Contested liberation

April 25 is a national holiday in Italy, la festa della liberazione, marking the end of Nazi German occupation in the spring of 1945, the collapse of Mussolini's Nazi-backed fascist regime, and the victory of the Italian Resistance. Last year's Liberation Day was a sedate affair, with some band music, a few speeches in the town hall, and a bunch vintage World War II jeeps and trucks were on display in the main piazza.

Most of them were U.S. Army issue, because along with the Resistance, the holiday honors the American and British soldiers who helped defeat Mussolini and the Germans. It's strange to see people celebrating U.S. military force instead of protesting it, but in Italy memories of American soldiers handing out chocolates and helping the locals still seem to have a lot of power.

This year's festa was a much bigger affair. Loud engine noises on our street, usually a pedestrian-only thoroughfare, drew us out onto our balcony. We saw a massive column of military vehicles heading down Via Cavour, as though Fidenza were being liberated all over again.

The vehicles were kitted up as if it were still 1945, and so were the people riding in them. Most of them seemed to be pretending to be American liberators, although there were some pretend Britishers, too.

Since they were in fact Italians, several of them took the opportunity to liberate some gelato.

We walked over to the piazza, where we saw even more vehicles, even more cosplay, and several references to the Allies' success at rescuing Italian art that had been looted by the Germans. (George Clooney was nowhere to be seen, however.) 

Given that most of this part of Fidenza was destroyed by American bombers during the war (the town was and is a railway hub), everyone seemed amazingly pro-American as well as pro-Resistance. And also, one assumes, happy that Italy's fascist government was defeated.

That made me wonder how the Italians who still cherish some nostalgia for the good old days of Il Duce--there seem to be plenty of them--feel about this annual celebration of his defeat, and of the Resistance, which was led by Communists and other leftists. (The right tended to be on the other side.)

Sure enough, they don't much like it. The leading right-wing party here is la Liga, the League, and its head, Matteo Salvini, the country's interior minister, has been known to make comments along the lines of "Mussolini did some good things." A few days ago Salvini announced that he wouldn't be taking part in Liberation Day activities and would instead join an anti-mafia event in Sicily. 

April 25 is about "parades, partisans, and anti-partisans, fascists and communists," he declared. "It's 2019 and I'm not much interested in the fascist-communist derby. I'm interested in the future of our country and the liberation of our country from the Camorra and the Ndrangheta," two deep-rooted crime organizations. 

Other League politicians said they'd also be too busy with other pressing matters to appear at Liberation Day events. And critics point out that Salvini has consistently shunned Liberation Day celebrations ever since he became head of the League. "But today's news," one of them wrote, "is the fact that the minister of the Republic is taking a position of neutrality and equidistance between those who celebrate the struggle for liberation and those who want to memorialize fascism." An Italian version of "good people on both sides," one might say.

Some day soon, will a 21st-century version of the "good war" have to start up all over again, more than 70 years later? As Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."