Not with words but with deeds

[gabbiani-ipotetici]

What is this "Ora e sempre, Resistenza" tag?

In the 2018/2019 Winter, I made a series of posts on Google+ that were about the history of Italian leftist parties and movements and Italian Resistance. They were written mainly for my friends and acquaintances in the USA that had trouble grasping how and why so many Italian folks were/are eager to describe themselves as Socialists, Communists etc.

This was done to give them a broad understanding of the perspective Italian leftists have when talking about politics and the role USA had in shaping our part of the world during and after WWII, because this past influences strongly how we discuss the past and imagine our future. They are meant to give you a broad, basic understanding of a topic that you can then explore more in-depth at your leisure. If one of these posts leves you with questions and wanting to know more, it means I've done a good job.

Some posts feature explicit/troubling/potentially triggering pictures (like blood, dead people/bodies, etc.). I'll put them behind a read more and make a bolded content warning in the post so you'll know to avoid them if needed.

Please note that I am not a historian. I am just someone enthusiastic about sharing their own perspective and understanding of a very important part of their nation's past, especially when it comes to that part that is right now ceasing to be living memory and becoming history.

When I first wrote most of these posts I was in a rush and didn't save/record properly the sources I used, I'll try to find them when possible but please note sometimes they'll just be missing from a post.

If you find a post to be missing critical information or just plainly wrong, please contact me so I can check and update it if needed.

[secifosseluce]

These days there are some, in Italy, who question whether the Resistance had any real impact over the course of the war. To my generation that is an irrelevant question: we understood immediately the meaning, moral and psychological, of the Resistance.

 It was a source of pride to know that us, Europeans, had not passively waited for the liberation to come. Neither was it meaningless, in my opinion, to the young Americans who were paying their blood tribute for our freedom that behind the lines there were Europeans who were already paying their debt either.  

Umberto Eco, Il fascismo eterno 

[sonjabysonjamorgan]

i know everything else is going to shit but the content being put out by the uk this year has been simply breathtaking

[gabbiani-ipotetici]

Alle Barricate - Gang

Il 31 luglio del 1922, l'Alleanza del Lavoro (unione di quelli che erano i sindacati di sinistra prima dell'avvento del regime), indisse uno

Alle Barricate (To the barricades) is a song about the "Fatti di Parma", as the 1922 events are known. The video has several pictures taken at the time.

"Fun" fact: during Fascism, the Oltretorrente neighborhood was completely remade. The official reason was that it was in unsanitary conditions, but many think it was also so the city would be harder to defend in case there were further rebellions.

Note: "Parma" is the city, "the Parma" is the city's river, which shares the same name.

The Parma was actually crossed, briefly, because there was a main bridge that was too big and in the open to be defended. Luckily, right in front of the bridge stood Oltretorrente with its labyrinthine streets, and Balbo was quickly forced to turn back.

Translated Lyrics

August ‘22, all of Italy is being rounded-up

house by house, killed by Fascists

They’re like the black death, cowards and murderers

paid by owners that follow Mussolini’s orders

But the Parma won’t be crossed, Parma is a whole different matter

from Oltretorrente rises a cry, “Death or glory!”

To the barricades, to the barricades, to the barricades

to the barricades, to the barricades, to the barricades

They’re fighting side by side, they look like migrants [*]

the Arditi del Popolo, Anarchists, Comrades

For 5 days and 5 nights, from cellars to rooftops

the uprising is fierce and they fight through gritted teeth

But the Parma won’t be crossed, Parma is a whole different matter

from Oltretorrente rises a cry, “Death or glory!”

To the barricades, to the barricades, to the barricades

to the barricades, to the barricades, to the barricades

Here in Oltretorrente you hear a cry, a promise

From Borgo Saffi to Naviglio red flag will be triumphant

And the black shirts are forced to retreat

Parma is freed from the Fascist horde

But the Parma won’t be crossed, Parma is a whole different matter

from Oltretorrente rises a cry, “Death or glory!”

To the barricades, to the barricades, to the barricades

to the barricades, to the barricades, to the barricades

[*]Oltretorrente was a poor, working-class neighbourhood, and many of the people living there had recently emigrated from the countryside to the city looking for work

Testo italiano/Italian lyrics: https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?id=47741&lang=it

[gabbiani-ipotetici]

So, in last post I left you with a view of how frustrated, angry, and unsatisfied Italians felt.

The anti-protest laws were no longer in place and the WWI experience had also created in many people a sense of national belonging and helped the spread of a common language, which meant that the Socialist Party (at the time still including the Communists) could finally reach a national audience. The Party got a big boost thanks to the Russian Revolution, but more generally the war awakened people to the reality of their situation and to how Italy was quite backward when it came to workers’ rights and the State caring for its citizens (see: how veterans were treated after the war). The Spanish Flu epidemic added further uncertainty and fear (and killed another sizeable chunk of young, strong people).

1919 saw waves of protest and strikes that involved every kind of workers, in every region of Italy; they all had specific requests and reasons to protest, but the overall trend was asking for more jobs, more safety, and higher pay (or redistribution of farmlands with no owner or left uncultivated).

Veterans formed associations, Socialists and Communists joined parties and unions, and even Anarchists found a leadership figure in Malatesta, now allowed to come back to Italy after years of exile.

On the other hand, Mussolini’s Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian Combat Fasci) were becoming bolder and explicitly and violently opposed the demonstrations. Many people who considered themselves nationalists and anti-socialist/communist created their own associations, too (including several veterans that thought Socialism’s condemnation of war was a lessening of their personal efforts and sacrifices).

There was a big strike on 19-20 July 1919, but while Anarchists wanted it to not have a set duration, Socialists decided it’d last two days and constantly called for an orderly, peaceful demonstration, while Socialist newspapers called for revolution. The result was a decrease in trust in the Party, while the government gained strength and nationalists became even more polarized despite the peaceful strike.

At the end of 1919 Bologna saw the XVI Socialist Party’s Congress, where some important lines were defined: accepting violence as a mean to destroy the capitalist hierarchy, the condemnation of WWI and more generally of war as a bourgeoisie tool (and cutting ties with Socialists that had advocated for Italy entering the war), and accepting the Russian Revolution as a key event (and also accepting the Parliament’s dissolution). You might notice how there’s a complete lack of what to do about factory workers and farmers’ fights: the Party was unable to agree on a course of action, and this meant that there was a lack of aim.

1919 elections were a huge success for the Socialist Party with 32,4% of votes, but the second party (the Catholic Partito Popolare) got 20,6% and had several allies, while the Socialists’ political stance meant alliances were very hard for them. Of note is that at this point Fascists didn’t get any of their candidates elected. So you had this big party, with a lot of votes and reach, but with few ideas on how to achieve its goals and politically isolated.

1920 saw the intensification of strikes and protests, several of them requiring police or army intervention and with several deaths. In June even Bersaglieri (a specialty infantry corp) stationed in the city of Ancona rebelled: they feared they were going to be deployed to Albania, where fighting was very hard. They disarmed their commanding officers and fought for several days against the police, Carabinieri and even the army. Ancona saw fierce fighting, tens of wounded, and about twenty deaths.

They acted with the support of Socialist and Anarchist associations, and shortly there were more protests and strikes in many cities in the Marche and Romagna, and even in Milan. People in these cities wanted to show solidarity and also to deliberately create chaos so fewer forces could be sent to Ancona to oppose the revolt (for this reason, many protests blocked railways).

The second day of fighting, receiving news of the city’s armed forces fraternizing with the rebelling Bersaglieri, the government and the king decided to send external forces, but the railway workers declared a national strike. The government managed to send all of one train, which was shot at on arrival (killing some guards), and the government decided the proper answer to this was shooting at the city center using the city’s fortress cannons, and to have the whole city bombed from the shore. After 4 days of fights, the revolt was tamed.

The direct consequence of this rebellion was Italy and Albania signing a peace treaty, since the Italian government now knew that its people would not support that war, and it was the one big revolt that showed that, even if in the end the government won, results could be achieved by coordination, cooperation and having the population’s support.

Almost at the same time, there were several big factory strikes due to unions’ requests for wage increases (to adjust them to the ever-increasing cost of living) being completely rejected. By September almost all metallurgic factories were on strike, involving more than 400 000 workers (the number reached 500 000 when the strike spread to some non-metallurgic factories).

Several occupied factories continued production, with occupying workers then selling the products to try to lessen the effects of not being paid, but that rarely worked. More often, food and help for families were given by cooperatives, unions, and other forms of workers’ solidarity. Some workers were armed and kept watch to ensure police and army didn’t try to interrupt the strike/occupations by force, and railway unions once again helped by organizing armed pickets to stop army forces from reaching the strikes’ locations.

The unions had to decide how to handle what was now a complex situation. After days of discussions, they ruled out using the situation to try and achieve some kind of workers’ revolution. After almost 20 days of strike, unions and Confindustria reached an agreement that gave workers more rights (pay increase, vacations, dismissals, etc.), but it also forced workers to stop the ongoing occupations.

In the days right before and after the agreement, there was an increase in tensions and several deaths on both sides, and the anti-communists used them heavily for propaganda reasons.

In the end, the strike was seen as a failure by many due to the Socialist leaders’ inability to take a strong stance and their lack of strategy, and there was, of course, a rift between those who thought they should have kept on fighting and those who were happy with the agreement. On the other hand, factory owners were livid: they had been removed from their factories for a month and had to agree to the workers’ requests. To summarize, no one was happy with the outcome, and public opinion became more and more polarized.

The last months of 1920 saw an increase in Fascists’ violent actions, while in January 1921 the Communists left the Socialist Party, further weakening it and closing for good the “Biennio Rosso” (the two red years), as it became known.

What followed in 1920-1922, known as the “Biennio Nero” (the two black years), is the period when Fascist’s actions became more and more bold, acting with task forces that hit local Socialist, Communist and Anarchist people and locations (unions, newspapers, etc.) to scare and weaken them, riding the anti-Socialist wave and public opinion polarization that followed the Biennio Rosso. These squads were often economically supported by factory and landowners, that saw in them the best tool to ensure their workers stopped rebelling so much.

