April 25th is – for all of Italy and for all Italians – the day of “Liberation”. Rightly a national holiday and an unavoidable celebration of the connection with the modern identity of a country that also had to rediscover its civil memory.
Many already remembered it between 1945 and 1948, that is, between Liberation and the Constitution. For example, Ivanoe Bonomi – a socialist with a reformist orientation, president of the Council of Ministers from 1944 to 1945 (he had also been president in dramatic conditions between 1921 and 1922 in the immediately pre-fascist phase) – recalled this in an editorial in the Corriere della Sera of 23 December 1947 dedicated to the largely majority vote of the Constituent Assembly in favor of the Constitutional Charter which will be in the Official Journal a few days later, on 1 January 1948.
For Bonomi we had to reconstruct our interrupted identity history by going back not only to the Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy in 1861. But also to 1848, the year of the great European and Italian popular uprisings (particularly those in Milan) which launched the challenge to the future of ‘Italy. A challenge that fascism broke, erasing moral and material conquests and bringing Italians back into the tragedy of the world war and then the civil war.
That said, April 25th is also the day moral capital of Italy it is Milan itself and not for the economy, finance, business, commerce. But why in Milan did the CLNAI (Northern Italian National Liberation Committee) – chaired by Alfredo Pizzoni, Luigi Longo, Emilio Sereni, Sandro Pertini and Leo Valiani – proclaimed the general insurrection of all the territories still occupied by the Nazi-fascists, leading the attack final of all the partisan forces active in Northern Italy of different political orientations gathered in Freedom Volunteers Corps against the fascist and Nazi garrisons by imposing their surrender. From Milan the unmistakable voice of Sandro Pertini launched the uprising on the radio. Here is his voice:
«Citizens, workers! General strike against the German occupation, against the fascist war, for the salvation of our lands, our homes, our workshops. As in Genoa and Turin, you put the Germans in front of the dilemma: surrender or perish».
Anonymous heroes
What was the Italian Resistance? Much more than its “consistency”
In any case, three hundred thousand partisans would not have been able to do much without the anti-German military force of the Americans, Russians and English. But they allowed, with their one hundred thousand fallen, each in heroic conditions, to restore dignity and the right to speak in the international and European forum to the country that was about to be born (the Germans were unable to express similar energy).
The day of celebration that is still celebrated does not tell the story of a bureaucratic event, a treaty, an affair between states. It tells a story of the people, a story of a generation, a story of men and women who mostly in substantial anonymity put their bodies up for grabs in order to change the course of history. The one that appears marked by destiny and which in reality always depends on human negotiation.
I remember going a few years ago to bring my contribution of memory – specifically on the figure of Sandro Pertini – at the invitation of Mario Artali, late friend, who passed away at the beginning of 2023, in the monumental area of the Fondotoce Memory Park, near in Verbania a little on the northern border between Piedmont and Lombardy. Thousands of names of fallen partisans. No famous names. All names written on small tombstones to indicate the immense tombstone of their history which is both common and monumental.
I also brought, on this occasion, the memory of the figure of my father, lieutenant of a front line company in the Greek war, on the island of Samos who decided on the night of 9 September 1943 not only not to hand over his weapons and of his company to the Germans not far from that island (they were in Rhodes), but to go up into the mountains with the Greeks themselves to continue the battle for European liberation. It is also the only way to courageously save his own life and that of his men.
September 1943 – The VIII company of the “Cuneo” Division of the Italian Army – in the center with the service pistol slung over his shoulder, lieutenant. Emilio Rolando – on the island of Samos.
Never enough, it’s always good to spend a little ink to talk about the contribution of the Italian military, in disarray on 8 September, who didn’t escape because you can’t escape from an island and who chose the only possible way. That is, reasoning – in that context obviously, without yet knowing about the massacre on the nearby island of Kefalonia – on the short circuit of the history that affected them that day. And choosing, for the first time in their lives, to be part of a true mosaic of change. Invisible at the time but whose synthesis will then be set on April 25th on a date of finally pacified collective identity.
Pacification and open questions
It is true – some will say – that the word “pacification” is a bit of a stretch.
In any case, this word has never stopped being discussed, also on the basis of many historiographical insights and many testimonies available.
There are two dominant features of the most recent investigation concerning that complex historical phase.
One concerns the pluralism of the inspirations of resistance action of the fighting Italian youth – men and women – which must always be reclaimed (with components from the left, the center and even the right, albeit in a limited form). To say how much the party’s claim to show the contribution of the communist component as prevailing compared to the importance of this chorality was hurt; responsibility of a part of communist historiography, even if the accounting of the fallen, it must be said, recognizes that component’s importance. Another concerns the claim of the opposing component in the tragedy of the two-year period 1943-1945, i.e. the fascist republican component, to ask for “patriotic” legitimation for its choice, in the sense, it is said, of having made a contribution to the “coherent defense of national pride”.
