Reflections of a stormy petrel

I feel very bad about being unable to post my usual April 25 post commemorating the Italian Partisans of WWII.

In 1821, as the first of the revolts against Austrian rule shook Italy, Alessandro Manzoni, the greatest Italian writer of the time, wrote an enthusiastic ode about the liberators. Ill led and divided, the rebels failed, and two generations were to pass before Italy was united and free; Manzoni lived to see it, but many brave men must have died in disappointment and despair. Nonetheless this song remains as a passionate image of the hopes and anger that drove two generations of men to revolt, fight, die or go into exile rather than tolerate the intolerable - until victory was won, late, messily, with plenty of unresolved issues, but for good.

In 1945, the young Italo Calvino, son of two scientists, joined the partisan fighters and took part in some of the last actions before the German wave of surrender between April 25 and May 2. As partisan actions go, his were not very remarkable, but the lyrics he wrote twenty years later for Italian singer Sergio Lebovici were. It is curious that the two poems share the same metre.

Behind the cut are the texts of both poems. For the convenience of my friends, I have placed my translations first.

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Today is Liberation Day in my country. It celebrates the war of partisan resistance fought against Germany and its Fascism puppet government in Italy from September 8, 1943, to May 2 (or thereabouts) 1945. The day April 25 was chosen because on that day the Nazis - negotiating via the Church - surrendered the city of Milan to the Partisans (and not to the allies, who only made it there a day or two later); because, according to the conventional viewpoint, he who holds Milan, holds Italy, and because Milan had been the central strategic target of the great battle that had begun two weeks earlier. Once it had fallen, there was nothing left for the invaders but to try and fight their way to the Alpine passes and home.

It may seem little to Americans or Britons, and very little in the enormous pageantry of blood in which even Britain and America count as co-protagonists at best, but this period of our history is of immense importance to us. It means, for a start, that we do not have to regard ourselves as having collaborated with evil at all times. It is not, after all, an ex post facto eulogizer, but a Fascist bureaucrat drawing up an intelligence report, who estimates that in 1944, no more than 5% of the population favoured the Fascist government. It means that freedom was not something given us as a contemptous favour by a victorious enemy, but something that our fathers took for themselves, with guns in their hands, at the risk of death and torture - whatever the Americans and the British thought of us (and their deliberate attempt to wreck the Italian economy, their refusal to treat Italy as an ally, the incredible order in September 1944 that Italian partisans should lay down their weapons and go home, and the ghastly final peace settlement, showed very well what they thought). And for all the flaws of the partisan movement, the internecine violence, the Communist presence, nevertheless, the fact that 250,000 living men in arms were present to take the surrender of Nazi invaders and Fascist traitors, and that 50,000 dead testified with their blood the commitment of the Partisan forces and the people behind them to victory against Nazism, means that we earned that freedom. With all its faults, the free Italian state, whose values are those of the Founding Fathers of sixty years ago, imprinted in the opening articles of the Constitution, stands still. We lost freedom once; we took it again with our blood, and, God willing, we shall not easily lose it again.