Fabrizio Collini’s sister’s death and the destruction of the family farm

The destruction of Fabrizio Collini’s family farm and the death of his sister turn the German seizure of his father into a devastating personal catastrophe. In the sequence of events, a child’s ordinary return home becomes a flight from violence, and the family farmhouse—once the center of familiar routines—is ultimately reported burned down. The episode is recalled through Fabrizio’s childhood perspective, where incomplete understanding and sharply remembered objects shape what he can bear witness to.

Background and the Father’s Disappearance

Fabrizio knows there is a war, though its earlier losses are distant to him: his father’s two brothers had died in the Italian campaign against Greece three years before, and Fabrizio hardly remembers them. What remains is his father’s grief and the repeated word for madness, which the child understands as something terrible without grasping its full meaning. As German troops spread through the area, adult conversations about requisitioned factory goods, partisans, and assassination attempts reach the children in fragments. Their games change from cops and robbers to partisans and Germans, turning the conflict into play before its consequences enter their home.

At night, Fabrizio sometimes watches his father put on a grey coat and beret, kiss his children, and leave the farm. His sister tells him that their father is a partisan, while their mother, who died when Fabrizio was born, is already absent from the family. When Fabrizio arrives home on the day of the attack, his sister is waiting in the doorway in her black church dress, crying. She tells him that German soldiers have taken their father. He cries with her; his questions find no answer, and she cannot yet talk about what has happened.

The Return to the Farmhouse

After they go inside, his sister mechanically prepares eggs and bread. Fabrizio eats; she leaves her own food untouched. She proposes that they go to Uncle Mauro, their mother’s elder brother and their only living relation, whose farm lies almost ten kilometres away. Before they can leave, she sees the German military vehicle returning. Its details—the folded-down windscreen and spare tyres on the bonnet—mark the threat as immediate and concrete. A single soldier is at the wheel, and fear in his sister’s voice sends Fabrizio running.

He hides in the large dog kennel, empty for years, curled beneath a dirty, scratchy blanket. Through a gap in the boards he watches the jeep’s tyres and a pair of boots pause before moving toward the house. When he hears his sister scream, hiding becomes impossible: he crawls out and runs back to the kitchen. He finds the soldier with his sister and a pistol aimed at her. The child’s return exposes him to a scene he cannot understand as a whole, but its danger is unmistakable.

The Gunshot and Fabrizio’s Flight

Fabrizio screams. In the sudden movement that follows, the sights of the pistol catch on the chain around his sister’s neck. As the soldier snatches at the weapon, it fires; the shot kills her. The sequence is abrupt and contingent: the caught chain holds the gun in place, and the struggle over it ends in a death Fabrizio has neither anticipated nor the means to prevent. His scream, meant only as an involuntary response, coincides with the instant everything changes.

The account fixes the moment not only through violence but through objects that belong to ordinary family life. His sister’s enamel locket bears the Virgin Mary, a gift from their mother. On the kitchen shelves stands their father’s brown tobacco tin, familiar from evenings when he rolled two cigarettes after supper and talked with the children. Fabrizio notices its lacquered lid and the two figures seated peacefully by a campfire. That image of an unchanged, peaceful scene stands beside the catastrophe in the kitchen; when he sees it, he stops screaming and looks at the soldier. The tobacco tin does not explain what has happened, but its everyday permanence gives the child’s attention somewhere to settle amid what he cannot comprehend.

Escape and the News of the Losses

When the soldier moves, Fabrizio manages to move too. He runs across the farmyard, slips on the wet paving stones, and hurts his right knee. Even in flight, his thoughts attach to the ordinary rule he has broken: his father will be angry because his Sunday trousers are torn. He runs past the kennel and pond, through the pine forest, over a narrow bridge, and along a woodland path toward the open plain. His route leads to Uncle Mauro’s very different farmhouse, a long building on a rise approached by an avenue of pine trees.

Fabrizio reaches the house breathless and struggles to explain what has happened. Uncle Mauro takes a shotgun from a cupboard and drives back toward the farm with two labourers. The account does not describe what he finds there. It resumes after night has fallen: Uncle Mauro sits on the steps in the cold, and Fabrizio joins him. His uncle opens his large woollen coat so the boy can sit beside him, then puts an arm around him. Fabrizio sees wet tracks on his uncle’s soot-blackened face and hands. Only then does Uncle Mauro tell him that the farm has burned down and his sister is dead. Fabrizio asks whether she was burned too; his uncle confirms it.

Significance

The episode links the loss of Fabrizio’s father to the death of his sister and the destruction of the place that had held his family’s life together. Its telling stays close to the child’s partial perception: the return of the jeep, the gap in the kennel boards, the tobacco tin, the torn Sunday trousers, and the uncle’s soot-marked face register what explanation cannot. The movement from a familiar farm routine to flight and then to the uncle’s brief, devastating report gives the event its shape. Fabrizio reaches safety, but the home and sister to which he might have returned are gone.