LIFE: Now That I Think About It

CHIAVARI, Italy – Before I moved back to the Italian Riviera last January, I lived in a small town about 20 minutes from Milan, called Saronno. I lived there for about 12 years. In the beginning I worked as editor of an English language magazine and then, since Milan is all about fashion, I moved on to Women’s Wear Daily, a somewhat influential newspaper dedicated to the fashion industry. 

 Sforza Castle, Milan, Italy

After 12 years in Saronno I figured I knew the town pretty well, but it wasn’t until someone asked me where they could buy postcards of Saronno did I realize that there are no postcards of Saronno. There aren’t any stickers that say I heart Saronno, or Go Saronno soccer banners either. And as far as I know absolutely nothing ever happened there that anyone would want to know about. I also realized that was what I liked the most about the place.

Saronno is an old, unpretentious market town that has been around since the days of the Romans. If the name rings a bell, it’s probably because of Amaretto di Saronno liqueur and Lazzaroni cookies, which both come from there, or rather came from there. Seems to me the production plants have moved south, but I may be wrong about that.

What I’m not wrong about though is that absolutely nothing of any importance ever happened in Saronno, no one famous was ever born there or even visited there, not even Cecilia Gallerani and she was the Countess of Saronno.

 Cecilia Gallerani

“Who?” said my neighbor. “There was a Countess of Saronno?”

“You would know who she is if you saw a picture of The Lady with Ermine," said her husband who claims to know about these things. "That is what Leonardo daVinci named the portrait he painted of her in 1490,” he says. “The portrait, and the town of Saronno was a gift to Cecilia from her lover, the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza. He is the one who lived in the big brick castle in the center of Milan and the one who started building the Duomo di Milano, Milan’s massive cathedral. Technically the Duke gave Saronno to Caesar, the son he had with Cecilia in 1491,” he continues, “but of course Cecilia had control of it as Caesar was a newborn baby. That all happened the same year the Duke married Beatrice d’Este.”

“The Duke and Cecilia had a baby and then he married another woman a few months later?” I ask.

“Yep,” says my neighbor. “He had arranged it with Beatrice’s father when she was born and by the time they got married the Duke was 39 and I think Beatrice had just turned 16.”

 And what about Cecilia?” I ask, “She couldn’t have been too happy about that, having just given birth to his baby. What happened to her?”

“Nothing,” says my neighbor. “The Duke eventually married her off to his best friend and moved them into a palazzo just outside of Milan. The Duke and Cecilia continued to see each other even after they were both married to other people, but then he got involved with another woman, Lucrezia Crivelli, and that was that.”

“His poor wife,” I say. “Poor Cecilia too. So what year was that?”

Ludovico Sfoza, Duke of Milan

“Around 1492,” he says. “A few years later the Duke was defeated by the French and for the next couple of years Saronno and Milan, and the rest of his Dukedom was under French control. But then the Duke formed an alliance with the Pope, and with the help of the Pope’s army and Swiss, German and Spanish mercenaries he was able to recapture his Dukedom. Then the bubonic plague hit.”

“Didn’t anything nice ever happen here?” I ask.

“Not that I know of,” he says.

“Well, how about important people. Are there any important people here?“

“Actually, most of the old people you see in Saronno now weren’t born here, they came from Milan during World War II, like me. It was the summer of 1942, the year I was supposed to start school that the British began bombing Italy. By the autumn of that year, they had dropped more than 1,600 tons of explosives on northern Italy. Our neighborhood in Milan was in shambles. I remember my mother clutching her food coupons and standing in long lines, stepping over piles of rubble from the buildings that had been bombed. That’s how we lived, barely lived to tell you the truth. My brothers and I went to bed hungry more often than not. And it was scary. Sometimes during the night the air raid sirens would go off and my mother would pull us out of bed and rush down us into the basement of our building.  Everyone would be down there and we would huddle around a short-wave radio listening to Radio London and the Voice of America, praying for the news that the Americans had landed. When that finally happened, we moved out here to Saronno because my mother knew they would be fighting in the streets of Milan, and she was right.”

After that conversation I began looking at my neighbors a little differently. I even started to feel more kindly toward Father Franco and his cackling chickens and feeling a little guilty about reporting him to the Mayor’s office for harboring a public nuisance. I had nothing against Father Franco but those damn chickens, and especially the rooster who woke me up every morning at 4 AM, had to go. Then I realized that I hadn’t heard them for a couple of days.  

I asked my neighbor if he thought my letter had provoked the eviction of the entire chicken population over at Father Franco’s, even though all I had asked for was that they get rid of the rooster.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It wasn’t you. There’s a town ordinance that doesn’t allow farm animals to be kept in residential areas. It just takes a while for things to happen here.”