You probably know about the March on Rome (October 1922), when Mussolini and his men basically took the nation’s political power in their own hands by force.

You probably don’t know that there were other marches that year, shows of force meant to intimidate, “conquer” and break cities where there was a strong Anarchist, Socialist and Communist presence. Of course, those cities saw the rise of self-defense squads, often as part of the Arditi del Popolo (aka The People’s Daring Ones), a militant anti-Fascist group founded in 1921 to oppose Mussolini. Weirdly, they were an offshoot of Arditi, those very militant, war-like, and often nationalist troops that found their glory by doing daring, risky actions during WWI. The founders were actually the former Arditi closer to Anarchist ideals, that did not wish for another war. The Arditi del Popolo were not supported by leftist parties, and ironically by including people from across all the left they were more inclusive than their parties (that by then were becoming quite sectarian), and you can find a few important names among them.

August 1 1922 saw a national strike to protest against Fascist violence. Of course, Black Shirts answered by escalating violence and after 2 days the strike was called off. Ten thousands of Fascists, led by Italo Balbo, marched along the Via Emilia “submitting” any city they met along the way. But Parma (a city in Northern Italy, very close to where I live) decided things would play differently. There was a very, very strong anti-communist presence, and the Arditi del Popolo’s founder, Guido Picelli, lived there. They had trained, they had several factory workers that served in WWI and now led squads, and had set up a supply and information network. They organized themselves, set up barricades in the neighbourhoods of Naviglio, Saffi and Oltretorrente (old, medieval areas, with narrow and confusing roads), and waited.

15 000 Fascists approach the city and meet a harsh resistance: men and women armed with old rifles, guns, and even a few bombs, many of these folks were not part of the Arditi but simply citizens that don’t want their city conquered by Fascists. Kids and teens patrol roofs and carry stones in their pockets, ready to be thrown below. Strategic crossroads have been mined, bell towers are used as lookouts and to communicate, and most of the bourgeoise local population has little to no sympathy for Fascists, too, supporting the Arditi with food and shelter, and even some priests gift their churches’ benches and tables to be used in the barricades. It’s not the easy victory Fascists wanted and expected.

There’s a (temporary) happy ending: after three days of fighting, Balbo has to admit defeat. He and his men retreat, and the army steps in. The city’s Prefect reaches an agreement with Picelli, and the army is welcomed warmly, with food and folk dances and no further fighting.

This unique event isn’t very known, it’s a footnote in a year where a lot of important stuff happened, but I think it’s important to know about it as a reminder that Mussolini's rise to power, while wanted by some, was fiercely opposed by at least as many, in words and in deeds. He had to resort to violence and electoral fraud, facing opposition almost at every step. Antifascism wasn’t something that arose as an answer to Mussolini, but rather the natural opposition of people that espoused different ideals (of freedom, rights, and equality) and as such could not tolerate Mussolini’s acts. They existed well before he rose to power, or wrote in a newspaper.

Here you can find a good, more detailed summary of the Parma's siege and resistance. It's in Italian but Google Translate usually does a decent job.

[gabbiani-ipotetici]

Earlier this year I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Sabaton's latest album, The War To End All Wars, has a song about the White War.

the framing is the tragic White Friday of 1916. Sabaton cleverly avoid lyrics that would identify the deceased as either Austro-Hungarian or Italian, allowing the song to represent all those who died on that day.

By reading comments under the videos and around the Internet it looks like this is the first time many folks outside of Italy or Austria, both older and younger people, learned about the White War. While the infinite mud plains and trenches of central Europe became the face of WWI for good reasons, I'm glad this song allowed more people to learn about a more "private" but equally if not more lethal and harsh side of this war.

LYRICS

I won’t be coming home

I won’t be going anywhere

I will guard this post forever

Here on the alpine slope where I did my final stand I shall remain

Among the ice and snow that binds me to this mountain

A force of nature too strong, sent from above Where spirits lead the way, the winds will never fade

White Friday, I’ll take the

Stairway to heaven

I’m sky high, when I die

I’ll be immortal Forever, I never

I won´t return to

Blood Mountain, I am the

Soldier of heaven

I saw the end of war

I watched the soldiers come and go

And I kept my watch forever

So many brave men fell in the battles that were raging down below

I have seen it all but none will hear my story

All of these years I have been frozen in time

I cried for spring to come but here, winter remain

I always dreamed that I would, serve high above

Where spirits lead the way, the winds will never fade

[gabbiani-ipotetici]

Mio nonno partì per l'Ortigara (My grandpa was sent to Ortigara) is a song that, I think, encapsulates a lot of what WWI was like for many soldiers: being sent to a faraway, dangerous place (Ortigara saw a fierce, bloody battle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mount_Ortigara), where bad planning makes the losses even worse. Then coming back after the war and the government forgetting about you, only to remember when it's convenient and giving you too little. too late (while 1000 lire were a lot in 1918, around 1500/2000 €, in 1970 they were about 10 €/$), while making a grand gesture that is only for the government's benefit. And, as the song reminds us twice, peasants were the ones doing the shooting and dying, not politicians.

Translated lyrics

My grandpa was sent to Ortigara

when he was 19, with the Alpine troops

and from the trenches they fired at each other

farmer against farmer

One day they were ordered to attack

under the artillery fire

which should sweep away

those bloody barbed-wire fences

But they didn’t aim well

and out of three hundred Alpine soldiers

out of three hundred, only thirty survived

after a night in the snow

and they didn’t even get a thank you

they didn’t even get a two days’ leave.

So the war was won, they said

and it seems that the Italians won it

and my grandpa left with the others

in that winter of hunger and cold

But the Fatherland wasn't greedy

once he put his gun aside

because the minister rewarded him

with a 1000 lire check

And on the train on his way back home

his eyes were pursuing a fleeting dream

with 1000 lire you can buy

all the wheat fields of Granaiolo

And then he started a family

but the check didn't arrive

then a war even worse than the previous one

made him forget about the check

And the years pass slowly by

among the golden wheat and the vineyards

his son dies only thirty years old

he sees his grandchildren grow up

And he sees the children grow up

as he feels he's getting old

they have moved to the town

and sometimes pay him a visit

And he prepares the young wine

for them to bring home

a chicken and ten eggs, too

and then he plays with my daughter

And then one day the telegram comes

everything at the right moment

with a delay of fifty years

the payment has been issued

So they call him to the city theatre

everyone's been summoned

all the “Boys of '99”

well over seventy years old

Those who fought for Italy

amongst military bands and flags

are gifted a shiny medal

grandpa's been made a Knight!

And of those old 1000 lire

he was given only 900

due to some deduction

and the stamp duty tax

And he told grandma the big news

laughing as he spoke

"It looks like they made me a Knight

but they gave me no horse!"

My grandpa was sent to Ortigara

when he was 19, with the Alpine troops

and from the trenches they fired at each other

farmer against farmer

Italian lyrics/Testo italiano: https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?id=12&lang=it

[gabbiani-ipotetici]

Let’s get down to business and meet that awful, messy, and bloody event that was the Great War!

I’ll go ahead and assume that you know when/how/why it started and what the major players are, so I can focus on Italy. Italy was part of the Triple Alliance (Italy, Austria-Hungary, Germany), but relationships between Italy and Austria quickly deteriorated at the start of 1900 because of bitterness for the culturally Italian areas still part of Austria, and also due to the latter’s aggressive and expansionist politics and the worsening of its relationship with Russia. Also, one of the roles of the Alliance was to keep Italy under control, to avoid further patriotic wars after the Independence ones.

Furthermore, Italians are very good at finding loopholes (as anyone that’s played a board game or rpg with one of us knows), so when war broke out the government, fearing to side with the losers and wanting to see how things played out, pointed out that the Triple Alliance was a defensive agreement, that Austria was the one attacking, and that Germany and Austria-Hungary broke the agreed rules by not telling Italy beforehand of their purpose to declare war.

Italy was neutral, but not for long: ever since the Unification there was a strong movement to reclaim the terre irredente (unredeemed lands), aka those lands that were part of other nations but were historically/culturally Italian. Now, this was true for some of those regions, like Trentino and Trieste, but other regions included were a cultural and ethnic mess (like Istria, Gorizia, Dalmatia) and others were areas that were willingly sold long ago and/or had chosen freely to join other countries (like Corsica, Savoy and Nice). It was part honest patriotism, part a grab for power and lands.

The interventionist faction was very vocal and gained a big following; add in that the Alliance’s progress wasn’t as quick as planned, and that Italy feared retaliation if their former allies won, and by the end of 1914 Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs had secretly contacted the Triple Entente to negotiate compensation for Italy entering the fray at the Entente’s side.

For this reason, to us Italians, WWI is “the 15-18 war”, because we weren’t at war in 1914.

Despite reports about how the war was quickly becoming a long, drawn-out affair and about how modern artillery, machine-guns and chemical gas were changing war in a way never seen before, Italy joined the war still thinking it would be a relatively quick thing and soon they would comfortably sit on shiny, new borders by virtue of choosing to side with the winners at the right moment.

Of course, the war wasn’t quick nor clean, but a bloody, messy thing. Italy was woefully unprepared for war, with an outdated army and a backward industry. Add in military leaders that held on to ‘800 views of war and how an army should behave and an extremely strict military marshal (Luigi Cadorna), and the outcome is way too many dead and injured soldiers that could have been avoided.

In addition to the images of WWI “mud war” that have become popular, Italian (and Austro-Hungarian) soldiers faced the White War: fighting in the Alps, digging tunnels and trenches in the hard rock, finding a way to carry artillery and supplies on mountains (two-thirds of the border was above 2000 m of altitude), facing snow, freezing cold, avalanches. Regular troops had it bad enough, but everyone agrees that those fighting in the mountains had it worse, and estimates agree that about two-thirds of deaths on both sides were due to the cold and the environment rather than enemy action.

It was even more wearing than “regular” war: besides the charges and artillery fire, there was the ever-present fear of enemy sappers digging a tunnel right next to the ones you slept in, planting charges and detonating them to bury you alive. It was nothing short of nerve-wracking.

