Manipulating the Voice of the Other: On the Sagapò Army, Italiani Brava Gente, and Other Italian War Rumours of the Second World War

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article discusses the story of the armata sagapò as a war rumour, putting it in relation to three other unverified stories of the Second World War that circulated in post-war Italy, i.e. the anecdote of the Soviet dispatch number 630, the speech attributed to Churchill on the performance of the Folgore divisions at El Alamein, and the myth of Italiani brava gente. It shows that all the considered narratives were structured around a common process of ventriloquisation and, by relying on the sociological scholarship that has investigated the phenomenon of rumours, argues that the formation and circulation of these pieces of hearsay were related to the process of renegotiation of Italian identity that followed the collapse of Fascism. While doing this, the article questions the veracity of the story of the sagapò nickname putting forward a new explanation for its creation.