Salò Republic

The Salò Republic period, as recalled by Jacopo Belbo, is a turning point in the unsettled years between Fascism and postwar democracy. The area around his uncle’s home passed under the Fascist Social Republic after Italy’s armistice, while partisans organized in the surrounding mountains. Belbo’s account links this change of regime to his uncle’s accommodation with successive governments and to the childhood memories that later gave him a rare sense of historical clarity.

Political transition and local setting

Belbo places his story between 1943 and 1945, when Italy moved from Fascism toward democracy and then experienced the Social Republic, with partisan fighting underway in the mountains. He was eleven and staying at his uncle Carlo’s house after air raids in the city led his mother to evacuate the family. In this recollection, national upheaval arrives inside a domestic and rural setting: a household, a tax office, and a town whose political control changes around its inhabitants.

The transition is especially visible in Carlo’s work for the state. After Mussolini was removed, Carlo continued running the tax office for the Badoglio government. When the area fell under the Social Republic after September 8, he adjusted again and collected taxes for that regime. Belbo does not claim to know whether his uncle privately suffered over the political changes; what he remembers is a man who remained a servant of the state as authority shifted.

Partisan war and the changed balance of power

The Social Republic period unfolded alongside the growth of partisan groups in the mountains. Adeline Canepa, the tenant farmer who worked Carlo’s land, spoke of contacts with the partisans and promised that vengeance would come. The children, Belbo recalls, knew stories about the partisans before they had seen them. One reported leader, known as Mongo, was a former Carabinieri sergeant major who had lost a leg in early fighting against the Fascists and the SS and commanded brigades in the hills around the town.

The conflict became immediate when partisans descended into town. They were not yet in uniform, wore blue kerchiefs, and fired into the air to announce their presence. Residents shut themselves inside their homes. Although Carlo’s household had reason to think that Canepa’s connection to the partisans might protect him, a squad with automatic rifles entered the tax office and arrested him. The capture makes the change of power concrete: Carlo’s official position had persisted across regimes, but it did not shield him once armed authority arrived in the town.

Belbo’s memory of the period

Years later, Belbo describes these wartime memories as unusually sweet and real. In the narrator’s retrospective understanding, the period seemed to offer distinctions absent from the later world of the Diabolicals and its shifting stories: a bullet was simply a bullet, and the opposing sides appeared marked by red or black. That remembered clarity is not presented as an uncomplicated account of the war; Belbo had also been a spectator, watching other people’s memories and the making of history rather than writing it himself.

The march against fascist conspiracies in Milan brings that remembered past into contrast with the narrator’s own later experience. The demonstration operated within tacit territorial boundaries between protesters and fascists, and the narrator stood among the spectators rather than joining a group. He later questioned whether this absence came from prudence, his generation’s distance from the conflict, or cowardice. Against that uncertainty, Belbo’s childhood recollection of political sides and immediate stakes acquired the force of a lost standard of clarity.

Historical memory and the novel’s frame

The period returns through narration at different distances. Belbo first tells parts of his childhood story over drinks; later, the narrator reconstructs it from Belbo’s text, noting its gaps, overlaps, and crossed-out lines. The personal memory is thus both an account of wartime experience and a document mediated by recollection and reconstruction.

That distinction matters because the novel places the remembered partisan struggle beside the group’s later habit of turning history into a single hidden design. The narrator even considers whether the encounter between Carlo and Mongo could be called synarchic because men on opposing sides might share an ideal of chivalry, but recognizes that this interpretation could deprive Belbo of the memory’s private value. The Social Republic years remain important not as proof of a grand pattern, but as the historical setting for Belbo’s attachment to a time when, in his memory, conflict seemed more direct and truth less entangled with invention.