In 2002 I made my first visit to the city of Forlì in northern Italy. It
was a moving occasion for me as it was the place where my mother was born and
where, as a young woman, she got to know my father who was at that time a
soldier in the New Zealand Division of the 8th Army. That was in 1944. My
mother followed my father back to New Zealand after the war, where I grew up
with many powerful impressions of the places and events of their wartime
experiences. But, as vivid and as frequently emotive as my parents’
reminiscences were, 58 years later they all took on a new reality for me on
that first visit to Forlì.
In the company of my father (his first time there since 1945), I was
astonished by his very precise recollections of buildings, streets and
directions around the city. I was also reminded of my mother’s first
return to Forlì after 35 years, where she was spontaneously greeted in the
street by an old acquaintance who exclaimed ‘I’ve not seen you
for such a long time!’
Some things were more poignant for their absence. The farmhouse at
Malmissole in the outskirts of Forlì, where my parents first actually met,
has gone. The house on via Giorgio Regnoli in Forlì where my mother and her
parents had lived after the city’s liberation received a direct hit
from a German shell and now a notably more modern house stands in its place.
But amidst these and many other reminders, the Forlì soundscape triggered
another response. Standing in the centre of the city’s Piazza Aurelio
Saffi listening to bells from churches clearly audible over great distances
gave me a strong sense of experiencing the sounds as something resonant of
the place and its history… that these were ‘voices’ from
the past — something permanent, yet alive — evoking a sense of
being touched by the physicality of sounds that others had experienced with
the same immediacy over many years and through some dark, violent times. Of
course, the emotional nature of that visit made me especially receptive to
such an idea.
But in response to a flood of expressions of place and identity, and my
own inexorable feeling of being at once earthed and estranged in Forlì, these
works explore the interaction of memory and experience, narrative and
evocation bringing sounds and voices from the past and the present together
in imaginary soundscapes.
This is Piazza Aurelio Saffi, at the heart of Forlì, a small city in
the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna. It’s a warm
September morning and the piazza is crowded with people, watched over by
the lofty bell tower of the 12th century Basilica of San Mercuriale.
The bells of the Duomo — the Cathedral of Santa Croce —
cascade across the center of Forlì and beyond, echoed by bells of
outlying churches and chimes of the city’s clock tower. It feels
like these sounds have existed here forever, part of the space, part of
the life of the city.
Just next to the tower of San Mercuriale there is a small portico with
a memorial captioned Caduti per la Libertà — fallen for
liberty — acknowledging many who died in World War II in the
struggle against occupying Nazi forces and Fascism. Their pictures, some
of them children, are etched into tiles in memory of what people of this
town went through at that time.
The year of 1944 saw Forlì ravaged by the bombardments of both Allies
and Germans and subject to vicious Nazi reprisals against her people,
trapped in a conflict that forced its way into their lives in a chaotic
struggle amongst foreign soldiers, partisans and a new wave of
repubblichini — soldiers of the Fascist puppet state of
Northern Italy. And it was here, from the tall iron lampposts that circle
Piazza Saffi that the bodies of La Banda Corbari were hung, a
group of partisans executed after being captured by Nazis and denounced
by Fascists. Such chilling cruelty, such inhuman actions. These were
witnessed and endured in Forlì.
Standing here, in front of the San Mercuriale memorial, we see faces,
names, dates. All are reminders that the suffering brought by war is
intensely personal and its violence indiscriminate. In the broad wash of
time, we so easily lose sight of the individual tragedies, and the little
chance events from which life and death hang in the balance, woven within
the savage machinery of war. It’s one such story that is remembered
now.
Following the armistice between Italy and the Allies in September
1943, the 8th and 5th Allied armies commenced an invasion of the Italian
mainland and began to move north from the southern cities of Taranto and
Salerno. As armies engaged in bitter combat, a nation was immersed in a
chain of horrific destruction that thrust its way through cities and
across the land.
War Correspondent 1
Now you hear the roar of the bombers, they’re approaching now in
from the sun right high above overhead is a Spitfire…
War Correspondent 2
… takes the form of an all out air offensive against their
forward positions and this attack is in progress before me as I speak to
you. Very large numbers of planes are coming over, giving the German
positions… dive bombers have gone and the artillery again takes up
the pounding of the enemy forward positions…
War Correspondent 3
And as the shells screamed down and the walls collapsed in gray powder
around us we raced back to tell you, on the spot, the full nightmare of
the war…
War Correspondent 1
All down the hillside now the pounding grows in a multitude of vicious
mounds of flame and smoke… Approaching now the target. Already a
cloud of green smoke is rising from the center of the town which is
evidently the point to be bombed. And there’s the load of the
Boston attack just fell on the town and terrific black smoke is rising in
amazingly thick columns spread over the whole area. And the sound of the
actual explosions will reach you now.
