Since we started this project on the Florentine Resistance and the Nazi raid on Radio CORA – the clandestine Resistance radio operation in Florence feeding valuable intelligence to the Allies as they moved north from Rome – a number of people have commented that they did not know the full extent of the Italian Resistance, let alone the Resistance in Florence itself. If you live in Florence, there are lots of reminders that the City endured the War and that partisans died in defense of liberty. But if you are an native English speaker outside Italy or a casual visitor, it is not surprising that the Resistance narratives are obscure or unknown.
There are a lot of reasons for this general lack of awareness. We at Gidari Publishing are addressing one of them – the lack of English translations of first-hand accounts of the Resistance, particularly in Florence and Tuscany, that tell the stories of courage and bravery and self-sacrifice.
Another reason is that much of the writing tends to be academic scholarship, and it tends to focus on the Italian civil war in the aftermath of the defeat of the Nazis and liberation of Italy. To the extent that the Resistance plays a role in those narratives, it most often is to highlight the depth of distrust between the various factions fighting the Nazis as an antecedent to the division that emerged after the War, pitting communists against social democrats in seeking to form a government.
But pure Resistance stories are gaining some mainstream ground. So we wanted to highlight a couple of excellent and highly readable books by Caroline Moorehead that focus on the resistance to fascism in Italy during and leading up to the War. These are essential reading and part of her overall “Resistance Quartet” series. The first book – A Bold and Dangerous Family: The Remarkable Story of an Italian Mother, Her Two Sons, and Their Fight Against Fascism – tells the story of the Rosselli family in Florence, led by the family matriarch Amelia and her two sons Nello and Carlo. They represented the cultural elite of Florence and its disgust with fascism. Nello and Carlo paid the ultimate price for their resistance, both assassinated by Mussolini’s secret police. Amelia and her remaining family fled to New York thanks to visas arranged by Eleanor Roosevelt. Here’s how the book is described:
Renowned historian Caroline Moorehead paints an indelible picture of Italy in the first half of the twentieth century, offering an intimate account of the rise of Il Duce and his squaddristi; life in Mussolini’s penal colonies; the shocking ambivalence and complicity of many prominent Italian families seduced by Mussolini’s promises; and the bold, fractured resistance movement whose associates sacrificed their lives to fight fascism. In A Bold and Dangerous Family, Moorehead once again pays tribute to heroes who fought to uphold our humanity during one of history’s darkest chapters.
A House in the Mountains: The Women Who Liberated Italy from Fascism followed in 2020. Just as the Italian Resistance is little known, so too is the role played by women in the fight. In this book, Moorehead tells the story of four young Piedmontese women living secretly in the mountains surrounding Turin, risking their lives to overthrow Italy’s authoritarian government and fight the Nazis. What made this partisan war in the north all the more extraordinary was the sheer number of women who took up arms, became partisan leaders, and often died just like the men fighting next to them. And Moorehead conveys the disappointment of these women when they are relegated back to a domestic life and excluded from power in the aftermath of the War.
Moorehead’s books provide the grand sweep of the Resistance in Italy told through individual experiences, both of well-known anti-fascists and lesser or unknown average persons confronted by the brutality of the Nazi and fascist regimes. That is what Rossella Levi does too in No Act of Betrayal, but on an intimate, personal level. You read her book and you understand immediately the hard choices that every member of her family had to make during the War. And you can’t help but realize that this had to be the case repeated time and again in every family caught up in the War. Almost everyone we talk to about No Act of Betrayal says the same thing – they are left wondering “what would I do.”
No Act of Betrayal is available for sale on Amazon here.