In 2021, the 80th anniversary of the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia, 133 scholars from different countries signed an appeal to the Italian state authorities requesting that they publicly acknowledge Italy’s responsibility for the occupation of the country.
Apart from the aggression itself, the Italian Army was directly responsible for reprisals, execution of hostages and internment in concentration camps of approximately 100,000 civilians in the regions where it garrisoned, namely Dalmatia and parts of the Dalmatian hinterland, the province of Ljubljana, and Montenegro. The authors of the appeal suggested that the Italian President Sergio Mattarella would pay an official visit to one of the concentration camps created by the Royal Army established in July 1942 on the Croatian island of Raab, as a significant act of repentance.
Hosting a total of 10,000 inmates over the span of 15 months – mostly partisans and their relatives arrested during counterinsurgency operations–living conditions in the camp lead to the death of 1,400 people, including many children.
Known only as a holiday destination to the Italian public opinion, Raab – Arbe in Italian – is the site of a memorial, erected in 1953 by the Yugoslav government, and of an annual commemoration.
Yet, no Italian state representative has ever paid an official visit to it and no Italian politician has ever taken part in the annual celebrations. A ‘non-site of memory’ for the Italians, Raab is therefore the most glaring manifestation of Italy’s unwillingness to come to terms with its own past and to construct a shared memory with the former victims of Fascism’s expansionism.
No wonder, then, that the scholars’ appeal was utterly ignored by the Italian authorities.
Italy’s refusal to come to terms with its wars of aggression
The wars waged by Benito Mussolini’s regime as part of the Axis drive to reshape the world order have long been relegated into oblivion. While in the immediate post-war years the Allied powers were inclined to let the countries invaded by Mussolini prosecute Italians guilty of war crimes, the Cold War led them to reverse their attitude. Italy was part of the capitalist bloc and shedding a veil on its past was instrumental to its rapid integration into the anti-communist camp.
Some of the formerly occupied countries followed a quite similar strategy. In 1944, for example, Greece, one of the victims of Italy’s aggression, saw the establishment of an anti-communist regime, engaged in a civil war against the Communist Party. While at the end of the war its political leadership had sought the extradition of many Italian war criminals to be prosecuted in Greece, it became now eager to receive support from the anti-Communist camp. Therefore, it promptly shelved the war crimes issue to avoid tarnishing good relations with Italy. With the Tito-Stalin split of 1948 and Yugoslavia’s rapprochement with the West, the latter refrained from requesting the prosecution of Italian war criminals.
Furthermore, Italy’s memory focused largely on the resistance movement against the Germans that had developed after the armistice with the Allies in 1943. The image of a people collectively engaged in the fight against fascism overshadowed the past, even if some of those very people had fought before on different fronts to realize Fascism’s imperialist dreams.
Not unlike other countries in Europe, the Italian public opinion rooted its memory of the war in the stereotype of the ‘bad German’, an easy escape from the responsibilities of many Italians who willingly partook in the Nazi endeavour to reshape the world order and in the extermination of the Jews, Roma and Sinti people, and other groups deemed undesirable.
The swift demise of Italy’s colonial empire, including present-day Libya, Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia, all lost during WWII, contributed to obliterating that part of the country’s past as well. Italy’s bloody counterinsurgency in Libya, started shortly before Mussolini’s rise to power (1922) but reaching massive dimensions in 1930-32, remained unknown to the wider public for decades and has yet to be integrated into the collective memory of the Italians.
The aggression against Ethiopia in 1935, a key step in the formation of the Axis alliance, opened up Italy’s decade of war. While poison gas and bombing of civilians to lower their morale were used to crush the enemy during the war in 1935-36, operations to repress resistance to Italy’s rule were compounded by brutal violence against civilians in the following years.
Since 2012 a mausoleum to Marshall Rodolfo Graziani, directly responsible for many of the massacres perpetrated in the colonies and considered a war criminal by many post-colonial states, stands on his grave in Affile, near Grosseto. Erected with public money, Graziani’s monument is a shameless testimony to Italy’s difficult relationship with its past.
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A late scholarship
Memory and scholarship are often non-communicating vessels, yet, in the immediate post-war years, Italian historians actively cooperated in silencing this subject. While an international scholarly output on Italian colonialism started to appear, Italian scholars shunned the topic of Italy’s colonialism until the 1960s, when Angelo Del Boca, not an academic scholar but a journalist-turned-historian, began to publish the first monograph on the Italo-Ethiopian war.
To no surprise, his studies were met with strong resistance from part of the Italian public opinion and several historians. A partisan during the war, in the 1960s, Del Boca was attacked by the former Minister of the Colonies, Alessandro Lessona and by several associations of African veterans. Later, in the 1990s he conducted a debate with renowned journalist and historian Indro Montanelli, who denied Italy’s use of gas in the Ethiopian war.
Even more delayed was the formation of a body of scholarship on Italy’s occupations during WWII. Not until 2003 was a monograph encompassing all Italian occupied territories (Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania, France) published. Unsurprisingly, Davide Rodogno’s book was acclaimed by many as a pioneering and long awaited study and was later published in English by the prestigious Cambridge University Press.
Del Boca and the myth of ‘Italians good people’
Italy’s public memory was even slower in acknowledging what the historians brought to light. A step forward towards wider popularization of the subject came with the publication of Del Boca’s book Italiani brava gente? Un mito duro a morire (Italians good people? A hard-to-die myth) in 2005.