War Correspondent 4
We passed through village after village and every one of them bore the
scars of the twin war machines which had smashed through them in these
past few months. In the streets, black with churned up mud, and in the
crumbling doorways of windowless, often roofless houses, I saw
barefooted, ragged little children, faces pinched with cold and shivering
against the cold rain. Often, as we passed through towns, I saw men and
women digging in the ruins of their homes for something they might still
call their own. … The gathering darkness added the last somber
touch to this dismal scene of war. Here men had fought and died, and the
air was full of the tragedy. Then, when we were only a few minutes from
here, and we entered the approaches to this little town from where
I’m talking a little procession came toward us. First there was the
Priest striding quickly along in the rain. And behind him came four
little boys all about 10 years old. They were carrying a very little
coffin on their shoulders, and they were almost running to keep up with
the priest. Behind them, coming from the front, a long convoy of 8th Army
lorries followed, and didn’t try and pass.
The winter months of 1943-44 saw harsh weather — and extreme
cold transformed the land into a frozen, inhospitable environment. To
escape the cold many soldiers abandoned their usual sleeping place of a
slit trench covered by a bivouac tent for whatever houses were nearby,
bringing them into close contact with civilians. As towns and villages
were destroyed, many Italian citizens became sfollati —
evacuees — dispersed out of cities and into the countryside.
War Correspondent 1
The heaviest fall of snow so far this winter has just taken place. The
whole countryside is now a picture of winter, with bare brown trees and
hedges carrying a pattern of snow over the white blanket beneath. The
roads are churned to broken drifts of slush and ice, and all movement is
becoming increasing difficult. As I speak to you, snow is still falling
and it seems certain that settled winter conditions have fallen on the
Italian front.
For people caught in the sweep of this war, danger was everywhere. In
the sky at night, over many parts of Northern and Central Italy reports
of a phantom airplane, dubbed Pippo, symbolized the anxiety of
civilians. It came only in darkness, sometimes without incident,
sometimes dropping flares here and there, or explosives where a light
might be shining. The droning presence of Pippo inflamed the
fears of ordinary people — an invisible, looming threat that some
were sure was American, while to others it was German, or even Italian.
Pippo epitomized the identity of the enemy as something fluid
and ambiguous — the destruction brought by strangers, and the
menace fermenting within the nation.
In the summer of 1944 a young woman, evacuated from the city, rode
toward Forlì on her bicycle, looking for what was left of her
family’s house, shattered in one of the first waves of Allied
bombing. Along a country road, a black speck floated on the horizon and,
suddenly, became an Allied fighter plane whose eyes saw this innocent
figure as the enemy. She never knew just how it was that she escaped, but
she rode on to find what was left of her home — gutted and strewn
with remnants of the life they had left behind. And yet what she saw that
day was that the garden had bloomed into a vibrant image of hope.
This is the story of a little Italian farm. Which, just for a day,
found itself in the front line. At that moment it was simply point
098524, where two German machine guns had to be cleared up. It had no
human personality as it were. It was just a map reference that would be
passed and forgotten by the end of the day. Inside, the whole family were
sheltering in a deep cellar. The walls were still shaking from an
occasional shell dropping near at hand. On a rough bed, the old
grandfather was lying wounded in the leg. He’d been wounded by one
of our own lads who’d mistaken him for a German when Grandfather
had come hobbling out of the door to welcome us. And Grandmother, aged
70, was holding his hand. The old lady produced two pathetically soiled
letters obviously read and re-read a hundred times. They were from her
grandsons, prisoners of war in Sardinia. Was there any hope that she
could see them again? And as they talked, I realized the immense hope
that the ordinary, simple people of Europe feel…
Well, that is a New Zealand tank just entering Florence. Today is
Friday the 4th of August and New Zealanders, together with South Africans
on the right flank have reached the goal of long endeavor and fighting
after many hard weeks of action… It’s really quite difficult
to carry on any kind of connected commentary. People are gathering around
the microphone, I’m being constantly patted on the back and
presented with flowers. There’s great shouting and excitement and
really one can only convey a very scattered picture of this tremendous
occasion. Bottles of vino are being produced from everywhere. And the New
Zealanders of course are taking every opportunity of the… er…
opportunity to slake a thirst, which has grown over the dusty road and
particularly during the last 2 nights of hard fighting.