As I said, Italy wasn’t prepared to sustain a brief war, even less a long one and those in command were often nobles or, at best, bourgeoise, disconnected from the farmers and factory workers that composed most of the ranks, and attached to old-fashioned, ineffective tactics (as an example, Italy did have modern artillery, but the troops were poorly trained and there was little to no thought behind its use, defensive use was almost unheard of etc.). As a result, Italy suffered many losses and many defeats.

Morale wasn’t great to begin with, and Cadorna required and enforced very strict discipline, especially against deserters. While a deeper analysis shows that soldiers’ executions due to desertion were high, but not as much as his reputation would lead one to believe, it is true that he sacked, demoted or removed from command officers at an astonishing rate (usually because they refused to follow his suicidal orders, or because they did and as a consequence performed poorly).

Morale was very low, and while the stereotype of the Italian soldier as a coward only looking after himself is exaggerated, low morale was unavoidable given that they were smart enough to realize they were asked to risk their lives in senseless fights, obeying orders from men that didn’t care about them. Someone in command realized that they couldn’t magically rise soldiers’ morale by executions, so they created occasions for amusement and relaxation in the rear lines (often organized by priests, who understood the need for a bit of relief and peace) and, after Caporetto, even “trench newspapers”, full of propaganda but that also aimed, through drawings, cartoons and simple language to increase the literacy of the troops. Each issue was planned by artists, writers, pedagogues and teachers, to strike the right balance of amusing and instructional. Often it was soldiers that helped write some parts of their newspapers, helping create a sense of belonging and community, and the whole project was a success.

Most of the troops were farmers, and the others were usually from working-class backgrounds, too; many of them were completely illiterate and knew their regional dialect, but not Italian (or knew it poorly) because they didn’t need it in their everyday lives. For the first time since Italian Unification, poor people from all around Italy met and got to know each other, learning about their differences but also becoming united in the struggle for survival. More than 50 years after having created Italy, the grim tragedy of war finally granted Massimo d’Azeglio wish, creating (at least partially) an Italian people. Unfortunately, this also meant that much of that early national identity was steeped in a “us vs. them” mentality.

The age of conscripted men ranged from 1874 to 1900 (though they never saw combat), for a total of a bit over 5 million men. That’s 27 years and almost half of the Italian’s male population at the time. Of course, older years were less represented, the average soldier’s age was 28 years old, but that’s more than one generation taking part in the war and being scarred by it.

The young men from 1899 have a special place in our WWI remembrance. Called Ragazzi del ‘99 (Boys of ‘99), they were barely of age when conscripted, received a very basic and rushed training and were thrown on the front lines, especially after the Battle of Caporetto, to reinforce the front following the disastrous defeat. The poetic image of young soldiers valiantly defending Italy against enemy forces with their lives engraved them in people’s memories.

Oh, yeah, Caporetto. The dreadful WWI battle for us Italians, a disaster so grievous and probably avoidable that “Caporetto” still is very much alive in everyday use more than a century later, meaning a terrible and crushing defeat. The English wiki page, unfortunately, doesn’t examine the causes for the defeat as deeply as I’d like, but it can give you an idea of how badly Italy was beaten.

Battle of Caporetto - Wikipedia

Cadorna was replaced, field officers were given more power instead of just following plans, Italians managed to create a defense line along the Piave, held it, and then counterattacked at Vittorio Veneto, a long battle that spanned several days after which the Austro-Hungaric defense lines’ broke and Italy finally had its victory. The war was almost over by then, and while the battle’s importance in the bigger picture is still debated by historians (it probably did precipitate the victory of the Entente, avoiding several months of further fighting), there’s no doubt that it was extremely important in molding Italy’s self-image as a European power.

At Caporetto many Italian soldiers were taken prisoner, and this leads us to another very dark page: prisoners of war. While conditions were poor for all POW, other nations realized after a few months that they had to support them to avoid them starving, or at least let families and charities to send them packages with food, clothes etc. Italians weren’t so lucky: the government and military command (especially Cadorna) considered them traitors and deserters and ruled they were to receive no support. Families sometimes managed to send them relief packages, but they rarely arrived untampered. It’s estimated that out of 600 000 Italian POW, around 100 000 died due to starvation, cold, or illnesses. And after the war, when their fellow soldiers at least got celebrated, they just… were forgotten. We have very few stats and stories about them because they just didn’t want to draw attention to themselves.

While soldiers’ bonds with each other were often very strong, the war created a big rift between them and civilians. Many soldiers wrote how they didn’t feel at ease while on leave: especially at the beginning, civilian newspapers were quite optimistic, the government refused to impose wartime austerity (fearing it would break the illusion of a “short war” in civilian minds) and the horrors of war were unheard of. The war happened mostly far from civilians (with a few exceptions, like the people living along front lines or those that suddenly found themselves in Austro-Hungarian territory after Caporetto), and many soldiers felt disconnected by this peaceful environment. In 1915 soldiers were forbidden to visit cafés while on leave, for fear that they might say too much about the true situation at the front in an environment usually full of dangerous folks like, say, Socialists or Communists.

While the truth about the war situation slowly emerged, soldiers still had reason for bitterness and resentment against the “imboscati” (literally “[those] hidden in the woods”, it means something like draft-dodger), men that weren’t conscripted because their jobs were deemed too important for the war effort and thus avoided the war. There was a misconception that farmers were conscripted while city’s factory workers weren’t, but the truth is that only some very specific trades and qualifications granted you that status. It’s simply that Italy at the time was still mostly made of farmers so the army’s composition reflected that, but the aforementioned farmers hadn’t the means to understand that and so the stereotype remained (helped by the fact that a soldier’s pay was very, very low).

As the war went on, the home front situation worsened too: austerity and rationing began, while many factories were converted to military ones. The lack of men meant that farmer families faced many difficulties, but it was a golden chance for women to enter the workforce as factory workers, something that was usually considered men’s work unsuited for delicate female hands and dispositions. Many women also found clerical work in areas previously forbidden to them, and even as Army’s secretaries.

On the other hand, those factories that were deemed “of military interest” lost many of the worker rights that were earned in the previous years: the salary was lowered, unions disbanded and overtime required. Overall, any area considered “war zone” faced a severe limitation of people’s rights. The definition of war zone changed over time, expanding and including most of Northern Italy by the end of the war. In these areas people lost the right to assembly, to any kind of political activity, to go on strike, etc.

Despite these huge limitations, there were protests and strikes. Thanks to German submarines making trade difficult, coal became scarcely available to civilians and of very low quality, and many cities had trouble providing enough bread for their now suddenly bigger population. The protests’ instigators were often women, fed up with having to work more for less, fearing for the lives of their husbands, sons, and relatives. From late 1916 and for most of 1917 strikes and protests were a daily event. Despite the government’s efforts to keep the peace and its massive use of propaganda, people didn’t want to be at war or endure hardships for political games many of them didn’t care for or know about.

The end of the war didn’t bring the joy nor the prosperity hoped for. Italy did get many of the lands it asked for (gladly gifted by the European powers eager to dismember the Austro-Hungarian Empire), but the city of Fiume had been promised to Croatia or Hungary. Irredentists used this as an excuse to create the myth of the “mutilated victory”, aka an incomplete one, saying that Italy was tricked. This led to Gabriele D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume in 1919 (which was short-lived) and planted the seeds of a rhetoric that would later be used by the Fascist Party to leverage populist fellings.

As it happened in almost any country that took part in WWI, the soldiers came home to a different country than the one they left, one that was eager to celebrate them but not to give them a job or to take care of their wounded. Many of them had not forgotten the way the government treated them, as disposable units, and this led to deep distrust. Many of them were farmers and went back to a backward agricultural system, and asked for land redistribution and compensation.

Many industries that had converted their production to a war-oriented one now were out of a job, and so were their former employees. With the wartime restrictions gone, unions and parties gained strength again and protests and upheavals became even more common (the news of the Russian Revolution played a part in this, of course). The government had huge debts with other nations (especially UK and USA), which further worsened the economic situation.

And let’s not forget the Spanish Flu epidemic, that further reduced the number of young, strong people that could help the nation rise again after the war.

Italy was a powder keg, just waiting for someone to light the fuse.

[gabbiani-ipotetici]

This lovely group of ladies from a village nearby my birthplace sings Son la mondina, son la sfruttata (I'm the mondina, the exploited one), a song written around 1950 by a PCI member. It's not a super traditional mondine song, but I want to include it because the lyrics show how much respect and admiration they had earned among the Socialist and Communist parties.

The flag mentioned is of course the Communist red flag, meaning that with their continued struggles for more rights and livable conditions they advanced the overall cause.

The last stanza is anti-war because that was a strong agenda for 50s PCI, but sometimes it gets sung as "And we'll make war against owners/all together we'll win against them/no more exploited on earth/we'll be stronger than cannons".

Translated text

I’m the mondina, the exploited one

I’m the proletarian that never faltered

I’ve been killed, chained

faced prison and violence, nothing stopped me.

With our bodies on the train tracks

we stopped our oppressors

there’s a lot of mud in the rice fields

but the symbol of work doesn’t stain

And we’ll fight for work

for peace, bread and freedom

and we’ll create a new world

of justice and new ideas

This glorious and beautiful flag

we’ve picked it up and raised it even higher

from Vercelli to Molinella

carried at the front by our youth

And if someone wants war

we’ll stop them all together

we want peace on Earth

and we’ll be stronger than cannons

[gabbiani-ipotetici]

This song is perhaps the most famous mondine's song: Sciur padrun da li beli braghi bianchi (Mr. landlord with the nice white pants), a song usually sung the last few days of work to remind the land owner, who can keep his nice pants white and clean thanks to mondine doing all the hard work, that it was time for the mondine to be paid.

The lyrics also talk about how mondine are no longer hired for months or weeks, but by the day or by the hour. The song mixes an Italian heavily influenced by dialect and a "cleaner", more standard one.

