Italian Resistance Research Articles

Visible and Invisible: Tokening the Memory of the Holocaust in Fascist Concentration Camps

ABSTRACT This article explores commemorative plaques at former fascist concentration camps in Italy, focusing on how they reflect the memory of the Holocaust. Using lexical analysis to rank word frequency, the study identifies four narrative modes: Culpabilisation, Heroisation, Victimisation, and Redemption. Before the establishment of Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2000, plaques predominantly highlighted the Italian Resistance against Nazis, with minimal acknowledgement of the Holocaust. Although there has been a shift towards recognising the Holocaust since Law 211, the Resistance narrative remains central. Fascism is rarely mentioned, indicating a tendency to downplay Italy’s fascist past and its Nazi alliance. While these plaques meet legal requirements for remembrance, they often lack historical accuracy, focus on local events, and prioritise heroism over the recognition of atrocities and their perpetrators.

Song and poetic text Bella ciao in a mosaic of languages, cultures and arts

The development of textology and intertextuality opens up new perspectives in the interpretation of famous texts, including the song of the Italian Resistance participants Bella ciao . Its numerous polymodal representations in different languages and arts account for the need to systematize them on uniform methodological grounds. The material of the article is the song and poetic text in Italian dialects and in the common Italian neo-standard, its translations into Romance languages, interpretations in Russian, Caucasian and other languages, as well as multimedia and polychannel versions. The goal of the article is to discuss intertextual, semantic and semiotic parameters of the text; to establish the parameters of internal and external intertextuality of the versions of the original text; and to characterize the precedent phenomena serving as the basis for the development and transformation of their aesthetics. The study aims to build and interpret the precedent links and associations of the song Bella ciao in its intertextual transformations; to determine its specificity in the semiocultural conditions of reading and interpretation and at the same time to evaluate its place in the context of Italian and world culture. The methodology is based on a set of methods at the intersection of linguosemiotic, functional and semantic approaches focusing on such parameters of the text as precedence, variation, correlation of linguistic and non-linguistic codes, comparison of the original and translations, polycode, polymodal and translation transformations. The study has established that, as a result of numerous intertextual transformations, the original text expressing unique Italian cultural meanings acquires new interpretations acting as a starting point or the development of both precedent and new plots. It is used as a polycoded intersemiotic model for the creation of new interpretations and, in the long term, becomes a tool for the preservation and reproduction of cultural memory.

Prevalence and Characterization of Resistance Profiles of “Unusual” HCV Subtypes in Italy within the Italian Resistance Network Vironet C

Prevalence and Characterization of Resistance Profiles of “Unusual” HCV Subtypes in Italy within the Italian Resistance Network Vironet C

The problem of military leadership of the Corps of Volunteers for Freedom in Italy (1944-1945)

The article examines the problem of creation of the highest military leadership body of the Italian Resistance movement - the General Command of the Corps of Volunteers for Freedom (CVL). As an important aspect of this problem, author regards the creation of the post of Commander in Chief of the Corps, held by General Raffaele Cadorna (1889-1973) in November 1944 - May 1945, and the gradual solution of the issue of the lines of his authority. Author pays special attention to the Cadorna’s point of view on the issue and also reveals the involvement of members of the Committee of National Liberation for Northern Italy (CLNAI), representatives of the official Italian government and Anglo-American Allies in addressing this issue.

‘Queering the Textual Politics of Alba de Céspedes’s Prima e dopo’

Abstract Alba de Céspedes’s Prima e dopo (1955) has generally been interpreted within the framework of the Italian Resistance and the subsequent disillusionment of Resistance ideals. While taking this interpretation into account, I argue that the central narrative of desire in Prima e dopo is not Irene’s relationship with her lover, Pietro, but Irene’s subversive desire for her maid, Erminia. I analyse and challenge some of the mechanisms and methodologies of Italian literary historiography that create and reproduce the disregard and devaluation of queer desire, specifically lesbian desire, in Italian narratives, and I identify scholarly, cultural and textual mechanisms that have rendered queer desire in Prima e dopo invisible. In sum, this article contributes to an Italian lesbian archive and lesbian literary historiography and argues that a queer reading of Erminia’s role in Prima e dopo enhances our understanding of the post-Resistance framework of the novel and its radical politics.

