A four-part podcast series on the Italian resistance to fascism, both during World War Two and immediately after, in conversation with anti-fascist partisans themselves.

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Episodes

E77: Italian resistance, part 1 – Working Class History

E78: Italian resistance, part 2 – Working Class History

  • Part 2: Migrant partisans, the resistance in the cities, the raid of the Jewish ghetto in Rome, liberation and the execution of Mussolini

E79: Italian resistance, part 3 – Working Class History

  • Part 3: The resistance betrayed? The Togliatti amnesty and the reconstitution of Italian fascism after World War Two

E80: Italian resistance, part 4 – Working Class History

More information

Merch

To help fund our work, we have produced a range of merch commemorating the Italian resistance based around our theme tune, Bella Ciao. Check it out in our online store.

Media

The partisans who feature in this series (colour images courtesy of noipartigiani.it)

Elsa Pelizzari: courier, Nico Group of the Green Flames, Perlasca Brigade. Nom de guerre: “Gloria”.

Alfredo Schiavi: 7th detachment of the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade ‘Luigi Clerici’; later a gappista. Nom de guerre: “Oremus”.

Antonio Amoretti: participant in the ‘Four Days of Naples’. Nom due guerre: “Tonino il biondo”.

Adelina Grossi: participant in the Women’s Defence Groups (Gruppi di Difesa della Donna, or GDD).

Mario Fiorentini: co-founder of the Rome Central Patriotic Action Group (Gruppo di Azione Patriottica, or GAP). Noms de guerre: “Giovanni”, “Dino”, “Gandi” and “Fringuello”.

Episode graphic images

Part 1: Partisans associated with the left-wing Action Party during the liberation of Milan, 1945.

Part 2: Members of the Roti Group partisan unit, 1943. The unit was active in the Marche region of Central Italy. As well as Italians, the Roti Group was also made up of a number of partisans from Eastern Europe and East Africa. Learn more about the Roti Group.

Part 3: Members of the 54th Garibaldi Brigade in Val Maga (Brescia province), 1944. At the front of the photo is 15-year-old female partisan, Rosi Romelli.

Part 4: Demonstrators in Milan’s central square (Piazza del Duomo) in protest against the attempted assassination of Communist Party leader, Palmiro Togliatti, 1948.

Bonus 1 (film): Still from Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945). In the centre with the neck scarf is the actress, Anna Magnani.

Bonus 2 (music): Partisans in Piacenza, Emilia-Romagna.

Bonus 3: Members of the Red Flying Squad, a group of former partisans active in Milan who continued to fight fascism after the end of the war.

Sources

Acknowledgements

  • Thanks to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Jamison D. Saltsman and Fernando López Ojeda.
  • Thanks to Carlo Gianuzzi from the Commissione Scuola ANPI – Brescia and Davide from Cronache Ribelli for all their invaluable help producing this series. Thanks also to the National Association of Italian Partisans (ANPI) for letting us use interviews from the Noi, Partigiani website
  • Thanks to Lilian McCarthy and Davide for their translations, and to our amazing voice actors: Susy, Carlo Gianuzzi, Chiara, Calo, and Giacomo
  • Edited by Tyler Hill
  • Episode graphic: public domain.
  • Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can purchase it here or stream it here.

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Transcript

Part 1

Matt: The Italian resistance to fascism saw unbelievable bravery from hundreds of thousands of ordinary people. It’s a story of mountain guerrilla bands ambushing one of the most advanced armies in the world. It’s a story of general strikes, urban insurrections and the overturning of gender norms. A story of victory and betrayal, it’s also a story where someone from a working-class family, who had started working at the age of ten, would find themselves negotiating the total surrender of 30,000 Nazi soldiers. This is Working Class History.

[intro music]

Matt: We’ve been working on this series for around two years now, and have put in God-knows how many hours of work, and incurred significant expenses in terms of translation, transcription, editing and so on. We can only do this because of support from you, our listeners, on patreon. Our supporters fund our work, and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes, ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise and other content. For example, our patreon supporters can listen to all parts of this series now plus three bonus episodes. Join us or find out more at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

We’ve also produced a range of commemorative merch themed around the Italian resistance and our theme tune, ‘Bella Ciao’, to help us raise funds for our work. And as a listener to the podcast, you get a 10% discount off that and other items using the discount code ‘WCHPODCAST’. Link in the show notes.

As we were working on this series, Italy elected its first far-right government since World War II. The Brothers of Italy party, led by Giorgia Meloni, is an organisation that can trace its history back to Italy’s postwar fascist party, the Italian Social Movement (MSI), and by extension, the Fascist Party of Benito Mussolini itself.

As such, it’s more important than ever to remember the stories of those who put their lives on the line to resist fascism. To that end, we’re so glad to have been able to interview two participants in the Italian resistance: Alfredo Schiavi and Elsa Pelizzari. Both were in their nineties when we interviewed them and, since conducting the interviews, have both sadly passed away. They were both amazing interviewees and it was an absolute honour to speak to them. Losing them really highlighted to us just how fragile our direct connections to the struggles of the past can be.

At a time when the Italian right has made overt attacks on the memory of Italy’s anti-fascist history, casting its participants as criminals or traitors no morally different from the Nazis and fascists they were fighting, it’s more important than ever that those participants should be able to tell their stories in their own words.

As a content note for our listeners, it should be pointed out that this episode contains some descriptions of torture and sexual violence.

In order to tell the story of Italian resistance to fascism during the Second World War, it’s necessary to first go back over twenty years to the rise fascism itself in response to Italy’s militant workers’ movement following World War I.

From 1919 to 1920, the Biennio Rosso (or ‘Two Red Years’) saw huge numbers of workers taking part in strikes, factory and land occupations. In response, Mussolini’s National Fascist Party was formed, funded by wealthy industrialists linked to firms like Fiat and Pirelli who were grateful for the fascist violence against the workers’ movement that had threatened their profits.

Elsa Pelizzari: In 1923, the fascists killed a worker, Mr Giovanni Inga, a carpenter who was drinking wine at the workers’ circle – they beat him to death. He only said, “Why am I not able to stay where I want to stay? I want to do what I want to do.” And after that they beat him. And a lot. 

Matt: This is Elsa Pelizzari, talking about when fascists killed a socialist carpenter in her village of Gazzane in Lombardy.

Elsa Pelizzari: Because of that the village was always a little bit rebellious against fascism. I also grew up in a family where nobody loved the Duce, as Mussolini was known.

Matt: Mussolini’s rise to power and the early resistance to it by anti-fascists is too big a story to go into here. But after years of violence against opponents and an armed ‘March on Rome’ by around 25,000 fascists, Mussolini became Prime Minister heading a coalition of fascists, liberals and conservatives. The left continued to be violently suppressed and, by 1926, all of Italy’s democratic structures would be stripped away.

Elsa Pelizzari: Under fascism, life was unbearable. That is, we were ignorant and we knew nothing about it all. More than anything, we were oppressed, you know, they controlled us. We weren’t free.

I’ll give you an example from elementary school. It was the fascist Epiphany, la Befana (January 6). They gave gifts to all the children. To us in my village, they barely gave us anything because the village was always a bit rebellious against fascism. Let’s say they were pretty socialist, our dads.

I asked the teacher “Why don’t you give anything to us from Gazzane?” She said, “Because you’re a Bolshevik village”. I was 10, I didn’t know what Bolshevik meant, and given that in our local dialect when someone has a cough we tell them they’re “bolso”, I connected “bolso” with Bolshevik and listened if someone had a cough, but nobody was coughing. So I asked my father who explained who the Bolsheviks were and that they were in Russia and they had a revolution. So, this is an example, just to say that we were discriminated against because we were from a subversive village.

Matt: Closely allied with Adolf Hitler’s Germany, Italy entered World War II in 1940 on the Nazis’ side. But as the war went on, Italy was increasingly devastated: by 1943, it was starting to lose the war on all fronts, prices were rising sharply, and extreme rationing meant it wasn’t uncommon for people to lose 10 kilos (22 lbs) in a single year.

Elsa Pelizzari: For the poor, like us, we had the ration book. They gave us daily food rations for 800 calories. So in addition to danger, and fear, we also had to suffer hunger.

Matt: It was in this context that the first major act of rebellion against fascism took place in March 1943 as a mass strike wave of over 200,000 workers spread across Italy’s industrial north. In a letter to Mussolini, one senior fascist described the events, saying:

“I have experienced the demonstrations of workers in Milan, naturally from the shadows. I felt deeply embittered both as a fascist and as an Italian. We were incapable either of predicting or repressing them, and we have broken the principle of our regime’s authority.”

A few months later, at the start of July, Allied troops landed in Sicily. Fascist leaders could see that Mussolini’s time was up and, on 25 July 1943, they voted to have him arrested. 

The news was met with celebrations, but also confusion: some thought Mussolini’s arrest meant Italy would pull out of the war. Others thought it meant the end of fascism. Some fascists hoped that by getting rid of Mussolini, they could continue as normal without him. Fascist leaders, unsure what to do about growing opposition, the Allies arriving from the south and the Nazis in the north, simply floundered. Then, on September 8, the Allies forced them into an armistice. The king and senior members of the military and government then ran away to the Allied-controlled south.

With their Italian allies in disarray, the German military stepped in. They quickly occupied half of Italy, rescued Mussolini from prison and installed him as leader of the ‘Italian Social Republic’, also known as the ‘Republic of Salò’.

Despite the Nazi occupation, resistance continued to grow and, within days of the Italian Social Republic being declared, there was a major uprising: the ‘Four Days of Naples’. A few days before, the Germans declared that all men in the city aged 18-33 were to be taken to Germany as forced labourers and anyone not reporting for deportation would be executed. The Nazis also started destroying factories, archives and other infrastructure as they planned to escape the Allied advance from the south. But when the Nazis tried to physically take people out of Naples, the city erupted: lorries carrying deportees were stopped, military barracks were broken into, and weapons distributed to the population.

Antonio Amoretti: It wasn’t difficult to find things to make barricades with. Naples was full of rubble left from the bombs. When it rose up, and it was the first city in Europe to liberate itself from German domination, it had been worn out by continuous aerial raids, families were even living in the subway station tunnels. From September 27 to 30 1943, guerrilla warfare spread quickly into every neighbourhood, every alley: ordinary people, fighting and dying, in hundreds, with women and children on the front line. My father was supposed to be in that battle of the resistance. But instead it was me on the barricades, together with a group of kids young like me.

Matt: This is Antonio Amoretti, a partisan from Naples, being interviewed by a member of ANPI for the Noi, Partigiani website. He was only 16 when the uprising against the Nazis broke out.

Antonio Amoretti: My father, a tram driver from a peasant family, frequented a group of opponents of the regime who met at the dentist studio of Ciccio Lanza, known as ‘the communist dentist’. 

The evening of September 27, my dad came back from one of these meetings and told my mum: “Tomorrow I need to go into the street, I need to shoot and I can also die. I suggest to you: this nutter,” that was me, “don’t let him go outside.” However, the next day he was stopped by an attack of malarial fever. My father fought in World War I and had contracted malaria. The relapses were terrible, he was delirious with a temperature of 41°C…

So, that morning I took advantage. I took the pistol that he kept hidden and also the Austrian dagger that one of my uncles was wounded with during the First World War. He’d survived and brought it back with him as a memento.

Armed like this, I took a walk around my neighbourhood, Stella San Carlo all’Arena. It was a working-class area: there were shoemaker boys because there were many shoe factories, glove makers, barbers. Craftsmen, basically. That morning I went house to house to warn friends.

When the city rose up and fighting broke out in all the neighbourhoods, I went with another four or five comrades to a barricade. The whole city was filling up with posts built spontaneously by people. Many came out of hiding places. I remember one kid I recognised, his name was Lampugnano. He climbed onto a roof and started shooting. The Germans who, by the way, had barricaded themselves in the Bosco di Capodimonte and had occupied the Arturo Collana stadium, threw a grenade and it blew poor Lampugnano’s head off. 

The same thing happened to Genaro Capuozzo, the boy of eleven years who was made famous by the films about the Four Days. He was on the terrace of a convent being ‘the server’ for the machine gun, holding the tape of bullets for the person shooting. Maybe it didn’t happen a scene like you see in the films, throwing a bomb at the tanks, but little was changed. He died at eleven years old liberating his city and, correctly, he was given the Gold Medal for Military Valour.

Another person I knew well was Maddalena Cerasuolo – ‘Lenuccia’ – the only woman honoured for military valour for having fought in the Four Days. But there were also many others. I always say that if it weren’t for the women, the insurrection would never have happened. Maddalena fought alongside her father, Carlo, who distinguished himself in the defence of the Bridge of Health that the Germans had covered in mines.

