“Giorni di guerra” (Days of War), the diary of the soldier Giovanni Commisso, not yet a writer, engaged on the fronts of the First World War, has just been republished, after ninety years. “Now – notes the author of “Capricci italiani” – I was leaving to be a soldier for real and perhaps also war. I was assigned to a regiment of engineers based in Florence. The sergeants of my company were so ugly and bestial that they constituted a human type to which I was not accustomed”. The ghosts of that war, “a horrendous carnage that dishonours Europe” in the words of Benedict XV, reappear, as a warning for the present (with other horrendous carnage on many fronts of the world), in the book “Il Capitano. Emilio Lussu: Il Carso, l'Altopiano e il Piave che non ha mai raccontata” (The Captain. Emilio Lussu: The Carso, the Altopiano and the Piave that he never told about) by Stefano Aluisini and Ruggero Dal Molin (published by Itinera progetti). A solid and robust work, with unpublished details on Lussu and the Sassari. 250 pages of text and 745 notes. In addition, 205 iconographic pages with 350 rare and precious photos.
"The Horrible Carnage"
Aluisini and Dal Molin (guardians of the extraordinary Dal Molin photographic archive in Bassano del Grappa) warn that “thanks to other eyes and ears that saw and heard what the writer saw and heard at the time, but chose not to tell, we reread an Emilio Lussu who was at times unknown. But above all, thanks to a vast photographic apparatus, we retrace all the battlefields in which he was a protagonist, often seeing again the faces of those who were close to him at the time, thus rereading “in the clear” and in full all his three and a half years of war, from the Carso to the Altopiano, from the Bainsizza to Caporetto, from the “Tre Monti” to the Piave”. A broad picture, suspended between the humanity that often emerges in life in the trenches and the inhumanity of war (there is also the cowardice of the high commands), enriched by the memories of friends and comrades in arms of the “Cavaliere dei Rossomori” . “And it is these memories – the authors explain – that reveal some of the missing pages of “A Year on the Plateau”. Thus we read of Emilio Lussu who pushed under the enemy’s barbed wire to open a passage with explosives or engaged in assaults against machine guns, or of when he held the rear guard during the dark days of the retreat from Caporetto or resisted in the center of a square of bayonets on the Piave, then opening the way by fighting with his soldiers”.
Teresa Nardini
Facts that add to those already highlighted in the work published for the first time in Paris in 1938 and then by Einaudi in 1945: "Along this path - Aluisini and Dal Molin underline - we were also accompanied by the memories of the Guerrato-Nardini family of Bassano del Grappa, where Emilio Lussu spent with Alfredo Graziani some of the moments of rest from service on the front line in the trenches of the nearby Altopiano, moments often immortalized by the friend's Kodak. From these fragments of life, the unforgettable figure of Teresa Nardini will emerge in all her human stature, a truly special woman, linked to Lussu by an unshakeable friendship and affection, willing to do anything to personally help the soldiers of the "Sassari" and their families, both during the war and in the difficult years that followed". There is also what Aluisini and Dal Molin define as “the subtle trace of the love cultivated by Emilio towards an unknown girl, destined to die in the trenches of the Altopiano with one of the writer's best friends, not without a further aura of mystery”. The book, which also highlights the eternal gratitude of the Veneto towards the “intrepid Sardinians”, was born in the fertile field of relations between the Dal Molin archive and the municipality of Armungia in the name of Emilio Lussu and his exemplary life between fronts and frontiers.