Maybe it’s just as well. It sounds to me like enough has happened there already.

LIFE: Veteran's Day Italian Style

CHIAVARI, ITALY - This story begins a thousand miles away from where it actually happened. It begins on July 10, 1943 when the Allied forces landed in German occupied Sicily. Within a month of the landing the German and Fascist had been driven from the island and the liberation of Italy had begun. 

American War Cemetery Near Florence, Italy

The Allies then moved on to the mainland. As they made their way up the boot, the Germans battled them every inch of the way. It was soon clear that routing the Germans out of Italy was going to be more difficult than the Americans had imagined. The terrain was rough and the troops were not prepared for Italy’s endless chain of mountains and valleys. Communication routes were primitive to say the least, and whole army corps were often left isolated in remote mountain passes for long periods of time.

The Germans had the advantage. They were dug into carefully prepared defense line positioned on elevated areas, and could track the Allies every move. The Allies did their best to move armored vehicles and motorized troops along the valley floors, but late summer storms often brought violent rain and flash flooding. The primitive roads became muddy traps and the Americans were often reduced to using mules to move supplies and equipment.  

The Americans Had Arrived

But free Italy they did, and more than 320 thousand Allied soldiers, 114 thousand Americans, died in the process. I doubt there is a town in Italy that does not have a monument to those lost in that war. You see them everywhere: monuments to Italian partisans, to Italians massacred by the Germans, monuments to those who died during the horrific bombings and monuments to Italian soldiers and sailors. You find them in piazzas and parks throughout Italy, standing for all to see.

But there are other reminders of that war, much more public tributes to the Americans, the Allies and the partisans who did what some thought could not be done. April 25 is Italy’s official liberation day, and I’ve never been in a town in Italy that didn’t have a street called 25 Aprile. But in some of the smaller towns the liberation was a little more personal.

 Marching into Cornuda, Italy

There are so many war stories that can be told, personal accounts of senseless massacres, endless bombings, the destruction of entire towns which left piles of rubble where houses once stood, where children once played, where life was lived. It’s easy for those who visit Italy to gloss over the statistics, walk past the monuments, not give a second thought as to why a street would be named with a date. And those are the reasons why the story of the “Battle for Cornuda”, a battle that took place in that small town of 7,000 people in northern Italy, is worth re-telling on the day  America celebrates its veterans. 

        

The “Battle for Cornuda” has been called one of the most violent battles of the war. It began just before midnight on 30 April, 1945 when under the cover of night, a company of German scouts advanced up to the center of town. Then an entire battalion of Germans, around 600 soldiers, began to enter the town from the south.  

 The Streets of Cornuda Were Strewn with Dead Bodies

At first the Americans didn't understand what was happening. When the horse drawn wagons arrived in Cornuda’s main piazza, ostensibly to water the horses, it took them a minute or two to realize what was going on. Those wagons certainly didn’t belong to the Americans, the American’s didn't use horses. They didn’t wear spiked boots either, and there was the unmistakable clicking of spikes echoing loud in the nighttime silence. And then they understood. The Germans had arrived and they were ready to fight.

Their reaction was rapid. All the American units quartered in the buildings of Cornuda and along the roads were alerted and ordered to open fire against the German battalion. To their surprise, the Americans were met by hundreds of German soldiers who had been hiding in town, right under their noses, and bitter hand to hand fighting broke out in the streets. The German attack was fierce enough for them to reach the American battalion's command post.

Just Before the Battle for Cornuda

The German soldiers stormed the town launching grenades (called “potato mashers”) through the windows of buildings and using bazookas against the ground floors. But the Americans were also going all out for this was not a fight they wanted to lose. After a few hours of battle the Germans realized they couldn’t sustain their positions, not with the kind of determination and fire power coming from the Americans, so they surrendered.

Cornuda was liberated. The townspeople were now free to rebuild their town ad their lives, and plan their new future. One of the first things they did was to change the name of Via Littorio, one of the streets that had experienced the heaviest fighting, to Via 30 Aprile 1945 in honor of the bloody battle of Cornuda and those who died there, Italians and Americans.

 Via 30 Aprile, 1945, Cornuda, Italy

So on this Veteran’s Day as thousands of Americans celebrate our country’s veterans past and present, know that here in Italy American veterans are being celebrated as well. Wreathes are laid on every war monument in Italy on Italy’s Day of the Dead, November 2. But those veterans are also celebrated every time the Italians walk down the streets of their towns and think about the terrible things that happened on those streets. They never forget for streets like Via 30 Aprile 1945  in Cornuda, 24 Aprile in Parma, 21 Aprile in Bologna, 25 Aprile in Milan, Turin, Genova and so many other cities and towns, are permanent reminders of what is, and what could have been, if not for the Americans. Every day is American Veteran’s Day in Italy.

