The focus of this digital history project is how the memorials of the Italian resistance affect the historical memory of Italians and tourists who visit the memorials.
The focus of this project is to map the various memorial sites around Italy for both the allied nations and the resistance so that we can understand their cultural impacts on post-war Italy and why these sites matter most in historical memory. Aline Sierp writes, “The way a nation selects what should be publicly remembered or forgotten, the way the past is critically reflected upon and the way interpretations of those past experiences are transmitted from one generation to the next, can tell a lot about the social and political framework that structures contemporary society.”[1]This project will set forth an argument comparing the Allied effort to memorialize during the Italian campaign and the Italian effort to memorialize the Italian resistance as a way of interpreting and analyzing the historical memory of the Italian resistance compared to the allies effort to liberate Italy.
This project has collected data on allied and Italian monuments locations, the date of the monuments creation, its origin, whether the monument is allied or Italian, and which organization is taking care of the monument to show the varied legacy and historical memories the Italians have concerning the liberation and resistance movements throughout Italy so that we may understand the cultural and historical significance these monuments play in contemporary Italian society.
In order to understand this question we first must locate each memorial and display its location via Carto and that is what this project aims to do in order to understand precisely what geographic locations and the corresponding events the Italians and the allied nations have chosen to memorialize. This data was found in multiple sources, however a comprehensive list can be found in traveler’s guide books, memorial organizations websites, and was mapped utilizing Carto.
Sources and Methodology
The data set comes from Anne Leslie Saunders’s A Travel Guide to World War II Sites in Italy[2]. Saunders has compiled a comprehensive guidebook with two hundred memorials in total dedicated to various allied and Italian resistance engagements with the Nazis. Saunders begins each chapter with an overview of the battle in each area with respect to allied advances, Italian and German fortifications, and counter-offensives.
Saunders then inserts longitude and latitude coordinates along with context for each specific memorial site. She then reviews the memorials significance to the people of that location, and then identifies it as a massacre site, a battlefield, a cemetery, or a statue. Saunders then describes the overall battle movements through each memorial site, whether the memorial is dedicated to any specific allied nation, whether the site is dedicated to any American unit, or whether the site is dedicated to Italian Resistance members.
The collection of data for this project came from two sources, the first is A Travel Guide to World War II Sites in Italy written by Professor Anne Leslie Saunders and the second is the Places of Memory and Resistance page from the National Association of Partisans of Italy. This particular book was chosen as it focuses on the allied nation’s monuments strictly within Italy and it utilizes information from such organizations as the United Kingdom’s Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) and the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC). The CWGC was set up to manage the WWI and WWII graves, cemeteries, and memorials of the Commonwealth forces. Professor Saunders has broken down each nation’s cemeteries and listed each respectively in their own chapters, creating a notable distinction between nations and the precise location of their memorials within Italy. For example United States cemeteries can be found in chapters 6 and 9, while Poland’s cemeteries can be found in chapters 5, 14, and 18.
The data that Professor Saunders has collected has proven to be invaluable as she has indicated which country has created what memorial, and it’s precise longitude and latitude coordinates, as well as a brief description of the battle that occurred at each memorial site and lastly she has translated any inscriptions on these memorials from Italian to English. This data can be used to illustrate allied intentions with war memorials so that a study can be conducted on the allied war effort and what the various battle sites, individuals, military units, and gravesites memorial commissions felt was important to honor.
The second set of data that was collected for this project comes from the National Association of Partisans in Italy (ANPI). The ANPI has collected location data for all of the memorials dedicated to the Italian partisan and resistance fighters through its school education committee. The ANPI has compiled an interactive google map as well as various educator cards that describe each memorial, its physical location, and a brief description of the resistance action that had been carried out in this area. Though the map is comprehensive with respect to the resistance memorials for the Italians, it doesn’t display the allied war memorial effort making it a unique data set that only shows Italian memorials to the resistance within Italy. This distinction indicates the significance of memorials to Italians compared to the allied memorial effort as a whole.
