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The Black Brigades are the Fascist armed force in the wartime episodes recalled by Jacopo Belbo. In the town where he grew up, they occupied the plain while local partisans withdrew to the hills; as liberation approached, the arrangement collapsed into fighting. For Belbo, their black insignia and the partisans’ red made the conflict seem definite in a way that his later world of hidden plots and uncertain motives did not.

Position in the wartime conflict

Belbo describes a tacit, unstable division of territory between the Fascists and the partisans. The partisans were local and knew the surrounding fields, woods, hedgerows, passes, and shelters; in winter, snow and the exposed plain made it dangerous for them to remain there, so they retreated to higher ground. The Fascists, who were not from the area, stayed mainly in town and ventured out on raids. In spring, the partisans came down and occupied the town while the Fascists kept their distance, but this pattern depended on both sides avoiding a direct clash.

That uneasy arrangement persisted near the end of the war. The Fascists had not yet left for the city, where the decisive fighting was expected, while the partisans held back in anticipation of imminent events. Radio London transmitted coded messages to the Franchi brigade, and the two sides may have communicated; Belbo nevertheless recalls a misunderstanding that brought the partisans down before the Fascists had departed. Fighting followed. The episode establishes the Black Brigades as part of a local conflict shaped by geography and a temporary, informal accommodation—not simply by a continuous front line.

Fighting in the town

The conflict entered Belbo’s family’s immediate surroundings. His sister had previously seen armed men treating their weapons casually, and the family had not been alarmed. Once a bullet struck a tree near where she had been standing, the neighbors warned her to go indoors when she saw armed men. On a later occasion, she came inside as instructed; then the family heard successive volleys, followed by heavier gunfire. The remembered sequence turns an earlier appearance of safety into a sudden recognition that the fighting was real.

Belbo also recounts his father sheltering in a doorway while shooting crossed the street. A squad of the Black Brigades fired a machine gun from the town hall tower across the square. The Fascist former mayor, sheltering in the same doorway, tried to run home during a lull and was shot before reaching the corner. Belbo’s father, who had lived through the First World War, stayed in the doorway. The contrast between the mayor’s attempt to cross the street and his father’s decision to remain under cover gives the armed presence of the Black Brigades a concrete, immediate consequence for civilians caught in the town.

Belbo’s memory and the brigades’ significance

Years later, Belbo calls the memories of the town sweet, not because the fighting was harmless, but because he regards those years as a period of clarity. In his recollection, a bullet was unmistakably a bullet, the opposing sides could be distinguished by their colors, and death was not an ambiguous disappearance. The Black Brigades thus belong to a past that seems morally and politically legible beside the later uncertainty surrounding Colonel Ardenti and the supposed Plan.

The narrative complicates that clarity: Belbo had often been a spectator, watching other people make history rather than writing it himself. His nostalgia does not erase his distance from action; it helps explain why he remembers the Resistance years as a lost standard of truth even while questioning whether he ever had his own moment of choice. The Black Brigades matter both as a force in the remembered conflict and as one side of the stark opposition through which Belbo measures the ambiguity of his later life.