There are several versions that differ by one or two stanzas, this version goes like this:

Translated lyrics

Mister landlord with the nice white pants

Take out the money, take out the money

Mister landlord with the nice white pants

Take out the money, so we can go home

Excuse us, mister landlord, if we’ve troubled you

It was the first time, it was the first time

Excuse us, mister landlord, if we’ve troubled you

It was the first time, and we didn’t know what to do

Mister landlord with the nice white pants

Take out the money, take out the money

Mister landlord with the nice white pants

Take out the money, so we can go home

We uprooted it [the rice] and tore it off

and now that it’s been pulled out, and now that it’s been pulled out

We uprooted it and tore it off

and now that it’s been pulled out, we’ll say goodbye and go.

Mister landlord with the nice white pants

Take out the money, take out the money

Mister landlord with the nice white pants

Take out the money, so we can go home

And we don’t go months anymore, or even weeks

We only go a few days at a time, only a few days at a time

And we don’t go months anymore, or even weeks

Only a few days and then we go home

Mister landlord with the nice white pants

Take out the money, take out the money

Mister landlord with the nice white pants

Take out the money, so we can go home

And we don’t go months anymore, or even weeks

We only go a few hours at a time, only a few hours at a time

And we don’t go months anymore, or even weeks

Only a few hours and then we go home

Mister landlord with the nice white pants

Take out the money, take out the money

Mister landlord with the nice white pants

Take out the money, so we can go home

And when the train whistles, and the rice weeders are at the station

With their money box on their backs, with their money box on their backs

And when the train whistles, and the rice weeders are at the station

With their money box on their backs, going up and down the cars

Mister landlord with the nice white pants

Take out the money, take out the money

Mister landlord with the nice white pants

Take out the money, so we can go home

[gabbiani-ipotetici]

A bit of a side-step today, to talk about some often forgotten protagonists of late 1800s and early 1900s movements and strikes for better work conditions: mondine.

Mondine (singular: mondina) were women that worked in the big rice fields of Veneto, Piedmont, and Lombardy. It was seasonal work, usually lasting about 40 days in May and June, consisting in cleaning the flooded fields’ beds of weeds before the young rice sprouts were planted.

It was hard work, spending 10-12 hours in the water, with insects biting you, your hands getting cut by weeds, plus snakes, the heath, the landlord yelling at you to talk less and work faster. Their conditions were so bad that many contemporaries noted them in their diaries and memoirs with a mix of pity and astonishment.

Young women traveled many km by train, most of them from the three regions I mentioned earlier but also from Emilia Romagna. They arrived at the station near their final destination (usually Vercelli, Pavia, or Novara), where a cart waited to carry them to the farmhouse where they’d sleep for the duration of their work, usually on straw. You’d be provided food, but usually it wasn’t abundant nor good, and the pay was low for such demanding work.

Long hours, horrible work conditions, and then going back in the evenings to a disappointing dinner and an itchy bed, all of this far from home… and yet, poverty and the need for money meant that every year many women would show up to do this thankless job. It’s no wonder, then, that they went on strike often or joined workers’ protests asking for better work conditions.

While you can find some women becoming important in socialist and anarchist movements of the time, politics were a men’s world. While rich and bourgeoise women usually didn’t work or did clerical work, women from the lower classes had to work to help feed the family. In cities, some of them joined factories, but it was considered a male occupation so it was much more likely for women to work in service roles or at home. In rural areas women usually helped work the family’s fields, or worked as farm hands or helped herding animals and so on. Add in that women often lacked socialization spaces that were far from their family’s or community's eyes, and it’s easy to see why it was more difficult for a woman to become aware of things like the struggle for workers’ rights: they were “men stuff” and many women lacked the chance to meet others sharing their issues.

Working as a mondina meant being an independent contractor of sorts, spending time in a different world for a while, made of women with whom you shared that hard work, every hour of the day, suffering together in the hope that the money you earned could pay a debt or, like in my grandma’s case, the sewing school that would mean you’d never need to work in the fields again. It was the chance to form bonds and cultivate a kind of rebellious spirit that many women had to suppress outside this specific context.

There’s a lot of folk songs created by mondine that lament their hard work, the unfairness, how the landowner is exploiting their work, how their pay is low, and so on. Women would sing them while working, and they range from sardonic to angry to bitter. They show that they were aware of their situation, and after the creation of the Italian Socialist Party in 1892 mondine often were an essential part of strikes in their work area.

Some mondine had tried to organize strikes before, but they failed because they lacked organization. With the Socialist Party as an ally, they could organize more easily and often worked together with factory workers and farm hands to paralyze whole areas for days or weeks, often being very harsh with strikebreakers.

Often some mondine were arrested, in some strikes there were deaths, and overall they were acknowledged as extremely determined. While strikes and protests weren’t always successful, they managed to get better work conditions: pay raises, getting 1kg of rice for every day of work (which would then be sold back at home, or used for cooking), and even agreements to an 8-hours workday between 1906 and 1912 (different areas adopted it at different times).

Strikes became less frequent but never disappeared: WWI meant adding anti-war songs to their repertoire, and many of them had become more politically conscious during the previous decade. There was a big strike in 1927 when, due to a drop in rice’s price, it was decided to lower mondine’s salary by a staggering 30%. Mondine organized with the help of the (then underground) Italian Communist Party. Strikes began and police intervened, arresting about 100 people, culminating in 10000 mondine and farm hands protesting on 30 June 1927. They were successful and there was no more talk of salary cuts.

Similarly, in the spring of 1944 there were several strikes across almost all rice-producing areas, once again with the support of underground Resistance groups, and in many areas mondine got a better pay, more and better food, and the right to stop working during air raids. Many Socialist and Communist clandestine newspapers praised these strikes and showed great solidarity, recognizing in the mondine as comrades in the fight against oppression.

Mondine were famous for their close bond with each other and their stubborn determination. Being a mondina allowed many women to find a bit of independence ant a time when mainstream culture told them they could be daughters and mothers but not their own person, and showed them that obtaining change was possible.

Mondine were quite common well into the 50s and one may argue that they became even more common as the production of rice increased and spread. Nowadays their memory is kept alive by the cori delle mondine, choirs founded by ex-mondine to keep alive their songs (and usually branching out with other folk songs of their time). Some of them are quite popular and had tours abroad, and while many of the singers are quite old they eagerly take in new, young singers to pass on their memories and traditions. It's a very important part of our local history and I'm happy to know it'll be kept alive for a while longer.

Twelve, fifteen hours each day in knee-high water, bent to harvest and plant rice. This for 40 days, far from home, eating polenta and rice, sleeping on straw in shacks. When we work talking is forbidden, and if one talks we're reprehended and threatened. But at least we can sing. So when we want to communicate, maybe that one of us is ill or that there's going to be a strike, we start to sing.

(Bruna Salerni, an ex-mondina and syndicalist from Lombardy)

There’s been a few Italian movies where the protagonist is a mondina, if you’re curious about them I endorse Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice), which is a drama about women’s autonomy and exploitation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Rice)

[gabbiani-ipotetici]

BANDIERA ROSSA (CANZONE ORIGINALE) (1 MAGGIO 2022)

BANDIERA ROSSA (CANZONE ORIGINALE)_TestoAvanti o popolo, alla riscossaBandiera rossa, bandiera rossaAvanti o popolo, alla riscossaBandiera r

Bandiera Rossa is one of the most famous Socialist/Communist songs.

The Socialist version was written in 1908 and the Communist tweaks after WWII., but there's good reason to believe it was based on an even older song. It has enjoyed an amazing success, having been translated into many languages and is still sung today. For its history, I think it fits well today's post.

Italian and English Lyrics: https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/music/lyrics/it/bandiera-rossa.htm

[gabbiani-ipotetici]

Italy has a long, long history when it comes to Socialism and Anarchism. Communism, too, since 1912, but it became a party officially separated from the Italian Socialist Party only in 1921 and thus its history in Italy is closely tied to Fascism (and its fight against it), while Socialism and Anarchism and their ideals were well-established and had already developed their own identity well before Fascism; they influenced Italy's history deeply, and they both faced many hardships (often self-inflicted).

Socialism and Communism can be confusing terms, especially when looking back at their history: sometimes they are synonyms, sometimes they are different facets of the same movement, and sometimes (and definitely in the last century or so) they’ve been separated movements. The First International saw a myriad of what today we’d call leftist/progressive currents, all debating and discussing trying to find common ground (and sometimes failing, leaving, and so on). Of course, declaring oneself’s belonging to this or that specific current was a matter of pride, but the edges were often blurred.

We also have to remember that at the time, in a world rapidly changing due to the Industrial Revolution, where people’s way of living changed dramatically in many areas, the people revolting and asking for more rights often had more pressing matters than finding out exactly what sub-current of progressive ideas they were expressing through their actions.

Marx and Engels defined most of the progressive thinkers that came before them as “Utopian Socialists”: envisioning an equal, perfect future, but lacking the understanding of the roots of inequality and class struggle (often not admitting its existence at all). Of course, sometimes they were more down to Earth than that, but it’s true that they often were intellectuals that lacked first-hand experience and understanding.

In case you didn’t know, the Communist Manifesto fared very poorly at first. It became more famous in the 1870s, during/after the First Internationale (where Marx played a huge role) and the rise of Socialist parties and associations across all of Europe in the following years. You might remember that at the time Italy’s progressive movements were becoming disillusioned with its new king and State, and at the same time various independent associations based on Socialist ideals were blooming almost everywhere, many of them with a strong focus on helping each other. In 1882 Italy saw the birth of the Partito Operaio (Factory Workers’ Party), in 1892 the Partito dei Lavoratori (Workers’ Party, which later became officially the Socialist Party), and for once it looked like political ideals were flowing in the same direction and fusing together, instead of fracturing and splintering. There was the first openly Socialist member of Parliament, too!

Before 1882 Socialism and Anarchism had been very closely tied in Italy, but there was a lot of tension between the two because many anarchists (especially individualist anarchists) wanted an immediate change by any means, while socialists usually preferred a different approach based on gradual reforms and waiting for the right moment to overthrow the status quo.