The use of Carto in this research project helps to visually represent data that clearly marks the Italian monuments and the allied monuments throughout Italy that would not be as clear on a physical map. Carto also displays that data in an interactive way to raise awareness of space and place, and opens the investigation into if these memorials have seen change in continuity over time. For example the data revealed in Carto that Italian memorials to the resistance are predominantly in the northern half of Italy, while simultaneously showing that the allied memorials are prevalent in both the extreme Northern and extreme Southern regions indicating that a concentrated effort to remember only Italian resistance fighters didn’t occur until the fall of Rome, the data also indicates that the allied war effort was largely unaided by the Italian resistance as the allies made their way through southern Italy. The data also reveals that no central control of the resistance existed within Italy and the allies may have had a large hand in forming resistance parties in Italy after the liberation of Rome.
Carto mapping of these memorial sites not only reveals the importance geography plays in the formation of the resistance, but it also helps to shape the cultural legacy these memorials have on the Italian people as well as reveals the impact these memorials may have on thousands of tourists who visit them every year. Mapping in Carto helps us to understand place and space’s role in building memorials better. Carto mapping also assists in the exploration of much broader implications with respect to the cultural legacy of memorials between the allied efforts and the efforts of the Italian resistance and reveals how those legacies are remembered both by the allied nations and the Italian people. This data also points to larger issues such as the Italian’s lack of response to the allied invasion of Sicily and Southern Italy, and the allies’ intentions with the formation of the resistance after the liberation of Rome more research will be needed in order to address these specific issues.
It appears that the answer to the question is that the Italian people have dedicated 60 memorials around Italy that represent the Italian resistance and the allies have commissioned 200 memorials around Italy. The resistance memorials are mostly concentrated in the northern half of Italy and only a few exist in southern Italy compared to the allied memorials which are in great numbers in Sicily and in the Northern Alps of Italy. More research is needed to understand why there is such a heavy concentration of resistance memorials exclusively in the northern part of Italy and the cultural and historical significance of each monument to the Italian people.
One possible conclusion concerning cultural and historical significance in contemporary Italian society is that the Italian resistance during World War Two is a mixture of political ideology, differing objectives, alliances, and agreements to put those ideological differences aside for the common cause of liberating towns and cities, ridding Italy of Fascism, and driving the Nazi’s from Italian soil could have driven the decision to create memorials in the first place as Tom Behan writes, “The story of the Italian Resistance movement is the story of how ordinary people (a people who are often racially stereotyped as being cowardly), who had lived under a dictatorship for 20 years, played a key role in ending a system which seemed set in stone, [and] totally unbeatable.”[3] Behan continues to argue that the Italian people, plagued with having to choose between famine and resistance chose to resist rather than starve to death while the allies may not have experienced such hardships.
Historical memory can be an elusive concept as illustrated by Alessandro Portelli who writes, “Public memory manipulates the events into contrasting morality tales about guilt, responsibility and innocence, and into political apologies on the meaning and morality of resistance and the foundation of the Republic.”[4] Italians have come to see the resistance as the founding of their modern society, and their chosen system of government. Resistance fighters are seen as the people of Italy rising up to bring liberty to the shores of Italy after 20 years of dictatorship, not outside nations fighting to liberate Italy.
Portelli uses the example of the Salvo D’Acquisto, an Italian Carabinieri (military policeman), who sacrificed himself in order to save the civilians of the village he was sworn to protect. What is interesting is how D’Acquistos’s story then becomes culturally iconic in Italy, his picture being displayed in every Carabiniere police station across the nation, despite the fact that D’Acquisto was simply rounded up with other civilians for reprisal killings of German soldiers killed a day earlier in an explosion supposedly set up by Communist resistance fighters. D’Acquisto didn’t take a stand and hurl himself upon the Germans so he could protect his fellow Italians as the story portrays him, he convinced the Germans to let all of the hostages go as he was digging his own grave, the Germans decided to kill D’Acquisto as the other hostages had fled while they were talking and he was the only hostage left and the German soldiers needed to show they had carried out reprisal killings for their dead the day before.
Soon after the war, the truth of D’Acquistos death is quickly re-written and D’Acquisto becomes immortalized in books, paintings, ceremonies, and film in order to push a certain narrative. Portelli argues that D’Acquisto’s death was used by the Christian Democrats to paint the Partisan Communists in a bad light, Portelli writes, “The civilian Communist partisans were ‘guilty’ and did not turn themselves in, leaving the hostages to be killed; the Catholic Carabiniere Salvo D’Acquisto was ‘innocent’ and safe but delivered himself and saved the hostages by dying in their place.”[5] It is through stories and the monuments that are created around iconic heroes like D’Acquisto and the Acqui Division on Cephalonia this project will be able to draw concrete conclusions about historical memory and the Italian resistance by identifying particular physical monuments that mark the memory of public view and commemoration of the Italian resistance movement.