Pressing on to the north, following their involvement in devastating
battles at Orsogna, at Cassino and in the battle for Florence, the New
Zealand Division of the 8th Army was among the forces advancing along the
Adriatic coast in September 1944, approaching the so-called Gothic line
of German defense which stretched across northern Italy from La Spezia to
Pesaro. Heading north from Rimini on the Adriatic Coast, this eventually
brought the New Zealanders to Forlì. Amongst these troops was Alex, a
gunner in the New Zealand 5th Field Regiment. Over 60 years later, he
recalls passing through Piazza Saffi for the first time.
Alex
We went through Forlì, right through the square, and right up and
through the big archway and then we turned right and went down to
Malmissole. The Germans hadn’t been long gone. We went through the
Saffi and there was… the Germans had strung up a lot of Partisans
from… on each of those posts, those lampposts. There was a big
sign, a big painting up on the wall, I think it was like a poster, just
down by where the church was, showing a New Zealand soldier — like
a Maori it was too, he was a Maori — with a baby in his arms and
the blood dripping from it and underneath written ’this is the
enemy: beware’.
Narrator
Allied troops and partisans had liberated Forlì on the cold and misty
morning of November the 9th 1944, after a night battle for the Forlì
airfield. Yet it remained a perilous place. One BBC war correspondent
described his experience in Piazza Saffi when he arrived there on that
day.
War Correspondent 5
Eventually we found ourselves in the main Piazza or square, a
beautiful place in a rather gloomy, sinister way arcaded on two sides
with a fine Romanesque church with a tall tower right opposite us. San
Mercuriale we were told it was. And I was just remarking to a colleague
that the church along with the rest of the city seemed to be entirely
undamaged when swish, bang, a shell from a German field gun, a 105,
exploded slap in the middle of the square. This was followed by five or
six others, though we didn’t wait to see them burst.
Narrator
In fact there had been many civilian deaths and terrible destruction
around the town as a result of Allied bombing raids in the preceding
months, and in the wake of the German retreat. Under the Nazi occupation,
scores of people — partisans and those accused of supporting them,
Jews and other innocents caught in reprisals — were put to death,
while many others were deported to forced labor camps in Germany and its
remaining territories.
The night before the Allies’ entry into Forlì, the city lay
coldly silent in fear of another air raid. Then, in the small hours of
the 9th of November, the silence was shattered as the retreating Nazis
carried out their earlier threat to blow up the city’s prominent
towers, including the municipal Torre civica, and the campanile of the
Duomo, whose falling bells shattered the great wooden beams below. By
some grace, the tower of San Mercuriale was spared.
One family named Fariselli had, like so many others, been forced to
escape the city’s dangers as the tide of the war overtook them in
1944. They had lived close to the railway station, a key bombing target,
and with their home destroyed in an air attack the parents, Euclide and
Maria, two of their daughters Tarcisia and Imelde as well as
Imelde’s small children, Giovanna, Giorgio and Carla found refuge
in the outskirts of Forlì at the home of the Strocchi family in the
farming area of Malmissole. Soon, German troops were also staying in the
farmhouse — and this was to plunge the family into torment…
One soldier, handling a machine gun… incomprehensibly triggered it
and, in one shocking instant, took the life of Imelde’s little
boy.
As the world stood still for one family, the conflict continued around
them as the Allied pursuit of the German army and civil war scoured the
country. And then, as winter drew near, it was in front of the Strocchi
farmhouse at Malmissole that the New Zealand soldier Alex found himself
looking for shelter with the rest of his battery in November 1944. It was
here that he met Tarcisia.
Alex
We arrived in the sort of courtyard you’d call it, where it was
cobblestones. And the Sergeant Major said to me “Well, go up and
there and get a room for us.” So I went upstairs and there were
three or four rooms. There was a passageway down the middle and there
were three rooms there and three rooms on the other side. So I got that
one, I went and got that room and there were a lot of grapes hanging up,
I remember that, and I remember tasting them — they were quite
good, they were green grapes. And then I walked over to this other room
where there were windows on all of them but on this other side there was
nothing. But I walked over to this other room and had a look out the
window because there was … a lot of people down below, turning
around and mucking around, you know, people. So I looked out the window
and who should be sitting on the window at the end but this beautiful
girl, you see, so I just looked out the window and sort of said to her
“Buongiorno”, and she said “Buongiorno “.
