Italy’s past isn’t history Contemporary politics is waged through memory

That’s echoed by the country’s broader refusal to settle on an established historical narrative. “Every time public attention is drawn back to the past,” the politician and academic Pietro Scoppola once wrote, “polemics arise that almost result in a wish to dissolve the consciousness of national identity”. Those polemics are evident in the many books about the country’s discordant commemorations, from John Foot’s Italy’s Divided Memory to Giovanni Contini’s La Memoria Divisa.

Much of this stems from the First World War and its immediate aftermath. In Britain, the mud and the trenches, the poppies and the poetry, are hewn into our collective consciousness. But in Italy there was a ferocious debate about whether to enter the war at all (it eventually did in 1915). Afterwards, there was an often bloody battle about the meaning of all that sacrifice. During the so-called “Biennio Rosso”  — two years of acute political polarisation when strikers and workers were met with brutal repression, often courtesy of proto-fascist gangs — a “war of memorials” began.

Many anarchist and socialist councils erected plaques and monuments that blamed Italy’s 650,000 dead on fat cats and warmongers. The town council of Albano Vercellese, between Milan and Turin, erected a monument that said bluntly: “To the dead who unsuspectingly gave their youth to the cause of capitalism.” Throughout 1919 and 1920, fascists began bombing, shooting or otherwise removing monuments that seemed too anti-militarist. As a result, many plaques were given armed guards. When Aldo Milano, a fascist footballer, tried removing that anti-capitalist commemoration in Albano Vercellese, he was shot dead.

After Mussolini’s March on Rome, in 1922, warfare and its victims were again glorified. The result was Redipuglia, not far from the battlefields where so many Italians lost their lives fighting against Austria-Hungary in the country’s far northeast. It’s a vast monument, housing the remains of 40,000 named combatants, as well as the bones of 60,000 unknown soldiers. When you go there today, you feel like an ant, dwarfed by cypresses and vast steps disappearing into the sky. You can still see the fascist insignia of the “fasces” — wooden rods and an axe wrapped together. On the distant horizon, there are three crucifixes like Golgotha.

Redipuglia became a symbol of the brief union between fascism and Christendom and — with a central tomb containing the remains of the Duke of Aosta, the king’s cousin — the union between an extremist insurgency and the established aristocracy. Just as important, it’s a union of the living and the dead: every step is covered, in that familiar Thirties font, with one word: presente. It’s the standard reply to a military roll call.

Yet Redipuglia, only completed in 1938, soon became an embarrassment. After Mussolini was ousted by the ​​Grand Council of Fascism and the King, in 1943, that immense royal tomb was awkward. After the Allied victory in 1945, the fascist insignia was even more uncomfortable.

Commemorating the fallen of the Second World War was equally fraught. Italians had fought on both sides, both for Mussolini and against him. In the post-war consensus, partisans once labelled “terrorists” and “criminals” became “liberators”. The country became covered with tributes to Giacomo Matteotti, the Socialist politician murdered by Mussolini’s henchmen in 1924. Countless streets were named after other martyrs: near my home in Parma is Via Sette Fratelli Cervi, named after seven brothers killed in nearby Reggio Emilia.

Not far from Redipuglia, the Risiera di San Sabba became one of the country’s central exhibits of remembrance: this red-brick rice warehouse was a concentration camp, where political and Jewish prisoners were either murdered or transported to Nazi extermination camps. The Risiera, it’s thought, was responsible for the deaths of up to 5,000 people, and became a national monument in 1965.

Yet here, again, Italy was ambivalent. Although the post-war republic was officially keen to distance itself from Mussolini, criminalising the reconstitution of the Fascist Party, Italian monuments and buildings never faced anything like German denazification. Today, you can still see a 55-foot marble needle outside the Stadio Olimpico in Rome: “Mussolini Dux” is written on the side. There are fascist slogans in the mosaics nearby and a forest, the size of 15 football pitches, that spells out “DUX”. Iconography here doesn’t really get eradicated or cancelled, merely over-written.

It’s in the country’s northeast that the lack of a national narrative is felt most keenly. The vast majority of Italian casualties during the First World War were along the Isonzo, north of Trieste, as troops attempted to reclaim “unredeemed” Italy from both the Habsburgs and local Slavs. And it was here, at the tail end of the Second World War, that Italians suffered retribution: some, controversially, call it “ethnic cleansing”. As Tito’s communists advanced, around 5,000 people were killed, with many thrown into the deep foibe, the narrow gullies that sink into the mountains around Trieste.