Resistance fighters were also directly responsible for driving the Nazis away and allowing the Italian people to create a republic that continues to this day, but Italy enjoys something that is unique to their countries resistance fighters that many other European countries didn’t enjoy as summed up by Lynda Lamaree, “Italy was one of the few countries in Europe to make justice on its own; the Italians did not leave it up to the Allied courts. The forces of the Resistance took matters into their own hands to reclaim their identity.”[6]
How Italians choose to remember their fallen is why it’s so important to explore historical monuments as a way of drawing concrete conclusions about historical memory and the Italian resistance. By identifying particular physical monuments that mark the memory for public view and commemoration of the Italian resistance movement we are interpreting and analyzing the historical memory of the Italians. How these people remember is just as important as what these people remember, and through this project, it is hoped to understand the context in which memorials are built and celebrated by the Italian people and Italy’s unique place in post-war Europe.
Contemporary Italian society can be defined by the resistance movement. During World War II the Italian resistance is estimated to be 182,000 partisans strong with 500,000 potential recruits.[7] The resistance movement consisted of the three largest anti-fascist political parties in Italy at the time the Communist, Socialist, and Christian Democrats, and was comprised mostly of Italy’s middle class. Soldiers fleeing Mussolini’s fascist army or Hitler’s POW camps also joined the Italian and foreign resistance movements. Such examples include the Garibaldi Battalion in Yugoslavia and the Acqui Division in Greece. The Italian resistance movement means more to the Italian people today than simply taking to the streets to fight fascism and drive Hitler from Italian soil. It has become a part of Italian identity to remember and memorialize the men and women who not only liberated villages and towns but to commemorate the idealists who created Italy’s modern republic.
As Paolo Pezzino writes, “the resistance offers a classic example of the ‘public use of history’ in which historical interpretation has served primarily to justify political, institutional, and ideological ends.”[8] The reason why the Italian people choose to memorialize the resistance is that it consisted of working-class Italians who sacrificed in order to make Italy free. Those stories transcend statutes and days of remembrance, they have been woven into Italian society, however, for Americans, the idea of memorization is entirely different that the Italian ideas around memorization.
As Erika Doss writes from the American perspective on monument building, “omnipresence can be explained by what I call memorial mania: an obsession with issues of memory and history and an urgent desire to express and claim those issues in visibly public contexts.”[9] Doss explains that Americans have created an obsession with issues of memory and a desire to express those memories publicly, hence the need to memorialize every allied engagement in Italy as the data revealed in this project with the allies overwhelming 200 memorials in Italy compared to the 60 the Italians have had dedicated to the Italian resistance.
Doss points out that memorial mania is “driven by heated struggles over self-definition, national purpose, and the politics of representation, memorial mania is especially shaped by the effective conditions of public life in America today; by the fevered pitch of public feelings such as grief, gratitude, fear, shame, and anger”[10] as compared to the Italian idea of creating places that are deeply engaging with the Italian purpose and identity. Doss continues by arguing that “Today’s growing number of memorials represent heightened anxieties about who and what should be remembered in America. The passionate debate in which they are often embroiled represents efforts to harness those anxieties and control particular narratives about the nation and its publics.”[11] Doss’s ideas, though representing American memorials, are in direct alignment with the Italian ideology behind creating memorials as Italian political parties often use memorials to control the nation through its monuments and historical narrative, but differ in cultural significance.
The long legacy of the Italian resistance occupies a special place in contemporary Italian society because the past matters in Italy, so much so that the resistance movement has transcended stories of liberation. As Phillip Cook puts it, “political parties have at one time or another ‘taken a mortgage’ on the resistance and borrowed against it [for political gain], and it has gone unchecked by historians.”[12] This has led to questioning of memorialization of the resistance by the Italian people. While most Italians agree that the resistance has earned the right to be memorialized and celebrated in Italian culture Palolo Pezzino writes, “April 25th is the day of memory for the Italians who fought but doesn’t cancel out the ‘other’ memories of those who remember having attempted to survive by steering a middle course between the fascists and the partisans, of those who remember not the resistance but their partial resistance and those who do not want to remember or be remembered.”[13] How do monuments honor the people caught in the middle? Were they resistance fighters? Did they have a choice? Do they even want to be remembered?
