How Italy was saved by its women
confused, dramatic, controversial, remembered and misremembered” period in Italian history.
The peninsula was systematically plundered, as Germany expected to be supplied with rice, tobacco, cheese, fruit and vegetables, while the Italians were reduced to eating horses from the abandoned barracks. Half a million Italian men were “sent to German labour camps to contribute to its war economy” – farms, mines, heavy industry. “They were humiliated, beaten up, starved.”
Martial law was imposed. Strikes were forbidden. The Germans opened fire with machine guns on civilian crowds. A six-year-old girl “was casually shot as she played. A 17-yearold, washing clothes at a well, was crushed by a lorry full of soldiers.”
To Hermann Goering, the Italians were no more than “a gypsy people who will end up putrefying” and Hitler came to concur, agreeing that the whole lot should be “massacred, killed, annihilated”.
Faced with complete desolation, Italy’s salvation was its womenfolk, who were “neither cowed nor fearful of the consequences”, as Moorehead writes in this gripping study of women’s role in the Resistance. It put me in mind of Alan Bennett, who has a line to the effect that, the events and upheavals of history being the responsibility of the heedless men, it is the fate of women always to be following behind, “with a bucket”.
This had been particularly so in Italy, where traditional Catholic orthodoxy, as codified by Mussolini, meant that Italian women were confined to the kitchens, looking after babies and practising “obedience with joy”. Such was the official misogyny, women “could own nothing and decide nothing”. They were not permitted to enter the professions at any senior level. If they went to a university, they had to pay double the fees. Career women were labelled by the Fascists as “brazen, libertine, sensual, materialistic, egotistic and irreligious”.
The paradox at the passionate heart of A House in the Mountains is that the Second World War offered Italian women emancipation. Given the chance “to die like men and to live like men”, women had a unique, if terrible, opportunity to decide their own fate. The numerous characters Moorehead names – Teresa, Libera, Vera, Rosa, Ada, Bianca, Freida, Silvia – demonstrated immense bravery, and many were only in their teens.
They served the partisans, acting as lookouts, carrying messages between the secret headquarters and escaping through the Turin sewers. The girls visited and fed POWs hiding in mountain caves. They obtained maps, drew and printed false papers. These women operated like generals, building up “an enormous network of contacts”, making decisions and issuing orders.
It is sobering to discover that many of Moorehead’s heroines perished, after being arrested and incarcerated and raped. (Ninety-eight were executed in Piedmont alone.) Their teeth would be knocked out and drilled down to the nerve.
The more the partisans blew up bridges, derailed trains and looted German supplies, the heavier the penalties. Attacks on German soldiers “would be revenged at a ratio of a hundred to one”, as occurred in Rome. Bodies were “left hanging on trees as warnings”. Another duty performed by the women was to collect and wash the bodies of executed comrades, preparing them for burial, even if “some were too disfigured to identify”.
With the British and Americans advancing up the peninsula from Sicily and Salerno, and also moving south from Normandy, the Germans, in retreat, were more evil than ever, destroying everything as they went, evacuating and blowing up cities (Naples to this day hasn’t fully recovered), forcing villagers, even children, to watch executions. Moorehead tells the horrific tale of hostages buried alive: “For several hours, faint cries could be heard coming from the ground.”
The reader lets out a sort of strangled cheer when we reach the moment in April 1945 when Mussolini is shot and strung up in Milan. But the madness didn’t end there. There was a frenzy of retribution and score-settling among the victors. I hadn’t known before that, as Il Duce’s corpse was about to be hoisted aloft, somebody rushed forward and stuffed a dead mouse in its mouth.
This book is as replete with atrocities as any Jacobean play. The women it highlights might belong in classic drama or opera. The most moving scene involves Matilda de Pietrantonio, aged 21. In the final hours of the conflict, she and an armed associate came across seven young Fascists, who raised their hands in surrender. Her companion raised his gun. “No,” said Matilda, “the war is over. You are not going to kill anyone in cold blood. Go home. Go. Run.”