Traces of fascism

The stories this secluded door could tell

Welcome to the pages of my Travel Journal, featuring meandering portrayals of life on the road. This one comes to you from the town of Pietragalla in Italy. For lighter reading, you might prefer my series of Sketches.

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Sunlight bounced from the stonework. Occasionally a little car would thrum around a corner. Somewhere a bird was singing. But an old stone archway beckoned and, following where it led, I found myself in a much shadier place.

VIVA MUSSOLINI.
VIVA HIMLER.
VIVA HITLER.

The faded writing, so black and simplistic as to be almost a caricature of itself, seemed to transform what might have been refreshing shade into a claustrophobic kind of gloom.

Peering through the gaps in the old doors, chained and padlocked, revealed only a small abandoned cantina, a cellar, but the story of what had been inside during the Second World War seemed begging to be told.

I asked an old gent nearby if he knew. We had already struck up some friendly banter (well, as much as my non-existent Italian would allow) based around our shared interest in his old Fiat. He lived barely 100 meters away and seemed the kind of chap who would know the town inside out, but the door wasn't on his radar. He didn't know what graffiti I was talking about until, at his request, I led him to it.

I imagined a meeting place for local political activists who, after Italy's alliance with Germany in July 1940, felt brave enough to display their feelings. Perhaps it was intended as a welcome message for the arriving Germans, who had been told they would find supplies inside. Perhaps the opposite was true and the words were written as a decoy to put the goose-stepping fanatics at ease, and the owner was in fact storing munitions for the fight against fascism.

Just ragazzi

On seeing the door, the old man's curiosity collapsed, and my curiosity was dismissed. “Oh – ragazzi, ragazzi!” he insisted. Just youths, nothing serious. I'd learned the word from watching episodes of Montalbano (a Sicilian murder series I've been quite addicted to) in which the good inspector learns to forgive petty misdemeanours on his path towards unearthing greater evils. Ragazzi don't commit real crimes. They're an omnipresent undercurrent, trouble makers, their plurality granting an implied kind of anonymity which enables them to move on and be forgiven, and for society to wipe away their transgressions. Because all Italians were once ragazzi.

The word doesn't translate easily into English.¹ As far as I can tell, it's somewhere between "guys" – used in a social setting, as in "hi guys" / "ciao ragazzi" – and more discriminatory words like "yobs" or even "chavs", words which in English carry vindictive tones and imply a social underclass. (The term "youths" feels weak by comparison, but at least it doesn't reek of class divide the way "chavs" does. I find that one pretty obnoxious.) The ragazzi who graffiti doors and break bottles may be a nuisance, but they're not outcasts. They're part of the earthy mess that is humanity. Perhaps this man's father had been the ragazzo with the paintbrush.

I felt a little guilty for showing an interest in the story of the old door. The town of Pietragalla is far more proud of its spectacular Palazzo Ducale, its medieval streets, its immaculate 18th Century church and its grassy "village" of intriguing palmenti, unique stone huts used for fermenting grapes to make wine (and now benefitting from a hefty restoration budget). In the midst of all this nobler stuff, I felt as if I had come close to insulting the kind man and the history of his town. He showed me no resentment, but his insistence on the nothingness of the story was telling.

Trust and fear

Perhaps the question of old allegiances is more delicate here in Italy than it is in the UK or the USA, where fascism never took hold and where the streets never rumbled with German tanks. In July 1943, just a few weeks before Italy's surrender, the bodies of American airmen were literally falling from the exploding wreckage of their aircraft in the skies above Pietragalla. (The details of the downing of the B-24 ‘Fyrtle Myrtle’ – and what a great name that is – survives in surprising detail.)

When Italy capitulated to the Allies in September of that year, as British forces captured first Sicily and then with the Americans moved into the south-western regions of Salerno and Calabria, the country changed course almost overnight, but German troops remained as Allied bombs fell and local resistance movements struggled to flush them out.

These ancient little streets perched on hills and clinging to mountainsides must have been rife with suspicion, uncertainty and fear. English travel writer Eric Newby, who was sheltered by locals in the Apennines after a semi-botched mission to blow up some German aircraft, writes of the constant paura, the fear, that ran through society. The word reappears throughout his memoir of that experience, Love and Death in the Apennines. Paura, paura... it governed who people spoke to, where they went, who they danced with. If someone became unexpectedly shy or unfriendly, another would offer a conciliatory explanation: "He has paura."

Whatever happened in this quiet alley, its old graffiti-covered door seemed to offer a glimpse into the fear of those times. Perhaps it was ‘only’ ragazzi who painted those words, but wars are largely fought by ragazzi. Europe is strewn with their remains.

RAF and USAF airmen in Italy in 1944, with an American Jeep and a British Wellington bomber.

1. I am not an Italian speaker, so please take my analysis with a pinch of salt, and if you know better, do correct me!