Memorials to the fallen are scattered all throughout Italy, and they have various meanings to the people who see them every day. Some memorials have hundreds of thousands of guests attend every day, while others people barely look at it as they pass it in the street, and some completely ignore the sacrifice of the resistance altogether. As Pezzino argues, “In parts of Italy some memories persist that combine a specific rejection of local partisans experiences, and a general refusal of anti-fascist values and a refusal to participate in the official commemoration of Liberation Day on April 25th.”[14] Pezzino’s point is that most Italians, and most of the world, see the resistance fighters as heroes. From a national perspective, it is expected that Italians celebrate them as such every April 25. Pezzino also argues that now the job of historians is to “come to the question of the national significance of the resistance, and its capacity to represent an element of identification for the majority after the war.”[15] National Identity in Italy is the main driving force behind how Italians define who they are. Memorials, stories, spaces and places are all designed for the Italian people to remember how important identification is as one united Italy. Pezzino answers the question about what historians’ roles must be in identifying the national significance of the resistance by arguing that “Italy sees itself as a ‘divided we’ with a collective memory that is a full-scale historic factor, a meeting point between the political and social side of live, between experience and the re-ordering of society, a means of defining and consolidating identity to the extent that it ‘conserves and transmits values.’”[16]
He argues that historians have an obligation to set the record straight with respect to the resistances role in the war, its legacy, and its continued political efforts after the war. The memorials are what transmit those values to Italians every day. The physical space and place many of those memorials occupy have some historical significance and to a larger extent a political motivation geared towards the resistance and their movement, from the caves at the Ardeatine mountain to the memorial plaque on the sides of buildings, the resistance has become a part of the Italian culture and a part of the political debate.
What blurs the legacy of the resistance is the role Italy played in the war, as Rosario Florenza argues, “The role of Italy in the war was unclear, or at least complicated: the country was simultaneously loser, occupied, resister, victor.”[17] Italians after the war failed to adopt a unifying national memory. But Italians did legitimize the political role of anti-fascism in the new Italian republic as Forlenza argues, “Italians became the victims of fascism, and their role as anti-fascists were glorified, the resistance and the war conducted with the allies was portrayed in epic terms as the second Risorgimento or ‘rising again.’”[18] Forlenza also argues that “cultural memory had a critical influence on Italian democracy and to the democratic identity of Italians”[19]
Part of this Risorgimento also included the allies and their attempt to downplay Italy’s role in helping Hitler and Mussolini rise to power. As Pezzino argues, “For the allies, if Italy could position itself as both a defeated nation and a cobelligerent nation, with a government called upon to undo the wrongs of Fascism yet claimed to be anti-fascist, it could be employed towards a general displacement of the crimes committed by Italians during the war of which the resistance played a key role in.”[20] So Italy had a vested interest in branding the resistance as a part of the new republic, and as such commemoration and monuments had to reflect Italy as a nation of anti-fascists, but a problem existed within the resistance movement itself. As Pezzino points out, “In the midst of the Cold War the Communists question prevented the resistance from becoming the new founding myth of Republican Italy because of the weight of [the Communist] parties role in the liberation struggle.”[21]
Post-war Italy becomes a hotbed of political navigation between the allies and the people of Italy. Italians are stuck between association with the Nazis and being the origin of Fascism, and being liberated by a predominantly communist resistance. Italians had to walk this fine line as the allies began to govern Italy under occupation as the war ended. Italy minimizes its association with fascism by showing itself to be the victims of Mussolini’s fascist state, but it also minimizes the Communist’s role in the resistance, while touting the resistance fighters as the hero’s of Italy hence the need to build a minimum amount of memorials commemorating the resistance, while the allies build memorials all over Italy.
The ability of the Italians to play the victim after the war is over puts Italy in a unique position of not being punished by the post-war trials, and the allies allow the Italians to rebuild without having to participate in the Nuremberg trials. When it comes to memorials the Italians purposely build memorials that honor the resistance as a whole, not acknowledging any political party that the memorial is associated with. In return for Italy’s pardon, the allied nations begin to build memorials dedicated to all of their individual nations’ dead all around Italy, while the Italians only build a few that are dedicated to the resistance.