Much has been written. There was a lot of controversy.
Just as the investigation into the cases of excesses of violence on the part of anti-fascists in the immediate end of hostilities and the civil war itself. An investigation which has been relaunched in recent years by the contributions of an Italian journalist, Giampaolo Pansa, who had a “left-wing” reputation and who agreed to compromise his image a little with respect to a certain part of Italy to carry out the his battle of “unveiling”. Today those who defend him say that you have never renounced his personal positions in defense of anti-fascism despite considering his writings “dutiful”, of which the most famous was “The blood of the vanquished”. I think that, on this too, historians must continue to provide any useful and non-prejudicial clarification. Clarification that, moreover, the occasion of the 80th anniversary of 25 July and 8 September 1943 – with the links between these two close dates concerning the end of fascism and the complex transition which will lead, after two years, to 25 April 1945 – engaged many historians to make new contributions (for example Emilio Gentile and Elena Agata Rossi) and many journalists to tackle new interpretations.
Fascism had put a nation that was not capable of sustaining a “world” war, that is, on multiple fronts, in a state of defeat. And the bombings on our cities – the ones on Milan were dramatic – since 1942 led to the inevitability of a unilateral armistice. An argument that involved taking the military responsibility for the war out of Mussolini’s hands and bringing it back to the king, to make immediate diplomacy possible to get out of the conflict.
The Royal Household and General Staff therefore acted – in agreement with a part of the fascist ruling group which then expressed itself during the Grand Council of 25 July – to create those conditions that could not be postponed. The only possible condition of “national interest”.
Mussolini was finished. He was described as someone now willing to get out of the race. Only Nazi blackmail reactivated him and forced him to regenerate in the north, under German police supervision, a puppet state, the Social Republic, which will generate the inevitability of civil war by delaying the escape of Italy and Italians from the catastrophe. Indeed, entering the hardest and most murderous phase, complicity in the Nazi genocides included.
What “national pride”? What “defense of the homeland”? What “moral coherence”?
Republican fascism was a servile redoubt of the worst of the totalitarianism of the 20th century.
If there were young people who believed in us, now let us say peace to their souls.
If there was courage in someone, courage, if it is pure courage, is not always part of a just and courageous philosophy. The tricolor flame that arises from Mussolini’s tomb to invoke the rescue – a symbol of Italian post-fascism from 1946 to today, with different shapes and containers – is part of this historical manipulation. The April twenty-fifth it certainly separates losers and winners. But the Constitution, born of April 25th, pacifies everyone in its legal and moral substance.
With only one point of intolerance. Express the impossibility of recognizing that the rehabilitation of fascist antipatriotism is legitimate.
To understand the profound nature of the human, civil and cultural transformation amidst the climate of violence that characterized the age of fascism, from its origins to the last days, therefore the sense of equally profound transformation of the symbolic characters themselves of the culture that would change in Italy thanks to the constitutional and anti-fascist recovery, there are countless episodes regarding the mutation of the ruling class.
I mentioned Ivanoe Bonomi earlier because the Corriere della Sera recently republished, in the anastatics of its first historical pages, that page from 23 December 1947.
But alongside the editorial of that day there is also the political mash of that day.
Which gives an account of the climate in the Chamber compared to the 453 yes votes and 62 no votes to the text of the Constitution, after a long and intense preparatory work.
Among the declarations of vote, Giorgio La Pira, Christian Democrat and future mayor of Florence (who will also be one of the inspirers of the political transformation in the 1960s with the first centre-left), is mentioned, who asks that the invocation of the text say “In the name of God, the Italian people. this Constitution is given.” Etc
Togliatti, Concetto Marchesi and Piero Calamandrei intervene calmly to identify a divisive factor and the president Umberto Terracini (to whom that page dedicates much praise) invites the proposal to be withdrawn “with the same nobility of heart that had driven her to suggest that introduction“. The article tells of a La Pira who, accepting, sadly spreads his arms. And he also tells of Francesco Saverio Nitti (liberal-radical, head of government between 1919 and 1920, in exile for a long time during fascism) and immediately afterwards of Palmiro Togliatti, secretary of the Italian communists, who get up from their seats and go towards La Pira to hug him.
Il April twenty-fifthfor many of these symbolic stories which all arise from the watershed of ’45, is therefore an indispensable date in Italy’s civil calendar.