Dreadful Homecoming, Italy 1944 March 23, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
Sometimes when you read descriptions from history, something snags on your imagination and you can’t get loose: in fact the wool on your mental pullover starts to unravel… Sometimes it is hard to explain why. But for what it is worth here is a scene from history that could have featured as a vignette in a Russian novel. Massimo Salvadori (obit 1992) is the hero of this piece. Born in 1908 he had already been involved in anti-fascist activities in the late 1920s with Justice and Liberty (the brave and hopeless centre-left resistance to Mussolini) at a time when such things were both dangerous and unfashionable in Italy. In 1932 he was arrested and only got through to Switzerland using a British passport and he arrived in Britain in 1933, where he would live for much of the next years. He served in the British armed forces in the war and was eventually parachuted into Italy as a member of SOE, helping to organise the Italian resistance to German occupation. He quickly allied himself with the Actionists, the successors of Justice and Liberty and Italy’s first line of defence not only against the Nazis but also against partisan Communists. His work for a democratic Italy is a matter now of public record, but this heart-breaking scene is little known: it comes from his autobiography The Labour and the Wounds. Salvadori’s father was Count Guglielmo Salvadori Paleotti, who in 1924, the young Massimo had tried to protect in Florence, during a fascist outrage, being beaten for his troubles. And now, eleven years after leaving Italy, Massimo was home again, walking, in a British uniform down the sacred scented path of pines towards the mansion where he had grown up with his parents. Memories flooded in of the intervening period and of the friends he had lost in the war, his triumphs and failures, then he heard someone walking towards him.
I heard muttered words – they did not seem to be directed particularly towards me, but they were – it was my father’s voice. ‘Agente straniero!’ [Foreign agent] Wrapped in a familiar black cloak, he passed me on the stairs and vanished into the gathering darkness. So that was my welcome after eleven years! I felt a terribly bitter taste in my mouth. Others might not be so outspoken, but might well have the same thought on seeing me in foreign uniform. Eleven years are long. One becomes a straniero [foreigner] after eleven years. And to think that for all these years I had dreamed of that moment, of seeing my home again.
The next days would be still worse. He would be shown the records of all the friends, teachers, servants and relatives who had reported on him to the fascist police and he would personally come face to face with some of his Judases.
Other killing scenes: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
