AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Violence was also intentionally used as a deterrent. The threat of killing ten Italians for every dead German was not an empty one. There were public executions: Tina Anselmi describes how, as a seventeen-year-old trainee teacher, she and her classmates were made to witness the hanging of thirty-one partisans at Bassano del Grappa. (In her case, as in so many others, the deterrent did not work – her response was to join the Resistance.) And there were times at which the Nazi-Fascist regime exceeded even its own stated policy of brutality, such as the murder of 335 civilians and political prisoners at the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome on 24 March 1944, and the slaughter of around 560 civilians – including more than a hundred children – at Sant’Anna di Stazzema, near Lucca, on 12 August 1944.
My characters are invented, and so are the specific situations in which they find themselves. But their fear is real, and so is their determination.
*
There were many determined young women like Stella. Partisan couriers tended to be female, because it was easier for women to pass unnoticed. They took messages, supplies, literature, weapons, even explosives from point to point, keeping the work of the Resistance moving. They travelled on foot or by bike or on public transport; they wove notes into their hair, stuffed guns into their bras, concealed their contraband in shopping bags and prams and school satchels. It was hard, scary, indispensable work, and those who did it knew that – if captured – they would be tortured for the information they carried.
It’s no wonder that some of Italy’s foremost women politicians and activists started out as couriers. Lidia Menapace, Tina Anselmi and Rossana Rossanda are just three of the most famous names. But many couriers, like Irma Bandiera, Stefanina Moro, Ines Bedeschi and Clorinda Menguzzato, did not live to see the Liberation. They died defending the secrets they held.
There were also women organisers, like Berta and Agnese in this story. The cross-factional network Berta founds in Romituzzo is a small-scale, local version of the extensive Women’s Defence and Assistance network founded by Ada Gobetti, Bianca Guidetti Serra and Frida Malan, which is described in Gobetti’sPartisan Diary. And there were women combatants, increasing in numbers as the war went on. They often had to fight for acceptance, but they also proved themselves in battle. Carla Capponi, Norma Pratelli Parenti, Rita Rosani and Iris Versari are just four of the nineteen women awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valour for their exceptional actions in the Resistance.
Like Stella, many women partisans saw their contributions dismissed when the war was won. Only in the last decades has increasing attention been paid to the value – and the valour – of women’s participation.
Don Anselmo, too, is a very familiar figure to anyone who knows Resistance history. There were many priests and religious whose faith and humanity compelled them to oppose Fascism and the Nazi occupation, often at the cost of their own lives. The Archbishop of Florence, Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa, worked strenuously to save Italian and foreign Jews from deportation and murder – and he strongly encouraged his clergy to do the same. Don Anselmo would certainly have been part of his network, and he shares the cardinal’s anti-communist and anti-Fascist convictions.
Don Anselmo has a number of spiritual brothers, such as don Aldo Mei, don Pietro Pappagallo, don Giovanni Fornasini and don Francesco Foglia (a keen explosives expert, also known as ‘don Dinamite’). But perhaps his closest real equivalent is don Giuseppe Morosini, a former military chaplain who was active in the Roman resistance, helping the partisans with intelligence and weapons as well as moral and spiritual support, and who was executed on 3 April 1944. Don Giuseppe was also a model for Aldo Fabrizi’s heroic and lovable don Pietro in my favourite film,Roma, Città Aperta.
Stella, don Anselmo and their comrades are the most clearly recognisable types in this story, but the historical parallels don’t end there. Guido Comacchi will be identifiable to fans of classic Formula One, while publishing types will spot a few familiar traits in the character of Pierfrancesco Legni. The secret passage in Romituzzo is a copy of the famous one at Niccolò Machiavelli’s country estate in Sant’Andrea in Percussina, although there it connects the manor house with the pub across the road. (You can visit both, and you should.) In general, I’ve tried to make sure that my inventions are anchored in some kind of reality.
Achille Infuriati has his antecedents, too. There were many brave young men in the Resistance, and there were many gifted racing drivers in the post-war period. And there were some who combined the two spheres. One was the Italian-American driver Alfonso Thiele, an OSS captain during the war, who married the extraordinary partisan Walkiria Terradura. Another was Jean Achard, a French Resistance fighter and journalist who died in an accident before his motor racing career really had a chance to flourish.
But if I owe a debt to anyone in particular for the creation of Achille, it’s the late James Hunt: a great sportsman and passionate anti-apartheid campaigner who spoke candidly about fear, death, and the psychology of calculated risk-taking. I returned to his interviews again and again.
*
In writingEscape to Tuscany, and Stella’s story in particular, I have tried to do a little bit of justice to all the people I have named here. But the nature of Stella’s clandestine work, her young age and her small-town context mean that hers is a small story, not a big one. She isn’t privy to the strategic operation of the various factions she’s helping, or the work don Anselmo and don Mauro are doing from their respective parochial houses. And for her own safety and that of others, she must remain ignorant. This means that I have touched lightly, for now, on important topics that deserve proper consideration. I will explore these further in future work, beginning with my next novel, set in Genoa and centred on the Jewish-Christian resistance network DELASEM.
In the meantime, I have done my best to make sure that Stella’s little world is authentic in feel and believable in detail. I had a tremendous resource in the many first-person accounts by women partisans, both written and recorded. There are too many to name, but the stories of Tina Anselmi, Luciana Romoli, Ada Gobetti and Teresa Vergalli were particularly inspiring.
I also took advice wherever I could. I’ll save the most fulsome stuff for the acknowledgements, but Catherine Jones, Hilary Ely and Michael Carley all carefully read my manuscript from their various angles of expertise – guns, bikes, racing drivers, the complex landscape of the Italian Left – and not once, but several times. Mirna Bonazza, Marisa D’Angelo, Enza De Silva, Eliana Nucera and the staff of the Biblioteca Ariostea in Ferrara provided me with a beautiful and peaceful place to work as well as access to valuable material. Nicola Rebagliati was an exceptional consultant in all matters of Italianity, Teresa Vergalli provided invaluable additional details about her courier work over email, police adviser Graham Bartlett answered my questions about corpse decomposition, and Professor Geoffrey Swain kindly talked to me about Yugoslavia.
If, with all this help, I still managed to get something wrong – and I’m sure I did – that’s entirely my fault.
