Italian Social Republic

The Italian Social Republic enters Jacopo Belbo’s account of his childhood as the regime that takes control of the area after Italy’s armistice of September 8, 1943. It does not appear as an abstract political system alone: its authority is encountered through Uncle Carlo Covasso’s work collecting taxes, the partisans’ decision to arrest him, and the uneasy accommodations ordinary people make as power changes hands.

Background and establishment

Belbo dates the story to 1943–45, when he was eleven and living with his family in the countryside after air raids prompted his mother to evacuate from the city. The period moves from Fascism toward democracy and then into the rule of the Italian Social Republic, with partisan warfare underway in the mountains. The regime’s arrival is marked not by a single announcement but by a transfer of practical control: after September 8, the area where the family lives falls under its authority.

The same administrative machinery persists across these political changes. Uncle Carlo, a public official who had collected taxes for the Badoglio government after Mussolini’s removal, adjusts once the Italian Social Republic controls the area and continues collecting taxes for the new authorities. Belbo does not say whether Carlo privately welcomed or regretted the change; he recalls instead that his uncle said nothing about his feelings and carried on with his state service.

Local administration and partisan opposition

Carlo’s work makes him a visible local representative of the regime, even though his account of his conduct is that he has a family, receives a government salary, and has not chosen which government holds power. The danger of that position becomes immediate when partisan forces descend from the hills into town. People lock themselves indoors, uncertain what the armed arrivals will do; Carlo is arrested at the tax office and taken away.

The partisans’ commander, Mongo, explains that they regard Carlo as a local representative of the regime and have arrested him to make an example for the town. The confrontation changes when the two men recognize a shared military past. Carlo identifies himself by rank and service as a disabled veteran; Mongo, also a former serviceman and wounded commander, responds with his own rank and unit. Their recognition of a battle they both remember cuts across the political division between the regime and its opponents.

Carlo explains that he has continued to serve the government because he has a family and needs a salary, while also telling Mongo that the partisans, too, are sons of Italy and valiant fighters. Mongo accepts the explanation and orders his men to give Carlo a bicycle so he can return home. The episode does not make the regime and the partisan movement equivalent: it shows how personal loyalty and shared military experience can interrupt an arrest grounded in political authority. Afterward, the tenant farmer Adelino Canepa, who had boasted of connections with the partisans and promised vengeance against the landowners, stays away for several months.

Belbo’s memory and historical meaning

The Italian Social Republic’s brief appearance in the novel is inseparable from Belbo’s later understanding of the countryside years as a time when political sides seemed clear. He remembers a world in which a bullet meant a bullet and opposing groups could be distinguished by color, unlike the uncertain, fabricated connections that later engulf him in the supposed plots surrounding the Templars. Yet his own story complicates that remembered clarity: Carlo serves successive governments, while Mongo’s decision is shaped by an encounter that reaches beyond faction.

Belbo’s recollection therefore sets political history beside a small, specific act of judgment. His uncle’s position under the Italian Social Republic is neither presented as principled resistance nor as enthusiastic allegiance; it is explained through work, family responsibility, and adaptation. The partisan commander’s choice to release him reveals that the boundaries between opposing sides could be crossed through shared experience, even in a conflict structured by competing authorities.