This led to the socialists deciding to find their own, independent way, and some could say they had the right idea since they managed to gain more workers’ rights (especially when it came to women and children), they slowly gained consensus and in 1906 there was a major victory with the first Italian union being established. This was helped by slow, gradual reforms that extended voting rights to more and more people, which usually meant that more workers gained the right to vote and thus made following reforms easier, and so on.

There were also several reforms not directly related to work that the Socialist party and movements supported, like making school education mandatory until 12 years of age in 1904, but if you remember my grandfather’s story, you know that it was very rarely enforced, especially in rural areas. Many of those reforms were gradually actualized and laid the foundation for the rights we enjoy today, so having a strong Socialist party was definitely a good thing, but infighting and splintering were a constant threat to its well-being.

We have to remember that Mussolini, too, was once a fierce, famous member of the Socialist Party. He quickly understood how journalism could be used to spread subversive ideas and reach a lot of people, he was learned, he was outspoken and got into trouble. He also displayed a great skill in using the newspaper he was editor of (the Avanti!, a very popular one) for his own purposes.

But, when he very vocally changed his opinion about Italy joining WWI (from extremely pacifist, to neutral, to interventionist in a few months), he had to resign from the newspaper and this caused a deep fracture between him and the Socialist Party. He became more and more extreme, seeing war as the one true way to change society and create new leaders and ruling class. Well, you know how that turned out.

At the time the Socialist Party also had to face the political and ideological consequences of the Russian Revolution (and the Italian Communist Party’s split), and Italy was troubled by unrest and rebellions due to WWI effects on the population. Unfortunately, instead of rallying around their core principles and standing strong together, the Socialist Party did what it does best and started the infighting again, big time. So of course they were all fractured and divided when Mussolini and his squadristi decided to wreck Socialist party houses, their newspapers’ offices, and beat and kill a bunch of Socialist politicians.

The Socialist Party’s reaction was slow and inadequate. The Party finally got a moment of unity after Giacomo Matteotti’s murder. He was the Party’s new central figure and he relentlessly denounced every fraud, bought vote, irregularity, etc. he saw during the 1924’s elections, and so he was kidnapped and murdered. Unfortunately, it was too little, too late, and so in the following years many renowned socialists were murdered, imprisoned, exiled, or escaped (and tried to keep fighting on the diplomatic battlefield from abroad). Many others, of course, kept fighting on Italian soil, but the Party was hit heavily in its structure and was made illegal.

I once heard someone say that “unfortunately, the Socialist Party survived the war, but it didn’t survive the peace”, and I think that’s a good way to put it: two years after WWII ended, internal and external tensions (thanks, Cold War!) led to a crisis and there was a major split. The constant splitting and rebranding of the party became so common that you can hear jokes about it even today, when the Party is almost non-existent. Despite that, during the years it often promoted many important laws that allowed for big social changes, showing the ability to understand their fight isn’t just based on class struggle, but on erasing every and all injustices and discrimination, while the Italian Communist Party often lacked that foresight and refused to look at social issues from a perspective different from purely class struggle, rejecting any and all intersectionalism.

I’ve never known the “true” Italian Socialist Party (and its many significant splinters), when I started getting interested in politics it was already a zombie that kept going on by pure inertial force. I heard many things about it, most of them bad, but then in high school I learned about what it once was, what it achieved despite itself, and I can’t help but feel attached to this phenomenon that lasted more than a century, that is still alive in the minds and hearts of many Italians that, each year, hope desperately that this time is the one, our Left will re-learn what once made it great and we’ll have a new party that embodies the good qualities of the old Socialist Party, not just the bad ones. And each year we’re let down, and each year we mend our broken ideals and get ready to do what we can, even if it’s only at a local level. You have to start somewhere, right? That’s what we did once, and it worked. Despite everything, despite past and present and future disappointments, we have to fight, because that’s how those ideals survived two world wars, 40 years of international tensions, murders, betrayals and infighting. You can’t kill an ideal, as long as someone believes in them, right?

Ok, maybe that last bit made you believe that I consider myself a Socialist, or maybe a Communist. I don’t.

I grew up steeped in these politics and ideals, listening to my grandpa breaking down Communism into simple examples I could understand when I was a child, listening to old Partisans telling me about what kept them alive one more day, and it all made a lot of sense to me. However… I never liked the idea of a political party, not really. Blame it on Italian politicians and their unparalleled skill for turning everything they touch into garbage, but the news I heard and read made me understand quickly that: 1) many people change when they gain power, and: 2) it’s impossible for everyone to agree on everything, and being a stubborn and brainy kid I mistrusted deeply the same-thinking I sometimes saw in leftist parties.

Growing up, I somehow stumbled upon the concept of anarchy and Anarchism, and I loved it, especially the bits about trying to behave in a way that benefits everyone not because someone tells you so, or for fear of punishment, but because it’s clearly the right thing to do, both morally and also because it’s... what makes sense. I know this is an overused metaphor, but it really was as if a switch was turned on in my brain.

Our family had recently got connected to the Internet and I had discovered forums, so I did a bit of research and reading and I remember being mostly confused but also pleasantly surprised by the many different ideas, stances and opinions that were allowed to cohabit (more or less) peacefully. It took me a while to realize that this was my political identity and that there was a place for me in that family, if I wanted. It took me even longer to learn that the roots of that family were deep, reaching to even before the Italian Unification.

Did you know that Bakunin toured Italy in 1864? Or that one of the “big ones” of the Risorgimento patriots is considered by many to be the first Italian anarchist? Or that it was an Italian anarchist, Luigi Lucheni, that killed Empress Elizabeth “Sissi” of Austria?

Bakunin’s visit didn’t look like a success, at first. It did polarize opinions and there was definitely a movement by the time he left, but it had trouble gaining traction. They worked hard, wrote, and generally pestered people, until by the early 1880s there were several charismatic anarchic intellectuals that managed to build a following and spread their ideas, among them Errico Malatesta, that later traveled a lot (in part because exiled from Italy for a while), spreading Anarchist ideals around the world and considered done of the most important early writers when it comes to Anarchic theory.

As I mentioned earlier, at first Anarchism and Socialism were very close in Italy, but anarchists’ penchant for revolts and pushing for immediate change caused tensions until the Socialists went their own separate way. And looking at the number of royals and politicians killed by Italian anarchists, one can hardly blame them for wanting to keep their distance!

The very nature of Anarchism means that there were no leaders, but the State’s suppression and resulting emigration of “famous” exponents meant that they lacked any kind of inspirational/ centralizing figure. Despite that, the beginning of the new century saw a more relaxed situation (with the occasional uprising or murder, of course), and many took the chance to focus more on a less individualistic and more collectivist approach: strikes, protests, and other organized events. Most Italian Anarchists also opposed Italy taking part in WWI, and were very vocal about that.

Malatesta came back to Italy in 1919 and there was a new drive thanks to the focus of progressive parties and movements on unions, something that many anarchists definitely liked. Despite what was about to happen, it was definitely a period of growth and productivity for Anarchism as a whole.

Of course, this didn’t last: during the rise and apex of Fascism, many Anarchists were imprisoned, exiled, or forced to flee the country. Those who stayed fought fiercely, and we know that they often had unexpectedly good results in several conflicts in 1922 (like Parma and Sarzana, I’m going to talk about them in a later post). They also wrote a lot in many illegal newspapers, and many acted alone and are thus difficult to trace.

Of those that went abroad, several found a cause in the Spanish Civil War of 1936, despite the open opposition of the Marxist faction of the rebels (who often shot their former brothers in arms). Of course, many Anarchists fought more openly after the Badoglio Declaration, and there were some Anarchist partisan brigades.

After WWII, there was an explosion of, at last, openly Anarchist newspapers and organizations. Many think that the experiences of the war and the new ties with foreign organizations born thanks to the many exiles brought new ideas and points of view, but soon, like for the Socialist Party, ideological divergences emerged.

Of course, when talking about Anarchism any kind of organization and coordination is difficult due to its anti-authoritarian core, but in this case there were serious difficulties in reaching agreements over matters of huge importance like whether voting or not in the 2 June 1946 referendum (the one deciding between monarchy or republic). It was a mess.

The 60s and 70s were an atrocious time. Anarchists were often blamed for terrorist acts that were part of the strategy of tension (very famous is Giuseppe Pinelli, who was very probably murderd by the police and his death faked as a suicide), or manipulated by infiltrated fascists to strike where they wanted. There was more splintering into smaller organizations. On the other hand, the Italian ‘68 meant a rediscovery of values closer to Anarchist ones for many young people, and many Anarchists allied with feminist and ecologist movements, which were starting to become more important in Italy. It was a period of turmoil and change, and while many were rightfully scared,  the movement survived and adapted.

For better and for worse, nowadays Internet makes very easy to find like-minded people, to learn, to spread ideas. It makes easier to feel a bit less alone and to organize a protest, a party, a charity sale. Italian Anarchism is alive and well on the ‘net, and in the streets: there are several physical locations where you can go and talk to people, there’s an online blog that posts often, there’s a weekly magazine. There are people helping to resist evictions, people trying to pass laws in cities big and small, people organizing soup kitchens. People working hard and changing minds one day at a time, having to compromise each and every time there’s a political election, trying to find that elusive balance we have to face between rejecting hierarchies and doing what will help our communities now.

a few years ago I went to Bologna’s Pride parade. We walked in front of the local Anarchist association’s house, and three guys joined the parade with flags that were, if I remember correctly, anarcho-queer. I asked the guy what was it all about, and he told me: “Well, I think that queer rights are extremely important, so I wanted to do something to show that we support queer people and our place it’s a safe space, so I proposed a motion and we talked about it and some didn’t want to come because the parade is a “sellout”, but these two guys came with me and here we are!” And then we chatted a bit and he was just so happy that someone had recognized their presence, he beamed when I told him I’m queer and an Anarchist too and he tried to convince me to go to some of their meetings.