On October 1, the Allies found a liberated city. After the war, Napoli was assigned a Gold Medal for Military Valour. And I don’t have any doubts that it was worth the risk.

Matt: The Four Days of Naples was the first major defeat of the German military in Italy at the hands of Italians. And it was a taste of what was to come. 

The rebellion had also been organised by local resistance activists without any real link to the official national structures of the National Liberation Committee (or CLN), which had only been formed about two weeks before.

The CLN brought together five main Italian political parties, but the organisational and military heart of the resistance came from the political left: the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and the Action Party, with the Communists by far the biggest of the three. Meanwhile, on the right, there were the Christian Democrats and the Liberal Party. There were also the badogliani, elements in the Italian army loyal to Pietro Badoglio, the man who had briefly tried to lead the Fascist Party after Mussolini was arrested. 

Unsurprisingly, there were disagreements over how the resistance should conduct itself: the most conservative elements just wanted to wait for the Allies and avoid the creation of a mass movement while, among much of the rank and file of the left parties, it was hoped that the resistance would turn into a struggle for revolutionary change (though it should be noted that this view was not always held by the left party leaderships, which we’ll discuss more in Parts 3 and 4).

The multi-party structure of the CLN was recreated throughout Italy. Soon, most towns, cities, villages and even many factories had their own CLNs. As the resistance grew, one of the biggest groups joining were those who were dodging the military draft: in late 1943, half of those called up refused to go. By early 1944, it was as much as two-thirds, and by June, pretty much no one obeyed the call up, despite the decree that draft dodging would be punishable by death.

Alfredo Schiavi, then just 18 years old, was one resistance fighter who dodged the draft and then joined the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade. His brigade would later become famous as the one that captured and executed Mussolini, but that’s for later in the story.

Alfredo Schiavi: I was educated in a religious school, so I had this kind of background that shaped my behaviour. I knew nothing about politics, I only knew about the Christian religion, that there is sin and so on… I knew nothing else. I learned everything about politics during the war, I learned that we were fighting to change things in Italy. So it happened that I was sent to a zone where there was a Garibaldi Brigade, those who were closer to the Communist party, so I joined them.

The point is that I turned 18 on the 24th of January 1944, and only one month before, I left the religious school where I lived during those years. Then I was drafted by the army as those born in the first six months of 1926, otherwise you could have been sentenced to death. So I went there, as a young 18-year-old who knew nothing of the life outside of my religious school, so I came out dressed like a young fascist… but my cousin, who lived near Pavia and worked in the Mìnistry of the Interior in the Italian Social Republic but was actually a spy for the partisans, he told me to go there, since they let you choose your division. I chose the “milizia confinaria”, whose responsibility was to control the borders of Italy. One week later, I left for Sondrio with my weapons. I spoke with a butcher who lived in Chiesa Valmalenco, in a valley close to Valtellina. The butcher sent me to Morbegno, halfway through the valley. Here I first met the partisans of the 52nd Garibaldi Division. They sent me to Colico, which is a small town on the Lake of Como, where I remained for 9-10 months.

Matt: Resistance units were often very different from regular armies. In particular, the communist-controlled Garibaldi brigades tried to balance the usual military structures with more democratic ones, with leaders subject to election and recall. And instead of conventional warfare, the resistance was based on guerrilla actions, with smaller units hidden in Italy’s mountains choosing opportune moments to attack a far larger and better equipped enemy.

Alfredo Schiavi: I started being a real partisan, we did some ambushes, we were about 240 partisans in that unit, the 10th detachment on the Monte Legnone, just behind Colico, 2640 metres high. I should mention that near Sondrio there was a town called Sondalo, which was a place where many people affected by tuberculosis went to rest. One of the most important things we did, together with many attacks on German columns, was capturing an SS major. He fought at Stalingrad and he was one of the last officers who managed to flee the city via plane, since he was wounded, and then he was taken to Italy and he used to travel on a DKV motorbike, with the sidecar. 

He was going to Sondrio to heal, since he also caught tuberculosis, but he was past the worst phase of it so he needed to recover. We captured him on this motorcycle, which was driven by a Wehrmacht soldier. We were four with the falcon parabellum, we hit the driver who lost control, the officer was unharmed and he surrendered. He stayed with us 39, 40 days. He was watched on sight all the time by two partisans to avoid problems, when we moved he was always in the middle: he was important for us in order to do a prisoners’ exchange. Indeed, they gave us 38-40 partisans who were captured in that area.

Matt: Unsurprisingly, conditions for partisans in the mountains were extremely tough.

Alfredo Schiavi: We had to keep watch at night, you could not light any fire otherwise the Germans could spot and hit you with mortars, we slept in between the snow, that was one metre high. So we slept all together, hugged between the snow, this is why we had frequent changes otherwise you could have died by hypothermia. Those coming from within warmed those who were outside.

Everything changed continuously, we were not free to just roam around, we were given instructions. Even today, when I walk I count my steps from here to the road I’m supposed to reach, as I did as a partisan since if you ran into fascists or Nazis you were supposed to know how far was the enemy, to look for big trees to protect your side, how far was the closest spot which was safe from bullets. You also had to know how to behave in any possible situation. When a partisan was badly injured and you had to withdraw, you even had to kill your comrade who could have told important information if he was captured.

Matt: Indeed, the danger of captured partisans being forced to give up information was very real and potentially devastating. Here, Elsa explains about one incident which took place after information was extracted from a captured partisan.

Elsa Pelizzari: The fascists were meaner than the Germans. To be seen by the SS as one of them, they did terrible things here in the valley. They burned partisans alive, they tortured youngsters who didn’t talk, and then they were executed by firing squad. We saw terrible things done, by the SS, by the fascists, by all of them.

One example: they captured 10 partisans, they tortured them for two days. They didn’t talk. They drowned them in a barn with cattle chains, they shot them in the legs with a machine gun and then they burned down the barn. They burned them alive. That was in the Dorizzo Valley.

Matt: Such brutality was by no means isolated. In one incident in Bassano del Grappa, in north-eastern Italy, the Nazis declared that any partisans who surrendered would not be prosecuted. Local teachers, priests and even some mothers all pleaded with young resistance fighters to surrender in order to save their lives. 31 young men turned themselves in, but instead of being pardoned, they were all brutally murdered and hanged from trees in the town’s main street. The trees on that street (now called ‘The Street of Martyrs’) are still there today, with each tree displaying a plaque with the name of the partisan who was hanged from it.

In other places, it was common for Nazis and fascists to respond to successful partisan actions by killing ten people for every Nazi or fascist killed. These would be chosen either from resistance prisoners or even just selected at random from the local population. With the threat of such brutal reprisals, it’s no surprise that partisans operated with strict discipline not just with each other, but also in relation to the civilian population they were hiding among, both to avoid any anonymous tips to the authorities and to maintain local support. Indeed, it’s estimated that for every fighter, the resistance needed the logistical support of about 10-15 others to obtain funds, provide food, carry messages, and more.

Elsa was one of those who provided that support. Here, she tells us how she came to join the resistance, at the age of just 14.

Elsa Pelizzari: The Italian Social Republic eliminated all organizations. There were no longer scouts, there was no longer anything, but Mussolini only kept up Catholic Action, a group that organised for more Catholic influence in society. All parents had to register their children with the GIL, the fascist youth movement, and the fascists thought the parents would do it.

A young priest in our district went to the council to see the list of GIL members and saw that only a few parents had registered their kids. Only about 5 or 6. And so, out of fear for a reaction towards the parents, what did he do? As Mussolini had kept good with Catholic Action to keep himself good with the Church and the Vatican, this priest signed everyone to Catholic Action.

In this way, we could go to his house and also to the chapel to do our meetings and nobody arrested us even though there was a ban on meetings of four people or more. Us kids would go in groups of five or six but we had our little Catholic Action cards.

The priest started to tell us about how they lived in America, how they lived in England, and he told us a little bit about freedom that for us, we had never heard in our lifetimes. And, as he was alone, he told us, “go and look around, and then each one of you tell me your impression”. Each one of us kids told him what we felt about the occupation and from there he chose 13 of us, 12 boys and one girl, that was me, I was 14, but I was suitable to carry orders by bicycle because I already went by bicycle to meet my aunt on vacation, so I was a little bit prepared. The fascists didn’t scare me.

From here our group was born: Grupo Nico of the Green Flames and when I was the courier my code name was “Gloria”.

Our valley had three partisan formations: there was the Perlasca Brigade of Green Flames, there was the 122nd Garibaldi, and the 7th Matteotti. I connected these three. And I must say that if there had not been the girls in the mountains, and above all the mothers who hid and gave food to the groups. They were the couriers of our valley and communication and moral support and material help. In other valleys, some women were also commanders, especially in Val Camonica and Emilia-Romagna. Where there were no men in charge, some women took command of the brigades and they commanded well. There were many roles for women. In society, women were subjugated, let’s say, but in the resistance they were valued. Even now when there aren’t many living partisans, when we women run into each other we salute each other with love and respect because we helped the resistance. Because without certain actions taken by women, would the resistance have been able to exist?

We were strong and we also gave courage to the young men. Because many times they were demoralised. For example, the winter of 1944 was terrible. So much snow, really nothing. Hunger. There was two metres of snow and we couldn’t bring them anything to eat, they had to eat polenta and snow. And if it hadn’t been for the mothers of the valley, who as one woman said, they cooked the rabbit and then kept little at the table because they always brought it to the guys in the mountains.

There was a parent of one of the Garibaldi brigades who had a shop. One time a month he told the commander, send us the couriers, I’m preparing something. So they went by bicycle from our area to Desenzano, that was 20 or 30 kilometers away, to do these things under machine gun fire because there were airplanes that machine-gunned everything that moved on the road. So we prayed to succeed. And with this food being delivered, we had to arrive in the valley and go up the mountain, carrying it in our backpacks. A full backpack, we went up 1000 metres in height to bring food to the partisans.

Matt: However, it wasn’t always just food that couriers like Elsa delivered.

Elsa Pelizzari: One time an older man from Desenzano said to us, “Today I have some nice cheese to eat, but I also have four hand grenades, where should I put them?” He couldn’t put them in his bag because there were roadblocks already in there.

So, they were attached under our bicycle seats, two for me and two for Stella, another courier. He said “I recommend you, girls, avoid any holes in the road so you don’t blow up.” Stella was four years older than me so I said to her, “Listen, you go ahead as you’re older. Like this, if you jump in the air, I’ll avoid the holes!”

Anyway, what I’m saying is that the network did bring things, also shoes, blankets and everything else, up the mountains to the three partisan groups.

Matt: As well as transporting food and weapons, Elsa (alongside the rest of her group organised by the Catholic minister) also acted as spies for the resistance.

Elsa Pelizzari: This priest who made the group was called Don Angelo, and with his connections he put us to work. For example, I was with the agriculture unions. The head of our group, Nico Gasparri, was with the Ministry of the Interior. One was in the Decima MAS naval flotilla. There were four at armories that were in Santa Barbara of the Republic, and two belonged to an association of the SS. One was working at a machine shop, so we were spread out. It was a real spy ring, basically.

Our work was to gather news and other things. I pretended to be a convinced fascist. In fact, next to my office, there was the headquarters of Mussolini’s personal guards. They were all young, more or less my age, and we became friends and I convinced them I was a fascist. They trusted me so much that when they went to eat or went to training, they left their office open.

The first time I was able to enter, look around, see certain documents, I took one and quickly brought it to Don Angelo. He said this is an important identity document. We would need more, not all the time, but one a week or one every two weeks. 

The fact that I could get into the office and get this document saved many lives. I’ll explain to you why: the commander in the valley, of the Perlasca brigade, had taken photos of all his comrades and sent the negatives to a photographer in Salò who was an anti-fascist. He made the photographs, like a card, and he gave them to me and I brought them to Don Angelo and he pasted them onto this document. And then our commander, Nico, who worked at the Ministry of the Interior, he stole an official stamp. On top of the photographs we put the stamp from the ministry, and this document, when a partisan had to move somewhere, he kept this document. Anyway, this was also one of my jobs.

Matt: As Elsa said earlier, women were absolutely essential to the functioning of the resistance. This was not just the case in relation to the thousands of women who supported the resistance by hiding partisans, providing food or making warm clothes (all of which were vital, especially as winter arrived). But, as Elsa mentioned, many women also took on military activities: in Emilia-Romagna, for instance, a woman called Novella Albertazzi commanded a partisan group of 200 people, 80 of whom were women. 