Didn’t know what to say, I said “Vuoi una sigaretta?”
and she replied “No, non fumare.” So, I just sort of smiled
at her again and she smiled back and I thought, by gosh… that was
it. It was just love at first sight.
Narrator
Not long after Alex and Tarcisia met, her family were able to move
back into Forlì — Tarcisia with her parents to a house close to
Piazza Saffi, and Imelde and her children to an apartment on the other
side of the town. Alex’s regiment were now in action at Villanova,
between Forlì and the city of Faenza to the north. In the following
months, Alex and Tarcisia met whenever they could and almost straight
away one of those meetings was to change their lives forever.
Of course what actually happened, with the bombing… Imelde and
Carla and Giovanna, they went with their cousins, there were quite a few
of them, into this big apartment place. I never ever saw it. But they
were — I believe — they were on the fifth floor. They had
gone two days before Tarcisia and her mother and father left, and they
went to via Regnoli and Tarcisia told me where they were going and told
me it was 38 via Regnoli. So she said “Would you like to come
down?” By this time we’d moved up to Villanova, so she said
“If you’ve got… would you come down one
afternoon?” so I said “Yes I’ll come down
tomorrow.” So I got down there and she told me this afterwards that
her mother had said to Tarcisia that morning “Well, this afternoon
we’ll go round and see Imelde and see how they’ve settled in,
and Carla and company.” And Tarcisia said “Oh do we have to
go today?” and Maria said “Why?” She said, “Well,
that soldier that I like is coming down and he’s going to come and
see me.” And her mother said “Oh well, OK, we can go another
day, don’t worry about it, it’ll be alright.” So I duly
arrived and Tarcisia was there and gave me a glass of wine. Her mother
was sitting in the corner, knitting away, knitting away. And I spent just
the afternoon with her, you know, cuddling a bit… and then I left
and of course I had to walk to the square to get my truck and I just went
straight out, straight through the big archway, which is blocked off now.
Well I got past, just through that archway, and I saw this plane, or I
heard it, and saw it. And I just saw the bomb coming out. It was an
enormous thing, it looked to me like a great big 44 gallon drum and it
was just turning over like that as it flew down — and about that
height which, had I stayed where I was, it seemed to me it would have
dropped, more or less… but I took off, it actually carried on a bit
further where the apartment was — hit this apartment…
I never thought anything about it. I heard it explode and all the rest
of it, the big noise and I’d got back to Villanova. Next morning I
went down to see Tarcisia again and, oh, she told me the great tale you
see about it and she said that she was just going round to the hospital
see and she told me that Imelde had died, she was killed outright but
Carla was still alive and so was Giovanna. So I went round to the
hospital with them and Carla was, she was still sort of… I
don’t think she knew where she was but her eyes were clogged up and
they were trying to clean her eyes a bit. But Giovanna was just lying
there and she had a cut on her head about that long from there right back
and just all exposed. I said to Tarcisia “Why don’t they, you
know, do something with her?” and she said “They seem to
think she’s going to die.” So I went round and saw one of the
nurses, they were nuns and this nun could speak English and I said to her
“What’s, why are they not?”… she said
“We’ve got nothing, we’ve got no bandages, we’ve
got nothing.” Well, she said “What we’ve got,
we’ve got very few, we are only using them for people who will not
die and she said I’m sorry but that little girl is going to
die.” Which she did the next day. They were crowded, packed in.
There must have been five hundred people in that little hospital and
there were five hundred people in that apartment.
Here, outside Forlì’s Duomo, Alex and Tarcisia met on Easter
Sunday in 1945, and it was not long before they decided that Tarcisia
would follow Alex to New Zealand after the war. They were lucky, and able
to grasp the promise of a new life together. Love provided the fortune
that allowed them their future, but a future that carried with it the
agony of loved ones lost. Yet today in Forlì, across the space of the
main Piazza, in the dark reverberation of her churches and sharp echoes
of her narrow streets the Duomo’s bells have risen out of
destruction and speak of all that the city witnessed, to give a voice to
all those souls for whom time was made to stand still.