Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War 1944–45

Although the main Allied attack that started on 11 May would be flung against the 20-mile stretch between Cassino and the western coast, there were troops on both sides loosely holding the line all across Italy to the Adriatic. In the centre of the country, for example, in the Abruzzi mountains, were a number of Italian troops of the Royal Army, loyal to Vittorio Emanuele III, now esconsed in Brindisi and the man who had been King of Italy throughout the century, even during the Fascist era. Attached to the British X Corps, the Corpo Italiano di Liberazione – or CIL – found themselves opposite their former ally and on a different side to a number of their fellow countrymen. As such, the Italian civil war was already under way.

Further to the south, in a tented reorganisation camp near Lecce, were a number of artillerymen due shortly to join the reconstituted Nembo Division, CIL. One of the lieutenants of the 2nd Group – or battery – of the 184th Artillery Regiment was twenty-three-year-old Eugenio Corti, a highly experienced and capable officer who was only gradually coming to terms with events since the previous September.

Eugenio had been one of only around 4,000 of an original corps of 30,000 Italian troops to have escaped the Soviet encirclement along the River Don in early 1943. He had reached Nettuno, near Anzio, just a week before the armistice was signed on 8 September 1943, but as an officer, had been living out and therefore had been asleep – and safe – when, at dawn on 9 September, a force of German troops attacked the barracks and rounded up the survivors. Local civilians, already desperately short of food and just about any other conceivable supplies, subsequently looted the barracks. Three days later, any Italian officers still in or around Nettuno were ordered to convene at a small palazzo in town for a ‘clarifying report’ by the Germans. Unlike most of his colleagues, Eugenio had, in Russia, developed a serious distrust of their former ally, and so had tried to dissuade his fellow officers from attending. Few, however, had listened to his entreaties. ‘I saw with my own eyes,’ he wrote, ‘the kind of blindness that strikes men, as they lose even the most ordinary capacity for discernment that could dissuade them from following an already formed opinion.’33 (#litres_trial_promo) Appalled, Eugenio had only been able to watch as the Germans kicked and shoved the Italian officers into the backs of trucks and drove them away.

Eugenio had managed to dissuade just one of his colleagues, a fellow lieutenant, Antonio Moroni, from handing himself over to the Germans. Having shed their uniforms for civilian clothes, the pair had watched distraught as columns of German troops poured southwards. The initial relief on hearing the news of the armistice had gone. Instead they had wondered whether Italy would soon share the fate of Poland. ‘As soon as they feel sure of themselves,’ Eugenio had suggested to Antonio, ‘they’ll begin the massacres.’34 (#litres_trial_promo) Both had agreed they could not return home to Lombardy, in the north; but nor would they idly endure German violence and occupation. Antonio suggested heading for Rome. In a large city, he reasoned, it would be easier to remain anonymous until the Allies arrived – and that was bound to be soon. Eugenio, however, said he preferred the high ground and sparsely populated mountains to the south. Here he was certain the mountain people would resist the German occupation. Because he had been right about the Germans earlier, Antonio had agreed to join him in the mountains. Neither, however, had had any idea what to expect, or how their fellow Italians would respond to German occupation.

Eugenio and Antonio had made their way across Allied lines in the middle of October and presented themselves at the garrison of Potenza in central southern Italy straight away. From there, they had been sent to a reorganisation ‘camp’ – a requisitioned school building – near the Adriatic, where remnants of the Italian Army still loyal to the King were supposedly being reconstituted with a view to fighting on the side of the Allies. The reality, however, as Eugenio soon became aware, was that royalist Italian forces were in a desperate state. Most of those trapped in southern Italy at the time of the armistice had been under-trained troops who had never been in action; their discipline was terrible, as was their morale. Equipment was almost non-existent, and Eugenio and his comrades were all too aware that the Allies had little respect or use for them. Rations were also meagre. Some days, Eugenio was given no more than two biscuits on which to survive. Many lacked proper uniforms. ‘Those were very bitter days,’ wrote Eugenio, ‘when it seemed as though we could lose all hope in the fate of Italy.’35 (#litres_trial_promo)

