Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War 1944–45. James Holland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      It was a very insular world and few ever thought of escaping it. A small number had a radio – the Bolti family had an aged set – but most news travelled by word of mouth and had it not been for the war, most Italians living in rural backwaters would have had only a rudimentary idea of what was going on beyond a few miles from where they lived. Except in times of war, few needed to. Most accepted their lot, had little ambition, and fully expected life to continue in much the same way it had for centuries before. The men and women worked on the land, the women bred the next generation. Only in wartime, with the men gone, was this pattern suddenly threatened. The Bolti, for example, had four daughters, all of whom worked and lived on the farm. Cosimo struggled to find them attractive. ‘They were not at all romantic,’ he says. ‘They had bad breath, and were not very clean. Their only ambition was to find a strong and hard-working husband, have lots of children, and then bow to his undisputed authority.’

      Cosimo would perhaps have been surprised to know, however, that this pattern of existence was repeated throughout much of rural Italy. In the Ausoni Mountains, for example, some fifty miles south of Rome, there were a number of mountain communities that were far more cut off from the rest of the world than the Stura Valley in Piemonte. Some 5,000 feet high, on a verdant plain near the summit of Monte Rotondo, Pasua Pisa lived and farmed with her family. In May 1944, Pasua was twenty-eight; she had lived on the mountain all her life. They were a small community – just a few farmhouses of around ten families – although unlike most contadini, Pasua’s family owned their own farm; not that it was much – little more than a hayloft above the animals. This scarcely made their life any easier, however, and like most peasant farmers, everyone had to work long and physically demanding days.

      They were largely self-sufficient up on the mountain. They grew crops, made their own wine, and reared buffalo from which they had milk and made mozzarella cheese. Once a week, they would go down the mountain with the donkeys to the small market town of Amaseno, a journey that took a little over an hour on the way down, but well over an hour and a half on the way back. ‘We didn’t sell much of our produce,’ says Pasua, ‘just the odd calf or sheep, as we only needed to buy a very few things, like salt. We would take our grain to the mill and get it milled, and our grapes pressed.’ There was, of course, no electricity up there, or drains. Water was collected when it rained, or could be drawn with the help of a donkey from a nearby spring. On feast days they would sometimes go down into the valley; more often, they would stay on the mountain and hold a dance there.

      ‘I was beautiful,’ she says, although she had left it until she was twenty-three to get married, quite late for most young country women. ‘Lorenzo,’ she says suggestively, ‘was born straight away.’ It was a simple life, yet Pasua had always been happy enough; after all, she had known nothing else.

      For the most part, Mussolini, fascism and national and international affairs had passed her by. Only when war came did Pasua take notice, for with it came conscription: being a farmer was not a reserved occupation, as it was in Britain. Suddenly, the young men on the mountain were gone, her husband included, leaving her with their only child. Her husband had been posted to North Africa, where he had been taken prisoner by the British. Pasua had heard nothing except a telegram informing her that he was now a prisoner of war in Canada.

      Without the young men around, life had been considerably harder: it had meant even longer hours and more work for everyone, but there was no point complaining; Pasua, like everyone else, simply got on with the task of existing and making sure the farm kept running. She was also lucky that her father was still alive and there to help her. Furthermore little four-year-old Lorenzo