Queering Two Resistance Novels: Historical Trauma, Open Secrets, and Non-Genealogical Plot in Carlo Coccioli’s Il migliore e l’ultimo and Beppe Fenoglio’s Il libro di Johnny

ABSTRACT A queer reading of Coccioli’s Il migliore e l’ultimo and Fenoglio’s Il libro di Johnny complicates the narration of the Italian Resistance by following a zig-zag path. This path begins on 8 September 1943, a traumatic day in which the national fiction fell apart, leaving the two novels’ heroes stranded without an army, a country, or a king. The path continues through the Resistance in the form of youth secession: the escape of thousands of young women and men away from home to build their own territorial, resistant communities. The last stage in this path consists of the rejection of the vertical link with the father and the establishment of horizontal connections between individuals who until recently were unknown to one another.

In silenzio senza disturbare nessuno. Claudio Sartori, Brescia 1913–Milano 1994 by Mariella Sala, Massimo Gentili-Tedeschi and Pinuccia Carrer

Reviewed by: In silenzio senza disturbare nessuno. Claudio Sartori, Brescia 1913–Milano 1994 by Mariella Sala, Massimo Gentili-Tedeschi and Pinuccia Carrer Paola Teresa Rossetti Milan In silenzio senza disturbare nessuno. Claudio Sartori, Brescia 1913–Milano 1994. By Mariella Sala, Massimo Gentili-Tedeschi, and Pinuccia Carrer. Milano: IAML Italia, 2021. [453 p. ISBN 978-88-943024-2-4, €40,00 https://shop.magazzinomusica.it/narrativa-e-saggistica/48005-in-silenzio-senza-disturbare-nessuno-claudio-sartori-brescia-1913-milano-1994-9788894302424.html] This book is an account of the personal and professional history of Claudio Sartori (1913– 1994)—the brilliant, yet withdrawn intellectual, the fine writer to whom we owe, amongst other achievements, the concept and realisation of the first systematic catalogue of printed Italian librettos up to 1800, and the pioneering Bibliografia della musica strumentale italiana stampata in Italia fino al 1700 (Firenze: Olschki, 1952). This tribute to the ‘father’ of Italian bibliography is a well-documented reconstruction of the visionary groundwork that has opened the way to research on Italian music sources. Sartori is, possibly, best known as the founder of the Ufficio Ricerca Fondi Musicali (URFM), established in Milan in 1965, with the ambitious goal to locate and catalogue the vastly scattered sources of Italy’s national musical heritage. The book conveys a comprehensive portrait of the man: from his family background and education, through his civic and political engagement, to his lifetime contribution as a newspaper commentator and music critic, as well as an eminent musicologist. The authors have unearthed, and painstakingly edited, a huge number of unpublished sources from public archives and private collections in Milan, Bologna, Turin, and other cities, bringing together the testimonies of a significant chapter of Italy’s music history in the twentieth century. A chapter that deals with post-war reconstruction of music libraries and the establishment of national and international networks of cooperation would not exist without strong willed individuals, like Sartori himself. The sheer number of documents retrieved and transcribed, at times from illegible calligraphy, constitutes a most valuable feature of the book. Reading through each of them is rather time-consuming, but the overall picture they afford is well worth the effort. As Tiziana Grande, president of IAML Italia notes in her preface, the volume, so necessary to young generations of aspiring musicologists, music bibliographers and librarians, is in fact ‘a book for everybody’ (p. 10), because we all need to be aware of the massive efforts made in order to save from decay and destruction, Italy’s enormous music heritage sources on paper. Mariella Sala’s chapter, ‘La giovinezza bresciana’ (Youth in Brescia), deals with Sartori’s early life. We learn about his family, education and further studies in his native city where he [End Page 74] forged close friendships with fellow-students such as the poet Vittorio Sereni—and in Pavia, where he met teachers like Giusto Zampieri, who played a role in shaping Sartori’s interests in music. The chapter reconstructs Sartori’s very first steps as a professional music bibliographer, librarian, and palaeographer. It was during the pre-war years that the scholar developed his lifelong interest for fellow-townsman Antonio Bazzini (1818–1897): violinist, composer, director of the Royal Conservatoire in Milan, he had taught Giacomo Puccini and Alfredo Catalani. The early 1940s marked, instead, the beginning of Sartori’s collaboration with I Classici Musicali Italiani, a seminal multipart monograph on Italian ancient music, initiated and directed by Giacomo Benvenuti, and to be issued in sixty volumes. The project came to a sudden halt, due to the chief editor’s untimely death, and the difficulties caused by the outbreak of World War II. Very little was known, until after Sartori’s death, about his active participation in the Italian Resistance. Sala recounts the events through contemporary accounts and documents, partly obtained from the Sartori family (see also, Mariella Sala, ‘La resistenza di Claudio Sartori’, in Accademie e società filarmoniche in Italia, studi e ricerche: dalle canzoni agli oratori, da Ernesto Cavallini a Claudio Sartori, creatività popolare e riflessioni colte, ed. Antonio Carlini [Trento: Società Filarmonica Trento, 2012], 123–158). Sartori, whose Jewish mother Pia had borne the brunt of Italian racial laws, went...