Life had improved, however, albeit very slowly. In the subsequent months more men and materiel had arrived and talk of mutiny had died down. Training had become more organised and with it the enthusiasm of the men had grown. Even so, by the beginning of May 1944, Eugenio had little to cheer about. Rumours of disputes between the British authorities and their own superiors reached them, while there was still no sign of the Nembo paratroopers they, in the artillery, were supposed to be supporting; apparently, they were still in Sardinia. ‘The sense of our uselessness,’ wrote Eugenio, ‘which had never completely vanished, came back again.’36 (#litres_trial_promo)

If Eugenio and his colleagues felt side-lined, it was because they had been. Part of the armistice deal had been that Italian armed forces, more than 3 million strong throughout Italy, the Balkans and the Aegean, should fight on the side of the Allies, and indeed, the government had been assured of more favourable treatment if they ensured this. Unfortunately Badoglio had managed to make a spectacular mess of such plans when the armistice had been finally announced the previous September.

Admittedly, Badoglio and the non-Fascist government had found themselves in a very troublesome position during the forty-five days between Mussolini’s dismissal and the announcement of the armistice. As German troops had begun to pour into the north of Italy, they had been all too aware that if they turned on their ally, they could expect the full wrath of a jilted partner. But equally, they had realised their future position might be much improved if they could be seen to have helped the Allies. Judging which side to back had proved an extremely thorny problem, and so throughout most of August they had earnestly avowed their unswerving loyalty to Germany, whilst secretly negotiating peace terms with the Allies.

No one, apart from Kesselring, had been fooled by any promises from the Italians, however. The Allies, without ever revealing their hand, had allowed Badoglio to believe they had a far larger invasion force than was the case; they had also agreed to send in the US 82nd Airborne Division to help the Italians secure Rome. Had the Italians known that Clark’s Salerno invasion would see only three landing divisions and two close behind – rather than fifteen as they had been led to believe – they might never have signed at all. Nor had the Allies allowed the Italians to know the timing of the Salerno landings. Consequently, when Eisenhower had made his own announcement of the Italian surrender on the afternoon of 8 September and then sent a signal to Badoglio to do likewise by 8 p.m. that same day, it had caught them completely off guard. They had been expecting the invasion to be as much as a week later.

This had left the Italians in the position of their worst nightmare. Although they had been due to become ‘co-belligerents’, they had not had time to organise their armed forces properly. Badoglio had further complicated matters by failing to tell the Italian armed forces to begin fighting the Germans; instead, he merely told them they should no longer fight the Allies, which was not the same thing at all. Moreover, the Allies’ plan to drop the 82nd Airborne into Rome had been shelved just as the paratroopers were being loaded onto their planes. Badoglio had realised with mounting horror that they could not possibly expect to defend Rome. A far more realistic expectation had been that they would soon be rounded up, along with the King, and most probably shot for their perceived treachery.

With this in mind, fleeing to safety had seemed a better option than martyrdom. ‘For me, one question was of capital importance and overmastered all the others,’ wrote Badoglio; ‘that was the necessity to maintain at all costs a close and continuous contact with the Allies, so that the armistice might continue in operation.’ If the government remained in Rome, he reasoned, this could not happen. And so, the following day, 9 September, Badoglio, King Vittorio Emanuele III and the royalist government had fled the capital, first to Pescara and then on to Bari on the southern Adriatic coast, far, far away from the fighting.37 (#litres_trial_promo)

Whatever their motives, the flight from Rome had been appallingly handled and had left the country rudderless. Gripped by panic and fearing for his life, Badoglio had failed to keep a clear head. In the early hours of 9 September, he had even issued orders to all Italian military headquarters not to ‘take the initiative in attacking the Germans’. This had hardly been helpful to their new allies, especially since around Rome the Italians had been numerically superior to the Germans, and in the Ariete Division had had their best-armed units led by General Raffaele Cadorna, a highly experienced commander. How effective the Italian forces could have been against the Germans will never be known, but there were plenty of people who saw both the armistice and the abandonment of Rome as terrible acts of treachery and betrayal, including many of the officers and men surrounding Eugenio Corti in the Royal Army; their disenchantment had played its part in the breakdown of authority and discipline.

Finally, in his haste to flee, Badoglio had also completely forgotten to take Mussolini from his captivity on Gran Sasso in the Abruzzi Mountains and hand him over to the Allies as had been agreed. Instead, on 12 September, 120 crack German paratroopers had sprung him without a shot being fired and flown him, via Vienna, to Munich and then to an audience with Hitler himself.

