THE FIRST TO die was Giuseppe Oronzo Palmisano, the most belligerent of all the Palmisano men. He had long been preparing for the moment his homeland would call him to arms. He fell on 23 May 1915, the same day Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary and joined the Allied coalition in the First World War. Poor Giuseppe Oronzo always maintained that fighting on the front offered men a great opportunity: it taught discipline, strengthened character and allowed youngsters to channel appropriately their natural-born aggresion. He believed that the battlefield was the only place where brute force could be brought to bear in a natural, organized manner. Like a noble art, he used to say.
Giuseppe Oronzo was loyal and reliable. His problem, though, was that he had always preferred to resolve differences with his fists. But despite this violent streak, he wasn’t an entirely bad sort: he was the first Palmisano to enlist, and was assigned to a volunteer corps, quite an honour for someone from a small town like Bellorotondo. Shortly after, he was the first to head to the Carso front, in north-east Italy, and the first to enter into combat. He was also the first of his detachment to go over the top to attack the Austrian positions. And he was the first to get a bullet to the chest, right in the sternum. When he felt the impact, accompanied by a sound like two pieces of metal colliding and a very unpleasant burning sensation, he assumed the bullet had just grazed the buttons of his uniform tunic and he tried to carry on. His legs refused to move, they folded under him and he collapsed. When the Austrians stormed the trench, a corporal with a curled moustache stepped over his body and rammed his bayonet into his heart, but poor Giuseppe Oronzo didn’t feel it: life had left him some time before. The first Palmisano died with the banal honour of being one of the first Italians to lose his life, that very first day of war on the Austrian front. That summer he would have turned twenty-two.
Donato Fu Francesco Paolo Palmisano (2) was the second to die. The most cowardly of the family, he would have done anything to avoid being called up, but alas, he wasn’t even afforded the chance to experience the full horrors of the trenches. He also died on the Carso front, towards the end of the first summer of the war, victim of a howitzer shell from the Austrian artillery that was defending the border city of Gorizia. And, a few days later, Silvestro (3) died, pumped full of bullets from the new Austrian machine guns, which, in October 1915, ravaged those troops assaulting the Santa Lucia hill on the north-eastern Italian frontier. Installed in lookout posts far from the line of fire, the Italian officers drank tea from porcelain cups served by gloved auxiliaries, and from their towers they ordered successive waves of troops to attack the mountain. Until, finally, the commander of the Italian armies, General Luigi Cadorna, realized it was a useless massacre and put paid to the offensive. That was the end of the third battle of the Isonzo, a river squeezed in between magnificent mountains, right by the border with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a river that had never been heard of in Bellorotondo until that day.
The twins had the most horrific death of them all. As boys, Gianbattista Di Martino (4) and Nicola Di Martino (5) couldn’t stand being made to dress identically. They hated when the women in town would stop them on the street to pinch their cheeks and coo over them, ‘So cute, like two peas in a pod.’
Growing tired of such maternal effusiveness, one fine day they decided to never wear the same outfits again. They stopped walking to school together. They refused to leave the house at the same time. They wouldn’t go anywhere near each other in the school playground. If, during some local festival, the family went for a stroll along the Via Cavour, in the centre of Bellorotondo, they found a way to walk separately, one on either side of the road. And when they were teenagers they did everything possible to differentiate themselves physically: Gianbattista grew a moustache and Nicola opted for a small beard; one parted his hair on the right side and the other on the left. When they began to court girls, Gianbattista went after the exuberant, extrovert ones who laughed a lot. Nicola, on the other hand, eyed the more discreet homebodies.
When they had finally managed to forget that they were twins and the old women in town finally stopped cooing over them, they were called up. They both received the conscription letter on the same day, 1 February 1915, and from the same postman. They were also sent to the same barracks, and once the army had shaved both of their heads and put them in the same uniform, they were once again so alike that it was impossible to tell them apart. From that day on they trained together and slept in bunk beds, one on top of the other. Six months later, they travelled north together, in the same company, and they were also side by side when they received word that they were headed to the front and were to prepare for immediate combat.
The twins had just turned nineteen and once again were like two peas in a pod, but it no longer bothered them. Instead, they grew inseparable: they slept next to each other, they hunkered down together in the muddy trench and they advanced together when they attacked the Austrian positions. No one in the company could tell the brothers apart. Captain Di Luca gave them orders as if they were a single person: ‘Palmisano, get behind those trees and shut that damn machine gun up, once and for all!’
Gianbattista and Nicola didn’t ask for whom the order was meant. They both crawled out of the trench and crept along, stuck together as if they were just one man, to the rocks. Then they ran to the pine forest and half an hour later the enemy machine gun exploded and their fellow soldiers shouted, ‘Long live Palmisano!’, figuring they would both feel included in the cheer.
