Italian Resistance

The Italian Resistance enters the novel not as a distant historical backdrop but as Jacopo Belbo’s remembered childhood: a world in which armed factions occupied the same landscape, a bullet could settle an argument, and survival might depend on an instinctive gesture rather than a theory. Recounted years later to Casaubon and others, these memories become Belbo’s measure of a lost clarity—and an uneasy account of how he watched history unfold without feeling that he had truly chosen his place in it.

Occupation and a Divided Landscape

Belbo places his childhood story between 1943 and 1945, during the transition from Fascism through the Italian Social Republic and toward democracy. At eleven, he had been evacuated from the city as air raids increased and was staying with his uncle Carlo and aunt Caterina in the countryside. The family’s rural home stood within a tense social order: Carlo owned land cultivated by the tenant farmer Adelino Canepa, who provided half the produce to the owner. Each side regarded the arrangement as exploitative, though the two households lived beside one another. War would turn that quiet proximity into a test of loyalties.

After Mussolini’s fall, Carlo continued to serve the state, first collecting taxes for the Badoglio government and then, after September 8, for the Italian Social Republic, which controlled the area. Canepa, meanwhile, boasted of his links to the partisan groups forming in the mountains and promised vengeance against the Fascists. The local children had heard stories about the partisans but had not yet seen them. Among the figures in those stories was Mongo, a former Carabinieri sergeant major who had lost a leg fighting the Fascists and the SS and now commanded the Badoglian brigades in the surrounding hills.

The opposing forces were separated not only by politics but by terrain and local knowledge. The partisans were largely local men who knew the cornfields, woods, hedgerows, mountain passes, caves, and shelters. They came down into the town in spring, while winter drove them to higher ground, where snow made movement across the plain dangerously visible. The Fascists, mostly outsiders, tended to remain in town and venture out on raids. Belbo remembers a tacit pattern of seasonal occupation and restraint: the partisans descended, the Fascists kept their distance, and the arrangement could hold until a misunderstanding or the approach of liberation disturbed it.

Carlo Covasso and Mongo

The first partisan visit to town shattered the family’s assumption that Carlo would be left alone. The men arrived without uniforms, wearing blue kerchiefs and firing into the air. Around eleven, a squad with automatic rifles entered the tax office, arrested Carlo, and carried him away. Aunt Caterina feared that he would be killed; because he had a metal plate in his head, she imagined that a blow from a rifle butt would be fatal. Canepa came to the house with his family, distraught at the accusation that his talk had brought the partisans down on Carlo. Caterina sent him away, and the household waited in terror.

Carlo returned about two hours later on a bicycle, steering with one arm and appearing almost casual. Belbo later explained that Mongo’s men had taken him outside town because they regarded him as a local representative of the regime. Before the commander, Carlo snapped to attention and introduced himself as Major Carlo Covasso, of the Alpine Division, a disabled veteran and holder of a silver medal. Mongo, holding a gun in one hand and a crutch in the other, answered with his own military identity: Sergeant Major Rebaudengo, Royal Carabineers, commander of the Badoglian brigade Bettino Ricasoli, and a bronze-medal recipient.

Their recognition of shared battlefields changed the encounter. Carlo named hill 328 at Sasso di Stria; Mongo had fought at hill 327. They exchanged memories of combat, and the disabled men—one missing an arm, the other a leg—stepped forward and embraced. Mongo explained that Carlo had been arrested because he collected taxes for the Fascist government allied with the invaders. Carlo replied that he had a family, drew a salary from whatever government was in power, and had not chosen that government. Mongo accepted the explanation, asking him to collect taxes slowly and take his time. He ordered his men to give Carlo a bicycle, and Carlo went home. The two men’s common language of military service and country briefly crossed their opposing political positions; Canepa, by contrast, stayed away for months afterward.

The Battle in Town and Belbo’s Moment of Action

As the Resistance approached its final victory, the uneasy local balance collapsed. Belbo recalled that the Fascists remained in town even as liberation drew near, while the partisans held back, expecting the decisive blow to come elsewhere. Messages broadcast by Radio London for the Franchi brigade grew more frequent. Then, perhaps because of a misunderstanding, the partisans came down from the hills before the Fascists had withdrawn. His sister first saw two armed men apparently playing tag; a bullet struck a tree beside her, and she was told to go indoors if she saw such play again. When she came inside to report that the men were at it once more, the first volley sounded. Gunfire multiplied until the family could no longer hear one another speak. Belbo, his sister, and their mother crouched under the sink; Carlo crawled along the corridor and led them to the safer wing of the house, while Caterina cried because their grandmother was outside.