If the Allies had taken a pretty dim view of the fighting qualities of the Italians, then this was doubly so in the opinion of the Germans, and the ease with which they had disarmed the vast majority of the Italian armed forces in the days that followed the armistice had only confirmed that opinion. Indeed, the Germans had been primed and ready and no sooner had the surrender been announced than Operation AXIS had been put into swift effect. German officers had reached the majority of Italian barracks within a few hours of the news of the armistice with instructions for the Italians to co-operate or else face German fire. A number of telephone lines had been cut to isolate the Italians further and misleading propaganda had been hastily spread about.

Cosimo Arrichiello, a twenty-three-year-old soldier based in northern Italy, had witnessed this utter confusion first hand. Brought up a good Catholic, he had gone to bed on the night of 8 September and had prayed hard that God would save Italy and especially those in the south around Naples, where he had been brought up and where much of his family still lived. He had also asked the Lord to restore peace and stability, not just in Italy but around the whole world. Having done this, he had felt better and had been dozing off to sleep when he heard a bugle. Glancing sleepily at his watch, he had seen it was half past eleven at night – perhaps, he had thought, it was an air raid. Within moments he and his colleagues had been ordered to hurry downstairs. Bleary-eyed, Cosimo and his fellow soldiers at Pellizzari barracks had fallen in, whereupon the captain, in an emotional voice, told them that the Italian government had signed an armistice with the Allies. ‘This is no time for rejoicing,’ he had warned them, however. ‘This is not the end of the war. We have a German army in Italy, which is determined to fight the Allies at any cost, and this will not make our lives easier.’ With that, they had been ordered back to bed.38 (#litres_trial_promo)

Cosimo’s feeling of relief at the news had been mixed with a sense of bewilderment which was in no way assuaged the following day. At dawn they had been ordered on a march and given emergency rations. After three hours on the road, they were brought to a halt, their mules unloaded and their ageing First World War-era howitzers assembled. Having eaten some lunch in the early afternoon sun, they had then been ordered to pack up once more and return to their barracks. By the evening they were told they were confined to barracks, although rumours had begun to spread that a number of troops garrisoned nearby had already disbanded and left, fearing otherwise that they would be captured by the Germans.

Cosimo had hardly known what to think, although it had begun to occur to him that it might be up to each individual to use his own initiative; certainly the officers had appeared to be in as much turmoil and confusion as everyone else. Shortly after he had gone to bed, a commotion had developed, with people running around outside. From the courtyard, someone had shouted ‘Hurry! The sentries have gone! Quick! The Germans are coming!’ His heart racing, Cosimo had hurriedly dressed, cursing as the laces on his shoes snapped in his haste. Grabbing his wooden suitcase he had run to the barracks gate, peered outside, and seeing no Germans, had sped off towards a friend’s house in town.

By the middle of the following morning, there were still no Germans in sight, but there had been plenty of notices from the barracks commander ordering his men back without fear of recrimination, and warning that they would be shot as deserters if they did not. Reluctantly, Cosimo had done as ordered and was shocked to discover that Pellizzari barracks had been looted. Officers were standing around gloomily amidst the pervading air of apathy and sudden listlessness. No further orders had been given. Moreover, as Cosimo realised, he was among only around 40 per cent who had returned – the others being still at large.

His return had been short-lived, however. In the early afternoon, reports had arrived that the Germans really were on the edge of town. Once again, mayhem had followed, but this time most of those still at the barracks had left for good, and Cosimo was one of them.

The Pellizzari barracks were in Bra, a small town south of Turin, and although his friend in the town had agreed to hide him for a short while, Cosimo had been unsure what he should do next. His father and two of his brothers were in Java, in Indonesia, where they had moved before the war in an effort to find much-needed work, but though he had desperately wanted to get back to his mother and remaining brothers and sisters – there had been eleven in all – he had felt it was simply too risky to travel all the way from Bra, in the north-west of Italy, back home to Naples.

A few days later, he had thanked his friend and left, heading for the village of Bardo in the hills some miles away, where he knew his former captain’s batman lived and whose family had a farm. No German had spotted him leaving Bra and no one had bothered him as he walked through the seemingly peaceful countryside. ‘There was so much freedom around me in that world of nature,’ he noted; ‘yet deep in my heart I knew that I wasn’t quite free.’ Far from it: Cosimo was now on the run, an outlaw in his own country, and like many hundreds of thousands being rounded up all over the country, he faced, at worst, execution for desertion and, at best, servitude as manual labour for the Germans deep within the Third Reich itself – a role for which Germany considered the average Italian male was far better suited.

