Myth and Morality in the History of the Italian Resistance: the Hero of Palidoro

Fig. 1.

Italian postage stamp celebrating Salvo D'Acquisto, after a painting by Vittorio Pisani (1899-1974). There is hardly a town or village in Italy without at least a street, and often a monument, dedicated to Salvo d'Acquisto.

Look, half, three-quarters, of the carabinieri barracks and offices all over Italy are named after him; the same is true for schools, and for squares, schools, streets all over Italy. Each month there are inaugurations of plaques, of streets, called after Salvo D'Acquisto. I think he's just been beatified, and they're in the final stages of the canonization process.

A retired carabiniere, Frascati, 1997¹

[M]ost commonly historians are apt to see myth, if they notice it at all, as an impediment to their true work. [. . .] Yet if we turn to almost any historical field, this persistent blindness to myth undeniably robs us of much of our power to understand and interpret the past.

Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson, The Myths We Live By, 1990²

This paper is about the creation and function of myths and their relationship to and function in history. The myths and histories in question concern the most criticized and the most celebrated events in the memory of the Nazi occupation in Rome (from 8 September 1943 to 4 June 1944): on the one hand, the partisan attack in Rome's via Rasella that killed thirty-three Nazi policemen attached to the SS, followed by the subsequent massacre of 335 civilians in Nazi retaliation at the Fosse Ardeatine (23-4 March 1944); and on the other the execution and 'sacrifice' of the carabiniere Salvo D'Acquisto in Palidoro, a rural and fishing village just north of Rome, on 23 September 1943.

In both cases, public memory manipulates the events into contrasting morality tales about guilt, responsibility and innocence, and into political apologues on the meaning and morality of Resistance and the foundation of the Republic.³ Indeed, one story is openly pitted against the other: myths do not live in isolation but combine in systems and structures.

The most contested episode in the history of Italian Resistance to Nazi occupation in 1943-4 is the attack conducted by a unit of the partisan underground in Rome's central via Rasella and the massacre next day of 335 prisoners (ten Italians for each dead German) in an abandoned quarry on the via Ardeatina.⁴ Since then, these events have become the object of ongoing controversy and a memory struggle that hinges on the false but widespread belief that the Germans warned that they would proceed to the retaliation unless the 'perpetrators' of the attack in via Rasella turned themselves in for the rightful punishment. The partisans did not do so, and therefore by large sectors of public opinion they are held responsible for the death of the 335 hostages. In fact, there was no such request or warning: the massacre took place less than twenty-four hours after the attack, giving the partisans no notice and no time to hand themselves in even had they intended to. This myth has served nevertheless to generate revisionist anti-partisan narratives and raise doubts about the morality of the Resistance and, implicitly, about the anti-Fascist roots of the Italian republic.⁵

The young carabiniere Salvo D'Acquisto was executed by the Germans in Palidoro on 23 September 1943. This is how an official publication of the carabinieri corps told the story in 1946:

Arrested in Torre in Pietra [a few miles north of Rome] on the evening of 22 September 1943, jointly with twenty-two other civilian hostages, in reprisal for an alleged attack that killed a German soldier and seriously wounded two others, in order to save from the massacre the hostages already lined up for execution on the edge of a grave they had dug themselves, though innocent, he proclaimed himself alone responsible for the attack, and thus fearlessly went to his death.⁶

At first, Salvo D'Acquisto was listed...