ARTICLE: An Adolescent Under the Bombs, 1940

Today I wanted to bring you a few excerpts from an Italian Second World War diary. They were written by one Paolo Grassi, who was living in Milan when Italy joined the war on the side of Germany in 1940. Later, he wrote:

This "Diary of my war" retraces the five most tragic years in Italian history - from the outbreak of the war to the fall of fascism, from the bloody Nazi occupation to the liberation - seen through the eyes of a boy forced by events to grow up too quickly. Despite all kinds of violence, the desire to live emerges from the pages, the maintenance of values, the search - as far as possible - for an adolescent "normality", which however soon gives way to awareness, to indignation at the horrors.

Grassi’s background was working class, and in 1940 he lived in a large complex of social housing ‘which occupied, and still occupies, three of the five sides of an entire block and which had its entrances on Via Cucchiari and Via Gran San Bernardo. In the middle, a large courtyard in which stood, on one side, the public baths building and an area occupied by small gardens, on the other, a large pine tree, certainly older than the buildings surrounding it.’ There was also a large aircraft works nearby. His adult neighbours were a mixed bunch, politically speaking:

Of the heads of families, half a dozen were practicing fascists, third-rate hierarchs who strutted around in their uniforms on which golden eagles… badges and various insignia abounded. The others were simply registered out of conformity or to have the bread card, while a small minority of die-hards, who could afford it, were not registered at all. Of the latter, the most daring sometimes criticised fascism even in public, risking being denounced, having trouble with the law and ending up in confinement or in prison.

…Like all the boys who attended a school, I was enrolled in the GIL as a Balilla and wore the uniform (black fez, black shirt, shorts and gray-green socks and, in bad weather, a gray-green cape) on national holidays and whenever it was required, for example to do paramilitary exercises (attention! rest! march forward!, about-face! etc.), to participate in rallies or to welcome important visitors to Milan.

Paolo and his best friend Mario were bookworms. ‘We exchanged our confidences and each of us regularly informed the other of what we learned from reading books and newspapers, from listening to the radio and the conversations of adults, adding our own comments and listening to those of the other. It was, if you like, an elementary form of cultural exchange, to which we devoted ourselves by taking time away from playing with our peers.’ He was ten when the war started, and he and Mario had been contemplating starting their own little newspaper, La Voce di via Cucchiari, but they had no money and no means to produce it. Then came the war, and they decided that it might be interesting to try and keep a record of momentous events instead. Until 1945, Paolo and Mario filled pages and pages of notebooks with their own thoughts, with what they heard on the radio and by plagiarising newspapers. They worked with a thesaurus at hand and tried to sound as grown up as possible. They were helped by one of their teachers at their school on Via Monviso, who gave them pointers and editorial feedback on the proviso that they did not name him. At the beginning of the war, Paolo took his notebooks everywhere with him, packed into an old suitcase. After the Allied landings in 1943, he ‘thought it more prudent’ to hide them away from home in various places (a barn, a woodshed and even an uninhabited pigsty) ‘to avoid the risk that they could end up in undesirable hands and cause trouble.’ For several decades after the war, they lived in a box in his parents’ basement, until he moved them to his own. Then one day, he found himself unpacking them again in 2002.

I have felt the urge to reread my notebooks and my notes - full of corrections, faded by time and deteriorated by humidity - and to transcribe their content, correcting the style, but only in some places where I thought it necessary for the purpose of greater clarity, taking care, however, to always keep the concepts scrupulously unaltered and omitting only the most childish and uninteresting banalities.

By the end of the war, a fifteen-year-old Paolo would wield a gun himself, much to his Mama’s disgust, but that is a story for another day. Today, it’s 1940, the beginning of the diary and the thoughts of one Italian boy on the outbreak of Italy’s war…

The version of Paolo Grassi’s diary that I used was Diario della mia Guerra - Storia di un adolescente sotto le bombe. It was published in 2013 and I got my copy from the Resistance Museum in Rome. The copy of the diary was passed down to Paolo’s son Davide, who edited it with Carlo Migliavacca. The image I have used is from the front cover.