Rooting out Communism would become the target of allied and especially American foreign policy after the war had concluded. This would place great pressure on the Italian republic to focus on the anti-communist elements within the resistance and building memorials that focused solely on their contribution to the resistance movement, creating further division within the resistance party, and its memorialization of resistance fighters during the war. The political fallout over memorialization is prevalent in Italian politics. National monuments have become the site of protests and riots, such as the case in 1994 when the April 25th celebration turned into a full-scale demonstration against the new government led by the National Alliance, a political party with roots in Fascism. The monument debate within Italy continues to consume politics.
Italy’s inability to once and for all shake its Fascist past seems to be an unobtainable goal. With the establishment of the neo-fascist party in Italy and as a nod to its fascist roots has appointed Mussolini’s daughter as its figurehead. The creation of the Neo-Fascist Party and its recent win in the European elections shows that Italians are far from establishing the new identity they promised to figure out when the republic was created in 1945.
Monuments around Italy are designed to commemorate the sacrifice that all Italians faced as they struggled to escape the grip of Fascism and find a national identity. As Italians bow their heads and participate in their moments of silence around the country every year on April 25th they do so because they recognize those individual lives that were sacrificed so that Italy could be given that chance to find its new identity after Fascism.
Italians make no distinction between communist, or socialist, or Christian on April 25th because they know that those who sacrificed their lives did so with the understanding they were fighting for a liberated Italy. Italy has come to see these great moments as political capital to be used as cannon fodder for the political establishment, and yet these memorials remain standing for all to see. What’s important to Italians is their history, and their ability to honor those who have fallen. It is no wonder that memorials have become the center of politics as they stand for something much more than the men and women who sacrificed their lives so that Italy could one day be free. They now stand for the struggle that Italians face every day; to decide for themselves what kind of a republic they want to be.
Bibliography and Appendix
Appendix Item 1: Carto map https://33acqui.weebly.com/italian-resistance-memorials-project
Sources Sited:
[1] Aline Sierp, Remembering to Forget? Memory and Democracy in Italy and Germany (Siena: Center for the Study of Political Change, 2009), 2.
[2] Anne L. Saunders, A Travel Guide to World War II Sites in Italy (Charleston: Travel Guide Press, 2016)10-153
[3] Tom Behan, The Italian Resistance (London: Pluto Press, 2009), 5.
[4] Alessandro Portelli, Myth and Morality in the History of the Italian Resistance: The Hero of Palidoro, (Oxford: History Workshop Journal, 2012), 3.
[5]Alessandro Portelli, Myth and Morality in the History of the Italian Resistance: the Hero of Palidoro, 4.
[6] Lynda Lamaree, Heroes or Terrorists? War, Resistance, and Memorialization in Tuscany, 1943-1945 ( Savannah: Georgia Southern University Press, 2011), 91.
[7] Tom Behan, The Italian Resistance: Fascists, Guerrillas and the Allies,1.
[8] Paolo Pezzino, “The Italian Resistance Between History and Memory,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 10 no. 4 (2005): 396.
[9] Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 1.
[10] Erika Doss, Memorial Mania, 1.
[11] Erika Doss, Memorial Mania, 1.
[12] Phillip Cook, The Legacy of the Italian Resistance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 192.
[13] Pezzino, “The Italian Resistance Between History and Memory,” 407.
[14] Pezzino, “The Italian Resistance Between History and Memory,” 407.
[15] Pezzino, “The Italian Resistance Between History and Memory,” 407.
[16] Pezzino, “The Italian Resistance Between History and Memory,” 408.
[17] Rosario Forlenza, “Sacrificial Memory and Political Legitimacy in Postwar Italy: Reliving and Remembering World War II,” History and Memory, 24 no. 2 (2012): 74.
[18] Forlenza, “Sacrificial Memory and Political Legitimacy in Postwar Italy,” 75.
[19] Forlenza, “Sacrificial Memory and Political Legitimacy in Postwar Italy,” 76.
[20] Pezzino, “The Italian Resistance Between History and Memory,” 402.
[21] Pezzino, “The Italian Resistance Between History and Memory,” 403.
