, p. 101 (17 December 1944) and the letter from an officer of the 12th GNR legion, based in Moncalieri, reported in the ‘Esame della corrispondenza censurata al 30 giugno 1944’ (ACS, SPD, CR, RSI, envelope 9, folder 3).

  118 ‘See, now, I am satisfied, and even if I must die, I die contented’: letter from a carabiniere from Aidussina (Gorizia) in the service of the RSI (ibid.).

  119 Unpublished diary of G. Mauni, c. 39 (August 1944) and the testimony of Elsa Oliva (Bruzzone and Farina, La Resistenza taciuta, p. 134).

  120 Testimony given to the author by Nuto Revelli.

  121 ‘I also learned how to pretend to faint, giving me a few moments of peace, because these sirs no longer enjoyed striking me when they saw that I was not suffering’ (Bolis, Il mio granello di sabbia, p. 21), where this ferocity is counterposed to the guards, who ‘it must be said, looke
d after me well’ (p. 27).

  122 Such was the behaviour of a chaplain ‘a sorry sell-out figure’, in the Carceri Nuove in Turin: ‘Relazione del garibaldino Oscar sulla prigionia del commissario politico Emanuele [Artom], 15 aprile 1944’, quoted in an appendix to Artom’s Diari, p. 180.

  123 Letter from the Tagliamento militiaman Francesco D’Ambrosio, 27 April 1944 (not using ‘XXII’), who was in turn shot by partisans on 12 March 1945 (LRSI, pp. 146–7).

  124 See, for example, the letter of protest addressed to Mussolini by the patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Adeodato Piazza, of 24 January 1945 (cited in Malgeri, La Chiesa di fronte alla RSI, p. 329, n. 73).

  125 See Pavone, La continuità dello Stato, p. 252.

  126 Letter from Umberto Ricci to his parents and friends, 23 August 1944 (LRI, p. 193). See M. Mafai, Pane nero. Donne e vita quotidiana nella Seconda guerra mondiale, Milan: Mondadori, 1987, pp. 226–52, which describes some cases of corpses being exhibited.

  127 M. Foucault, Surveiller et punir, Paris: Gallimard, 1975, p. 38.

  128 E. P. Thompson, ‘Folklore, Anthropology and Social History,’ in The Indian Historical Review III (1978), p. 2.

  129 INSMLI, Manifesti e volantini. See the account of the public display of the barefooted corpses of partisans, ‘heaped on the pavement’ in Turin’s Via Cibrario, as described by Angiolina Fenoglietto (Guidetti Serra, Compagne, vol. I, p. 16).

  130 Instructions from the Command of the Vittorio Veneto brigades group, 1 April 1945 (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. III, p. 565). See also the communication from the Command of the 1st Gramsci division to the Command of the Valsesia, Ossola, Cusio, and Verbano group, 29 November 1944 (IG, BG, 07163).

  131 Letter from the Command of the 6th Bixio brigade (Liguria) to the detachment commands, 7 October 1944 (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. II, p. 415).

  132 Testimony of the canonical Francesco Raspino, who was present at the executions, in Rovero, Il clero piemontese nella Resistenza, pp. 73–5.

  133 Bocci, Ricordi di un allievo ufficiale, p. 47.

  134 Testimony of Diego Verardo, in Bravo and Jalla, La vita offesa, p. 112.

  135 Bocci, Ricordi di un allievo ufficiale, pp. 48–51.

  136 Chiodi, Banditi, p. 57 (25 August 1944). These are the words of Leonardo Cocito, later hanged.

  137 Legislative decree no. 5, 29 April 1945. The two men hanged from the trees were the federale Giuseppe Solaro and Giovanni Cabras (Vaccarino, Gobetti and Gobbi, L’insurrezione di Torino, pp. 318–19).