There were also specific women’s groups within the resistance. In 1943, the Women’s Defense Groups, or GDD, were founded and, by 1945, it boasted around 70,000 members with around 35,000 engaged in combat roles. And, like their male counterparts, female fighters risked brutal treatment at the hands of fascists: Gabriella degli Esposti, a mother of two young daughters, formed a Women’s Defence Group in the countryside outside Modena. Gabriella took part in armed actions and organised mass demonstrations before she was arrested in December 1944. She was tortured for several days during which her breasts were cut and her eyes gouged out. Her dead body was found with her stomach ripped open and it turned out that she had been pregnant. The following month, a women-only detachment (made up of 55 women in five squads) was formed in her honour.

GDD activists also organised strikes among women workers and protests against deportations or for higher rations. They also often had to struggle against not only the extreme sexism of fascist society, but also the sexism of the resistance as well.

Adelina Grossi: We were in my mum’s bedroom and we were having a secret meeting. Many women from Massa Lombarda were there (it’s called Massa Lombarda but in reality it is found in the heart of Romagna, between Forlì e Ravenna).

Matt: This is Adelina Grossi, an activist in the GDD, who was still only a teenager when she got involved in the resistance.

Adelina Grossi: We were organising a Women’s Defense Group. There were peasant and bourgeois women, communists and republicans. I was used to hearing anti-fascist reasoning from when I was little. My dad, a communist peasant with a fine brain, had been arrested in 1927: I was born while he was in prison at Regina Coeli in Rome. He did a year in prison and until the Liberation he suffered badly: spied on, marginalised, in misery.

For me, seeing as I was a girl, school was considered a luxury we couldn’t permit ourselves. As such, assisting at that meeting made me very excited: for the first time I really understood that, even as a woman, I had the right and the duty to dedicate myself.

The natural route, then, was to be a courier. But Lalla, also she was at the meeting in my mum’s bedroom, wasn’t a courier like all the others. Her name was Osvalda Baffè, she was eight years older than me and she lived on a farm not more than 200 metres from our house. And she was the head of a SAP, a Patriotic Action Squad, that had as its main objective to involve the population in the liberation struggle. For us, the situation was particular because there weren’t mountains to offer refuge to the partisans: on the plains, protection was offered by the peasants.

Lalla’s father, Pippo, had always been a communist and anti-fascist: they had put him on trial three times and he had done eight years in prison. As such, in 1944, it was all normal to organise with his children, Luigi and Osvalda, the first partisan formations of the area.

When Lalla asked me to accompany her on her rounds, I did it with enthusiasm. She knew she had to stay alert and, in fact, she didn’t sleep anymore at home. The fascists in Mass Lombarda were just waiting for the right moment to settle things with their long-time adversary, Pippo Baffè.

The day of liberation was indescribable. After the pain and fear had passed, after we had seen our friends killed, that day seemed like we could forget everything. Joy. We celebrated in Massa Lombarda. The crowds filled the streets and the piazzas, people hugged each other, people cried.

But when, after some weeks, the partisans paraded in uniform for the inauguration of Piazza Umberto Ricci, women could not be seen.

[Outro music]

Matt: That’s all we’ve got time for in this episode. We’ll come back to the treatment of women partisans in Part 3, where we’ll also discuss what happened to partisans and fascists after the war while in Part 4 we talk about postwar anti-fascist rebellions and how the resistance is viewed today. But next up, in Part 2, we discuss the resistance in the cities, the liberation of Italy from fascism and the migrant partisans who took part in it. Parts 2, 3 and 4 are available now for our supporters on patreon.

We also have three bonus episodes for this series: in the first, we discuss our favourite films about Italian fascism and the resistance; in our second bonus episode, we talk about some of the music that came out of the Italian resistance; and in our final bonus episode we talk more about postwar anti-fascist group, the Volante Rossa, and the continuity of Italian fascism from the war to today’s government. All of this is available exclusively for our supporters on patreon. 

It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes. In return for your support, you get early access to content, as well as ad-free episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted merch, and more. And if you can’t spare the cash, absolutely no problem, please just tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.

If you’d like to learn more about the Italian resistance to fascism, check out the webpage for this episode where you’ll find images, a full list of sources, further reading and more. Link in the show notes.

We also want to thank Carlo Gianuzzi from the Commissione Scuola ANPI – Brescia and Davide from Cronache Ribelli for all their invaluable help producing this series. We’d also like to thank the National Association of Italian Partisans for letting us use interviews from their amazing Noi, Partigiani website, which contains over 650 interviews with participants in the Italian resistance. Links to all of these in the show notes.

We’d also like to thank Lilian McCarthy and Davide for their translations and to our amazing voice actors: Susy, Carlo Gianuzzi, Chiara, Calo, Giacomo Paoloni, and everyone who helped us from ANPI Londra.

Thanks also to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jamison D. Saltsman, Jazz Hands and Fernando Lopez Ojeda. 

Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Tyler Hill.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode, and thanks for listening.

Part 2

Matt: Welcome back to Part 2 of our podcast series on the Italian resistance. If you haven’t listened to Part 1 yet, I suggest you go back and listen to that one first.

[intro music]

Matt: Before we get started, just a quick reminder that our podcast is brought to you by our patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work, and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes, ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise and other content. For example, our patreon supporters can listen to all parts of this series now. Patreon supporters also have access to three bonus episodes for this series covering postwar anti-fascism as well as discussions about films and music of the Italian resistance. Join us or find out more at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

We’ve also produced a range of commemorative merch themed around the Italian resistance and our theme tune, ‘Bella Ciao’, to help us raise funds for our work. And as a listener to the podcast, you get a 10% discount off that and other items using the discount code ‘WCHPODCAST’. Link in the show notes.

As a content note for our listeners, this episode contains some descriptions of war crimes.

Because of the armistice, and the Nazi occupation that followed it, the Italian resistance is sometimes depicted as a purely ‘national war’ between Italian citizens and their German occupiers. We go into more detail about what’s missing from that narrative in Part 3, like the two decades of Italian fascist dictatorship before the German occupation. But one thing that’s often ignored about the resistance was how international it was.

Elsa Pelizzari: In Valley Sabbia, there was a prison camp and there were Slavs, there were Americans, there were Germans, all captured by the Italian army. After the armistice on September 8, they couldn’t go home because there was the war. And so, many Slavs stopped with the Perlasca Brigade. In the 122nd Garibaldi Brigade, there were four Russians. Because the Russians couldn’t go back home, they came together.

There was also Professor Paramendic, a Slav, who was part of the Perlasca Brigade. He did some heroic things and was injured. Anyway, after the liberation, he came to Vestone and he bought the house in the hamlet of Forno d’Ono where he was hidden and made it into a museum of the resistance. 

Matt: However, this forgetting of international partisans is not just an accident, but reflects how these participants challenge the dominant story of a national war against foreign occupation. We spoke to Davide from Cronache Ribelli, a people’s history project in Italy similar to WCH, who explained this a little bit more.

Davide: They’ve been forgotten because they do not fit the narrative. They do not because if you talk about a national war and that’s all, how can you explain that there were 5,000 Soviet soldiers fighting with the resistance? How can you explain that? It was not only to save their lives. It’s not that they didn’t have any choice. Those 5,000 Soviet soldiers fought for the resistance. One-tenth of them died fighting in the resistance war in Italy thousands and thousands of kilometres away from their home. 

Soviets were the biggest numbers. There were other nationalities who fought next to the Italian partisans. Of course, for obvious reasons, Yugoslavia is another one. I’ll give you another perspective. There were even Italians who were deserters in Yugoslavia started fighting with the Yugoslavian resistance. There were a lot of Yugoslavians who were captured and sent to concentration camps in Italy. They were freed and started fighting together with the Italians. There are examples where it is even more clear how it was not only about the nation because they could have reached Slovenia easily. If you were held in a camp in Veneto, it’s four days of walking and you were home. They decided to stay there and fight because they knew that defeating fascism and Nazism was something more. 

You had a few hundred Czechoslovakians. Yugoslavians were fewer than the Soviets but still, there were a few thousand. There were more than 50 nationalities. There were even British who took part in the Italian resistance. Of course, most of them were prisoners of war who were freed or pilots who were shot down. They were lucky and were recovered by partisans. It’s worth mentioning, when we go back to the Soviets, that all the nationalities of the republics were represented and not only Russians. There were Ukrainians, Belarusians, Estonians and people from the Central Asian Republics. It was huge. Their numbers were like two whole divisions of partisans or even more. Their numbers were so high.

Another example which is worth mentioning is the Germans. We had Germans, Austrians, who fought alongside the Italians. Rudolf Jacobs, someone we mention in our book, was a partisan in Liguria again. One day, he just said, ‘No, I’m not okay with that.’ He could have just stayed in the Wehrmacht and kept fighting this war but he decided to switch sides and become an Italian partisan and fight next to the Italian resistance. He died fighting Germans. 

We had people from all over the British Empire like Indians, South Africans and Irish volunteers. Other ones who are worth mentioning, which I had forgotten about, are the Black partisans. The most well-known one is Giorgio Marincola who was half-Italian and half-Somali. He fought and died after the end of the war in Fruili. We have dozens of examples but what is interesting, apart from numbers and the specific story, is that they’re really useful in understanding this from what they told us about the resistance after the war. It was not national. It was another kind of struggle and everyone could have been part of it because fighting fascism was a fight for human life and dignity. 

Matt: One great article on the international nature of the Italian resistance is called ‘Migrant Partisans: the Internationalist Resistance Against Italian Fascism’ by the Wu Ming Foundation. It includes more info about the groups Davide mentions, not to mention many others, like the ‘Lions of Breda Solini’, a battalion of Sinti partisans who had escaped a concentration camp and joined the resistance. We’ll include a link to that article in the show notes.

In Part 1, we spoke about the anti-fascist resistance in the mountains. But the cities, as hubs of both economic and political power, were also important sites of action for the resistance.

One key form of urban resistance activity was the strike: in the last episode, we spoke about the March 1943 strikes which rocked Mussolini’s regime. But from September 1943, striking workers didn’t just have Mussolini’s fascists to worry about, but also the occupying Nazi army. About 8000 striking workers would be deported from Italy to Mauthausen concentration camp, many of whom never returned.

Yet despite this, strikes continued throughout the Nazi occupation: in November 1943, a wildcat strike broke out in Turin in response to workers being killed after management refused to suspend work when an air-raid siren went off. The strike spread around the city, then, on December 1, to Milan where Nazi authorities began arresting striking workers before being forced to release them. After Milan, the movement spread to Genoa, the third city in Italy’s industrial triangle. Workers marched out of their factories and were joined by the wider population. When authorities shot three demonstrators, the resistance declared public mourning with everything shutting down, especially in working-class parts of the city.

Then, in March 1944, while occupied by one of human history’s most violent regimes, workers staged a series of coordinated general strikes across northern Italy in what was one of the biggest in occupied Europe: one estimate put the number of strikers at 1.2 million. An article in the New York Times, claimed between three and six million. Sabotage of rail and electricity lines were timed to coincide with walkouts while a printers’ strike stopped the country’s main newspaper, Corriere della Sera, from appearing for three days. The New York Times wrote about the March 1944 strikes that:

“nothing has occurred in occupied Europe to compare in scale with the revolt of the workers in Italy. It is the climax of a campaign of sabotage, local strikes and guerrilla warfare […] it is an impressive proof that the Italians, unarmed as they are and under a double bondage, will fight with reckless courage when they have something to fight for”. 

Strikes had become an integral part of the anti-fascist resistance, not least in the partisan insurrections that finally liberated the big northern cities, which we’ll discuss later. For many, anti-fascism and class struggle were intimately linked (in no small part because the big Italian employers had been among the strongest supporters of fascism). However, employers soon saw the writing on the wall and began to prepare for life after fascism by looking for elements of the resistance that they could work with (something which we’ll discuss in more detail in Part 3).

Resistance in the cities also took the form of urban guerrilla actions. In late 1943, the Communist Party set up the Patriotic Action Groups, also known as GAPs. GAP members, or gappisti as they were known, did things like targeted assassinations, sabotage of infrastructure, and guerrilla attacks on soldiers and the police.

Life as a gappista was tough. Multiple gappisti described it as even harder than the resistance in the mountains: they recount the extreme loneliness of a life permanently in hiding, the tension following an action, and the constant feeling of being hunted like an animal. In contrast to the resistance in the mountains, where membership was looser, gappisti were selected from within party structures, not just on the basis of political and military reliability, but also what historian and former partisan, Claudio Pavone, describes as a “coldness and determination of character.”

