"Grüne Linie" – On the paths of the Resistance

by Dario Orlandi
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Grüne Linie (Green Line) is the official name of the Gothic Line, the extreme defence along the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines of the retreating German army during the Second World War. It was Hitler himself, sensing the outcome of the war, who wanted to change the name to “Green”: he could not bear to be the “Goths” to give up on the last defensive line before the defeat.

That of Alto Mugello is a gentle mountain, dotted with farmhouses, woodsheds and gorges, green with woods of beech and chestnut trees which for two years were shelter for many Italians who chose to oppose the ideological and military violence of the Nazi-fascism.

Here the laborious silence of the mountain people was of support to the Resistants organized in the small democratic experiment of the “Republic of Carzolano”. Here, the walls of the shelters – now ruins – stand as mirrors of the passage of which they have been witnesses and the traces of the war resurface, still scattered on the ground.

Giancarlo Barzagli accompanies us in an exploration of these places, of the finds and the faces of a territory profoundly marked by the ethical, political and military conflict that has gone through Italy in the final stages of the Second World War.

In the images, silent and well thought through, rings the echo of the marching boots, of the shots, the “Halt!”, the crackling of makeshift camp fires, the damp and the cold of nights spent outdoors, in nervous wait for an imminent firefight.

And you could almost hear the author questioning himself about what remains today of the memory and the values that then ignited the young Resistants. “Just ask the beeches” suggests Wu Ming 2 in the beautiful story that enriches the volume, or meditate on the touching reflection of the partisan Gianni who in a letter to his friend Luciano wrote: “It would be better to say that there will be freedom if we know how to be the carriers of it and if we can transfer, to the city and to the entire country, the principles of loyalty and friendship that we have been able to establish and defend over here ”. It is difficult to say today if and how much of Gianni’s aspirations have really permeated Italian society.

The exercise of memory is a constant practice which a mature democracy cannot avoid, in order to remember the wounds from which it was born and to foresee new and future pitfalls. Because, as summarized by Indro Montanelli, “who ignores their past will never know anything about their present”.