It appeared in the heat of controversies over Fascism – two years earlier Silvio Berlusconi had publicly affirmed that Mussolini had never killed anybody and his internment camps were just “holiday resorts” – the book took the myth of the ‘good Italian’ head-on, describing episodes of violence committed by the Italians, between unification in 1861 and the Second World War.
The book did not aim at constructing a counter-stereotype to the self-portrayal of the Italians as good-natured people, incapable of perpetrating violence, with that of the ‘bad Italian’. Rather, as Del Boca affirmed in the short introduction, his concern was to show that the Italians acted in the “most brutal manner” just as other people did in “analogous situations”. The book is now available in English, published by the Indian Seagull Books with the title As Cruel As Anyone Else: Italians, Colonies and Empire, a wise choice encapsulating Del Boca’s main argument.
Spanning eight decades, the narration highlights episodes of mass violence of very different nature. It starts with a description of the bloody war fought by the Italian Army in Southern Italy against the brigandage, armed bands of former soldiers of the dissolved Kingdom of the Two Sicilies Army and individuals opposing the unification of 1861. Del Boca’s narration moves then to the colonial context, portraying internment in Eritrea in the 1890s. He focused in particular on the camp of Nocra, an island 55 km from Massawa that hosted up to 1,000 inmates in 1892. As in Raab during WWII, the camp, which remained in place from 1887 to 1941, hosted opponents of Italian rule in unbearable conditions.
In 1900, Italy took part in the repression of the Boxer rebellion in China using extreme violence to quell the Chinese anti-colonial uprising, acting ‘as cruel as’ the other colonial powers. Del Boca then describes the ferocious reprisals conducted by the Italian army in Libya in 1911 in response to the massacre by the Ottoman forces of Italian soldiers who had surrendered in Sciara Sciat.
The following chapter contains a fierce denunciation of General Luigi Cadorna’s stubborn and irresponsible conduct during the First World War, which led to the death of thousands of soldiers in useless attacks against the Austro-Hungarian forces. Del Boca’s father, who served as a soldier under Cadorna, used to tell his son war episodes that always ended with fierce accusations of the General: “our real enemy”.
With Fascisms’ rise to power, Del Boca’s account becomes more focused on colonial violence. Between 1922 and 1932 Libya became the theatre of a fierce campaign of repression against the local resistance to Italian rule, with 100,000 civilians interned in camps. Developed only in recent years, a Libyan scholarship in English employs the category of genocide to describe those events, a perspective still absent in the Italian scholarship.
Finally, the book dwells on the Italian war in Ethiopia, with a chapter dedicated to the massacre of the monks of the Ethiopian-Orthodox monastery of Debra Libanos in May 1937 and to the repressions in Slovenia, during the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941-43.
An editorial success, Angelo Del Boca’s book is more an account that urges critical reflection among the wider public, than a systematic study. Apart from the main theme of the book, a number of red threads run across it. For example, Del Boca often highlights the incongruity between Italy’s aspiration to a status of great power and the limited means to attain it. He harshly lambasts Italy’s political leadership for its ambitious but unrealistic plans, for which, like in the First World War, the usual ‘rank and file’ paid the price.
Inevitably doomed to failure, this drive towards a status of a world power was paved with instances of extreme violence against those who did not abide by Italy’s rule. Repression of opponents was at the core of Italy’s nation building, both inside the country and in its expansionist endeavour.
Thus, having read the book, one is tempted to conclude that while being just another instance of how colonialism was an inherently violent phenomenon, Italy’s relation to violence is indeed peculiar, being a belated nation and a belated colonial power, infused by a sense of having to catch up with the great powers. Italy’s nation building and its imperialist project was suffused with the idea that the ‘essence’ of the Italian character needed to be improved to fit the myth of the ‘Great Italy’, to use Emilio Gentile’s expression. At the very core of Fascism’s palingenetic ideology was the idea of creating a ‘new man’ out of the weakling Italian, turning him into a soldier forged in steel.
Italy’s ‘patriotic’ history
While there is by now a consistent body of scholarship on this topic, its reception by the wider public opinion seems still a long way off, the more so as the politicization of the debate around Italy’s past often stands in the way of critical reflection.
Since 2004, Italy’s memory of the Second World War centres on the so-called ‘Day of Remembrance’, namely the National Memorial Day of the Exiles and Foibe. This date commemorates the Italian victims of Yugoslav partisans’ reprisals at the end of WWII and the exodus of the Italian communities living in Istria and Dalmatia after the war.
As argued by many critics, the institutionalization of this memorial day contributes to obscuring Italy’s responsibilities in creating those very conditions that led to the expulsion of the Italians.
This should obviously not mean to reduce the responsibility of those specific killings to a mere consequence of a previous injustice. Yet, it seems evident that the choice of day, that closely recalls the Holocaust Remembrance Day, as well as the frequent use of a vocabulary drawn from the Holocaust, feed into a representation of Italy’s experience in the Second World War as a mere martyrology.
This is confirmed by the memory politics conducted by the present government of Giorgia Meloni and by many local administrations governed by the political right, and the habit of intimidating those historians who offer a more nuanced view.
Far-right politician Maurizio Gasparri has recently gone so far as to threaten to bring to court historian Eric Gobetti, the author of a successful book about the Foibe massacres, for his ‘denialist views’.
With the electoral success of Giorgia Meloni, political conditions in Italy seem as bad as ever for this to change. Indeed, not unlike other countries and, where a new wave of ‘patriotic histories’ accompany the rise to power of the far-right, Italy, ‘as anyone else’, is decidedly moving towards the adoption of a memory culture pivoted on self-victimization.