In fact, in under a week from the moment the armistice was signed the Italian Army had ceased to exist – all fifty-six divisions dissolved – and while there had still been a number of troops at large, Cosimo included, more than half a million had become POWs. By February 1944, there were some 617,000 former Italian troops interned in Germany and working in armaments factories. A large part of the navy had sailed to Malta and given itself over to the Allies, but the air force had also been disbanded and vast amounts of equipment requisitioned by the Germans. This booty included 9,986 guns, 15,500 vehicles, 970 tanks and self-propelled guns* (#ulink_286bcf8d-13bd-53b7-9da6-4a98b22dec95) and no less than 4,553 aircraft. Not a bad haul, all things considered.

Even so, there had been some resistance. The Italian Motorised Corps had fought with conviction outside Rome, and the Ariete Division had also moved to help a mass of some 10,000 civilians who had spontaneously taken up arms throughout 9 September.

One of those had been twenty-four-year-old Carla Capponi. From her mother’s flat near the Forum, she had seen flashes of artillery fire from the south-west throughout the night of the 8th/9th. Early on the morning of the 9th, she had heard excited voices in the streets below, and looking out had seen a group of men, armed with rifles. They beckoned her to join them – the Germans were coming and they needed everyone to help defend the city. Without much hesitation, Carla told her mother she was going to join them.

At the Pyramid of Cestius by the Porta San Paolo, Carla had joined the growing resistance. Unarmed, she had spent the day tending the wounded and carrying food and provisions to the Italian troops and armed civilians. The fighting around the Pyramid had gone on throughout most of the 9th and on into the 10th, with high casualties on both sides. Realising he was the highest-ranking officer left in Rome, the ageing Marshal Enrico Caviglia had taken charge of the resistance, only to receive a severe ultimatum from Kesselring: surrender, or Rome would be carpet-bombed into dust. Unwilling to test the threat, Caviglia had ordered his ad hoc force to lay down their arms. They had done so, but for many – Carla Capponi included – the two-day battle had given them a taste for resistance. The seeds of Rome’s partisan war had been sown at the Porta San Paolo.

There had also been smatterings of resistance outside Italy – on Corfu, for example, and on Cephalonia. Of nearly 12,000 Italian troops on this latter island, more than a thousand had been killed in ten days’ fighting against the Germans, while nearly 5,000 had then been subsequently executed in one of the worst crimes of the entire war. Cephalonia had become a ‘carpet of corpses’.* (#ulink_afaf3e8b-8f41-5a4a-96ab-3465154bccdb)39 (#litres_trial_promo) The 4,000 who had laid down their arms and survived the massacre had then been given starvation rations before being shipped to Germany. Cruelly, all three vessels had hit mines and sunk. Those who had jumped to safety had been machine-gunned in the water. In all, 9,406 soldiers out of 11,700 were killed. Almost the entire garrison had been wiped out.

Not all Italians wanted to see the back of the Germans, however. Far from it: the bulk of the Nembo Division in Sardinia, and units of the Folgore Division, veterans of Alamein, had sworn their allegiance to Hitler and had continued to fight on the side of the Germans and under German command; so too had the Decima MAS, a semi-autonomous group of elite naval commandos led by the charismatic Prince Valerio Borghese. And not by any stretch of the imagination had there been universal cheering on the signing of the armistice. Twenty-one-year-old William Cremonini, for example, had been appalled on hearing the news. ‘I was disgusted,’ he admits. ‘It was a shameful thing.’

He was an only child, and his father had died when he was five, so William had been brought up solely by his mother. Both she and most of their neighbours had been supporters of Mussolini, and as a boy William had joined the Balilla, the Fascist youth organisation that had been established in 1926. Like the Hitler Youth that followed, it served as a means of fascistizzazione, of reinforcing Fascist doctrine amongst the younger generation. Boys joined the Balilla between the ages of eight and fourteen and the Avanguardisti from fourteen to eighteen. William had enjoyed it – the sports, the discipline, and the sense of camaraderie that developed amongst them, so that by the time war broke out in June 1940, he and his friends had been excited by the prospect of winning glory for their country, and eager to do their bit.