The fighting also trapped Belbo’s father in town. He had taken shelter in a doorway, where a former Fascist mayor was waiting too. When the mayor judged that a lull offered a chance to reach home, he ran for the corner and was killed by fire from a Black Brigade machine gun in the town hall tower. Belbo’s father, a First World War veteran, stayed in the doorway. The episode sets survival against the temptation to mistake a brief silence for safety: the mayor acted and died, while Belbo’s father’s instinct was to remain under cover.

Belbo later described one deed as the single heroic act of his life, but the scene qualifies that claim. During the battle he had been pulled away by his uncle rather than choosing his own course. About an hour later, Canepa came upstairs and urged the family to take refuge in the cellar. He and Carlo had not spoken for years, yet in the danger Canepa was again treated as a human being, and Carlo shook his hand. The family spent an hour among wine barrels as gunfire continued overhead. When the shots subsided, a partisan asked from outside whether any supporters of the Italian Social Republic remained in the area. The question told them that the Fascists had gone. Belbo’s father and grandmother eventually returned; the family prepared food, Carlo and Canepa resumed their silence, and distant gunfire marked the pursuit of the fugitives into the hills. The household understood that the partisans had won.

Belbo’s description of this victory is deliberately mixed. For a moment, he says, he entered the action as if stepping into a film, exposed to ricocheting bullets; then he was running again, like an unexpected figure who appears in one story and gallops out into another. He knew that he had won, but with help from the Fascists, and the experience still felt like watching a movie. The distinction between witnessing and acting would trouble his later recollections: the battle gave him a scene of danger and decision, yet not an uncomplicated story of personal courage.

Memory, Clarity, and Belbo’s Shame

The battle remained vivid not because it gave Belbo an uncomplicated heroic identity, but because, in retrospect, it seemed to belong to a time when the world was legible. Years later, as he and Casaubon worked in the same house, Belbo’s attention kept returning to the hall and to the fighting that had taken place nearby. He called those memories sweet, though they included gunfire, a corpse in the square, and the fear of losing his family. Their sweetness lay in the apparent plainness of the stakes: a bullet was a bullet, and the opposing sides were marked in red or black. Against the evasions and shifting appearances of the Diabolicals, the war seemed to offer a truth that could be seen and survived without interpretation.

Casaubon gradually understands that this clarity is also a construction of memory. Belbo had spent years covering disillusion with fiction, and now, while navigating the Diabolicals’ falsehoods, he looked back to the countryside as a lost measure of reality. Yet even in those remembered days, he had often been a spectator, watching other people make history and acquire memories that he would not write as his own. His account of the battle preserves that contradiction: he remembers entering the action, but also remembers being pulled away by Carlo; he claims a heroic deed, yet admits that the victory felt like watching a film. The distance between a scene witnessed and a choice made becomes part of what the memory means.

That distinction also shapes Belbo’s later thoughts about political courage. At a march against fascist conspiracies in Milan, he went to show solidarity but stood among reporters, editors, and artists at the edge of the gathering instead of marching with a group. He compared the arrangement to a lion and its tamer: each side kept to its allotted space, and only an advance across the boundary produced a roar. The demonstration seemed to him a regulated confrontation, a simulated revolution with rules. His recollection turns the march into another test of whether he had acted—or merely watched.

Belbo asks himself whether he stayed away because the conflict was not his, or because he once again ran from a chance to choose. He had been born too late for the great opportunities of an earlier generation, he reflects, but could have taken a risk anyway, perhaps to prove to himself that he would have chosen rightly under different circumstances. He distrusts that retrospective test: an opportunity contrived to demonstrate courage is not the true opportunity. Wisdom, he concludes, can itself make cowards, leaving a person perpetually alert for the decisive moment and therefore liable to miss it. His wartime memories do not resolve the question of his courage; they explain why the question persists.

From War Memory to Historical Myth

Belbo’s recollections also show how a remembered place could be recruited into a larger historical construction. Years after the war, Casaubon visited Tomar and descended into a crypt beneath the castle, passing seven rose-shaped keystones toward a well. A guide said occult students made pilgrimages there and that the chamber was believed to have served for initiation. Casaubon connected the physical castle with the first meeting place in the supposed Provins message: Tomar, he reasoned, was a credible refuge for Templar survivors and a site where they could meet agents of another group. The landscape of remembered wartime loyalties thus stood beside a very different use of the past, in which historical locations became evidence for a secret continuity.

Casaubon recognized that the supposed secret was not simply waiting to be uncovered: it had to be constructed. That distinction throws Belbo’s war memories into relief. In the countryside, he had experienced political divisions as immediate and material—uniforms, weapons, shelter, and the danger of crossing a street. Later, amid the Diabolicals’ fabrications and Casaubon’s pattern-making, those memories acquired the force of a lost standard of truth. The novel does not make them immune to interpretation; instead, it sets the remembered clarity of the Resistance against the temptation to turn every historical place and coincidence into proof of a comprehensive Plan.