Alfredo Schiavi, who we spoke to in Part 1, was one such gappista.

Alfredo Schiavi: I was transferred, together with Erasmo, my other latin-speaking friend, in another town in Piemonte which I cannot tell you, to become a gappista. Those were partisans groups who were quite restricted. The gappisti worked in small groups of 2 or 3 partisans inside the cities as spies, or to kill enemy informants and spies. We lived at a priest’s house where I was disguised as an altar boy with the chained incense burner which you can find in any church. The priest was dressed in purple, which meant he was responsible for giving the last rites to soldiers, so we could go pretty much everywhere without problems.

We didn’t know anything about anyone. We knew only the notes we received, ‘this needs to be done, that needs to be done’ etc. One time we were moved, we had to go to Milan. This I will tell you. We had to eliminate a captain of the Black Brigades, a fascist paramilitary group. An evil man. He lived near Corso Buenos Aires. Every morning, at 8/8:30, he came down and there was a car that was waiting for him. And we, for two or three days, went there and this car with two or three people who were escorting him, naturally. We didn’t go into homes, we needed to do everything in the open. One morning it was raining, we were there as usual. Obviously, I wasn’t dressed like an altar boy anymore. And there, we saw him at the door and the car wasn’t waiting there. So, what did he do? He walked a bit to take the tram. And he paid for it dearly.

Matt: Another city which saw fierce partisan resistance was Rome. On 23 March 1944, the infamous Via Rasella attack took place: Roman partisans attacked 156 fully armed Nazi soldiers marching behind a motorbike with a mounted machine gun in the side car. Ten kilos of dynamite were exploded and, while the Nazis were still reeling, a group of partisans attacked them with hand grenades and machine guns. 33 Nazis were killed and over 100 wounded.

The action was a success; but, as Roman partisan, Mario Fiorentini explains, they could not have been prepared for what would happen next.

Mario Fiorentini: From my balcony, on the facade of the building in front, all the way to the highest floors, they can be easily recognised the signs of the bombs that exploded on 23 March 1944 in Via Rasella. Back then, I already lived in this house, in the area I was known, and it was for this reason that our commander, Carlo Salinari, forced me to not participate in the action that I’d had the idea and prepared the details for: because I was seeing the Nazis of the Bozen battalion march past every day at the same time. 33 soldiers and two passers-by died as a result of the blast. But, the next day, 24 March 1944, there was an escalation in the speed of the reprisal that we, of the GAP, were not able to predict: the killing of 335 hostages in the Ardeatine massacre.

Fate wanted me to live for more than a century to shed my tears again, as I am doing now, in front of those innocent martyrs. I claim the hard necessity of actions like that of Via Rasella, because the enemy needed to be fought in the cities, not just in the mountains. But the ferocious immediacy with which it was exercised, not even 24 hours after; we could not have predicted the Nazi reaction, because it was without precedent.

Matt: As we mentioned in Part 1, reprisals worked along the rule of murdering ten people for every Nazi or fascist killed. With 33 soldiers killed, that meant 330 were supposed to be transported to the Ardeatine caves to be murdered in revenge. The victims were led into the caves in groups of five. Their hands tied behind their back, they were then shot in the neck. Many were forced to kneel over the dead who had been killed before them as the cave became filled with bodies. During the massacre, it was noticed that an extra group of five had been brought by mistake, but they were also killed anyway, bringing the total killed to 335.

As another example of what’s wrong with viewing the resistance through the lens of a ‘national war’ (and the often cynical motivations of those who do), in March 2023, Italy’s far-right Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, put out a statement supposedly to ‘commemorate’ the anniversary of the Ardeatine massacre. In it, she described the victims as having been killed “just for being Italian”. What Meloni leaves out here is not just that those killed were actually anti-fascists, Jews, or even just criminals selected to make up the numbers, but that their killing was only possible because of the collaboration of Italians whose political lineage would extend to include Meloni herself.

One of those killed in the Ardeatine massacre was particularly important to Mario.

Mario Fiorentini: Among the innocent victims of the Ardeatine massacre, fate wanted that he would be included Fernando Norma, of the Justice and Freedom brigade, who was my teacher in anti-fascism together with Paolo Emilio Manacorda. They were the ones who opened my eyes, instilled political passions in a young man like myself who, for economic reasons, had not had the possibilities to pursue education.

My father, Pacifico Fiorentini, was Jewish. When Mussolini announced the Racial Laws in 1938, I was 20. In reaction, I went to the head Rabbi in Rome and asked him to convert me, but he dissuaded me. The sad day of the ghetto raid, 16 October 1943: my parents were also captured and only at the last moment were they able to bribe someone from the SS and escape, while I got away by jumping over the rooftops.

Matt: Historical revisionists often claim that the antisemitic atrocities which took place in Italy were the fault of German Nazis rather than Italian fascists. And though antisemitism was fringe in early Italian fascism, it became a major theme after the invasion of Ethiopia, with regime propaganda promoting the racial superiority of so-called ‘pure Italians’ over Africans. Antisemitic themes increased in the Italian press, culminating in the 1938 Racial Laws and the ‘Manifesto of the Race’, which accompanied them, stating that Italians must “openly declare themselves racist” and that Jews “do not belong to the Italian race”.

The Racial Laws made it illegal for Jews to study or teach in schools or universities, or work in banks, insurance companies or the government. Jews could not publish books, or own land over a certain value. They could not marry non-Jews and those naturalised since 1919 lost their citizenship.

When Rome’s Jewish ghetto was raided, over a thousand Jews were rounded up and deported to concentration camps. On arrival, they were separated into two groups: the first, consisting of over 200 people, were sent to do forced labour. The second group, consisting of 820 people, were judged incapable of forced labour and sent directly to the gas chambers. Out of over a thousand Jews rounded up in the ghetto raid, only 16 survived.

In total, 2091 Jews were deported from Rome: 1067 men, 743 women, and 281 children. Just over 100 survived. All of the 281 children deported from Rome were killed in the camps.

Mario Fiorentini and his parents escaped an almost certain death. And, for Mario, it meant his continued involvement in the Roman GAP.

Mario Fiorentini: In our action unit there were intellectuals who had transformed themselves into fearless soldiers.

It had actually been one of them, Antonello Trombadori, who told us that we had to react with an unbelievably big action to the arrest of Sandro Pertini and Giuseppe Saragat, two high-ranking socialist politicians involved in the resistance who were locked up in Rome’s Regina Coeli prison. So, on 26 December 1943, while my comrades covered my back, I got on my bicycle and, at the time of the changing of the guard, threw myself on the Lungotevere parallel to via della Lungara. I threw a package with two kilos of TNT at the SS men guarding the prison gate. Eight died, five instantly. Ready to throw myself into the river, when the first volleys fired from the windows of Regina Coeli, I started pedaling desperately amidst the bullets. I was lucky: they didn’t have time to hit me.

Matt: With continued strikes and guerrilla actions in both city and countryside, and the continued Allied push from the south, it was only a matter of time until fascism was defeated.

The consensus was that the resistance needed to topple fascism itself: for some, this was to prove the democratic and anti-fascist credentials of the Italian people. For others, particularly rank-and-file communists, it was to be the first step of the working class to transform society (it should be said, however, that this opinion was not necessarily shared by the leadership of their party, as we’ll discuss in Parts 3 and 4).

Whatever the motivations, it was generally agreed that to topple fascism it would take a series of insurrections in Italy’s major northern cities. But by the end of 1944, only Naples and Florence had been liberated via insurrection, and even in Florence it took three weeks and the arrival of Allied soldiers.

All this changed by the spring of 1945 with a string of partisan insurrections liberating one city after another: first was Bologna, where on April 20, with the Nazis fleeing the city, partisans occupied the city’s main buildings. Fighting was relatively brief, but resulted in 300 Nazis dead and 1000 captured. The Allies, pushing north through the countryside as part of their Spring Offensive, arrived the next day into an already liberated city.

Two days after the liberation of Bologna, rail workers in Milan declared an indefinite strike. The next day, GAP members attacked fascist barracks in broad daylight. An insurrection was called for April 25 at 2pm and by that evening, the city’s main public buildings, radio station, newspaper and military offices were occupied by partisans. Give or take a few fascist holdouts, Milan was under full partisan control by April 27 with the Allies arriving in the city two days later.

The same day that rail workers in Milan walked out, a general strike was called in the major port city of Genoa. The Nazis offered to leave the city untouched if they were allowed to withdraw peacefully; but, as one partisan commander put it: “Do you really think we’ve gone through so many months of war, enduring so many sacrifices and deaths, just to let you escape unharmed?” That night, partisans attacked positions throughout Genoa, occupied the police headquarters and released political prisoners from the city’s main jail. By the evening of April 25, Remo Scappini, a communist partisan from a working-class family near Florence who had started working when he was just ten years old found himself negotiating the total surrender of General Gunther Meinhold and 30,000 Nazi soldiers. Allied troops arrived on April 27 to find a liberated Genoa being run by partisans.

Turin probably suffered the most difficult path to liberation: on the night of 18-19 April, while unrest was still building in Bologna, a general strike began in Turin with the slogans “Against hunger and terror”, “Milk for children!” and “Fascists: surrender or die!”. A week later, on 26 April, an insurrection began with partisans from the countryside descending on the city. By the morning of April 28, Turin had been liberated. The Allies arrived on May 2 to find yet another major city already under democratic control.

While partisan insurrections were causing fascism to collapse in city after city, Mussolini left his wife and children behind and, dressed as a German soldier, attempted to sneak into Switzerland with his mistress. Unfortunately for him, he was spotted by a partisan who called out “We’ve got Big Head!”. He was arrested by members of Alfredo’s 52nd Garibaldi Brigade and then executed.

One of those who carried out the execution was Aldo Lampredi, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who had spent years in fascist jails. Before Mussolini was shot, Lampredi said to him: “Who would have said that the communists, who you persecuted for so long, would settle their accounts with you?”

Mussolini’s body was then hung in Piazzale Loreto, a square in Milan where the bodies of 15 massacred partisans had been left on public display less than a year earlier.

Alfredo, who was acting as a gappista somewhere in Piedmont, told us about his memories of liberation.

Alfredo Schiavi: In the end we remained there until the 25th of April, me and Erasmo, when the priest told us the password from Radio London, ventisei per uno, “26 for 1”, that meant we were supposed to get down from the mountains and get out from the factories, to arrest the fascists while ignoring the Germans. The Resistance was over.

We went out with our civilian clothes. I was 18, Erasmo was between 20 and 23. We had to go back to Alessandria, which was an important hotspot for Italian railways. Trains came from Genoa, Milan, Turin… There were lots of German troops there for this reason, especially the division who surrendered in Genoa the day before. With their vehicles they were moving from Genoa to Alessandria, where they were supposed to take trains to Germany. They were free to move, while fascists had to be captured and taken to a big camp near Livorno, where they would have been questioned, held as prisoners or moved to Rome. 

We arrived there, on the bank of a river, I don’t remember the name. Then we spotted some blackshirts standing on the other side, so we thought they were moving towards Alessandria. We were quite afraid that they could do something stupid so we waited. But they did nothing, so we decided to move: we got up with our rifles, I shot some rounds with my Sten. The others threw some bombs. So, we managed to cross the river and… in the end they were trees that had been chopped down! And we thought they were fascists waiting for us! 

Then a peasant with a wagon gave us a ride to Alessandria. I remember he had some wooden stakes and we hung a red cloth from them like a flag. When we were on the main road, we crossed a German division and we just waved and said hi to them. 

Afterwards, I stopped at Rivalta Scrivia, where my uncle lived. Luckily, I stayed there with him for a week. Then my father came with a bicycle and we rode back around 60km to Pavia. It was the beginning of May.

Matt: But despite the Nazi occupation being in a state of collapse and its army in retreat, it still carried a significant threat to the locals it came across. Elsa – who was now still only 16 – experienced the seriousness of that threat first hand.

Elsa Pelizzari: I was taken hostage for seven hours by the SS when a caravan ready to escape back to Germany stopped in our village.

We couldn’t fight it, we didn’t have weapons like they did, because it was an 80-vehicle caravan. The CLN said that we should send someone to negotiate, that if they surrendered they would be allowed to pass freely to the Brenner Pass, which goes from Italy into Austria. But our commander, Nico, said that if we send a man, then they’d kill him immediately so what should we do? I said that I’d go as I knew a few words in German. They sent me with a bag filled with bread and they told me “You need to say we forced you to do this.”