And after that brief chat, that lasted maybe two minutes, I was reminded why I love this movement so much: all of the people that are bound to make mistakes because they’re only human, but that at their core believe that we owe each other respect and empathy, that we can talk and discuss and solve issues if we all put in enough effort, that you can and should ask questions and find your own answer, that believe in community and being kind, that are ready to jump in and help you because we’re all family, and even if sometimes you disagree or argue or won’t talk to each other for a year, there’s a seat at the table with your name and you’re welcome to sit down anytime you want.

[cooperhoward]

i just found out merriam webster has a time traveler feature that tells you some of the words that were “born” the same year as you. it’s pretty neat yall should do this

[xpyu]

new tag yourself game: pick 3 words “born” in ur year that describe u. im geocaching, dark web and abandonware

[gabbiani-ipotetici]

Today we’ll take a step back to the Risorgimento and Italian unification. We’re going to travel forward until we reach Fascism and WWII again, but I think it’s important to understand what happened before that, what kind of people were the ones that were 30, 40, 50 years old in the 1920s, what was their cultural context. And also, where did all that Communism and Socialism come from?

You probably know that Italy, as a State, is pretty young: 1861 is the official date, but depending on what you’re focusing on you could say it’s a process that took from 1815 (Congress of Vienna) to 1918 (end of WWI). Almost everyone agrees on the 1848-1871 period as the most topical one, spanning from the First Italian War of Independence to the capture of Rome.

In case you’re interested to learn more, the English wiki page is well done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_unification

You can see how summarizing a century of messy politics and wars is next to impossible, so I’ll assume that you know the gist of it. I’ll just point out some facts that usually aren’t taught in schools starting with the most important one: the Italian unification was (mostly) a drawn-out conquest and colonization. At the time the country was fractured into several kingdoms, all of them fighting against each other and other European countries. Italy was woefully late to the creation of a nation-state, and many intellectuals pushed for an Italian unification to happen. Of course, no one could agree on how it should happen, who should lead it, what kind of rights and ideals espouse, and so on. Some of them looked at the French Revolution as an example, others wanted a clerical State led by the Pope, others wanted a king; some wanted one nation, others a federation of kingdoms; some wanted to take back Lombardy and Veneto from Austria as soon as possible, others thought they had to establish the new state first, and so on.

In the years leading to the First Italian War of Independence, a lot of people felt restless, unsatisfied with the status quo, and tried to do something, anything. Carboneria was one of the most widespread revolutionary groups: starting from Southern Italy, they soon had many local cells working in secret to organize similar-minded folks, often finding recruits among the middle class and intellectuals. They were strongly inspired by the French Revolution and its ideals and by Freemasons, and they were quite anti-clerical. They hated Napoleon III, considering him a traitor of revolutionary ideals, and once almost succeeded in killing him! While some historians think they didn’t actually do much when it comes to results, they surely played an important role: many future leaders of the new Italy were part of Carboneria at some point in their lives, and their own ideals were a direct consequence of Carbonari ones.

There was in general a strong push towards more rights and equality. Apart from the influence of the French Revolution (remember that a sizeable piece of Italy was conquered by/decided to join Napoleon and became the Kingdom of Italy for ten years), many intellectuals were exiled and so found themselves living all across Europe, learning about other countries’ ideas and politics.

There was also a strong romanticization of the Roman Empire and of the Renaissance, often getting historical facts quite wrong (sometimes because history was less accurate at the time, sometimes due to propaganda). Many of the writings of the time are almost ridiculous now, talking about a mythical Italy that never existed. This constant looking back at past glories further showed how many people agreed that Italy should be one country again, but exactly what kind of country would it be was unclear.

The 1820s and 1830s saw a lot of uprisings across all of Italy, but they all were unsuccessful. In the South, revolutionaries often failed to get the populace’s approval, while in the North the Austrian army proved too strong and organized to be beaten. I do want to point out that Southern Italy did have its share of intellectuals and regular folks that wanted a better life and more rights and hated the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, contrary to the popular belief that they were lazy, complacent, or scared and thus had to be “freed” by the oh so progressive Northern army.

This is one of the worst and most widespread myths about the Italian unification: that the good, progressive King of Sardinia fought valiantly to bring progressive ideals to underdeveloped Central and Southern Italy. It was one kingdom conquering another, imposing its own ideas and customs on the conquered, and treating them as second-class citizens.

The “fight against brigands” that happened after the Unification was, at times, really a fight against Borbone supporters that rejected the new Savoia government, or people who simply didn’t like the reforms of the new government (especially army conscription). Sometimes, well, they were common criminals that saw an opportunity and took it. What’s sure is that many people weren’t happy with the new government, and were quite vocal about it.

I need to point out that the Borbone weren’t good kings. Their court was considered intellectual and refined, they had some excellent universities and the nobles enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, but their kingdom was quite behind when it came to people’s rights, agriculture and economy. Field workers had few rights, were tied to their land in a way similar to serfs, and the fabulous life of the elite came at the expense of the many.

However, what the Savoia did, especially how they did it, shows us that they just wanted to erase a dangerous enemy and acquire Southern Italy’s resources for themselves. Garibaldi said, later in his life, that he had regrets about helping conquer Southern Italy and that those folks were right to despise and oppose him because he too understood that he just helped replace one king with another.

Another big issue was the so-called “Roman Question”, aka: what to do with Rome? At the time it was a powerful, separate state. Many intellectuals had already planned to make it the new capital due to its position and cultural relevance, but there was the itsy bitsy matter of conquering it, and what to do with the Pope. Many wanted Rome to be conquered, while others felt the Pope’s dominion shouldn’t be questioned (in part to avoid diplomatic issues with other countries). Meanwhile, the Pope carefully avoided recognizing the new Italian State, but in 1871 (so 10 years after the Kingdom of Italy was born) Rome was conquered at last.

Of relevance is the “Non expedit” policy that Pope Pio IX promoted: it basically said that if you declared yourself catholic, you couldn’t take part in Italian parliamentary elections, thus creating a difficult situation for many Italians. Many catholics didn’t like nor understand this and it was softened during later years, but until its complete abrogation in 1919 you couldn’t be a catholic and be an active citizen. It created an ideological rift that only ended with Fascism.

The Pope wasn’t the only one that didn’t like the outcome or the Unification: many of its supporters were anticlerical and so were bitterly disappointed by the Pope being allowed to live and hold lands inside the Italian country, seeing it as an unnecessary compromise. Others didn’t really approve of a monarchic State, wanting instead a republic. Others didn’t mind a monarchy but realized that the Savoia weren’t as progressive as they hoped.

Plus, the country was a patchwork of different cultures and languages, with wildly different needs. Massimo d’Azeglio famously said: "L'Italia è fatta. Restano da fare gli italiani" (Italy has been made. Now we have to create Italians), and that’s a painfully true statement. Living conditions were often difficult for working-class folks, the government decided to joint the other European states in Africa's colonization and claim its share (requiring soldiers), some areas that were considered culturally Italians were part of other nations, and when folks revolted they were often met with harsh repression (which sometimes led to civilian deaths).

It was clear that having a national state wasn’t a magical cure-all, so soon people’s unrest started again, and this time many of them looked at socialism and anarchism for answers.

[gabbiani-ipotetici]

Giorgio Gaber was a man of many talents: an actor, composer, singer, playwright, with cutting, clever texts. He often satirized current events but was also capable of doing stuff like creating a song based on the experience of shampooing one's hair (and have it be relatable and make sense).

In this famous piece, Qualcuno era comunista (Someone was communist) he talks about widespread reasons why Italian people were communist in the past and current years (current being the early 90s). It's a spoken piece, the quality isn't great, my translation, as usual, is way less effective than the original, but I think it offers a very good perspective about why so many Italian people believed in this ideal, while also pointing out its many flaws. It's a bit long, but I think the ending absolutely hits the nail on the head. Look at his face while he's saying the last few lines, look at these emotions. That's the face of someone who truly believed in that dream.

(This song is also the origin of this Tumblr's name, for context)

Original text

No, non è vero io, non ho niente da rimproverarmi, voglio dire, non mi sembra di aver fatto delle cose gravi. La mia vita? Una vita normale, non ho mai rubato, neanche in casa da piccolo. Non ho ammazzato nessuno figuriamoci. Lavoro, ho una famiglia, pago le tasse, non mi sembra di avere delle colpe. Non ho fatto neanche l’assessore, per dire.

Aaah voi parlavate di prima… prima, prima mi sono comportato come tutti. Come mi vestivo? Mi vestivo… mi vestivo come ora. Magari non proprio come ora... sì, jeans maglione… l’eskimo. Perché? Non va bene? Ma era comodo. Cosa cantavo? Questa poi, volete sapere cosa cantavo, ma sì certo, anche canzoni popolari sì, Ciao bella ciao, devo parlare più forte? Sì Ciao bella ciao l’ho cantata, e anche l’Internazionale, però in coro eh.

Sì quello sì lo ammetto, ci sono andato sì. Li ho visti anch’io gli Intillimani. Però non ho pianto. Come? Se in camera ho delle foto? Che discorsi, certo, le foto dei miei genitori, mia moglie, mia f… manifesti? Non ricordo… forse uno, piccolo... Che Guevara. Ma cos’è un processo questo qui? Noooo quello no, io il pugno non l’ho mai fatto, il pugno no, mai. Forse una volta,  ma un pugnettino piccolo, proprio. Come? Se ero comunista? Mi piacciono le domande dirette eh. No no finalmente, perché adesso non ne parla più nessuno, tutti fanno finta di niente, e invece è giusto chiarirle queste cose, una volta per tutte. Oooh, se ero comunista? Mah! In che senso? No voglio dire…

Qualcuno era comunista perché era nato in Emilia.

Qualcuno era comunista perché il nonno, lo zio, il papà. .. la mamma no.

Qualcuno era comunista perché vedeva la Russia come una promessa, la Cina come una poesia, il comunismo come il paradiso terrestre.

Qualcuno era comunista perché si sentiva solo.

Qualcuno era comunista perché aveva avuto un’educazione troppo cattolica.

Qualcuno era comunista, perché il cinema lo esigeva, il teatro lo esigeva, la pittura lo esigeva, la letteratura anche, lo esigevano tutti.

