‘La donna nella resistenza’ (Women in Resistance)
9 May 1965
(ID Teca: D3117) This documentary - signed by the then young director Liliana Cavani, destined to a great career - starts from the farewell letter written to her loved ones by the partisan from Bologna, Irma Bandiera, and then provides, through the narrator, some data on the female contribution to the Resistance. Valuable interviews of some of these militants follow on the reasons that led them to take action. The documentary aired on Channel Two on 9th of May 1965, in the 20th anniversary of the Liberation (1965 was a central year to the memory of the Resistance).
Read the transcriptIndro Montanelli and the war in Ethiopia: the child wife
Estratto della celebre intervista al giornalista Indro Montanelli riguardo il suo “matrimonio” con una bambina eritrea ai tempi della guerra in Etiopia, all’interno del programma “L’ora della verità” nel ’69, scontrandosi con l’attivista femminista Elvira Banotti.
Read the transcriptHistoriography
L’Italia contemporanea (1918-1948, Contemporary Italy)
F. Chabod, Einaudi. Released in France years earlier as a typewritten collection of lectures given by Chabod at the Sorbonne, “L’Italia contemporanea” (Contemporary Italy) was an immediate success even outside the university classrooms. Chabod had died prematurely a few months ago, but he still remained the most famous Italian historian, a character of undoubted charisma and with an impeccable anti-fascist pedigree (partisan, first prefect of Aosta liberated). His synthesis had the gift of proposing a reading of Mussolini’s movement and the dictatorship within a long national history. His rise was basically due to the primordial fault of the revolution myth, agitated by socialists in love with their own propaganda, and to the weakness, if not the ineptitude, of the old liberal politicians, above all the most eminent of them, Giovanni Giolitti, convinced that he could manage the fascists and unable to see in their subversive and violent charge the death sentence of the liberal state he had served.
Mussolini il rivoluzionario (Mussolini the revolutionary)
R. De Felice, Einaudi. The first volume of the monumental biography of Mussolini had some peculiarities which would return several times in De Felice’s work. The tendency to amend the young Mussolini from his most conservative and negative notes, to leave wide gaps in the reading of some ambiguous episodes of the biographed (the transition from neutralism to interventionism to name one) and, above all, to accuse other actors (primarly the Socialist Party of 1914) of drifts that would have led the future Duce to play a role of a completely different nature. Although few realized it at the time, "Mussolini il rivoluzionario” (Mussolini the revolutionary) (1883-1920) was already a work tainted by deep revisionism, first of all for the attempt (unfounded) to attribute to the future Duce a positive project of modernization of the country and a progressive vision.
L’organizzazione dello stato totalitario (The organization of the totalitarian state)
A. Acquarone, Einaudi. Although it has not enjoyed the same public success as other volumes released in the same years, this monograph dedicated to the progressive construction of a state different from the liberal one is still fundamental today to understand the nature and developments of the fascist regime. Acquarone, who came from a legal background, was the first scholar to critically examine the ruptures imposed by the dictatorship in the constitutional architecture and in the administration management, questioning himself on the real totalitarian dimension of fascism. His conclusions would have been divergent from those of the next generation of historians, and not entirely correct (his view of fascism as a personal dictatorship and not a totalitarian state is highly criticized), but the contribution to the understanding of the new institutions remains decisive.
Storia delle origini del fascismo, vol. 1 (History of the origins of fascism)
A. Vivarelli, Istituto per gli studi storici Vivarelli would have dedicated his whole life to the reconstruction of the origins of fascism too. The first volume of a trilogy, which would be completed only shortly before his death in 2012, had several points in common with De Felice's contemporary work, first of all the depth of the archival excavation (the monograph was based on a systematic use of the sources kept at the Central State Archives in Rome). Moreover Vivarelli also saw (and would see even more in the two subsequent volumes released many years later), the genesis of fascism in the double fault of a mediocre and frightened liberal ruling class, unable to face a growth crisis in the country, and an arrogant and revolutionary socialist party.
Culture and politics
Government Tambroni
A single-party government, led by the Christian Democrat Fernando Tambroni, is born, supported by the votes of the Italian Social Movement, the neo-fascist party born in 1946 for direct inspiration from the experience of the Italian Social Republic. A wave of street protests broke out in the country, especially in Genova and Reggio Emilia, where the police fired on the crowd, killing 5 protesters (including some former partisans). In the same year, the military Prosecutor General Enrico Santacroce ordered the "provisional filing" of 695 case files containing investigative documents on killings and massacres committed by Nazis and Fascists during the period 1943-1945.
The film “March to Rome”
Dino Risi’s film "Marcia su Roma" is released in cinemas, starring Ugo Tognazzi and Vittorio Gassmann. This is the first comic and farcical reading of the rise to power of fascism through the story of two veterans, who reject the logic of violence at the last minute. Compared to the self-exclusive reading of fascism, based on the myth of the "Italian good people", Risi returns the parable of two disappointed fighters, two anti-heroes of the “squadrismo”, reversing the rhetoric of the march on Rome celebrated in the twenty years as revolution, the founding act of the seizure of regime power.
The “Republic born of the Resistance”
With his speech held on the twentieth anniversary of the Liberation, 9 of May 1965, the President of the Republic Giuseppe Saragat inaugurates a policy of memory focused on the exaltation of anti-fascism as a unified feature of national history and speaks of "Republic born of the Resistance", putting an end to that challenge of legitimacy of the partisan struggle that had marked the years of opposition between the DC and the left parties, during the centrist governments.
Massacre of Piazza Fontana
On 12th December in Milan, at the headquarters of the National Bank of Agriculture in Piazza Fontana, a bomb killed 16 people and injured 98. The massacre, linked to similar bomb attacks that occurred on the same day in Rome, is the first link in a long chain of neo-fascist terrorist attacks that will bloody Italy in the seventies. In the collective imagination Piazza Fontana marks the beginning of the "night of the Republic".