Bronzo incandescente. Dalla statua equestre di Mussolini a Il partigiano e la partigiana di Luciano Minguzzi

In 1929, an equestrian statue of Mussolini – made with the bronze of cannons stolen from the Austrian troops on August 8th, 1848 – was placed at the base of the Maratona tower, in the Littoriale stadium of Bologna. Torn down by the citizens after July 25th, 1943, its fragments had different destinies. After the war, the part representing the horse was melted and gave shape to two different statues by sculptor Luciano Minguzzi, depicting a boy and a girl, both partisans active in the Italian Resistance movement.

Деятельность Раффаэле Кадорны в составе Генерального командования Корпуса добровольцев свободы в Италии (1944–1945 гг.)

Importance. General Raffaele Cadorna Jr. (1889–1973) is one of the most important figures in the Italian resistance movement. In September 1944 he joined the General Command of the Corps of Volunteers for Freedom (CVL), which was the highest military leadership body of the Resistance, as a military adviser and in November 1944 he became the Commander in Chief of the guerrilla army. Despite the important positions held by the General in the leadership of the armed anti-fascist struggle, neither in the Russian historiography nor in any other one have existed specialized studies dedicated to his participation in the Resistance. Materials and Methods. The source base of the research includes official documents issued during the period under review by such bodies as the General Command of CVL and the Committee for National Liberation for Northern Italy (CLNAI) as well as sources of personal origin (memoirs of R. Cadorna). Accepted scientific methodology is used generally in the research process; own research is based on such principles as objectivism, historicism and systematicity. Results and Discussion. The attempt is made to examine the main aspects of Cadorna’s activities as a part of the General Command of CVL; to analyze the main problems that the participants of the Resistance movement faced in the autumn 1944 – spring 1945; to identify ways to solve them proposed by Cadorna (in cooperation with his colleagues from the General Command); to consider problems associated with the consolidation of scattered groups of insurgents in the unified guerrilla army (CVL) and effective management of its operations; to analyze the activities of Cadorna during the national anti-fascist uprising (April 25) and finally show his personal contribution to the victory of the Italian resistance movement. Conclusion. The activities of General Cadorna as part of the leadership structures of the Italian resistance movement facilitated the consolidation of the anti-fascist forces and was his personal contribution to the victory of the national liberation struggle of the Italian people against the Nazi invaders and their collaborators – Italian fascists.

The Gold Coast Brigade’s Crossing of the Juba River, Italian Somaliland, February 1941

Abstract In February 1941, West African troops conducted an opposed crossing of the Juba River in Italian Somaliland that, together with a South African crossing to the south, became a decisive action of the East Africa campaign of the Second World War. After the Juba was breached, Italian resistance in Somaliland crumbled with British imperial forces originating in Kenya taking Mogadishu in a few days and advancing into Ethiopia. Based on archival documents, this article pursues two aims. The first is to recover the little-known contribution of West African units during an important Second World War campaign. The second is to present the British-led West African action at Juba as an example of a successful river crossing long considered among the most difficult military operations. The intention is to provide an African example of operational military history traditionally dominated by case studies related to Europe, North America, and Asia.

Lanci di memoria. Un progetto di valorizzazione di archivi digitali

The pandemic has caused serious problems in museums and sites of memory, due to long closure. At the same time, however, the pandemic challenged the historians to develop new languages, in order to enhance the material and immaterial heritage. This article illustrates Lanci di memoria, a project that tried to disseminate interviews with partisans and witnesses of the Italian Resistance, preserved by Museo della Resistenza Piacentina.

