In 1950 the writer Giose Rimanelli went to Cesare Pavese at the Einaudi publishing house to present him with the autobiographical novel Tiro al pigeon and defined it as the story of a young man who had chosen to be "on the wrong side". This expression has remained famous. And still today it is used to refer to those Italians - over half a million, certainly no small figure, which is often ignored - who wore a uniform, took up arms and, not infrequently, committed horrendous crimes alongside of the Nazis, for the restored fascism in central-northern Italy in the aftermath of the armistice of 8 September 1943.
And yet, seventy years later, if we distance ourselves from the political controversies that still flare up today when we rehash a painful and nefarious page of our national history such as the civil war and the accession to the Italian Social Republic, on a purely historiographical level still there was no documented and rigorous history of Italy and the Italians in arms for Salò (which, moreover, was neither the capital nor the seat of government of the new fascist state, but thus went down in history since the dispatches of the Stefani news agency were sent from there, which began precisely with place and date). And this is precisely – L'Italia di Salò (il Mulino, pp. 490, euro 28) – the title of the new essay by Mario Avagliano and Marco Palmieri, two journalists and essayists who have come to the CSR issue after years of research and essays based on contemporary sources, diaries and letters above all, on the Resistance, the Italian military internees, the political and racial persecution in those dramatic years.
The book revolves around a range of questions: what were the main motivations that led to joining the CSR, what was the ideal link with the previous regime, what expectations did they feed on the new fascism, why many very young people made that choice, what kind of experience they lived under arms, what they knew about the Resistance and how they judged it, what they perceived and how they metabolised the racial and political massacres and deportations of the Nazis (in which many of them took an active part), how many had second thoughts and why, who remained faithful to the cause to the end and why. “It is difficult if not impossible to give answers to these questions – write Avagliano and Palmieri – through bureaucratic and institutional documents. A significant investigation is instead possible from below, i.e. through contemporary sources never before explored extensively, systematically and in an integrated way: the diaries and letters, the censored correspondence and the Notiziari Z of the fascist secret service with thousands of excerpts from transcribed letters, the periodical newsletters of the censorship commissions, the reports, briefings and Appunti per il duce on public spirit written by the various authorities, police forces, secret services and propaganda offices, the newsletters of the Republican National Guard (the militia of the reconstituted fascist party), the fiduciary notes of the spies who operated between the population and the armed forces, the wills". Finally, the subsequent memoirs are only marginally used, "polluted" by posthumous revisions dictated by the shame of defeat, by the need to hide aspects of that experience, by nostalgic claims and so on.
What emerged was a complex picture but very clear in its general characteristics, which for the first time also examines pages that had been almost completely lost in the maze of later memory of that experience, such as the existence of a clandestine fascism beyond the Allied lines in the regions of southern Italy, the adhesion of thousands of soldiers interned in Nazi concentration camps after the disarmament at the time of the armistice and the iron will not to cooperate with the Allies on the part of thousands of prisoners of the Anglo- Americans, who continued to swear allegiance to Mussolini and to organize Fascist ceremonies in the detention camps, often clashing harshly with those who had made a different choice.
Finally, the book devotes ample space to what was defined as "the march against the Vendée" by the Social Republic, i.e. the participation of all the armed forces of Salò - the National Republican Army, the National Republican Guard, the black, the irregular autonomous gangs and the Italian SS – to the anti-partisan struggle and the so-called "war against civilians", that is to say the wave of indiscriminate and criminal violence that hit Italy in those dramatic months, not only at the hands Nazi. Ultimately, a very black page, which thanks to this research and this balanced and documented essay, now appears a little clearer in many respects.