Although still not quite eighteen, William, with his mother’s assent, and a number of his friends had joined the Giovani Fascisti – Young Fascists – Bologna Battalion that was being formed at that time. Soon after, they had taken part in the ‘March of Youth’ across Italy, a grand military parade in which the Young Fascists marched sixteen miles a day for three weeks. In Padova, they had even been greeted by Mussolini himself.

In the summer of 1941, the Young Fascists had been sent to North Africa, and there they had remained until the very end of the campaign, having been one of the few Italian divisions to have repeatedly distinguished themselves on the battlefield. William had somehow survived until two weeks before the Axis surrender, when on 29 April, as they attacked a British position at Enfidaville, he had been shot in the chest. By good fortune, he had been evacuated on the last hospital ship back to Italy before the campaign’s end, and so had avoided the fate of so many of his colleagues who were to spend the rest of the war as POWs.

William had lost a lot of friends in North Africa. So many lives had been given for Italy, nearly his own too. Having been shot, he had recovered consciousness only to find himself in the middle of a minefield. Whilst trying to cross it back to his own lines, he had been tended to by some Germans. ‘They took my jacket off,’ he recalls, ‘and then the blood started glugging out.’ He was taken to a field hospital where a priest arrived to hear his confession: ‘It gave me the feeling that I was dying.’

Somehow, however, he survived. His feelings on hearing the news of the armistice were understandable. ‘Suddenly we were told we should be shooting Germans,’ he says. ‘Until the day before, we had been fighting with them. The first medical aid I received when I was wounded was given to me by Germans. We fought side by side. How were we expected to make such a change so suddenly?’

Still convalescing at home in the village of San Pietro in Casale, north-east of Bologna, William had in fact been on a train in the station at San Pietro when he heard the news of the armistice and had immediately taken himself to the nearest German unit in Poggio Renatico, a Luftwaffe base, and offered his services. Sent home again, he soon after met one of his former officers, who had also been wounded in North Africa. ‘Don’t join the Germans,’ he told William. ‘It’s ugly to fight in someone else’s uniform. Let’s hang on a bit and see what happens.’ William had done just that, and had soon learned that his old battalion commander, Major Fulvio Balisti, was back in Italy thanks to a prisoner exchange of badly and permanently disabled prisoners at the end of the North African campaign, and was serving as the new Fascist Provincial Head of Brescia. William had gone to see him and had immediately been offered the chance to stay in Brescia, serving with Balisti. However, he had also learned that the core of the surviving Young Fascists were now based in Maderno on Lake Garda, where they were serving with the personal bodyguard of Alessandro Pavolini, the Neo-Fascist Party Secretary in the newly formed Fascist Republic. Without much hesitation, William had gone to join them.

By May, William was a sergeant with the Bir el Gobi Company, as the bodyguard were known. Named after the Italians’ most famous stand in North Africa, they wore Italian grey-green uniforms and Fascist black shirts. It wasn’t soldiering as William had known it in North Africa, but he was happy enough – pleased to be with some of his old comrades and glad that his own sense of honour remained intact.

Others had been equally concerned about the betrayal and dishonour of the armistice, including Marchese Antonio Origo. At their beautiful country palazzo in the Val d’Orcia in southern Tuscany, the marchese and his wife, Iris, had spent the evening of 8 September in grim silence, listening with mounting unease to the locals rejoicing and lighting bonfires in celebration. Iris, on the other hand, had been more concerned about what would follow. She had been filled with a sense of foreboding, guessing – quite correctly – that Germany would continue fighting.

Iris had been born in England the daughter of an English mother and American father, and had had a particularly peripatetic yet privileged childhood. Around the time of her birth, in August 1902, her father contracted tuberculosis, and so the family had gone in search of warmer climes and clean air: Italy, then California, then Switzerland, then back to Italy again, where despite his TB, her father became American Vice-Consul in Milan. Iris was eight when her father died, but between holidays with her grandparents in Ireland, she remained with her mother in Italy. Her father’s wish had always been that she should be brought up in France or Italy or ‘somewhere where she does not belong’, so that she would grow up both cosmopolitan and free of the normal tug of patriotism.40 (#litres_trial_promo)

Consequently, she was still based in Florence when, in 1920, she was ‘launched’ as a debutante into Anglo-Florentine society. It was during this time that she met her future husband, Antonio, the illegitimate son of an Italian aristocrat and a man ten years her senior. They married in 1922 and a little over a year later bought a large estate south of Pienza and Montepulciano, in southern Tuscany, called ‘La Foce’. Antonio had no desire for either business or diplomacy – for which he was trained – and instead yearned to farm; and in this still wild but beautiful part of Italy, some sixty miles south of Florence and a hundred north of Rome, they realised they could create a new and worthwhile life for themselves.