And so I went to negotiate. There was the commander of the Wehrmacht, he accepted and said, “For us, it’s fine, but there, in the hotel, is the commander of the SS and we need his authorisation”. And he took me there to talk with the SS commander. When the SS commander heard what I had to say, he took a rifle and said, “to partisans, we respond like this”, and then fired right next to me. My brother and the others in the hills thought that they’d killed me because after seven hours I still hadn’t come back.

And so, then they locked me in a room: I won’t go into particulars, I don’t ever want to tell anyone about what happened. But it was seven hours of hell. Seven hours that I spent in terrible fear. And I prayed the Rebel’s Prayer of Catholic partisan, Teresio Olivelli: “In torture, clamp our lips / Break us in half, don’t let us bend.” Because they continued to ask me questions and I was saying, “They forced me as I was coming out of the shop with my bread and they forced me to take this mission. As such, I don’t know anything. I know the valley is full of partisans but I don’t know where they are.” I continued like this and I continued with this long process. 

After seven hours, and you can imagine after seven hours how scared I was, they opened the door and I could see at that point that there were only two vans. The one in front, they were loading with machine guns, and they made me get into the last one. And this scene I’ll remember forever because I saw this man at the steering wheel. He had hair swept back, like my dad, that was true. And I looked at him and I told him (because I knew a few words of German because we studied German at school back then) that he looked like my dad because he had hair like him. Before he wasn’t looking at me, but after that he turned and looked at me and asked “How old are you?” I was 16, I’d just had my birthday on April 4th, so this was the 22nd, so I was 16. And then he said, “You’re the same age as my daughter that I haven’t seen for three years.” 

Because of this I started to look at him a bit differently: before, inside me, I had a bitterness towards the SS for what they had done to me. I looked at him, and he looked at me almost with compassion. After they had finished loading the other truck, we had only exchanged a couple of words because I didn’t know any more German to make myself understood. And when the truck in front went around the bend towards Cunettone where the rest of the caravan had gone, he opened the door for me and said “Raus! Raus!” (‘Out! Out!’). He stroked my face and then let me out. I ran so fast from Tormini to Roè, I broke Pietro Mennea’s World Record! When I arrived back in the hills, my brother and the others welcomed me with joy.

This was on the 22nd. On April 29, we’d had the celebrations of 25 April, liberation, the church bells had rung etc. Don Angelo was giving a thanksgiving mass because we were all alive, the war was finished, we were okay. The mass finished, it was about 9:30, and we could hear tank tracks that were passing by our town of Roè. “Huh?” said Don Angelo. “It’s impossible that it could be the Americans already. They were just in Parma, they couldn’t possibly be here already.” And so we ran down to the end of the street, where the main road passed. And there we saw passing tanks with swastikas on them: “My God, the Germans are still around!” We hid, obviously. This was the 29th, and they were passing through, firing at random. Thinking that the valley was filled with partisans, they were firing at random. Like this they even killed my aunt who had opened the door to call her daughter who was in the bathroom behind the house and she was hit by the machine gun fire. Because anything that moved, they shot and killed.

Matt: But despite the continued threat of the retreating Nazi army, Elsa still had fond memories of liberation.

Elsa Pelizzari: Ah, that day was marvelous. Because we heard the bells ring, the factory sirens going off, and then above all for us, we could finally say that we were partisans. It was a liberation because until then no one could say who they were and what they did, they couldn’t.

It was truly a joy and we thought that everything would be different. We partisans would have rolled up our sleeves and worked to rebuild the houses to redo everything because it had all been bombed, we were all poor and we had to work, and we worked.

My hopes while I was part of the struggle for liberation were to live in freedom. And finally to be able to enjoy the famous freedom that Don Angelo taught us was how others lived. We thought that we could live freely and without impositions.

A thing which, unfortunately, for political reasons, did not happen.

[Outro music]

Matt: That’s all we’ve got time for in this episode. Join us in Part 3 where we’ll discuss what happened to the fascist movement and anti-fascist resistance in the years after the war, including betrayals, injustices, and divisions between partisans. Meanwhile, in Part 4, we look at how former partisans took justice into their own hands, talk about some armed uprisings, and how the resistance is thought about today. That’s all available now for our supporters on patreon.

We also have three bonus episodes for this series: in the first, we discuss some of our favourite Italian films about fascism and the resistance; in our second bonus episode we talk about some of the music that came out of the Italian resistance; and in our final bonus episode we talk more with Davide about postwar anti-fascism and the continuity of Italian fascism from the war to today’s government. All of this is available exclusively for our supporters on patreon. 

It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes. In return for your support, you get early access to episodes, ad-free episodes, as well as exclusive bonus content, discounted merch, and more. And if you can’t spare the cash, absolutely no problem, please just tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.

If you’d like to learn more about the Italian resistance to fascism, check out the webpage for this episode where you’ll find images, a full list of sources, further reading and more. Link in the show notes.

We also want to thank Carlo Gianuzzi from the Commissione Scuola ANPI – Brescia and Davide from Cronache Ribelli for all their invaluable help producing this series. We’d also like to thank the National Association of Italian Partisans for letting us use interviews from their amazing Noi, Partigiani website, which contains over 650 interviews with participants in the Italian resistance. Links to all of these in the show notes.

We’d also like to thank Lilian McCarthy and Davide for their translations and to our amazing voice actors: Susy, Carlo Gianuzzi, Chiara, Calo, Giacomo Paoloni, and ANPI Londra.

Thanks also to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jamison D. Saltsman, Jazz Hands and Fernando Lopez Ojeda. 

Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Tyler Hill.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode, and thanks for listening.

Part 3

Matt: Welcome back to Part 3 of our podcast series on the Italian resistance. If you haven’t listened to our previous parts yet, I suggest you go back and listen to those first.

[Intro music]

Matt: Before we get started, just a quick reminder that our podcast is brought to you by our patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work, and in return get exclusive early access and ad-free podcast episodes, bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise and other content. For example, our patreon supporters can listen to all parts of this series now. Patreon supporters also have access to three bonus episodes for this series covering postwar anti-fascism as well as discussions about films and music of the Italian resistance. Join us or find out more at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

We’ve also produced a range of commemorative merch themed around the Italian resistance and our theme tune, ‘Bella Ciao’. And as a listener to the podcast, you get a 10% discount off that and other items using the discount code ‘WCHPODCAST’. Link in the show notes.

As a content note for our listeners, it should be pointed out that this episode contains some descriptions of torture and sexual violence.

When we left the story at the end of the last episode, the major cities of northern Italy had been liberated by partisans while Mussolini had been captured, executed and his body hung on display up in a Milan square.

However, while Italian fascism looked like it was down and out, things would change very quickly in the years following the war. And part of the reason for this was in the divisions between different partisan groups themselves, as Davide from Cronache Ribelli explained to us.

Davide: The Italian Resistance was quite complex and we could say even divided movement. The only thing that kept them together was fighting fascism. There were really different units. The Communist Party, which had the most support and maintained some kind of underground structure, of course, organised most of the fighters. Communists were organised in the so-called Garibaldi divisions. There were also a lot of socialists who formed these divisions that were called Giustizia e Libertà. They were socially inspired and they took the example of the Rosselli brothers who were killed in France a few years earlier but we also had anarchist groups. In Italy, we had what we call Badogliane because they were really loyal to the government in the South of Italy. They were loyal to the King and they were monarchists. The divisions were quite important and this was also what caused a lot of division between them and which caused a lot of episodes. There were episodes where partisans actually shot other partisans. 

It was a complex phenomenon. Even the relationship with the Allies was complex. There is an example we use for that which is the so-called Proclama Alexander. Alexander was the British general who was commanding the Allied Forces in Italy. In the fall of 1944, they recognised that they would not come up and get to Berlin from Munich, from the South through the Alps and the front was opened in the North through the Normandy landings. They were just advancing from Belgium and from the border with France. They made a public announcement saying, ‘We’re just getting on the fence in Italy for the winter. Just don’t do anything stupid.’ They said something like that. ‘Do not attack. Do not make an offensive,’ which was a disaster for all the partisans. When the Germans knew that the Allies were not coming from the South, they used the whole winter to just attack partisans, to destroy their autonomous areas. That is a clear example of how complex and uneven the relationship was, of course, between the Allies and the partisans.

Matt: A useful way of thinking about these divisions was put forward by the historian and former partisan, Claudio Pavone. He argued that the resistance was actually made up of three distinct, but overlapping, wars: a patriotic war, in which Italy was fighting to liberate itself from German occupation; a civil war, not just against German occupation, but a popular progressive struggle against Italian fascism; and a class war, in which the workers and peasants, whose organisations had been smashed by fascists, fought against those bosses and big landowners who had benefited from – and, in many cases, actively supported – fascism.

However, this doesn’t just mean that different groups were fighting different wars: rather, for Pavone, all groups – and even individuals – fought some combination of the three wars simultaneously, even if those wars contradicted each other. The useful thing about Pavone’s categories is that they help highlight the tensions within the resistance that would get worse as the end of the war got closer (sometimes even between rank-and-file partisans and the leaders of their parties).

Similar tensions existed between some partisan groups and the Allied armies. For instance, when the Allies arrived during the liberation of Florence, they came with an order for the communist Garibaldi division to disband. The order came directly from General Harold Alexander, the same general that Davide just mentioned who, a few months later, would make the proclamation standing down Allied troops. The Garibaldi partisans refused to disband and set up roadblocks, declaring that “anybody who came to impose the surrender of weapons gained from the enemy through so much blood would themselves be treated as an enemy”. These kinds of tensions only got worse as liberation drew nearer and the question of what to do with captured fascists became more pressing.

Davide: Many of them were arrested. Some of them were executed by partisans. That was the same fate as Mussolini. He was trying to flee to Switzerland dressed as a German soldier and was just trying to get away when he was captured and killed in a few hours. Why did they do that? Because they knew that if he fell into specifically British hands, he could still have a role in post-war Italy. This was what they imagined and that’s what happened actually because many were killed on the spot. In the first months and then later, as we’ll see, many of them escaped or were captured and freed in a matter of months.

Matt: This wasn’t just a hypothetical concern. For instance, as fighting raged around the Fiat factory during the liberation of Turin, one of the directors, Vittorio Valletta, made his escape. Fiat management had long collaborated with both fascists and Nazis, making huge profits from producing military vehicles, and also identifying workers’ leaders for deportation to concentration camps. But by the end of 1943, Fiat bosses could see how the war was going: they made contact with the OSS (the forerunner to the CIA) and even started donating money to groups within the resistance. As such, when Turin was liberated and the Piedmont Committee of National Liberation (CLN) put out a warrant for Valletta’s arrest as a Nazi collaborator, Valletta – a Fascist Party member since 1930 – instead turned up in a villa under British protection for his “meritorious commitment to the Allied cause.”

The reason for this, of course, was that as World War II was ending, the Cold War was just getting started, and the defeated fascists would become useful once again. This was true in many places, but especially Italy, where the Communist Party had been so important to the resistance and, after the war, became a mass, working-class party: by 1946, the party boasted 1.6 million members, about two-thirds of whom were manual labourers. By 1948, membership was over 2 million, which out of a total population of around 46 million, meant that one in 23 Italians were members of the Communist Party. And, of course, given recent history, tens of thousands of these members (at least) would have been armed.

As such, the mood among rank-and-file partisans was understandably buoyant after the war. But this mood would not last long, as Davide explains.

Davide: The feeling was of joy after the liberation. The end of April and all of May was joyous. The war was over and people stopped being killed everywhere and the bombing stopped. That lasted for a few weeks. After that, they started to understand that something was going on and that those people had committed those crimes not only since 1943 but since 1919 when the fascist movement arose and started attacking workers, attacking unions, attacking Leghe Contadine, the organisation of the agricultural workers in the countryside. That started to change that feeling to suspicion and anger. It became clear only after the Togliatti amnesty which was a marking point that made clear the fact that 99% of fascists would pay nothing for their crimes and they were just going to go back into the courts, into the comuni, into the ministries and into the army just like that. Nothing happened and here they were again. We then had another step which was the political return of fascism with the creation of the Movimento Sociale Italiano.

Matt: In 1946, Italy became a Republic, after the population voted in a referendum to abolish the monarchy, which had been tainted by its support for fascism. It also established its first elected government in over two decades, led by the right-wing Christian Democrats and with ministerial positions given to the Socialist and Communist parties. The leader of the Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti, was made Minister of Justice and the Togliatti Amnesty that Davide mentioned was the name of the amnesty he passed for acts carried out during the Nazi occupation up to 31 July 1945. The idea was that political crimes and acts of violence carried out during the war would be pardoned, except for those defined as “heinous” or carried out by officials considered high-ranking.