  138 Referring to the Uarieu Pass in Ethiopia.

  139 Mazzantini, A cercar la bella morte, pp. 160–1.

  140 Chiodi, Banditi, p. 36 (16 August 1944).

  141 Gobetti, Diario partigiano, p. 196 (2 September 1944).

  142 Calamandrei, La vita indivisibile, p. 124 (20 December 1943).

  143 Testimony of the Communist Ambrogio Filipponi, in Portelli, Biografia di una città, pp. 287–8.

  144 Bernardo, Il momento buono, p. 178.

  145 On the women auxiliaries, see Fraddosio, Donne nell’ esercito di Salò, and, by the same author, La mobilitazione femminile: i Gruppi fascisti repubblicani femminili e il SAF, in Poggio, ed., La Repubblica sociale italiana, pp. 257–74.

  146 Letter from Laura Giolo to her family (LRSI, p. 241).

  147 Letter from Imola sixteen-year-old Luciana Minardi, 17 March 1945, later shot (LRSI, pp. 197–8). Compare with the similar way in which a parachutist expressed himself: ‘Marvellous, these cannonades, machine-gun fire etc. etc. Finally, I am in my element!’ (Luciano Dal Soglio, 26 May 1944, LRSI, p. 119).

  148 ‘Esame della corrispondenza censurata al 30 giugno 1944’ (ACS, SPD, CR, RSI, envelope 9, folder 3).

  149 See, on the first case, ‘Surrogati’ (understood as ‘sexual surrogates’), an article in La Fiamma, ‘organ of the Comitato di coordinamento femminile’ (Genoa?), March 1945; on the second case, see ‘Quelle in sahariana’, La Nuova Realtà, ‘organ of the Movimento femminile Giustizia e Libertà’ (Piedmont), 27 February 1945.

  150 Letter from the carpenter Violante Momesso to his mother. Shot by the Fascists in Venice on 28 July 1944 (LRI, p. 147).

  151 Testimony of Gianna Angelini, in Portelli, Biografia di una città, p. 277. Battaglia speaks of a girl who asked to be allowed to shoot, in Un uomo, pp. 206–7.

  152 Testimony of Anna Cherchi, from a peasant family, born in 1924 (Bravo and Jalla, La vita offesa, p. 85).

  153 Testimony of Luigia Varusco, born in 1890, whose regrets included not having been able to ground her own identity in her own efforts (Passerini, Torino operaia, p. 55).

  154 On the recourse to seduction in order to trick the Fascists and Germans, see Bruzzone and Farina, La Resistenza taciuta, and L. Mariani, Quelle dell’idea. Storie di detenute politiche 1927–1948, Bari: De Donato, 1982, p. 150.

  155 The testimony of Elsa Oliva appears in Bruzzone and Farina, La Resistenza taciuta, pp. 118–44. The quotes in the text appear on pp. 125, 126, 138, 130–31, 140.

  156 Testimonies of Albina Caviglione Lusso and Tersilla Fenoglio Oppedisano, ibid., pp. 69, 155.

  157 Letter from the liceo student Anka Knežcvic to her brother. She was shot in April 1944 (LRE, p. 590).

  158 See G. Crainz, ‘La ‘legittimazione’ della Resistenza. Dalla crisi del centrismo alla vigilia del ’68’, in Problemi del socialism 7 (January–April 1987), p. 76.

  159 Bruzzone and Farina, La Resistenza taciuta, esp. p. 39.

  160 Ibid., p. 88. See also the testimony of Teresa Bosco, in Guidetti Serra, Compagne, vol. I, p. 46.

  161 Testimony of Carolina Griffanti, in Passerini, Torino operaia, p. 23. Note also the episode recounted by Nelia Benissone Costa: ‘Upon Liberation, the partisans wanted to go and grab the woman who had made the denunciation, but the mother was opposed’ (Bruzzone and Farina, La Resistenza taciuta, p. 53).

  162 Letter from the Command of the Turin SAP division to the Command of the 1st Sector, 15 January 1945 (cited in Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. III, p. 237, n. 2).

