Emplacing the Italian Resistance : the dystopian fight against Fascism and Nazism (1943-1945)

For almost seventy years, the anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi Resistance in Europe have been framed as the event engendering and legitimising the rise and flourish of European democracies after the chilling Nazi parenthesis (Cappelletto 2005). Resistance was the key, as it were, to understanding the opposition and rejection by people across frontiers of the occupation and oppression of a destructive, inhumane and blood-thirsty regime. In Italy, the Resistance (or ‘Liberation War’ as the non-academic press tends to call the phenomenon) served as the inevitable event or process that gave rise to the Constitution and, consequently, to the democratic Republic (Di Scala 1999: 67; Cooke 2011). Most importantly, the Resistance made away with unpalatable Fascism, consistently remembered as a deeply embarrassing legacy for Italy, a modern nation striving to move forward after the War. Above and beyond social-cultural and political interpretations of what the Resistance was, this chapter reasserts the spatial and the sensual in the conflict unravelling in central and northern Italy between September 1943 and May 1945. It conceptualizes the meaningful connections between persons, places and events in the context of the civil war and Resistance movement. Memories and storytelling of the eventful ‘twenty months’ of the Resistance permeate virtually every city and town in northern and central Italy, and are promoted and conveyed by and through the work of dedicated associations - gatekeepers or custodians of memory - through publications and education. This is why it is crucial to understand how people moved, felt and perceived the places of their resistance. The challenge, which prompted the writing of the present chapter, was to ponder on these embodied events, map them out, bring them to life, and discover how they settle into our own personal worlds as feelings and affects.