For reasons we’ll discuss later, the law outraged many former partisans. However, there was a logic to it in a country desperate to return to normality after five years of war and two decades of dictatorship. As such, many partisans supported the amnesty, including Alfredo Schiavi.

Alfredo Schiavi: You see, Italy at the time was fascist as a whole, except for a few, but all the administration, judges… they were all fascists, so if you’d send them to jail, who could have ruled Italy? Who would have worked in the Italian administration? The Togliatti Amnesty was an act of goodwill from the communists toward the fascists. Can you imagine if all the employees and managers of the Minister of Economy were shot or put in jail? Indeed, many partisans fought against this amnesty and many communists decided to fight against Italy after 1945. But many then changed again their minds and nothing came out of it.

Was it the right thing to do? Probably yes. Yes, this gave fascists a new opportunity, like in the case of the Movimento Sociale Italiano. I remember that Vittorio Foa, a comrade and a friend in Turin, was a senator. He met an MSI senator and he told him “if you had won, we would have ended up in jail, but we won and here you are in Parliament.”

Matt: Alfredo here is referring to when socialist politician, Vittorio Foa, met fascist politician, Giorgio Pisanò, in the Italian Senate. Foa had spent eight years in fascist prisons before becoming a partisan. Pisanò, meanwhile, was twice awarded the Nazi Iron Cross after volunteering for the Italian Social Republic’s Decima MAS military corps and the Black Brigades paramilitary organisation, both of which were implicated in numerous war crimes.

Other partisans, meanwhile, fiercely opposed the amnesty, particularly rank-and-file communists, many of whom continued to carry out revenge attacks for some years after the war (as we’ll discuss in Part 4). Their reasons for opposing the amnesty were clear.

Davide: Let’s think about the administration, the bureaucracy and especially the army. They were just put back in their positions in the years following the war. The thing that probably had more consequences was the law: the judges that worked in Italy in ’45, ’46, ’47 and so on were all fascist judges. Of course, this had important consequences if you think that those were the years when you had to organise trials against mostly fascists and against those partisans who committed crimes, etcetera. Of course, their judgement was not an even one.

Matt: This issue had serious implications for the amnesty: after the war, many of the judges who had spent the past 20 years (in some cases their whole careers) administering fascist laws were now simply back in their old positions. And now it was these judges who would interpret which – and, more importantly, whose – crimes would benefit from the amnesty.

Davide: I’ll give you an extent of the numbers. Italy had 43,000 trials and 6,000 people were condemned at first. At the time, Italy had around 41 or 42 million people. To understand how bad it was, we can compare it to Norway. Norway, which had a country of a little more than 3 million people, had 18,000 people condemned for Quisling collaboration government. Denmark had 14,500 people condemned and they had less than 4 million people. In France, at the time, there were 50 million people and they had 170,000 trials and three out of four ended up with someone being declared guilty. When you do the maths, you can’t compare what happened in Italy to what happened in other countries, even some that were occupied for a short time like France. You’re talking about four years between 1940 and 1944.

There were those who carried out some of the most brutal acts during the war. This is part of it. I’m focusing on 1943 to 1945 but we had people who were responsible for massacres in Libya, Ethiopia, in Somalia, in Greece and in Yugoslavia. These people were not persecuted and in those post-war states like Greece or Yugoslavia, they asked Italy, ‘They did horrible things. They massacred hundreds and hundreds of people just like that and we want them to go on trial.’ Italy said no, and for the same reason, they never chased the Germans who were responsible for crimes in Italy in those years. In Italy, we call that baratto delle colpe which means exchange of guilt. I don’t care about you and so you don’t ask questions about that.

So, Togliatti, who was the Minister of Justice at the time, created this law, the Togliatti amnesty, which actually said something like, ‘Those who were responsible for heinous crimes, they shall not get amnesty but when it comes to the others, we can forgive them somehow.’ The point is it didn’t work like that. It was up to the law and judges’ personal point of view to understand what heinous meant. This was horrible. There had been mass rapes that were followed by torture that were not considered heinous. I was reading this amazing book called L’Amnistia Togliatti by Mimmo Franzinelli where he described this guy who was beaten on his genitals, who was burnt. They took out his nails from his fingers. This happened in Padua. They then put him on a truck and moved him to Abano Terme which is ten minutes away from Padua. Since he was put on the truck and moved to a town next to it, the judge said, ‘Yeah, he could move. What he felt was not that bad in the end if he could have moved in and out of town after that.’ The guy who was responsible for that received amnesty in 1948. This is just an example. There are dozens and dozens and they are all the same. 

We have Gaetano Azzariti who was the President of the Commissione sulla Razza which I can roughly translate as ‘race committee’ which was to judge people who were considered a lower race like Jews, Somalis, Libyans who were in Italy, and Slavic people who were living in Italy. Not only was Gaetano Azzariti freed with the amnesty but he became the second president of the Corte Costituzionale in Italy which is like the Supreme Court in the US. He was the second one. It’s not that he just went back and worked in his little town. He was the president of the Supreme Court. He was the fourth most important person in Italy. 

I’ll give you another example of that. We have Aldo Vidussoni who was the secretary of the National Fascist Party. He had some role in the regime and he was freed because following the trial he had, his role was not enough to consider him responsible for what fascism did. He was the secretary of the Fascist Party in the last years of fascism. [Laughter] There’s nothing else you can say about that. There’s another one, the Banda Carità, that was responsible for heinous crimes and they tortured partisans and killed people on the spot. All of them were out by 1953 – all of them! Luciano Luberti was called the ‘Executioner of Albenga’ which is a small town in Liguria. He wrote his memoirs and said he liked to shoot people right in the face, to torture, to kill. He was responsible for hundreds of killings. He got out in 1953 and killed again and it was the girl who was working with him. He kept writing books about how fascism was good. I’ll just let you know that he worked with Nazis because the fascists of Liguria didn’t want to work with him because he was violent… and this was the opinion of other fascists. This guy got out in 1953 [laughter]. These are just some examples of what happened with the Togliatti amnesty or what people got out. It was not just about making the state work. It was something more, it was another level.

Matt: It would be impossible for us to cover the sheer extent of fascist brutality or individual war criminals that went unpunished because of the amnesty. But one person that deserves mention is a man called Junio Valerio Borghese. Born into a Tuscan noble family, he was Commander of the Decima MAS military corps mentioned earlier. Under his command, the regiment had 800 documented murders to its name, as well as the looting and burning of entire villages, and the torture of hundreds of partisans. As was often the case, the man presiding over Borghese’s appeal was himself a fascist (not to mention also a family friend) and when Borghese’s release was announced, the courthouse broke out in fascist salutes.

Borghese is important because he would return as a sinister actor in Italian politics decades later. As such, Borghese indicates not just the kinds of people and past crimes that went unpunished because of the amnesty, but also what the amnesty would enable in the future.

We’ll come back to Borghese when we eventually finish our series on the Italian struggles of the sixties and seventies. But, in the meantime, not only were fascists like Borghese pardoned, but former partisans were frequently harassed and persecuted.

Davide: There’s something we have to point out, apart from the fact that we knew that judges were fascists and they treated anti-fascists as they did before but the Corte di Cassazione, which is like the judicial higher court in Italy, decided that partisans’ crimes were to be treated as common crimes while fascists who committed war crimes were given an amnesty under the Togliatti amnesty. [Laughter] That gives you an example of how it worked when it came to partisans. I think the best thing to do is to give a number. The amnesty even concerned some partisans actually who were judged as war crimes but it was only about 6% or 7% of people who got an amnesty. I’ll give you the story of two people to let you understand how this worked. First of all, Belgrado Pedrini: Belgrado Pedrini was an anarchist and he was from Carrara which is the birthplace of Italian anarchism. 

Matt: Carrara is the centre of the Italian marble industry, and from the late 19th century, the city’s marble quarry workers formed the epicentre of the Italian anarchist movement. While in most of Italy, anarchists largely joined the partisan formations of other left-wing organisations, Carrara and the surrounding area was one of a few places where anarchists were strong enough to maintain their own battalions. One such formation was the Lucetti Battalion, named after the anarchist Gino Lucetti, who tried to assassinate Mussolini in 1926. We discuss the Lucetti Battalion, and their song ‘Dai Monti di Sarzana’, in our bonus episode about the music which came out of the resistance, available exclusively for patreon supporters. 

In 1944, Carrara was liberated by partisans. The Italian Anarchist Federation seized the town hall in the central square, which still serves as the headquarters today. Belgrado Pedrini was involved in the movement there.

Davide: In 1942, just before the Armistice, he was still in Carrara and he shot a fascist policeman. He killed one and then he escaped. Then he was captured and put in prison. He was freed after the Armistice and kept fighting. He was then arrested by Republican Italy. He remained in prison until the ‘70s and was freed three or four years before his death. If you compare it with fascists war criminals, who got away in ’53 when there was a second amnesty that just wiped them all out and everyone was free. 

I’ll give you another example of that. There was a teacher, Clara Marchetto, who was from Trentino. She was trying to contact the French Army to give them the plans for the new Italian battleship, Littorio, but actually, she fell into a trap set by the fascist Secret Service. She was put in jail and some of her comrades were just shot. She was freed after that, escaped to the South and spent the rest of the war doing public works but she was not acting in the resistance. In 1947, they tried to arrest her due to her betrayal because she tried to sabotage the fascist war machine of fascist Italy. The battleship was firing against the Allies and all that stuff. She was persecuted after that and she got some kind of amnesty in the late ‘70s. She lived all her life in France because she escaped and lived in exile due to that. That gives you an overview of how differently partisans and fascists were treated but the main tool they used to do that and keep partisans in prison was to judge most of their acts as common crimes – not all of them but most of them – which were not covered by the amnesty.

Matt: These are just two examples, but there were thousands of others: an organisation called ‘Democratic Solidarity’, was set up specifically to defend ex-partisans from legal persecution and dealt with around 20,000 trials between 1948 and 1953, involving tens of thousands of former partisans.

But the poor treatment of partisans went beyond legal harassment for alleged crimes during the war. The harassment of partisans often seeped into their everyday lives, as Elsa Pelizzari recalls.

Elsa Pelizzari: A commander from Brescia, who was a veterinarian, applied to become a veterinarian in various towns and put on his application that he had been a partisan – he always came in second in the application pool.

One man in the area told him, “Don’t put down that you were a partisan.” And, indeed, he applied in another town, he didn’t put down that he had been a partisan, and he was hired as the vet.

People thought that partisans had done bad things. They were accused of so many things that weren’t true and, honestly, few people honoured the partisans.

Matt: And it was female partisans (despite the vital role they had played in the resistance, which we discussed in Part 1) who were treated particularly badly.

Elsa Pelizzari: I was an office worker. In the work book, it had my qualification as an office worker. Here, in Roè Volciano, they had closed the plant because it had been an arms factory and after the war they opened it again as a weaving and spinning mill. I went and asked if I could come to work as an office worker.

Let me tell you that, yes, they hired me. But not as an office worker. Because I had been a partisan, staying in the mountains with the men, who knows what I could have got up to, and I was not worthy of staying in an office with respectable people. That was my first humiliation.

It wasn’t just us from the valley area. Also in the cities. The president of the Green Flames, she also told me she experienced a great deal of humiliation because she was in the resistance. That is, there was a sentiment: lightweight women of easy virtue.

[Outro music]

Matt: That’s all we’ve got time for in this episode. Join us in our final part, where we look at how former partisans took justice into their own hands, talk about some armed uprisings, and how the resistance is remembered (and misremembered) today. That’s all available now for our supporters on patreon.

We also have three bonus episodes for this series: in the first, we discuss some of our favourite Italian films about fascism and the resistance; in our second bonus episode we talk about some of the music that came out of the Italian resistance; and in our final bonus episode we talk more with Davide about postwar anti-fascism and the continuity of Italian fascism from the war to today’s government. All of this available exclusively for our supporters on patreon. 

It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes. In return for your support, you get early access to episodes, ad-free episodes, as well as exclusive bonus content, discounted merch, and more. And if you can’t spare the cash, absolutely no problem, please just tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.

If you’d like to learn more about the Italian resistance to fascism, check out the webpage for this episode where you’ll find images, a full list of sources, further reading and more. Link in the show notes.