Foreword

In 1949, a mere four years after Italy was liberated from Fascism, a small group of intellectuals, politicians and historians decided to establish a historical institute in Milan, which celebrated its seventieth anniversary only very recently. They called it ‘Istituto nazionale per la storia del Movimento di Liberazione in Italia' (National Institute for the history of the Liberation Movement in Italy). Its founder and first president was Ferruccio Parri, the democrat and republican leader of the Action Party, who - among others - had animated the ‘Comitato di Liberazione nazionale Alta Italia' (Committee of National Liberation for Northern Italy). Parri was one of the leaders of the Italian Resistance against Fascism, as well as the Prime minister of the first government born after Italy's Liberation (25 April 1945).

Prisoners of War to Partisans: Australian Experiences in Italy during the Second World War

After the Armistice of September 1943, a large proportion of Allied prisoners of war (POWs) in Italy were released from captivity. This article considers the relatively small number of those men who made their way into the Italian resistance as partisans, drawing in particular on examples of Australian POWs who were in work camps in Piedmont at the time of the Armistice. In doing so it considers not only the circumstances and motivations guiding the POWs to become partisans, but also the factors which persuaded Italian communities and partisan groups to accept Allied POWs among them. The argument draws on Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of ‘social banditry’ to explain the conversion from POW to partisan, while also contending that the phenomenon was complex, dynamic, and best understood from Allied and Italian perspectives.

I dannati della terra: The Italian left facing the Third World on the eve of 1968

The Italian film I dannati della terra (The Damned of the Earth) (Orsini and Filippi ) is a prominent example of the connection between the European cinema of intervention and the Third World struggles of the 1960s. Set as a ‘film within a film’, the movie tells the story of a leftist filmmaker, Fausto Morelli, who faces the challenge of finishing a film about the liberation struggles of sub-Saharan Africa by building on the documentary footage that was bequeathed to him by his student and friend, the young Abramo Malonga, an African (Bantu). This article recovers overlooked and little-known documents about the film to show that it is the expression of an active cinematic Third Worldism forged in previous years between the legacy of the Resistenza Partigiana (Italian Resistance) and the Third World struggles of the 1960s. At the same time, the article analyses the ways in which the film ‘dialogues’ with experimental trends of the contemporary avant-garde artistic scene in order to challenge the viewer to debate the ‘open ideological hypothesis’ of the film and take an active part in the political struggles of the time.

Beppe Fenoglio’s I ventitre giorni della città di Alba – Personal Memory and Reflections on Civil War

The article examines I ventitre giorni della città di Alba, one of Beppe Fenoglio’s early texts about the Italian resistance during the Second World War. Largely ignored at the time of its first publication, it rose to fame only in the 1960s. This is strongly linked to the fact that Fenoglio depicts the resistance as a civil war, a rather controversial issue in post-war Italy. He deheroises the partisans and shows the inadequacy of social categories by adopting a specific narrative strategy that focuses on the mundane and the ridiculous.

Peasants and Partisans, Stranger Selves: Stuart Hood’s Memoir Project and Second World War Life Writing

This essay is the first detailed critical analysis of Pebbles from My Skull/ Carlino (1963/1985), Stuart Hood’s account of the 1943/4 period he spent fighting as part of the Italian Resistance. It situates Hood’s work in relation to the prevailing ‘Colditz Myth’ associated with British Second World War prisoner of war escapees and the conceptions of England and Europe underlying this myth. It also considers Hood’s ‘memoir project – the self-reflexive narrative of self he was compelled to tell, extending across multiple texts, and to which he was reluctant to give final form or finished meaning – in relation to recent theoretical work on life writing and military life writing in particular.

