With this emphatic statement, Palmiro Togliatti, the head of the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), both calmed the nerves and provided a unifying focus for the nascent Resistenza in Rome.
Of all the lessons the Resistenza Italiana offers contemporary leftist movements, this is the first: to defeat an authoritarian government, you must unify across ideological and party lines.
It is the only way to banish the old spectre of a self-defeating left, too often incapable of setting aside its divisions, even to defeat a common enemy.
Although the reasons for resistance were the same everywhere, the movement’s growth was uneven geographically, and in Rome, it was late.
Soon, an energised Roman Resistenza would carry out one of the best-remembered Italian partisan missions and, in turn, suffer barbaric retribution.
In Rome, there were reasons that the Resistenza arrived later than elsewhere.
The capital was not industrialised, so the Germans did not focus on the city. There was merely the government and the Vatican.
Under Mussolini and later the Nazis, an enormous number of troops was required for protection and maintaining order.
The factories of the North were crucial to the war effort. The region also provided fertile ground for the Resistenza, as it supplied a vast number of labourers who could organise against any regime.
Italians had grown disenchanted with Mussolini’s rule before WWII. They wanted improved living standards. To the extent that his grand projects delivered, workers supported him.
But Il Duce’s colonial adventures in Ethiopia were unpopular. Civil restrictions began to chafe, and Italians grew increasingly suspicious of his alliance with Nazi Germany.
You can’t understand what propelled the Resistenza to defeat Mussolini and the Germans without understanding this context, and why communists led the fight.
That’s why, to this day, despite its controversy under right-wing governments, Italians continue to go to great efforts to commemorate their victory over fascism every 25 Aprile.
This year, which marked the 80th anniversary of Festa della Liberazione, was no different.
In Colleferro, a small dormitory hill town outside Rome, a sizable crowd gathered to commemorate all that the Resistenza has come to signify in the history of the Republic, particularly for the Italian left.
An audience, a mix of the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) faithful, scarf-wearing supporters of the ANPI (National Association of Italian Partisans), and others, gathered to be reminded of the details of that history and hear the stories of partisan fighters.
If Colleferro registers in the minds of Italians at all, it is most likely as the site of a brutal murder, one which intersects with the fascist period and its racist legacy.
In September 2020, Willy Monteiro Duarte, a 21-year-old Italian-Cape Verdean, was beaten to death by four men, the Bianchi brothers, two mixed-martial arts practitioners and two accomplices. The Bianchis are serving life sentences, their helpers, sentences of over 20 years.
While it is often the case that the victim of a tragic killing is remembered as widely beloved, in Duarte’s case, it seems to have been especially true. A crowd of thousands attended his funeral, including Giuseppe Conte, Italy’s then-prime minister.
Duarte was posthumously awarded a gold medal for heroism by President Sergio Mattarella, as he died coming to the assistance of a school friend whom the four men were threatening.
In a country where resentment towards immigrants and those unaccepted by some as fully Italian was on the rise, Willy Duarte’s murder shocked Italians.
Colleferro today is the sort of place that could be fertile ground for extremist politicians looking to entice unemployed or underemployed youth. There is also a sizable population of the sort of stranieri (foreigners) who are more often termed immigrants than expats.
This year’s Festa della Liberazione ceremonies were held in Colleferro’s elegant modern library, evidence that funds had been found recently for such a project.
Following a sweeping historical recounting of the entire Resistenza movement from the Vice-President of the ANPI, Aldo Pavia, the proceedings shifted focus to intensely personal accounts of two local partisans, their stories told by their children and others.
Those children are now senior citizens themselves.
One lost his father in the Ardeatine massacre in Rome, in which the Nazis killed 335 Italians in retaliation for a partisan attack on an SS police regiment, which had inflicted heavy casualties.
The other described the life of his heroic mother, whose youthful rebellion led to her joining the Resistenza, with whom she fought bravely, and who, after the war, spent sixty years engaged in progressive politics.
On 23 March, 1944 while the Allies were fighting a vicious battle 70 miles away in the soon to be decimated Monte Cassino, members of the Roman Gruppi di Azione Patriottica (GAP), carried out the largest-ever attack by partisans against the Germans, on Via Rassella.
A bomb was planted in a skip and wheeled into position by a partisan disguised as a street sweeper, aided by eleven comrades, some of whom fired on the German column, others of whom provided cover via mortar fire.
They carried out their mission successfully, incurring 152 casualties. Nazi morale was severely damaged. All twelve partisans evaded capture, melting back into the city.
Following the attack, German forces harshly retaliated. For every German soldier killed by the partisans, the Nazis would kill ten Italians. Hitler ordered the assassinations to take place within 24 hours.
This posed a difficulty for the occupiers as they held only four partisans at the German embassy. They made up the numbers using 57 Jews already in Nazi custody, Italian soldiers, civilians and political prisoners who had not been sentenced to death yet.
A total of 335 people were taken to the place of execution, a cave in a Roman suburb, where they were murdered.
First up was a reading in memory of Domenico Ricci. A father of five, he joined the GAP in 1943. Together with his comrades, Ricci carried out acts of sabotage. He was rounded up in January 1944 before being shot in the Ardeatine Caves, four months before the Allies liberated Rome.
The second elderly child of the Resistanza spoke with extraordinary passion about his mother, the partisan Violetta Siria.
The bright and independent Siria left home at sixteen to join the partisans. She participated in numerous missions, often as one of the couriers who risked their lives to deliver vital messages.
Her son, Silvio Marconi, his voice saturated with emotion and rising in volume, spoke of the indignities suffered by the women partisans: the misogynistic assumptions they faced, that they were loose women ready to sleep with the fighters; that they were good for nothing more that cooking and doing the laundry of the men.
Twenty-five per cent of the Resistenza were, in fact, women, a far greater percentage than in the French resistance and greater than all of the Allied armies.
Marconi spoke of the celebrated partisan staffetta (dispatch), Tina Costa. He stated it plainly: Machismo is a central component of fascism, but there is also left-wing chauvinism, and it caused women partisans grief. Indeed, it was an extra burden that only women carried.
Marconi pointed out that all of the women fighters chose to volunteer. They were never paid, nor had they received the military training that partisan men had, many of whom were deserters from the Regio Esercito (Royal Italian Army.)
It is exceptionally rare to hear a man of that or any generation laud his mother’s activities in the world outside the home with such a nuanced understanding of gender discrimination and hardship. Silvio Marconi ended with an expression of solidarity for the people of Gaza.
Remembrance, recommitment, a platform and celebration of the importance of the aesthetics of antifascism; this is the central content and meaning of the Festa della Liberazione.
What was referred to by all as the emergency in Palestinian territory was evidence of the persistence of Resistenza values.
A second lesson that the Resistenza may have for today’s left is its longevity. It is not often remembered outside of Italy that Mussolini was in power for eighteen years before the start of WWII.
From Il Duce’s appointment as premier in 1922 until his partisans found him hiding in the back of a German car in April 1945, there were twenty-three years of dictatorship, poverty and war.
That’s an enormous legacy to have overcome. Particularly given the limitations the Resistenza had to work with, which persist in Italian politics today.
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Photograph courtesy of Valentino Petrelli. Published under a Creative Commons license.