Qualcuno era comunista perché “la storia è dalla nostra parte”.

Qualcuno era comunista perché glielo avevano detto.

Qualcuno era comunista perché non gli avevano detto tutto.

Qualcuno era comunista perché prima, prima-prima, era fascista.

Qualcuno era comunista perché aveva capito che la Russia andava piano, ma lontano.

Qualcuno era comunista perché Berlinguer era una brava persona.

Qualcuno era comunista perché Andreotti non era una brava persona.

Qualcuno era comunista perché era ricco, ma amava il popolo.

Qualcuno era comunista perché beveva il vino, e si commuoveva alle feste popolari.

Qualcuno era comunista perché era così ateo, che aveva bisogno di un altro Dio.

Qualcuno era comunista perché era talmente affascinato dagli operai, che voleva essere uno di loro.

Qualcuno era comunista perché non ne poteva più di fare l'operaio.

Qualcuno era comunista perché voleva l'aumento di stipendio.

Qualcuno era comunista perché la rivoluzione, oggi no, domani forse, ma dopodomani sicuramente.

Qualcuno era comunista perché la borghesia il proletariato la lotta di classe, cazzo.

Qualcuno era comunista per fare rabbia a suo padre.

Qualcuno era comunista perché guardava solo Rai Tre.

Qualcuno era comunista per moda, qualcuno per principio, qualcuno per frustrazione.

Qualcuno era comunista perché voleva statalizzare tutto.

Qualcuno era comunista perché non conosceva gli impiegati statali, parastatali e affini.

Qualcuno era comunista perché aveva scambiato il materialismo dialettico, per il vangelo secondo Lenin.

Qualcuno era comunista perché era convinto di avere dietro di sé la classe operaia.

Qualcuno era comunista perché era più comunista degli altri.

Qualcuno era comunista perché c'era il grande Partito Comunista.

Qualcuno era comunista malgrado ci fosse il grande Partito Comunista.

Qualcuno era comunista perché non c'era niente di meglio.

Qualcuno era comunista perché abbiamo il peggiore partito socialista d'Europa.

Qualcuno era comunista perché lo stato peggio che da noi, solo l’Uganda.

Qualcuno era comunista perché non ne poteva più di quarant'anni di governi democristiani, incapaci e mafiosi.

Qualcuno era comunista perché Piazza Fontana, Brescia, la stazione di Bologna, l'Italicus, Ustica eccetera eccetera eccetera

Qualcuno era comunista perché chi era contro era comunista.

Qualcuno era comunista perché non sopportava più quella cosa sporca che ci ostiniamo a chiamare democrazia.

Qualcuno credeva di essere comunista, e forse era qualcos'altro.

Qualcuno era comunista perché sognava una libertà diversa da quella americana.

Qualcuno era comunista perché credeva di poter essere vivo e felice solo se lo erano anche gli altri.

Qualcuno era comunista perché aveva bisogno di una spinta verso qualcosa di nuovo, perché era disposto a cambiare ogni giorno, perché sentiva la necessità di una morale diversa.

Perché forse era solo una forza, un volo, un sogno. Era solo uno slancio, un desiderio di cambiare le cose, di cambiare la vita.

Qualcuno era comunista perché, con accanto questo slancio, ognuno era... come più di sé stesso. Era come due persone in una. Da una parte, la personale fatica quotidiana, e dall'altra il senso di appartenenza a una razza, che voleva spiccare il volo, per cambiare veramente la vita.

No, niente rimpianti. Forse anche allora molti avevano aperto le ali, senza essere capaci di volare, come dei gabbiani ipotetici.

E ora? Anche ora, ci si sente come in due. Da una parte l'uomo inserito, che attraversa ossequiosamente lo squallore della propria sopravvivenza quotidiana, e dall'altra il gabbiano senza più neanche l'intenzione del volo, perché ormai il sogno si è rattrappito.

Due miserie in un corpo solo.

Translation

My notes between []

[In the introduction, Gaber lists a series of stereotypes associated with Italian communists in the form of a fake dialogue: what they wore, listening to folk Resistance songs, raising the fist, etc.]

No, that’s not true, I have nothing to be ashamed of, I mean, I haven't done anything really bad. My life? A normal one, I never stole, not even at home as a kid. I never killed anyone, of course. I work, I have a family, I pay taxes, I don’t think I’m guilty of anything. Say, I’ve never been an assessor, even.

Aaah, you’re talking about the past... in the past, in the past I behaved like anyone else. What I wore? I wore… I wore what I wear now. Well, maybe not exactly the same… jeans, sweaters… an eskimo. [“eskimo” in Italian is synonym with parka, and in the 70s was strongly associated with young communists, especially students] Why? It’s not ok? Well, it was comfy! What songs I sang? Well, you want to know what I sang, of course I sang folk songs, Ciao bella ciao, I need to speak louder? Yes, I sang Ciao bella ciao, and The Internationale too, but in a group.

Yes, I admit it, I went. Yes, I saw the Inti-Illimani. But I didn’t cry! What? If I have pictures in my room? But of course I do, my parents’, my wife, my d… Posters? I don’t remember… maybe a small one.. Che Guevara. But, what’s this, a trial? Nooo, I didn’t do that, I never raised my fist, ever. Ok, maybe once, but it was a small one, really. What? Was I a communist? I like direct questions! No, no, finally, nowadays no one talks about it, but it’s right to make things clear, once and for all. Oh, if I was a communist? What do you mean?!, No, I mean…

Someone ["qualcuno" in this text could be translated as both someone/some people] was a communist because they were born in Emilia.

Someone was a communist because their grandpa, uncle, dad were… Not mom. [women were often underrepresented because of a strong societal pressure to conform to Christian values and roles, and also because many leftist groups were very quite misogynist]

Someone was a communist because they saw Russia as a promise, China as a poem, and Communism as Heaven on Earth.

Someone was a communist because they felt alone.

Someone was a communist because their upbringing was too much Catholic.

Someone was a communist because cinema required it, theatre required it, art required it, literature too, everyone required it. [a critique of how, especially during the 70s, art criticism/studies were almost a Communist monopoly so you had to “fit in” politically if you wanted to take part in them]

Someone was a communist because “history’s on our side!” He facepalms

Someone was a communist because they were told so.

Someone was a communist because they weren’t told everything. [aka, they wouldn’t have been, hat they known about communist regimes’ crimes]

Someone was a communist because earlier, waaay earlier, they were fascists.

Someone was a communist because they understood that Russia was slow, but would go a long way. [this piece is from a few years after the URSS collapse, so it's deliberately sarcastic]

Someone was a communist because Berlinguer was a good person. [Enrico Berlinguer probably was the most popular leader ever of the Italian Communist Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Berlinguer ]

Someone was a communist because Andreotti wasn’t a good person. [Giulio Andreotti, politician, ex Prime Minister, famous for corruption and Cosa Nostra associations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giulio_Andreotti ]

Someone was a communist because they were rich, but they loooved the common folk.

Someone was a communist because they got drunk and got emotional at town festivals. [probably talking about Festa de l’Unità, where older folks tend to get drunk and reminisce]

Someone was a communist because they were so much of an atheist, they needed another God.

Someone was a communist because they were so fascinated by factory workers, they wanted to be one.

Someone was a communist because they were fed up with being a factory worker.

Someone was a communist because they wanted a raise.

Someone was a communist because we won’t have the revolution today, tomorrow… maybe, the day past tomorrow for sure!

Someone was a communist because “bourgeoises, proletariat, class struggle, fuuuck!” [here Gaber is parodying a kind of superficial intellectual approach to communist theory that’s way too common]

Someone was a communist because they wanted to anger their father

Someone was a communist because they watched exclusively Rai Tre. [one of the once more left leaning public TV channels]

Someone was a communist because it was trendy, someone because of ideals, someone because they were frustrated.

Someone was a communist because they wanted to nationalize everything.

Someone was a communist because hadn’t met any government employee [here Gaber criticizes the enormous Italian bureaucratic nightmare that is the world of government employment, rife with nepotism and people doing their best to work as little as possible]

Someone was a communist because they took dialectical materialism for the Lenin’s Gospel.

Someone was a communist because they were sure they had the working class behind them.

Someone was a communist because they were more communist than everyone else.

Someone was a communist because there was the great Communist Party.

Someone was a communist despite the great Communist Party.

Someone was a communist because there wasn’t anything better.

Someone was a communist because we had the worst socialist party in all of Europe.

Someone was a communist because the only state worse than ours is Uganda’s.

Someone was a communist because they were fed up after forty years of governments that were Christian Democratic, incompetent, and colluded with the mafia.

Someone was a communist because of Piazza Fontana, Brescia, Bologna railway station, Italicus, Ustica, etcetera etcetera etcetera [a list of domestic terrorist attacks and the Ustica massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itavia_Flight_870 I will have posts about them down the line]

Someone was a communist because to be against meant being communist.

Someone was a communist because they could no longer endure that dirty thing we call democracy.

Someone was a communist because they thought they were one, but maybe they were something else.

Someone was a communist because they dreamed of a freedom different from the American one.

Someone was a communist because they thought they could be free and happy only if everyone else was, too.

Someone was a communist because they needed a drive towards something new, because they were willing to change every day, because they felt a need for different morals.

Because maybe it was only energy, a flight, a dream. It was only a surge, a desire to change things, to change life for real.

Someone was a communist because, with this drive beside them, everyone was… more than themselves. Like two people in one. On one side, your personal daily struggle, on the other, the sense of belonging to a specie that wanted to take flight, to truly change life itself.

No, no regrets. Maybe even then many opened their wings without knowing how to fly, like some hypothetical seagulls.

And now? Even now, you feel like two people. On one side the fitting-in person that obsequiously walks across the bleakness of their everyday survival, and on the other that seagull, deprived even of the purpose of flight because the dream became numb.

Two miseries in one body.

[gabbiani-ipotetici]

I want to make one thing 100% clear: I’m not a historian.