We also want to thank Carlo Gianuzzi from the Commissione Scuola ANPI – Brescia and Davide from Cronache Ribelli for all their invaluable help producing this series. We’d also like to thank the National Association of Italian Partisans for letting us use interviews from their amazing Noi, Partigiani website, which contains over 650 interviews with participants in the Italian resistance. Links to all of these in the show notes.

We’d also like to thank Lilian McCarthy and Davide for their translations and to our amazing voice actors: Susy, Carlo Gianuzzi, Chiara, Calo, Giacomo, and everyone at ANPI Londra.

Thanks also to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jamison D. Saltsman, Jazz Hands and Fernando Lopez Ojeda.

Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Tyler Hill.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode, and thanks for listening.

Part 4

Matt: Welcome back to the fourth and final part of our podcast series on the Italian resistance. If you haven’t listened to the previous parts yet, then I suggest you go back and listen to those first.

[intro music]

Matt: Before we get started, just a quick reminder that our podcast is brought to you by our patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work, and in return get exclusive early access and ad-free podcast episodes, bonus episodes, free and discounted merch and other content. For example, our patreon supporters have access to three bonus episodes for this series covering postwar Italian anti-fascism as well as discussions about films and music of the Italian resistance. Join us or find out more at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

To help us raise funds for our work, we’ve also produced a range of merch commemorating the Italian resistance and our theme tune, ‘Bella Ciao’. And, as a listener to the podcast, you get a 10% discount off that and other items in our online shop using the discount code ‘WCHPODCAST’. Link in the show notes.

At the end of the last episode, we spoke about how the Togliatti Amnesty meant that many fascist war criminals were pardoned, while anti-fascist partisans were subject to harassment. Given this, it’s no surprise that many former partisans turned to other means to exact justice.

Alfredo Schiavi: We hear a lot about the triangolo rosso, the ‘Red Triangle’, the revenges of partisans against the fascists after the war, the books by Pansa… this happened in certain areas of Italy, especially in Emilia Romagna, where peasant workers were exploited like Africans are exploited today in the South of Italy. The partisans used the resistance and even the years after to have their revenge, especially on landowners who were close to fascism.

Matt: The books by Pansa that Alfredo mentions are those by Giampaolo Pansa, a journalist who wrote a lot of revisionist histories about the resistance, which we’ll discuss later in the episode. Meanwhile, the ‘Red Triangle’ that he mentions was an area in the Emilia-Romagna region where a lot of postwar reprisals against fascists took place and is sometimes also referred to as the ‘Triangle of Death’.

Davide: ‘The Triangle of Death’ is used a lot by fascists to say, ‘You see? They were violent. They were scum. They were criminals. They kept killing innocent people.’ Why in that area? Emilia-Romagna has a really peculiar history. It was quite strong not only with the unions but especially with the small farmers’ unions. Leghe Contadine was among the first targets of the fascists. Mussolini was from there. Mussolini was from near Ferrara which is just 40 kilometres east of the Triangolo della Morte (Triangle of Death). With the huge presence of these organisations that remained, they kept trying to do their work even during fascism and they were on the frontline when they organised the resistance in 1943 which meant that they also suffered from huge repression. It is true that you had a lot of killings in that area but it is easily relatable to the number of heinous crimes – and I mean ‘heinous’ not from a juridical point of view but from a human point of view – committed by fascists there. 

There is an example that fascist propaganda uses a lot which is about one of the Govoni brothers. Two of the Govoni brothers were fascists and they never felt guilty for their acts. They were strong fascists and they were proud of being fascists and they were killed. Some of their other brothers, who had nothing to do with it, were killed. It was a crime, yes. They said it was comparable to the kind of violence which was first caused by the fascists’ violence. I don’t think so. It is a crime. When innocent people are killed without reason, it’s a crime, but you cannot use it to put it on the same level and this is what has been happening in Italy for the last 40 years which is to put partisans and fascists on the same level.

Matt: A lot of killings did take place in the ‘Red Triangle’ after the war. But while fascists like Giorgio Pisanò (whose conversation with the socialist, Vittorio Foa, we mentioned in Part 3) claim numbers of around 35,000, a fairer number is probably around 8-10,000. As Davide explains, the extent of the violence in Emilia-Romagna was a response to the fascist violence that went back all the way to the early 1920s and the rise of fascism itself, not to mention the particular intensification of fascist violence as the war was ending: for instance, in the Reggio Emilia area alone, 105 partisans and 65 civilians were killed in the last ten days before liberation. A number of significant massacres also took place, like the Marzabotto massacre of 1944.

Davide: The Strage di Marzabotto (Marzabotto killings) was one of the worst in Italy. There were over 500 people killed in a few days just like that, including women and children.

It is not fair to say Marzabotto actually. I prefer to call it the Strage di Monte Sole (Monte Sole massacre) because Marzabotto was only one of the few towns which are there on Monte Sole. We’re south of Bologna on the way to Florence. It’s 15 minutes to there from Bologna. You get into the Apennines and those kinds of valleys which get you from Emilia to Tuscany. That was the perfect environment for partisans. What happened is that in late September 1944, the SS just tried to capture the partisans who were fighting there in Monte Sole. They had good intelligence and they knew they were coming but they escaped and left women and children behind thinking they wouldn’t harm women and children. Well, they did and it was a massacre. They just killed everyone who came up to them and wiped out whole villages.

It is important to say, when we talk about these crimes, that fascists were on their side. They were saying, ‘You know that family? This guy is probably a partisan. You have to capture his wife and torture her until she gives you something.’ This is another thing that, nowadays, it is quite common to say in Italy, ‘I know they were Nazis and they were scum but the fascists, in the end, they even tried to protect Italy.’ That’s not true. They were the main source of intelligence for the Nazis who were responsible for all those killings.

Matt: Postwar anti-fascist violence wasn’t limited to Emiglia Romagna: for instance, in Milan a group of ex-partisans around the Communist Party formed the Volante Rossa (or ‘Red Flying Squad’). The Volante Rossa defied the Togliatti Amnesty and carried out a number of assassinations until the end of the forties. We discuss them in more detail in our bonus episode, available exclusively for our patreon supporters.

There were also a number of incidents where frustration among ex-partisans boiled over into open armed uprisings, such as the one at Casale Monferrato, in north-western Italy, in 1947.

Davide: In Casale Monferrato, there were those fascists who were responsible for torturing and executing the members of a partisan group called La Banda Tom. They were tortured and their bodies were left hanging in Casale Monferrato in Piedmont for days. These were heinous acts but still these fascists were freed.

Matt: So, anti-fascists decided to take matters into their own hands.

Davide: They found some of the weapons because they didn’t give the Allies all their weapons after the end of the war – just in case – and they actually used them to take control of towns like Casale Monferrato and said, ‘We are occupying and so you have two options now. You can kick us out with weapons and blood.’ Of course, that would have been an issue. The Italian Army shooting all the partisans would have been something that would have started a political crisis. ‘Or you grant us that you will do something about them.’

Matt: The uprising in Casale Monferrato took place alongside a town-wide general strike: factories, shops, cafes and hotels all closed, their doors barred and shutters pulled down. This armed general strike lasted four days before being called off due to a combination of a large military presence and promises from both the government and the Communist Party. 

Davide: The Communist Party always tried to… in Italy we use a really fun term, which is to be a pompiere, a firefighter. So, to put out fires. And they say, ‘Yeah, we can negotiate.’ They said, ‘You’re right. Those people are criminals. We’ll put them back in prison. We won’t consider them for the amnesty. We shall give them new charges.’ Mostly, they were lies. Those people were put in prison to make things calm down.

Matt: Indeed, despite the promises made, the fascists who were convicted for the war crimes committed at Casale Monferrato would later have their executions suspended, then commuted to life in prison, and then, a few years later, were released.

The Casale Monferrato rebellion was far from the only armed partisan uprising in this period. However, the biggest rebellion would take place in 1948. It came off the back of an extremely bitter general election earlier that year which saw the Catholic Church mobilise against the left and whose mood was summed up by the right-wing slogan: “with Christ or against Christ”. Despite repeatedly acting to quell armed actions by former partisans, the Communist Party was frequently subject to frantic accusations of secret plans to stage a coup. And all this paranoid fantasising was, of course, encouraged by millions of dollars pouring into the country via CIA covert operations which helped sway the elections in the right-wing coalition’s favour.

It was in this febrile atmosphere, then, that Communist Party leader, Palmiro Togliatti, was shot, triggering a widespread revolt of the Italian working class.

Davide: Togliatti, the head of the Communist Party of Italy, was shot in July 1948 by Antonio Pallante who had quite anti-Communist feelings and was quite a nationalist even if not fascist. Again, he was someone who used to think, ‘I don’t want to be a satellite of the Soviet Union. The partisans are getting angrier and they have a consensus even if they lost the elections. Maybe they’ll win the next one and so we have to stop them from taking control of Italy.’ He just shot Togliatti for these reasons. That was another moment of tension because protests started overall in Italy. There were riots and on the day of the assassination attempt, 14 people were killed in the riots. 

There were deaths in Genoa, Naples, Livorno and Taranto which were big cities in the North and South actually and even in small ones like La Spezia and also in Rome. In the following days, 600 people were wounded and 16 more died during the riots. That was probably the highest point of this kind of tension in Italy. 

Matt: Togliatti would eventually survive. But within hours of the assassination attempt, the Italian working class responded with a nationwide wildcat general strike affecting factories, offices, shops and public transport. In Venice, workers invaded the radio studios of the national public broadcaster. In Arezzo, a jail was attacked and its prisoners freed. In the tiny town of Abbadia San Salvatore, a full-scale uprising broke out in which two police officers were killed.

But as with the liberation from fascism a few years earlier, the strongest reactions came from northern Italy’s industrial hubs: in Milan, a mass meeting of 40,000 workers decided to occupy their factories. Meanwhile, in Genoa, 50,000 people occupied the city centre. When a patrol of five armoured cars were sent to stop them, the crowd quickly took possession of the vehicles just like many of them would have done during the war against Nazi or fascist soldiers.

However, just like with the smaller partisan rebellions, the leadership of the left-wing parties and unions ultimately moved to bring this revolt to an end.

Davide: The way that things became a bit quieter was when the highest members of the Socialist and Communist Party started saying, ‘Just calm down. It’s not worth it.’ Even Togliatti himself, from his hospital bed, said, ‘Calm down. It’s not worth it. This guy was a bit crazy and he didn’t know what he was doing.’ Tension was rising and they even kidnapped the Fiat leader and kept him for a whole day before freeing him. Again, Togliatti and Nenni (Secretary of the Socialist Party) said, ‘Stop and don’t do anything stupid,’ and that was when things broke down.

Matt: Without winning any concessions, Communist Party and union leaders called on their members to return to work. When workers in Milan heard this, thousands marched on their union headquarters to demand an explanation. But when they arrived, the building was surrounded by police who refused to let them in while their union and party leaders refused to speak to them.

Despite all the Cold War sloganeering about a Communist Party preparing to seize power, the Togliatti Amnesty and the party’s swift movement against partisan revolts showed that its leaders were not interested in organising militant struggle (let alone revolution). While factory committees had played an important role in liberation from Nazi occupation, after the war communist leaders dissolved them, as according to party historian Gastone Manacorda, they feared the committees would “expropriate the capitalists and establish cooperative management of the works”. 

As Togliatti himself said, rather than class struggle in Italy’s fields and factories, the aim was to participate in Italy’s postwar recovery on the basis of “low costs of production, a high productivity of labour and high wages”. 

1948, then, can be thought of as the final defeat of the resistance generation. Demobilised by party and union leaders, the 1950s would be a difficult decade, not least in anti-worker violence from the Italian state: between 1948 and 1954, around 75 workers were killed and over 5,000 wounded as a result of police action against protests. And, as a cruel irony of history, many of the police chiefs ordering the attacks would have started their careers during the fascist dictatorship while many of the workers killed or wounded were former anti-fascist partisans. 

While the resistance generation was largely defeated, the popular memory of the resistance remained. And things would explode again in 1960, when the Christian Democrats turned to the far-right MSI to form a government.

Davide: In 1960 came the government led by Tambroni who was part, of course, of Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democracy Party). Actually, he obtained the ‘voto di fiducia’ (the final vote) that Italian law grants a party to rule, a majority to rule, and he got the ‘fiducia’ of the MSI. Actually, there was a government in Italy which was elected with the votes of fascists. That was too much. That was already above the line and what made things worse was that the MSI decided to hold its congress in Genoa which was a city that suffered heavily during the war. In Genoa, at a point, you had the Nazis who amassed the workers from factories who went on strike and sent them back to Germany. A few of them came back and there were huge fights. The resistance in Liguria was quite active and, as I said, repression following the resistance was hideous. It was horrible. 