Photos: http://www.history-online.com/Liberatori/it/Home.aspx

LIFE: Miracle of Sant'Anna di Stazzema

CHIAVARI, Italy - It takes Andrea about 10 minutes to drive from his family’s summer home in the posh Tuscan resort of Forte dei Marmi up a hilly road to Sant’Anna di Stazzema. Not that he has family in Sant'Anna any more, they have all moved on, far beyond the boundaries of the tiny hill town. But on those languid days of summer when the temperatures soar, the family gathers together in the large villa built by Andrea’s great-grandfather.

 

 Sant'Anna di Stazzema

There is no one left in Andrea’s family who remembers the old man, for he died a long time ago. He was one of the victims of the World War II Sant’ Anna massacre, shot to death by the Nazis for no other reason than he was there. 

The story of that terrible event became the subject of a novel by James McBride, and then a film by Spike Lee. The film tells the fictionalized story of what happened in Sant’ Anna in the weeks before the Allies liberated Italy. The heroes in the film are the ‘Buffalo Soldiers’, the 92^nd Division of African-Americans who served on the Italian front during the Second World War. In reality, the Buffalo Soldiers were never anywhere near Sant’ Anna. Maybe if they had been the story would have had a happier ending.

 

Buffalo Soldiers from Spike Lee's film Massacre of Sant'Anna

In a soft voice, Andrea starts to tell me what really happened in Sant’Anna that day. It gave me goose bumps just listening to him.

“The massacre of Sant’Anna di Stazzema was one of the most brutal war crimes committed by German soldiers and SS troops during the Nazi occupation of Italy,” he tells me.  “Over the course of a few hours, 560 men, women and children were murdered by the 16^th tank division Reichsführer SS.”

 Sant'Anna, one of the most brutal massacres of the World War II

Official military records show that the German army had ordered the evacuation of the city of Sant’ Anna a week before the SS troops arrived, but only part of the town’s population left. And then, a short while after the initial evacuation, many women and children returned home. They had nowhere else to go. Italy was crumbling before their eyes and there were severe shortages of food and clean water. With the Allies on the move, and the danger of being caught in an Allied bombing raid was real. But going home would turn out to be a terrible mistake.

What the villagers didn’t know was that the German Army and SS troops were moving in four columns towards Sant’Anna, massacring people along the way. German military historian Gerhard Schreiber describes what happened: “The killing began as they climbed up to the small Tuscan mountain village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema, where they murdered two old men at daybreak on Aug. 12, 1944 because they were too weak to be useful as workers. An Italian civilian who attempted to intervene in broken English was shot in front of his daughter by the SS men.

Burying the Dead

At 7 a.m., they arrived in the village and soon there was a mountain of corpses - the remains of 132 men, women and children.  In order to erase the victim’s identities, flame-throwers were used to cremate the entire site. In nearby Vaccareccia, the troops trapped 70 people in a stable, decimated them with hand grenades and machine guns, and finished them up with flame-throwers too. They then repeated their performance in the villages of Franchi and Pero. Whoever crossed their path was butchered. When the SS unit finally moved on into the valley beyond, they had massacred 560 people.

Andrea tells the story as if it happened to someone else’s family, and in a way it did. But on those sultry August nights, when the breezes come across from the mountains to cool those sleeping peacefully in Sant’Anna, the memories of what happened on that night remain. 

 Enrico Pieri

And the miracle? The miracle of Sant’Anna was that one little boy did survive. His name is Enrico Pieri. He’s an old man now, but he still remembers every minute of that terrible day. 

“We knew the Germans were coming,” he says, “but no one thought they would harm women and children. But when they arrived they rounded some of us up and began burning down our houses. Then they made us go into the house of a neighbor. As we entered the kitchen they began shooting.  I was only saved because the owner of the house dragged me under the stairs in the basement and protected me with her body.”

The massacre at Sant’ Anna is considered perhaps the most atrocious of the many war crimes German soldiers committed on Italian soil during World War II.  Last October, the Public Prosecutor's Office in Stuttgart, Germany, closed a 10-year investigation into eight suspected perpetrators still alive at the time in Germany because they were unable to gather enough evidence to prove their guilt. Italians expressed outrage over the decision.

 Monument to the Dead

But Enrico Pieri may have another chance of submitting a complaint against the decision. The decision is now being reconsidered and as everyone knows, in Italy anything can happen and usually does. Let’s hope the same is true in Germany.