Giovinezza

“Giovinezza” is the Fascist song Don Tico’s parish band was ordered to play at gunpoint. Its disastrous performance leaves the song not as a straightforward emblem of political allegiance but as a remembered test of coerced compliance, artistic dignity, and Jacopo Belbo’s sense of missed courage.

The forced performance

Months before the partisans arrived, Don Tico’s band was playing at a saint’s feast when the Black Brigades stopped them. Their captain demanded the song while drumming his fingers on a submachine-gun barrel. Don Tico accepted that refusal could cost lives: he told the musicians to try, since each person had only one skin, and beat time with his pitch pipe.

The band produced a clattering cacophony. The narration’s bitter irony is that only someone desperate to save his skin could call what they played “Giovinezza.” The episode makes the song’s public meaning inseparable from the threat that compelled its performance.

Shame and artistic pride

Don Tico later acknowledged the shame of having consented, but placed an even greater shame on the band’s playing. He was a priest and an anti-Fascist; above all, he insisted on his identity as an artist. The failure was therefore more than a political compromise: it wounded the musicians’ pride in their craft.

When two men from San Davide were later killed and the partisans arranged a solemn funeral, Don Tico immediately agreed to have his band take part. The village’s sharp tongues suggested this was also an attempt to make amends for “Giovinezza.” The song thus returned as an unspoken measure against which a later public act of mourning could be judged.

Belbo’s missed opportunity

Belbo had not been present when the band was ordered to play; he was absent with tonsillitis. The bombardon section instead included Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo. Belbo’s absence mattered to him not because his presence would have changed the course of events, but because he had lost the chance to discover whether he would have dared to refuse.

In his later writing, that unresolved question becomes part of his guilt over opportunities for courage he did not take. The narration connects it, perhaps, to his eventual death on the gallows of the Pendulum: the coerced song is an early, ordinary test of resistance that Belbo never had to face, and whose absence he could not stop revisiting.