Furthermore, the congress was to physically take place just a few hundred metres from the Sacraria di Partigiani, the monument which was dedicated to partisans. That was too much. The point is that that was too much not mainly for the anti-fascist parties because apart from the MSI, they were all anti-fascist parties. Those who got angry most about that were the youth and people who were just children during the war or even born after that. There were also former partisans. The point is that they started going to the streets and protesting spontaneously without, at first, the hand of the Communist Party. Another thing that got the Genoese people angry was the presence of Carlo Emanuele Basile who was the head of the Province of Genoa during the war and he was one of the people responsible for tracking down and sending workers to Germany. 

It was too much for Genoa. After they saw that, the people went to the streets in June and the congress was to take place on 2nd July in Genoa when it was supposed to start and there were huge fights on 30th June in Piazza de Ferrari. After that, they decided to renounce the holding of the congress in Genoa. This was a huge victory but it was not only about Genoa. The protests spread all across Italy. There were not only protests by anti-fascists but there were also some terrorist attacks by fascists who shot at Casa del Popolo, who shot at union offices and this kind of stuff. The one that is worth mentioning is the Strage di Reggio Emilia. Again, in Emilia-Romagna, there was this huge rally against what was happening in Genoa and it was even after it was cancelled. Policemen just opened fire and they killed five people. Two of them were young people and three of them were former partisans who were killed by the police of that state that was supposedly born from the experience of the resistance in Italy.

Matt: The riots, which became known as the Fatti di Genova, would have implications far beyond Genoa itself and pointed towards a new way of doing radical politics.

Davide: This was a marking point for the Left who were saying, ‘Maybe the Communist Party is not really doing its best to obtain a revolution, to conquer these kinds of riots.’ Many people say that 1960 was also the beginning of everything that was left of the Communist Party which was almost nothing until then. There were a few almost invisible groups left of the Communist Party. Now there was something more. We have all that experience that goes through the ‘60s, ‘70s and part of the ‘80s.

It probably marks the growing distance between the Communist Party and its ‘people’ let’s say between commas. And say ‘That’s probably not the best we can have,’ which opened the way to a different way of doing communist politics, legal or not legal, armed or unarmed. That is what I think we can say about the Fatti di Genova.

Matt: Indeed, the driving force for the Fatti di Genova were young people outside any traditional organisations. They were dubbed ‘the guys in the striped shirts’ for the fashionable horizontally-striped shirts many of them were wearing. Their actions, which were beyond Communist Party control, were a sign that a new generation of activists – with a new way of doing radical politics – was fast approaching. But we’ll have to wait until our series on the Italian struggles of the sixties and seventies to tell that story.

Of course, the power that the resistance had for popular social movements meant that its memory would have to be attacked and distorted in various ways. One distortion was how fascism itself would come to be understood as a part (or, rather, not) of Italian history.

Davide: After fascism was defeated, it was important how Italian history would have to be written considering what had happened, especially during the war but throughout the whole fascist ventennio (20 years of fascism). What happens then is incredible because the epic of Italian history starts from the mid-19th century when Italy was formed, the Risorgimento and the fight against the invaders. So Italy has this glorious history that goes on with the so-called Fourth Italian War of Independence which is the Great War actually. That is part of this epic and we have to be proud of that national history. 

We then have those two or three years of post-war liberal Italy and then we have fascism. Fascism is considered a mistake, as an exception. It’s like mushrooms that just come up from beneath the ground. They took power because they were so evil and violent and they beat their way to government. But there’s a problem with this reading as you can understand. There’s something missing… a huge thing missing. It is the role of the industrial and agrarian economic powers of Italy and the support they gave to fascism and the role they granted them, to say, ‘You are a bunch of violent thugs. Now you work for us and beat the crap out of socialist and communist workers. You put them back in line, and we give you money and political support. We don’t want to end up like Russia.’ This is how fascism moved from being a small group of violent fanatics to a ruling party. It was not just because they were only violent and evil. It was because they granted that power. 

Matt: This view of fascism is actually quite common, not just in Italy, but in much of the world. The whole phenomenon is reduced to just a temporary mania, perhaps in response to recent events like the Great Depression, but mostly just a historical aberration. In this view, there are no implications about the class society that supported fascism for so long, nor is there any need to reflect about its relevance to the present day.

With fascism reduced to this temporary mania interrupting the national story, the memory of the resistance has similarly been reduced to fit a narrative that the partisans were only interested in getting rid of fascism.

Davide: If I go out now in Italy and ask people, they would say that the resistance was those fighting against an invader. It was not like that. Most of the partisans, except maybe from the badogliani, they imagined an outcome that would have changed not only the political system but even the social system that ruled Italy not only since 1922 but even the years before with liberal Italy before the Great War and so on. They wanted change and something different. 

This is not just a hypothesis. You can see that in the way the resistance divisions were organised. The badogliani, they were an army. There were the officers and the hierarchy who you salute to. The officers were at the back, giving orders and you attacked. Most of the other formations, the other divisions were horizontally organised. There was a chief but the chief was the one who usually was on the front line fighting with the soldiers. There was a gender question. There were a lot of female partisans, even fighting ones. Nowadays, we only talk about the staffette who were the women who were just carrying messages from one point to another but there was a lot of fighting women as well. They were killed, they fought and they bled for the resistance.

Matt: Alongside this rewriting of what the resistance were fighting for, future rewrites of history would find different ways to diminish what the resistance actually did.

Davide: The way they tried to reduce the role of the resistance in anticipation of Republican Italy is what opened a huge side of the history of the resistance to the attack of post-fascist groups. This went on for decades after the end of the war. There was a point when things moved to a higher level, especially at the beginning of the ‘90s because of the fall of communism, the fall of the Communist Party, and the Svolta di Fuiggi which was this event where the former fascists said, ‘We’re not fascists anymore. We’re liberals (in theory).’ There was this guy who was from the PDS (Partito Democratico della Sinstra or Democratic Party of the Left) and was an heir of the Communist Party and a leftist called Luciano Violante. He was the first leftist to say, ‘Partisans they were heroes but the youth who fought for the Repubblica Sociale, in the end, they had their own beliefs. They were just guys and kids and youth like any others.’ He was the first one to say that. At this institutional level, there was huge work which was done on the historiography. Like Pansa who was one of the first who took those episodes that we mentioned before where fascists were killed. They took those episodes and made them bigger. 

Matt: Here Davide is referring to the work of Giampaolo Pansa, one of the most famous writers of revisionist histories about the resistance. In his Blood of the Vanquished series, Pansa argues that anti-fascist violence during the war was as bad as that committed by the Nazis and fascists themselves, and a prelude to an attempt to seize power by the Communist Party. 

His works operate through a process of decontextualisation and omission. A glaring example of this is actually on the front cover of Blood of the Vanquished itself: on it, partisans are marching a man through the streets, the caption on the inside cover explaining “fascist killed on April 28, 1945”. But the man in question was not just any fascist, but Carlo Barzaghi, ‘the executioner of Verziere’, responsible for compiling lists of Jews and political opponents for deportation to concentration camps and implicated in the murder of the 15 partisans we mentioned in Part 2, whose dead bodies were left on display in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto. So before we’ve even reached page one of Pansa’s book, sleight of hand is used to present the reader with what looks like an unlucky victim of excessive anti-fascist violence, when what we’re actually seeing is, in fact, a documented war criminal.

As the historian, Claudio Vercelli, explains: “It is useless to try and read something methodologically based or attributable to the category of historical studies in Pansa” and that Pansa’s characterisation of the Communist Party “borders on caricature [and is] borrowed from the frameworks and underlying paradigms of neofascist journalism.”

Davide: Pansa’s books are amazing because there are no sources, except witnesses who were fascists. They’re a monologue basically and saying, ‘Yeah, I’m right.’ They kept taking these episodes, made them bigger and talked of young girls being raped by partisans which are nowhere to be found in any archive. They have this network which makes these things popular. Nowadays, we have moved from a scenario where if, in the worst case scenario, the resistance was useless, they say, ‘It was the Allies who did the job, the Americans and British. Partisans were not influential, they just shot some fascists sometimes.’ That’s not true. Even German officials in Italy said, ‘They’re a pain in the ass. They’re damaging things. They’re difficult to fight, especially if we’re fighting the Allies at the same time.’ For years, you had this point of view which said, ‘No, it was the Allies who won the war. The resistance did nothing.’ Now, we’ve switched to another kind of idea where they say, ‘Actually, they were criminals. They did nothing. Not only were they not useful in winning the war but they did heinous crimes. They raped, they killed, they massacred, they butchered people. Millions of Italians were killed by the partisans.’ It’s just not true, of course, but they managed to do that due to this continuous historical work.

Matt: This historical work actually goes far beyond that of revisionist historians. In recent years, films and TV shows have been made which put forward exactly this kind of historical narrative. For instance, in 2005, Italy’s national public broadcaster produced and aired, Il Cuore nel Pozzo, a two-part miniseries which presents a grossly unfair picture of Yugoslav partisans indiscriminately persecuting the entire Italian population.

The show won the approval of the far-right National Alliance, which was a rebranding of the previous postwar fascist party, the MSI. Elsa Pelizzari pointed out to us in our interview that, at the time, the National Alliance was actually part of Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing government. 

Elsa Pelizzari: When Berlusconi went to lead the country, to become Prime Minister, he legitimised the National Alliance. He became Prime Minister with the votes of the fascists, because the National Alliance was a fascist party. He legitimised them to get their votes and we have seen what the end of that was.

Matt: However, the revisionism of Il Cuore nel Pozzo would be outdone by the 2018 film, Red Land (Rosso Istria). As historian Eric Gobetti explains, where the victims in Il Cuore nel Pozzo are innocent Italians struck by bloodthirsty partisans, in Red Land the film’s heroes and victims are unequivocally fascists, whose only salvation are the Nazi soldiers.

Unsurprisingly, this film also earned the praise of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, yet another rebrand from the National Alliance we just mentioned. Since then, the Brothers of Italy have formed a government as the biggest party in a right-wing coalition. Attacks on migrants, the LGBT community, and the left have followed, as have attacks on the memory of the resistance: in March 2023, President of the Senate, Ignazio La Russa, called the partisan attack at Via Rasella (which we covered in Part 2) “anything but noble”, claiming that the Nazi SS troops that partisans attacked were actually a musical band of semi-pensioners.

When we spoke to Elsa, just a few months before she passed away, the Brothers of Italy weren’t in power yet. But she had some thoughts about the fascist threat today.

Elsa Pelizzari: We have to stay very, very, very alert, because the fascists want to come to power. They still want to be in charge. For fifty years I have gone into schools to talk with kids, but the kids, the youngsters, even those in university, don’t know certain things, they can’t even imagine them either. So much that I’ve had meetings for hours and hours, they have endless questions because they didn’t know anything and they wanted to know. 

Unfortunately, no one knows the history. You are the generation that has to rebuild the foundations. I told you youngsters, you are the pillars, you have to carry forward that anti-fascist spirit that has animated us for all of our lives.

[Outro music]

Matt: That’s it for our four-part series on the Italian resistance. If you want to know about some films about Italian fascism and the resistance that are actually good, you should check out our bonus episode where we talk about some of our favourites. We also have bonus episodes where we discuss our favourite songs that came out of the resistance as well as postwar anti-fascism and how Italian fascism survived to produce the party that currently governs Italy. All of this is available exclusively for our supporters on patreon.

It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes. In return for your support, you get early access to episodes, ad-free episodes, as well as exclusive bonus content, discounted merch, and more. And if you can’t spare the cash, absolutely no problem, please just tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.

If you’d like to learn more about the Italian resistance to fascism, check out the webpage for this episode where you’ll find images, a full list of sources, further reading and more. Link in the show notes.

We also want to thank Carlo Gianuzzi from the Commissione Scuola ANPI – Brescia and Davide from Cronache Ribelli for all their invaluable help producing this series. We’d also like to thank the National Association of Italian Partisans for letting us use interviews from their amazing Noi, Partigiani website, which contains over 650 interviews with participants in the Italian resistance. Links to all of these in the show notes.

We’d also like to thank Lilian McCarthy and Davide for their translations and to our amazing voice actors: Susy, Carlo Gianuzzi, Chiara, Calo, Giacomo, and ANPI Londra.

Thanks also to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jamison D. Saltsman, Jazz Hands and Fernando Lopez Ojeda.

Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Tyler Hill.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode, and thanks for listening.

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