The Val d’Orcia had, like many parts of rural Italy, been neglected over the centuries. Soil erosion and misuse had left large parts of the estate resembling a lunar landscape, but Iris and Antonio soon breathed new life into it, and by the late 1930s they had re-landscaped much of the land, established around fifty tenant farms, and introduced more modern farming techniques. While Antonio oversaw the running of his tenant farms, Iris set up a health centre and a school for the estate children, which also provided evening classes for the adults.

Antonio had never had much of a taste for politics, and consequently had never openly opposed Mussolini and the Fascist regime, nor had he denounced it; neither had Iris, although both had been privately opposed to the war. Their concerns had been the safeguarding of Italy, and more specifically, La Foce and all the people for whose lives they were responsible. At the outset of war, Iris had gone to Rome to work for the Italian Red Cross, but two years later, expecting her third child, she had returned home for good. Soon after, the Allies had begun regularly bombing Italian cities and so Iris and Antonio began taking in a number of refugee children, both orphans and evacuees, from Turin and Genoa.

With the war now having reached Italy itself, the futures of these children and the many families in Val d’Orcia had seemed under an even greater threat. In the days that had followed the armistice, the Val d’Orcia, as elsewhere, had been flung into a state of chaos. News had been scarce, with no guidelines about what to do or what the Italian people could expect. The gates of the nearby prisoner of war camp had been opened, and the neighbouring countryside had become flooded with POWs. On the morning of 8 September, there had been 79,543 Allied POWs interned throughout Italy. Two days later around 50,000 of them were loose in the Italian countryside in what had been the biggest mass-escape ever. Iris had found a large number in a creek near Castelluccio, hiding from any Germans that might pass by, and clearly feeling rather bewildered and unsure what to do next. She had given a British corporal a map and a few Italian phrases and then on her return home had met one of their contadini – peasant farmers – in his uniform and on his way back to his regiment from leave. ‘What am I to do now?’ he had asked her.41 (#litres_trial_promo) He had just met a number of other soldiers, now in plain clothes, who had left their barracks in Bologna and Verona. All those able to run away had been doing so, he had been told, while the word on the street was that the rest had been rounded up by the Germans and packed off to concentration camps. Wild rumours and a mounting sense of panic had been rife. ‘Later in the day,’ Iris had noted, ‘yet other fugitive soldiers turn up.’42 (#litres_trial_promo)

By the beginning of May, the Origos, like the vast majority of Italians, were doing what they could to keep a low profile, trying to safeguard everything that was dear to them, and praying they would safely make it through the war. Yet Iris’s fears on 8 September had been well founded: Italy had become a place of suspicion and menace. ‘Nothing has been uglier in the story of these tragic months,’ she noted in her diary on 5 May, ‘than the avalanche of denunciations which have been showered on both the Italian and German officials. Professional rivalry, personal jealousy, the smallest ancient spite – all these now find vent in reports to the Fascist police, and cause the suspected person to be handed over to prison, to questioning by torture, or to a firing squad. No one feels safe.’43 (#litres_trial_promo)

Another doing his best to get by was Cosimo Arrichiello, who had been living in the small village of San Bernardo in the Stura Valley, south of Turin ever since fleeing the Pellizzari Barracks the previous September. He had been fortunate that the Bolti family had taken him in. Harbouring former Italian soldiers and Allied POWs was a crime punishable by death, yet there had never been any question of him being turned away. In return, Cosimo worked on the small family farm. For this, he was very thankful, and did his best not to let them, or himself, down.

He found the work extremely tough, however. A sickly child, he had not developed into a particularly physical person, and was far more interested in culture and the arts than sport and the great outdoors. Nor had he been a natural soldier, and in more than two-and-a-half years in uniform had barely moved from the barracks at Bra and had seen no action whatsoever. For a man who had been vehemently against the war from the outset, this lack of action had suited him well, and since his desertion he had had no further interest at all in fighting, whether it be for the Germans, the Allies, or the embryonic bands of partisans that had gradually emerged in the weeks and months that had followed the armistice.