For years, the foibe killings were forgotten. The exodus of 300,000 Italians from Istria and Dalmatia — including my grandfather-in-law’s family — was also largely ignored. It was only after the collapse of Italy’s post-war consensus, in the early 1990s, that the issue of foibe became another conundrum for Italian commemoration. With communism discredited, and the Christian Democratic party swept away by corruption scandals, Silvio Berlusconi forged a new coalition with the country’s post-fascist rump. Slowly, the story of the foibe was transformed into a narrative that fascists were actually martyrs.

The settled consensus around what happened during the Second World War quickly shifted. Berlusconi and his coalition partners often avoided or derided the traditional celebrations on 25 April, a national holiday marking Italy’s liberation from Nazi-Fascism. Partisans were once again scorned as “criminals” while Predappio, Mussolini’s birthplace near Bologna, became a Disneyfied fascist theme park. The town is now a Mecca for Italian toughs, where you can visit Mussolini’s tomb, guarded by true believers, and buy endless paraphernalia: busts of Benito; Il Duce wine; replica uniforms. Ignazio Benito La Russa, currently president of the Italian Senate and proud of his middle name, is one of the country’s most assiduous collectors.

Commemorating the dead from Mussolini’s Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI), when fascism became indistinguishable from German Nazism, has become one of the most controversial aspects of November remembrance. Each year, modern blackshirts descend on a section of Milan’s Cimitero Maggiore, where fighters from the RSI are buried. That recently removed plaque in Parma had been erected in 2011, lauding “the fallen and missing military and civilian members of the Italian Social Republic (1943-45). Italy before everything! Italy above all!”

The clearest example of this shifting narrative is Berlusconi’s government’s passing of a law, in 2004, to institute a “Day of Memory” commemorating both the foibe and the Istrian and Dalmatian exodus. It is now marked on 10 February every year, and Giorgia Meloni’s government recently approved legislation to build a foibe museum in Rome. In these initiatives there is, one hopes, a noble desire simply to commemorate the dead. But there’s clearly also political calculation: the foibe allows the far-Right to paint its ideological ancestors not as perpetrators, but as victims; and Italians not as sinning but sinned against.

So commemoration has become a provocation, a way not to honour the dead but to needle the living, and indeed Italy’s neighbours. In 2019, in Trieste, a new statue of Gabriele D’Annunzio was unveiled. A proto-fascist and the illegal occupier of Fiume (today Rijeka in Croatia), he’s unsurprisingly a disliked figure in both Zagreb and Ljubljana — let alone among the thousands of Slovenes who still live in this corner of Italy. In 2017, meanwhile, officials in Rome named a park after Rodolfo Graziani, a fascist and war criminal who used poison gas in Ethiopia.

At least the facts about people like Graziani are essentially known. But sometimes even the basics become blurred. In July 1944, 55 people died while sheltering in the local church in the Tuscan town of San Miniato. A fierce debate ensued as to whether the Germans had planted explosives, or the Allies had accidentally bombed the building instead. As a result, locals put up no less than four plaques, each with different wordings. A later atrocity, the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, has seen six separate plaques.

Sometimes, uncertainty can become sheer fantasy. In Rome, for instance, there’s a street named after a mayor, Leopoldo Ruspoli, who never actually existed. Many of the most cherished heroes of Italian history — the revolutionary Giovan Battista Perasso; the mariner Flavio Gioja; the medieval warrior Alberto da Giussano — are immortalised in statues even though their identities or achievements are very uncertain. Everyone knows that truth is the first victim of war, but in Italy even peacetime seems shorn of simple facts.

Quite who is remembered or forgotten clearly reflects contemporary political choices, and there’s a large section of Italian society that has, traditionally, been entirely absent from all remembrance: its women. But here, too, “memorialisation is changing,” says Patrizia Sambuco, author of Transmissions of Memory. In Abruzzo, in 2018, local women partisans were officially commemorated for the first time, with several streets renamed in their honour.

In some ways, there’s nothing new to all this. Italy is a notoriously schismatic country, constantly fracturing into ever-smaller tribes and borghi: Guelph against Ghibelline, then Black Guelph against White Guelph; Catholics against anti-clericals; fascists against communists. Siena’s Palio is just the most obvious example of a small city splintering into tiny neighbourhoods, providing pageantry and polemics aplenty.

Perhaps the difficulty in creating a national memory is more a state of mind. In sharp contrast to Britons’ love of pomp and circumstance, Italians scorn the state, its laws and its servants. It’s hardly surprising that a national narrative, or a truly inclusive war memorial, prove hard to find in a country with such startling, cynical proverbs. My favourite says simply: “Never trust a person whose nose has two nostrils”.

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Tobias Jones lives in Parma. His Ultra: The Underworld of Italian Football won the 2020 Telegraph Football book of the Year.

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