'No-one had asked me about that before' : a focus on the body and 'other' resistance experiences in Italian World War Two storytelling

In recent years, an increasing body of research has effectively problematised public historical and cultural narratives of European Second World War anti-Nazi and anti-fascist resistance movements; nevertheless, traditional approaches fail to address the embodied experience of living a day-to-day resistance against Nazi and fascist forces, and marginalise the human, contradictory and experiential elements of the struggle. This article focuses on some issues and challenges associated with the engagement with memories of Second World War Italian Resistance veterans. Drawing upon oral history interviews with twenty-eight veterans, the complexity of the dynamics between person, emotion and place comes to the fore.