Prologue

Posara, Tuscany, 11 August 1945

He’d finished the uphill stretch now. All that was left was the road down from Moncigoli to their village. He was looking forward to getting there and telling everyone the great news. They’d done it, he and his brother-in-law Attilio, the best mechanic in town. They’d found a house and signed the rental agreement.

The flat was in the centre of La Spezia, in a building on the corner of Corso Cavour and Via di Monale. It was beautiful and sufficiently spacious to accommodate their two families: nine people in all, plus a baby on the way, given that Anita, his wife, was pregnant. They had to sort out the sleeping arrangements for the three bedrooms, since the main room would serve as a tailor’s workshop. With the end of the war, people were returning to work and maybe, if things went well, they would soon need to employ a dressmaker or two.

The ride downhill was easy; the rod brakes of his sturdy Atala, the bicycle which had been his faithful companion through these difficult years, functioned perfectly in slowing down the movement into each bend. He’d set out that morning from Posara, the tiny village near Fivizzano where they’d moved to survive the war and had effortlessly covered the forty or so kilometres from there to La Spezia. It was a journey he’d done many times. He knew every bend by heart.

That black bicycle, with its crankcase protecting the chain, its bell with the die-cast maker’s mark and the dynamo which allowed him to cycle even when it was getting dark, had been an essential resource in ensuring his family’s survival. In the surrounding villages there was always one peasant farmer or another needing to turn a worn-out greatcoat inside out or mend the holes in a jacket which he had to wear for a wedding. He would hurry off and return home with eggs or a bottle of fresh milk. Everyone knew the tailor who travelled from village to village on his bicycle.

His wanderings soon became the ideal cover for taking messages to the partisan groups that were operating in the area. A note would be handed to him in the evening and all he had to do was remove the bike saddle and slip it into the seat post. On several occasions he had even read the notes, but the messages were incomprehensible; sometimes they were phrases in code which indicated the arrival of columns of Nazis or fascists from Massa to carry out a round-up. Or they simply contained dates and numbers, effectively the coordinates for weapon launches or Allied aerial supply drops for the partisans.

The tailor had been lucky; nobody had betrayed him, and he had never been found out. On a couple of occasions, he had even been able to embrace his brother Giuseppe, a political commissioner of a partisan detachment of the “Apuania” Garibaldi Brigade. Giuseppe had given him a pistol, a Luger P08, supplied with calibre 9 Parabellum bullets, which he’d seized from a Wehrmacht soldier who’d fallen in an exchange of fire. The tailor did not like weapons, and he had rushed back to Posara in terror of being stopped and shot dead at the first Brigate Nere checkpoint. But everything had gone smoothly and, once he was back home, he had taken care to hide the pistol. He’d wrapped it in a filthy rag and buried it in the cowshed, right under the animals’ feeding trough, where the hay was deepest, and he never touched it again.

He’d moved to Posara with his entire family at the beginning of 1942, as soon as it became clear that the tailoring business was definitively on hold. Nobody orders a new suit in wartime. In La Spezia everything that could be considered food had become impossible to find and too expensive, and with five mouths to feed he couldn’t afford to take risks. And so, the family had evacuated to the countryside, to his recently deceased father’s home village where his brothers and their families still lived. With their few furnishings of any value loaded onto a cart, they were all off to live in a single room set up above the cowshed. It was a kind of hayloft where they’d placed the solid wooden table from the tailor-shop, along with a portable sink for washing and three beds, where they would sleep in pairs around a stove which served for cooking and heating. For their physical needs, they went outside to a little wooden hut, where the sewage was collected to be recycled as fertilizer in the vegetable garden.

The peasant house was poor, the winters in the foothills of the Apennines were freezing, but there was no shortage of firewood in the woods of Turkey oak which surrounded the village. Higher up, in the autumn, they gathered chestnuts which, if dried, could be ground into flour. Everything else came from the animals: rabbits, chickens, three cows and a family of pigs. In the fields and kitchen gardens they grew potatoes, beans, cabbages, maize and various other vegetables. And there was plenty of fruit too, in season. A tough life for everyone, basically, but nobody starved.