What I’m sharing here is meant to give you my personal context, what kind of politics and ideals were the air I breathed while growing up, what is the context people from my age, geographical area and cultural background use when looking at current and past events. This means that, no matter how objective I might try to be, what I share is filtered through my personal, subjective point of view. For this reason, you’re more than welcome to point out mistakes I might make and ask questions (I might not have a ready answer, but I'm pretty sure I can point you in the right direction).

This postwill be very personal and subjective, because I’ll share a bit of my family’s history, to give you a context of the culture I grew up in. This post is long. If this doesn’t scare you, get ready to learn stuff about my maternal grandparents!

I was born and grew up in Northern Italy, in a small village near Reggio Emilia, one of the areas that saw many fights and deaths during the Resistance and that has always been very “red” (aka Socialist and Communist leaning) afterwards. My parents are both lower-middle class, but my grandparents on my mother’s side were very typical working-class people: grandpa was from a poor family of hired farm and factory workers, while grandma’s family was a bit luckier since they were mezzadri (a local kind of sharecropping) renting fertile land and a reasonable landowner.

Grandpa always was a staunch communist, while grandma’s politics were that weird and yet logical thing that was quite common in our area at the time: Catho-communism. All of her family was of course properly devout, but being farmers, Socialism simply made too much sense to them to be ignored, so they made the religion and the political affiliation work together somehow. When I asked her about it, she told me the words her father told her: “Good God gave us the fields and the sky, but it’s the People’s Cooperative that lends us the tractor”.

They weren’t an exception: many farmers heard about stuff like more rights, more education, more equality, compared them to their daily lives and to what they were taught about Christ, and saw a nice, neat fit. Of course, some priests gave them the side-eye, but as long as you went to church, had your kids baptized, and didn’t rock the boat, your own personal beliefs were tolerated in many villages (not all of them, of course).

On the other hand, being openly a socialist and an atheist (or a communist) was a different matter. Depending on where you lived it might mean a life of ostracism even well before and after Fascism. Grandpa was lucky because in our area many, many folks were openly leftist and he was able to meet with folks from outside his village, some of them more learned than him.

At the time Italy was enormously behind when it came to education and even basic literacy. Grandma was lucky: tractors becoming more widespread and an extremely fertile land meant that her father and her two older brothers could handle most farm work on their own and she completed both elementary and middle school (very uncommon at the time for people from her social class), then attended a sewing course and became a seamstress. Her father was extremely proud of her and always said that letting her get an education was the best thing he ever did, allowing her to move up in the world a bit and work from home, instead of being tied to a farm like he was.

My grandfather wasn’t so lucky: he took three years of elementary school and then he had to start working to support his family (he was the oldest brother). His real education came later, when politics led him to want to learn more, and while his handwriting always remained painsatkingly careful, full of mistakes, and used only when necessary, he routinely read and discussed the “big” socialist and communist authors. For many other men of his generation, leftist politics and movements were the first time that someone told them they could and should learn, become more. Not just politics, not just hope for a better future, but also the means to be, instead of just existing.

My grandpa was born in 1919, my grandma in 1931, so they had very different experiences of WWII.

Grandma memories are mostly uneventful, she was born when Fascism was a reality a decade old, and our village was mostly peaceful: it had almost no strategic value, so even when the civil war broke out Germans troops sent there were almost “on vacation” and usually behaved to avoid trouble (of course, they still were a foreign army/occupying force, they still confiscated food, they still made clear they were the ones in control, they still harassed local girls, etc., but it could have been much, much worse).

Local members of the Fascist party, those were the ones you had to look out for. They were the ones that would stop you in the middle of the road and search you to humiliate you, they were the ones that would gleefully tell the Germans about suspicious activities, they were the ones that savagely beat on a weekly basis a local communist man, spitting on him, laughing, and asking him to say “Viva il Duce!” and goose step (he never did it, often yelling “Fuck you and fuck the Duce!” back at them, and getting more beatings for it). Of course, the German soldiers were more than happy to sit back and have someone else do the dirty work for them, and keep the façade of being “reasonable”. Grandma told me that it was a very thin mask, and Germans and Fascists alike were despised by most of the village’s people, but the mayor was fascist and with some friends in the city, so they just waited and supported the Resistance by sending them food, clothes, and by having a few safe houses far from the village centre (all of this, of course, was very risky).

I mentioned earlier that grandma had two brothers. I know little about the oldest due to a family feud that started before I was born, but the middle one was very close to her and we all lived in the same house until he passed away when I was 7. I remember him as a very jolly, thoughtful and amiable fellow, always ready to draw farm animals for my brother and I, with an unparalleled love for grappa and cigarettes. He never married because his mother didn’t approve of the woman he was in love with and made him promise on her deathbed to never, ever marry her, and… he did, because he believed in promises and honour. He kept an active relationship with his beloved, but they never married or lived together. He was that kind of man.

Many, many years after his death, out of the blue grandma said: “Oh, did I ever mention that [Uncle] was a partisan?” and I was like, what?!, no you never told me! She didn’t tell me much, but I learned that Uncle refused to be conscripted and, together with a friend, hid among wood fascines in their farm’s attic for more than two weeks, with rats biting their feet, holding their breath every time they heard unfamiliar voices.

Grandma brought them food every day by means of a rope, a bucket, and a hole they made by removing a few bricks. She told me about the sadness and anguish she felt watching him go into the night, towards the hills, towards danger. She wouldn’t tell me anything about what happened to him while he was away and I didn’t press the matter because it was clear it was a painful topic, but I’m grateful that she shared that much with me.

She just told me: “He came back, he came back and he did the right thing by going, even if he knew his death would break all our hearts”. So, even in a relatively safe situation like my grandma’s, death and pain were expected. You never knew when you might receive a letter from the Army or from the partisans announcing the death of a loved one, or when a German command decided you had to be punished for someone else's slights. Fear, anguish and uncertainty were part of everyday life.

My grandfather was older, he should have been conscripted in the Army but he was partially deaf due to factory work and so he lucked out. Despite being very communist, he didn’t take part in any overt Resistance work because he had to provide for his siblings and mother, and so he couldn’t risk exposing himself. He didn’t get less vocal about his political views, though, and that alone was enough to get him insulted and threatened on a regular basis. He was very tall and built like a brick wall, so threats never became more than words, but he told me it was very unpleasant and unnerving. Many of his factory colleagues were socialists or communists too so it made things a bit easier, but the pressure was a lot and it was a very scary time for him.

I know that, after the Badoglio Proclamation, he joined the part of the Regia Aeronautica that fought alongside Allied forces (informally known as the Italian Co-Belligerent Air Force), serving mostly in a technician role due to his deafness. He never talked about it, but my mother told me that it was a very hard decision for him because doing so put his family in danger, since they were in the area occupied by Germans and RSI and thus could face retaliation, but thankfully it didn’t happen.

I think he never talked about it because, later in life, he was a very anti-militaristic man. While I think he did what he thought the right thing at the time to help his nation and its people, knowing him it’s very likely he had ambiguous feelings about having been part of any kind of army. Even his discharge paper is something I found only thanks to my mother, he never cared for it (but grandma kept a picture of him in his uniform in the living room, he was a very handsome young man and looks quite dashing in it).  Like my grandmother, he disliked any talk about that time. It was a time of poverty and isolation, and even if I think he didn’t regret his choices, he had to compromise his ideals and that’s never easy.

Why am I telling you this?

I grew up together with my maternal grandparents, sharing the same house from when I was born, until their deaths. They had a big part in raising me, and they shared their stories and ideals with both me and my brother, helping to shape us into the people we are today. And looking back, now I can see how their experiences shaped them.

My grandfather was a man of few words, but he taught us how to recognize bullshit in newspapers, tv news, and books. He taught us to never idolize politics. He taught us to always ask “why?” and to stand for what we believe in. All of this was from his experiences as a young (and then old) communist growing up in a world that didn’t want him to think for himself. He shared with us what he had to learn to survive in a harsher world, adapting it so we could understand the lesson.

Our grandma never lived outside the confines of our village. Sometimes she had to travel a couple hundred kms, but she disliked it, and up until her very last day she was a village woman. This meant that she could be quite small-minded at times because she knew no better, but her life experiences taught her to try and make an effort to understand.

This was especially true when it came to immigrants: Italy saw a big increase in the late 80s-early 90s (mainly from Eastern Europe and Northern Africa), and she was scared when confronted with change and with cultures and people she didn’t understand. She could be quite racist, frankly. And yet.

She talked with these new, strange, scary people. She asked them where they came from, about their families. And almost always, their stories were about what she remembered from her youth: wars, regimes, trying to find freedom and a better place. And you saw her think about it, her thoughts slowly changing, and then she wouldn’t magically become not racist, oh no, she would still say “those people” and shake her head when tv news talked about the “immigration emergency” and look suspiciously at brown and black folks, but she would also ask them what they needed, and give them fresh vegetables from the garden, or a couple of my grandpa’s old shirts, or some spare change, and sometimes she would say something like “They didn’t ask for war, they didn’t ask for this, this isn't right”.

Despite her small-minded way of thinking, her own experiences left her open to a “gut” kind of empathy, and she understood too well what it means to have to choose between your country and a chance at life. In her own way, she taught us that even if you don’t understand, you can and should still help. She taught us that the least you can do is listen to someone’s story and make them feel their voice is heard.

This is my maternal grandparents’ story. Just two people, but you can see how the war and the ideals of the time touched them and then, through their own words and actions, influenced me. Their stories are pretty common: almost any Italian my age or older has similar stories in their families, and almost everyone personally knows (or knew) a partisan. Almost everyone has stories of fear, desperation, hope, and bravery to share.

My generation and my parents’ didn’t live the war, didn’t live Fascism, but to us it’s not yet History: it’s memory, of our families, of our blood. To some of us, Socialism and Communism aren’t just words, political movements, or parties: they’re what gave our parents and grandparents strength and hope to fight, to go on, to survive, to try and create a better world for their descendants. They’re imperfect, they failed us and our country many times, but they’re real. No wonder, then, that many of us were inspired by those memories and ideals, and chose to follow them, or at least to use them as a starting point to continue that quest for a better, more just world.