The Unwilling Guide: Camus's The Plague

The Unwilling Guide:Camus's The Plague Robert Zaretsky (bio) the novel coronavirus has introduced a different kind of novel, Albert Camus's The Plague, to a new generation of readers. By early March, copies of Camus's novel—an account of first responders resisting a plague in the Algerian city of Oran—had sold out on Amazon. At the same time, numerous articles and essays have used the novel in order to understand our own plague—my Google search "Camus/plague/coronavirus" brought up 175,000 links to articles. Though their authors take different teachings from the work, they mostly agree it is the work to serve as a guide in these perplexing times. As a Camus biographer, I agree. But while The Plague is a guide, it is not as straightforward as we might expect. Certainly, the qualities that readers in a war-devastated world found in the novel, first published in 1947, are the same qualities that readers in our virusdevastated world now seek. These traits, affirmed the Italian resistance fighter and writer Nicola Chiaramonte, are "ordinary humanity and good sense" (Lottman 1997, 450). The novel's "ordinary" characters—doctors and drifters, clerks and correspondents—in their resistance against the inhuman force of the plague, anticipate the resistance of the "ordinary" men and women we applaud today. Yet the humanity shown by these resisters is ordinary only when contrasted to the insouciance, indifference, or inhumanity of those who hold extraordinary power. Frustrated by the refusal of the authorities in Oran to act on the irrefutable evidence of plague, the novel's protagonist, Doctor Rieux, observes that it "was only a matter of lucidly recognizing what had to be recognized." This ethic of seeing [End Page 297] clearly and speaking candidly ultimately means, in Rieux's words, "to do your job as it should be done." How extraordinary these ordinary qualities appear in dark times. Whether such qualities can be quantified is a matter I leave to my colleagues in the social sciences. What seems essential to recall, though, is that these virtues do exist. In fact, Camus insisted that they are more common—that we are "more good than bad"—than the behavior of political leaders might lead us to think. At the same time, he believed that this was mostly beside the point. The true issue, as Rieux reflects, is that we are "more or less ignorant" and that the "most incorrigible vice is that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims the right to kill." As editor of the resistance paper Combat, Camus saw too many instances of such deadly ignorance in France during the German occupation. He would not be surprised to learn that our own country is hardly exempt from leaders afflicted with the same degree of ignorance. But while this might give us no reason for hope, it is not, Camus believed, a reason for despair. We must do our jobs during this plague, just as we must recognize that we will be called to continue doing them when the next plague arrives, as it inevitably will. Robert Zaretsky robert zaretsky is a literary biographer who has written widely on Albert Camus. His latest book, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas, will be published in 2021 by University of Chicago Press. REFERENCE Lottman, Herbert. 1997. Albert Camus: A Biography. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 450. Google Scholar Copyright © 2020 The New School

La Déclaration de Chivasso. Un exemple de projet fédéral infra et supranational

During Second World War, Italian resistance fighters from the Aosta Valley and the Vaudois valleys meet in Chivasso to think about an international system for the post- war era. They defend a republican and democratic political system, and, far from micro-nationalism, they are the bearers of a federal project which combines the autonomist instances, specific to these linguistic and religious minorities, with a vision of European unity. The result is the drafting of one of the most Europeanist documents of the Resistance in Europe: the Declaration of the representatives of the Alpine populations signed on the 19th of December 1943. This article intends to study and contextualize this document, whose minority nature does not remove its importance within the framework of a Europe still today interested in matters of minorities as well as borders and by autonomist and independence movements.

Italo Calvino’s Colour Blindness and the Question of Race among Einaudi Intellectuals

Italo Calvino is acknowledged as an important voice in post-war Italian literature. Together with other important Einaudi intellectuals, such as Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese, Calvino helped shape the narratives around, and the legacy of, the Italian resistance and anti-fascism. Through his work as an editor at Einaudi and his membership of the Communist Party, Calvino was strongly involved in post-war debates on inequality and societal change. This article investigates the connections between these interests of Calvino and important Einaudi intellectuals with reflections on Italy’s colonial past and the struggle for civil rights and racial equality (especially in the United States). The Marxist framework through which Calvino approached these matters made him somewhat colour blind, causing him to erase differences and disregard possible connections between colonial and post-colonial struggles for civil rights.

Missed connection: relations between Italian anti-fascist emigration and British forces in Egypt (1940–1944)

Italian anti-fascists started to emigrate from the moment that Mussolini seized power. These émigrés, orfuorusciti, tried to organise themselves to put an end to Mussolini’s regime, but found themselves confronting a number of unexpected difficulties in their host countries. Among them,Giustiza e Libertà(GL) was one of the most active organisations. One of the problems they had to face was the issue of how best to deal with their hosts without compromising their integrity as Italians, and as patriots. The case of Paolo Vittorelli (Raffaele Battino), who is the subject of this article, presents a clear case study of this issue and shows how close collaboration between Italian anti-fascists and western democracies (in this case, the United Kingdom) was hindered by ideological problems. The study of such episodes helps us to shed light not only on the mentality of the GL émigrés, but also on the way the Italian Resistance would later approach the issue of working together with the Allies during the Italian campaign of 1943–1945.