  163 Testimony of Teresa Cirio (Bruzzone and Farina, La Resistenza taciuta, p. 83).

  164 Atti CVL, pp. 187–8. The detachment (of thirty-eight women) was set up alongside the 19th Garibaldi brigade ‘Eusebio Giamone’. It was Vittorio Foa who told me of the GL’s reaction to the uncouth suggestion of a gynaecological check-up. On the tension between women’s traditional roles and their handling weapons, see L. Passerini, ‘Ferite della memoria. Immaginario e ideologia in una storia recente’, and B. Guidetti Serra, ‘Donne, violenza, politica, armi: una esperienza giudiziaria’, Rivista di storia contemporanea XVII (1988), pp. 173–245 (p. 231 features three testimonies of partisan women, one opposed to shooting a gun, one undecided and one in favour: the latter woman is Elsa Oliva); R. Anni, D. Lusiardi, G. Sciola and M. R. Zamboni, I gesti e i sentimenti: le donne nella Resistenza bresciana, Introduction by L. Passerini, Brescia: Tipografia Quiriniana, 1990.

  165 Minutes of the ‘Delegazione del PCI per l’Italia meridionale’, 8 May 1944 (IG, Archivio PCI, ‘Direzione. Verbali riunioni 1944’).

  166 Open letter from ‘a political commissar’ and ‘a commander’ to ‘Our mothers, wives, sisters’ in an undated special issue of Noi donne dedicated to the ‘Volontarie della libertà’.

  167 This testimony appears in Bruzzone and Farina, eds, La Resistenza taciuta, p. 141.

  168 Fenoglio, I ventitré giorni, p. 9.

  169 Tersilla Fenoglio Oppedisano adds: ‘Now I no longer make any judgments, but then I did’ (Bruzzone and Farina, eds, La Resistenza taciuta, p. 160).

  170 Considerations advanced by the student Emanuela Cortopassi in a seminar at the Modern and Contemporary History Department of Pisa University, in 1982.

  171 See the testimony of Teresa Bosco, in Guidetti Serra, Compagne, vol. I, p. 43, and Gobetti, Diario partigiano, pp. 72–3. Nor did Gobetti like Noi donne as a title for the paper: ‘But I accepted it, certainly, when they told me that it had already been the name of a women’s paper in Spain, durin
g the revolution’ (ibid., p. 139, 9 June 1944).

  172 See, for example, the paper Quatre-Vingt-Treize, published by the ‘marraines du Détachement Victor Hugo’. The first issue, from 22 October 1943, contains this appeal: ‘Do not forget, Hitlerites, that we are the descendants of the women of the French Revolution, those women who did not hesitate to throw themselves into the struggle together with the Revolutionaries.’ The header of the second issue, 11 November 1943, featured the image of a woman exhorting others to battle, sword in hand, in tune with the iconography of 1870. In the February 1944 header of another paper, 14 juillet. Organe des marraines de la compagnie des francs-tireurs et partisans Français ‘Les Trois Glorieuses’, there appeared on one side a man with a Phrygian cap, and on the other a proletarian in Third Internationalist style: each of the two men, who held a banner bearing the legend 14 juillet, had a woman at their side, albeit of rather anodyne appearance.

  173 ‘L’ opera del clero e i partigiani’, Le Messager Valdôtain 1946.

  174 The Valtoce division had adopted the name of its commander, fallen in battle.

  175 Tramontin, Il clero italiano e la Resistenza, p. 20 (with other examples and bibliographic references). On don Sisto and his relations with Moscatelli’s Garibaldians, see Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. III, p. 34.

  176 See the contribution by G. Bianchi in Aspetti religiosi della Resistenza, pp. 73–4, quoted in Tramontin, Il clero italiano e la Resistenza, p. 20; Battaglia, Un uomo, p. 212 (see also p. 216).

  177 Norberto Bobbio insisted on this point in a seminar held at Turin’s Centro Gobetti on 28 April 1980.

  178 Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book II, §5. See J. Goulet, ‘Robespierre, la peine de mort et la Terreur’, in Annales historiques de la Révolution française LXIII (1981), p. 219.