Yet Cosimo had been luckier than many in finding San Bernardo, a quiet village in a low-lying valley in north-west Italy. Most German troops were in the cities or further south near the front, while the local partisans tended to stay in the mountains for much of the time. Consequently, the village and nearby town of Marene attracted less attention than some places. For the most part, local law and order was left to two members of the Carabinieri, the police force in Italy.* (#ulink_97b20ade-4e37-5b79-b698-dd490ed67ef9) Both men soon became Cosimo’s friends, and although they knew he was a disbanded soldier, they made no effort to betray his real identity. Neither Giacomo nor Dino was from the Piemonte region, and rather like Cosimo, they had little taste for politics and preferred to do their best to see out the war as quietly and peaceably as possible. Officially, as Carabinieri, they were German and Neo-Fascist collaborators. In practice, however, they had no real authority, no means of enforcing the law, and in fact made an effort to tip off Cosimo if there were any German or Fascist raids being planned. If the partisans appeared, they would do their best to avoid confrontation by remaining firmly in their quarters.

Even so, Cosimo had to be careful. He could rarely stray far from the farm and had to be on his guard most of the time. It was an existence he found monotonous in the extreme. Almost every day was unwaveringly the same: he would get up at dawn, have a hot drink made from roasted barley, then set to work – picking grapes, loading hay, mending fences, or attending to any other odd jobs. There might be something to eat at lunchtime – perhaps soup or polenta with some salad – and then a further meal in the evening of much the same but with a couple of glasses of homemade wine. Pasta and meat were scarcities, although they would usually manage to have tagliatelle on Sundays. As Cosimo admits, he felt more at home in an urban environment – and one that was southern too. Desperate to go home to Secondigliano, a small town near Naples, he struggled to find much in common with his hosts.

Italy might have been one of the most homogeneous countries in Europe, where 99.61 per cent of the population were Roman Catholic, but in other respects it was extremely diverse. It had only been unified since 1870, when the Risorgimento – ‘revival’– was completed. Before that time, it had been made up of a patchwork of city and sovereign states. Indeed, the drive for revolution and national unity had only really emerged following Napoleon’s invasion in 1797.

Yet even throughout the age of fascism, which had been dominated since 1922 by Mussolini, most Italians felt a far greater sense of local and regional, rather than national, identity and loyalty. Italy, for example, still had innumerable regional dialects, probably more than any other country in Europe. Cosimo Arrichiello, as a Neapolitan, could barely understand his Piemontese hosts. ‘They spoke their dialect,’ he noted. ‘I could communicate with them only when they made the effort to speak Italian, their knowledge of which was very limited indeed.’44 (#litres_trial_promo)

In the countryside, life was primitive, so much so that Cosimo, from a poor background himself, had been genuinely shocked. There had been no agricultural revolution in Italy, for example, and the system of rural existence had barely changed in centuries. Most farmers were contadini, impoverished peasant farmers, most of whom worked as share-croppers for big landowners, or padroni – such as Antonio Origo, for example. This system was known as the mezzadria, and, naturally enough, benefited the padroni far more than the contadini, who frequently struggled to deliver their share of crops and profit. Few contadini were educated or could read or write, so there was little chance of betterment; only by working like a slave and having a big slice of good fortune could the farmer create a secure existence for his family.

Living conditions were basic: no electricity, no running water, and only limited sanitation. There was a toilet, but it was only a hole in the ground, and it was not near where Cosimo slept. If he needed the toilet in the night, he would excrete on to a piece of paper and then bury the faeces the next morning. Most contadini lived in houses that doubled up as barns: the animals would be in stalls on the ground floor, while the family lived above. It meant there was always a strong smell of animals and animal dung, but their heat helped warm the rest of the house. Cosimo also found he suffered terribly from bed bugs. ‘I was a complete fish out of water,’ he admits. ‘For them this was all natural, but for me it was a form of slavery.’

In this battle for survival against over-mighty landlords and the ever-capricious Italian weather, religion, myth and superstition played important roles. Most people went to church regularly, and religious feast days, or feste, were important landmarks in the calendar and were celebrated by the whole community. But while the priest was an elevated figure in any community, the local witch, or strega, was also respected. With life as precarious as it was, few dared risk the strega’s curse.