[This post gathers some preliminary ideas developed during the RHUL Research Training Programme in Interart/Intermedia methodologies]
When the Italians remember the Second World War the main events that come to their minds are usually those that occurred in Italy after the 8th of September 1943. During this period, which followed the fall of Mussolini’s regime, the country was invaded by both the Germans and the Allies, and it was torn apart by a Civil War between Fascist and Antifascist supporters. In the decades that followed the end of World War II the two-years period of the Italian Civil War acquired a stable centrality in the Italian memory culture and, despite – or perhaps due to – the lively controversies it generated, it became the centre of the Italian collective memory of the Second World War.
By contrast the legacy of the Axis War, which Italy fought as a Fascist country prior to September 1943, constitutes a completely different scenario. This war has not been the object of stable public commemorations and it has occupied an extremely marginal role in the Italian memory culture. In spite of their marginal importance, memory narratives on the Axis War circulated across Italian society, mainly as a result of cultural products, such as memoirs, novels, short stories, and films, which conveyed to the Italian public representations of this part of the national past.
The cultural production on the Axis War is extremely interesting from an intermedial perspective. Indeed this body of cultural products has been characterised by numerous transmedial phenomena, presenting a series of motif, themes, topoi, and recurrent representations that were not specific of an individual medium, but that reverberated and re-appeared through a variety of cultural artefacts.
Italiani brava gente, dir. by Giuseppe De Santis (Titanus: 1964)
One of the most renowned of these recurrent elements relates to what is usually called the myth of ‘Italiani brava gente’. According to this stereotypical representation, during the Axis War the Italians constituted an army of innocuous and unwarlike soldiers that did not exceed in brutalities and always maintained a humane behaviour towards the local population of the territories it occupied.Â
This unfounded representation, which has been largely disproved by recent historiographical enquiries, had a widespread circulation in postwar Italian culture. For instance in best-seller books, such as Mario Rigoni Stern’s Il sergente nella neve (1953) and Giulio Bedeschi’s Mille gavette di ghiaccio (1963), the Italians are never portrayed as perpetrators of wrongdoings. Similarly, in successful books such as Renzo Biasion’s Sagapò (1953), Gian Carlo Fusco’s Le rose del ventennio (1958), and Marcello Venturi’s Bandiera bianca a Cefalonia (1963)
the Italians are presented as non-committed soldiers, who disregarded their military duties, while establishing good relationships with the occupied populations, especially with women.Â
Le rose del deserto, dir. by Mario Monicelli (Mikado Film: 2006)
Through the decades this overbearing depiction transmigrated from the pages of these books to the screens of the cinemas, reaching an even broader audience. Films such as Italiani brava gente (1964) directed by Giuseppe De Santis, Mediterraneo by Gabriele Salvadores (1991), and Le rose del deserto by Mario Monicelli (2002) adapted scenes of the Axis War literature and re-proposed to the public the alleged myth of the goodness of the Italians. In these films the Italians are presented as innocuous, often grotesque soldiers, who are never affected by the spirit of violence that characterises warfare.
Through a repeated use of these stereotypical representations, remediated by numerous media, Italian cultural production strengthened the alleged belief of the good-hearted nature of the Italians and, by doing so, conveyed a series of self-absolving representations of Italy’s participation in World War II.
Feature image: Mediterraneo, dir. by Gabriele Salvatores (Penta Film: 1991)
Further Reading:
Angelo Del Boca, Italiani brava gente? Un mito duro a morire (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2005)
Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
Filippo Focardi, Il cattivo tedesco e il bravo italiano: la rimozione delle colpe della seconda guerra mondiale (Rome; Bari: Laterza, 2013)
