Karlo Uncle

Uncle Carlo is a member of Jacopo Belbo’s family and a crucial figure in Belbo’s recollection of the armed clashes at the family villa near the end of the war. In a moment when the young Belbo mistakes exposure for heroism, Uncle Carlo forcibly pulls him out of a corridor seconds before a bullet hits the spot where he stood. His decisive intervention saves Belbo from a danger he does not understand; later, the same crisis briefly suspends an old feud, as Uncle Carlo and Adeline Canepa join hands to protect the household.

The Villa and Its Wartime Setting

The family villa was a large farmhouse with cellars on the ground floor, once used by Adeline Canepa to make wine from the Covasso family vineyards. By the time Belbo and his companions visit, the house has long been unoccupied. The property had been sold years earlier to pay inheritance taxes and other debts; only Adeline’s centenarian aunt remained nearby, tending a small vegetable garden and keeping hens and a pig. Uncle Carlo is thus recalled through a landscape marked by the dispersal of the family’s land and the survival of an elderly neighbor amid the abandoned estate.

The villa’s past turns into a battlefield during the final spring of the war. Belbo describes an uneasy local arrangement: the partisans, mostly local boys, came down from the hills in spring while the Fascists, outsiders to the area, generally kept to the town. In winter, the partisans retreated to higher ground, where they knew the passes and shelters; the Fascists then controlled the exposed plain. As liberation approached, however, the Fascists hesitated to leave, while the partisans held back in anticipation of events in the city. A misunderstanding brought the two sides into confrontation. The resulting gunfire transformed the family house, its terrace, corridors, and cellar into places of immediate danger.

The Shooting and Uncle Carlo’s Intervention

The crisis begins with the family’s attempt to interpret armed men as children merely playing. Belbo recalls his sister coming inside to report men with guns; an earlier shot, fired in fun, had struck a tree by the driveway without her noticing. After she obediently returned indoors, the first volley sounded. Further shots followed in quick succession, and the noise escalated from shotguns and automatic rifles to what sounded like hand grenades and machine guns. The family could no longer hear itself speak and crouched beneath the sink: Belbo, his sister, and their mother.

Uncle Carlo came along the corridor on all fours and warned them that they were too exposed. He directed them toward his part of the house, where they could shelter. The family moved, and Aunt Caterina cried because their grandmother was outside. The recollection establishes Uncle Carlo’s protection not through a grand plan but through practical action under fire: he crawls into danger to reach the others, assesses their position, and gets them away from it.

Belbo’s later account isolates a second, more personal intervention. After reaching his uncle’s part of the house, he insisted on standing in the corridor, imagining himself upright like a captain in the middle of a battle. The window was at the far end of the upper floor, and he reasoned that nobody could hit him there. Uncle Carlo became angry and dragged him into the room. Belbo was on the verge of crying because the excitement had been stopped when three shots rang out, glass broke, and a bullet came through the window. It glanced off a water pipe and lodged in the floor exactly where Belbo had been standing. Belbo concedes only that he might have been wounded had he remained there; the near miss nevertheless makes plain how little separated his imagined performance of courage from fatal exposure.

A Truce in the Cellar

About an hour later, Adeline Canepa came upstairs and said that everyone would be safer in the cellar. Belbo notes that she and Uncle Carlo had not spoken for years. The old hostility had begun when Adeline, then the quarrelsome tenant, denounced Uncle Carlo to the partisans. During the shooting, however, she was once more treated as a person rather than simply as the agent of that betrayal, and Uncle Carlo shook her hand. The gesture is temporary rather than a permanent settlement: after the danger passes, the two men ceremoniously stop speaking to each other again.

The family spent roughly an hour in the darkness among the wine barrels, amid the smell of stored vintages and the sounds of fighting outside. As the gunfire faded, a voice from a window overlooking a path asked, in dialect, whether any supporters of the Italian Social Republic remained in the area. Belbo explains that the question meant the Fascists had left. His father and grandmother eventually returned, while his mother and aunt prepared food. Shooting continued at a distance toward the hills as the partisans pursued the fugitives, and the family understood that their side had won. The cellar therefore offers temporary refuge, not an escape from the conflict; it shelters the family through the changing sounds that announce the Fascists’ retreat.

Belbo’s Memory of Choice and Protection

The story acquires its force from the contrast between Belbo’s youthful wish to enact heroism and Uncle Carlo’s unshowy insistence on survival. Belbo imagines himself as a captain who can stand openly amid the battle, but his uncle’s judgment, not his own, removes him from the bullet’s path. Belbo’s adult narration points out that, even in this episode, he had not chosen: he had let his uncle pull him away. The thought turns a childhood rescue into a measure of the passivity that troubles Belbo’s retrospective account of himself. The near miss is a concrete alternative to the heroic decision he fantasizes about: in the moment that mattered, staying alive depended on accepting another person’s intervention.

Uncle Carlo’s role is also defined by the tension between long-standing division and action under pressure. His feud with Adeline is not erased, and their renewed silence after the battle restores the old distance. Yet during the emergency he accepts her help and shakes her hand, making a brief practical alliance possible where ordinary relations had hardened into estrangement. The scene leaves him neither a flawless hero nor a reconciled patriarch. It remembers him as the family member who reads danger accurately, pulls Belbo to safety, and helps the household endure the fighting, while allowing the old quarrel to return once survival no longer requires cooperation.