The tailor often went to La Spezia, about once a month. He went to get general foodstuffs with the family’s ration coupons or to exchange produce from the countryside for packs of flour or pasta. He also took the opportunity to take some food supplies to Giulia, his mother-in-law, a powerful, stubborn woman, who had refused to have anything to do with the evacuation to Posara with the rest of the family.

They’d tried everything to convince her, but without success. She’d stayed behind, living alone, in a sad, dark basement in Via Napoli, convinced that, old as she was now, nothing really bad could happen to her. She’d been a widow for many years and was used to living completely independently. You could still see, in her facial features, the now faded signs of a stunning beauty; she was always smiling, and she never left the house without perfect make-up. Occasionally she would return to that basement, before the curfew, in the company of an elderly suitor. Giulia preferred to fast rather than do without lipstick.

When her son-in-law arrived, it was always time for celebration, because the tailor had knocked her up a new blouse out of some threadbare sheets, or he’d bring her a little cheese and some fresh eggs and would give her news of Anita and Giuliano, of Marisa and the other children.

Giulia hadn’t even been fazed when, on 19 April 1943, all hell had broken out over La Spezia. In the following days, using 173 Lancaster and five Halifax bombers, the RAF had dropped 1,300 tons of bombs, with the aim of destroying the naval base and the vast military arsenal, which was responsible for repairing the fleet. The bombs had instead devastated the historic centre and caused more than 120 deaths and almost a thousand injuries.

Even the building where Giulia was living was one of those bombed, but, miraculously, she was spared. The rescue teams had found her, with an elderly friend, in the basement, which she hadn’t left to run to one of the shelters when the alarm had gone off. Many years later, she would confess that they hadn’t actually heard the sirens, because her friend had brought with him one very last bottle of wine from his cellar which he thought had already been empty for some time and …

The tailor was thinking about all this as he went round the final bends. He was smiling, to himself, remembering Giulia’s flamboyance. He was happy because they were going back to the city, to his city. Anita and the children would welcome him with joy. A new life was beginning for all of them.

The five years of the war had been dreadful. In the last phase, in particular, the whole area had been subject to the bloody acts of the Walter Reder SS division and the Brigate Nere from Massa. In the Summer of ’44, first at Sant’Anna di Stazzema, then at Vinca and in scores of other small towns in the surrounding area, they had exterminated more than 800 old people, women and children. The situation had become too dangerous for Giuliano, the eldest son, who had crossed the front on Christmas night in ’44 to join the Americans.

The tailor himself had been lucky to save his skin too, when he’d been stopped by the X Mas military groups. It’d happened on 10 January 1944, when he’d been cycling home from one of his trips to La Spezia and had run into a mobile checkpoint. The partisan action groups (GAP) operating in the city had attacked a tram transporting X Mas officers and men, causing deaths and dozens of injuries. The checkpoints set up at all the entrances to the city were used to round up men who were caught on the street. The tailor was arrested immediately, his bicycle was confiscated, and he was shoved into a large room, at the back of the bunker which served as the base for the checkpoint, together with another ten or so hopeless cases. The militiamen who were guarding them were very young and extremely nervous; they had their fingers on the machine-gun triggers and were shouting non-stop. The tailor was terrified. They could shoot them straightaway, or after they’d tortured them. In the best-case scenario, they would take them to jail and then transfer them to some prison camp in Germany. He was in despair at the idea that he might never see his family again.

After some hours of anxious waiting, a young officer came in, barked out his name and took him outside at gunpoint. The tailor was ready to be shot when he heard his name being called. “What, you don’t recognize me? It’s Antenore, Nives’ son, your nephew.”

The tailor’s family...