In November, the Austrians dropped chlorine gas, right on the front where the twins had just earned a medal for bravery. When the lethal fog lifted, a horrifying carpet of cadavers was discovered in both sets of trenches: the wind had changed midway through the attack and, after annihilating the Italians, the gas had wreaked havoc on the Austrians themselves. Both armies had their work cut out in recovering the corpses of the victims of that piece of military insanity. Captain Di Luca’s men found the twins hugging, their bodies so entwined that they couldn’t manage to separate them. Their faces were blue from the poison, and contorted from the horror they had seen coming. Thick foam filled their mouths. Their jackets still smelled of gas.
The captain was resolute. ‘Stop what you’re doing and bury the Palmisano body. I can’t bear another minute of this horror!’
The soldiers stared at each other, disconcerted.
‘Which Palmisano, Captain? We can’t get them apart.’
‘For the love of God, can’t you see there’s no need? Bury them just as we found them. They are one man.’
And they buried Gianbattista Di Martino Palmisano and Nicola Di Martino Palmisano, clinging to each other in their final embrace, in a clearing in the pine forest, together for all eternity.
When the townspeople of Bellorotondo found out that the twins had died in each other’s arms, they were deeply moved and commemorated them in a huge, well-attended mass in the church of the Immaculate Conception. They all remembered the twins as little boys, when they still dressed identically, and they left the mass pleased that, before dying, the two brothers had decided to be twins again.
After that tragedy, the Palmisano women wore mourning clothes for the rest of the war. Days later, on Christmas Eve of 1915, they received the news of the death of Giuseppe Fu Vito (6) in Libya, an almost exotic location, far from the various fronts of the war and which, on the face of it, had seemed less dangerous. The boy was slight and he’d endured every sort of illness going as a child. In Tripoli, an infection saw his temperature rocket to forty-two degrees Celsius and after fifteen delirious days he could no longer stand the fever and died.
Fate was laughing cruelly at those peasant farmers punished by the war: the news of Giuseppe Fu Vito’s feverish end reached them just as the temperature in town dropped to three degrees below freezing. When the Palmisano women went out on the street to cry, breaking the crisp silence of Christmas Eve, they were met by the coldest temperatures yet that century.
Martino Palmisano (7) died the following March from a bullet wound to the head, in the fifth battle of the Isonzo, a river which by then everyone in the town had learned to place on a map. Most of them had assumed it was a very lovely but very small river in a corner of Italy so far from Bellorotondo that they doubted it was actually part of the same country.
In the autumn of 1916, Stefano (8), Giuseppe Fu Piet (9) and Donato Fu Francesco (10) fell within a matter of a few days. The first was killed by shrapnel from a grenade; the second, by complications from gangrene in one leg; and the third as a result of a heart attack in the midst of battle. All three of them had girlfriends and all three were thinking of getting married as soon as the conflict – quickly becoming a collective insanity that threatened the survival of families across half of Europe – ended. From the day they received the news of this triple tragedy, the three young women in question walked through the streets of Bellorotondo crying over their misfortune. And from that moment on, the town no longer had any doubt that the Palmisanos were cursed by a terrible maledizione. No one could say exactly whether the death of the three cousins in the foothills of the Colline dell’Hermada, the last obstacle to an Italian advance before Trieste, had happened during the seventh, eighth or ninth battle of the Isonzo; they followed one another at a dizzying pace and the line of the front changed position every week. But, after the coincidence of three deaths in a matter of days, the fate of that poor farming family achieved legendary status in Bellorotondo.
Were any more evidence needed that the Palmisanos were plagued by a monstrous curse, it came two months later, at Christmas of 1916. For the second year in a row, tragedy knocked at the family’s door on the most important festival night of the year: as they headed out for Midnight Mass, the news of Giuseppe Di Giovanni’s death (11) reached the town. In late September, the eldest of the Palmisanos had miraculously saved himself from an explosion in a tunnel dug by the Austrians beneath the Italian positions on Monte Cimone, but three months later he had fallen in a skirmish near Stelvio. Giuseppe had been sent to the Alps, to the high-mountain troops, because he was a specialist in digging mine shafts, an essential skill for the strange war that was going on at the Alpine front: instead of attacking on the surface, the Italians and Austrians dug tunnels and placed explosives beneath the enemy positions. Underground, in the bowels of the mountains, Giuseppe was the most skilled of them all, but patrolling outside the tunnels was different – he never felt comfortable marching along snowy paths that were sometimes at more than two thousand metres of altitude, and where he was finally greeted by a stray bullet in a skirmish.
During what remained of that winter and all of the spring of 1917, no more telegrams arrived and the lack of news seemed to contradict the worst portents. But really, the lull was due to the freezing weather that gripped the entire European continent. When the weather improved, the curse reared its head once again. At Pentecost, they learned of the death of Cataldo (12) in Albania, just as it had become an Italian protectorate and hostilities there had officially ceased.
And in the autumn came the disaster at Caporetto: the Isonzo front collapsed, the Italian army retreated across the entire line of the front from the Adriatic to Valsugana, almost at Trento, and more than three hundred men were killed, wounded or taken prisoner by the Austrians. In just one day, 25 October 1917, and just a few kilometres away from each other, Vito (13), Giulio (14) and Angelo Giorgio (15) were killed – all from rifle shots at point-blank range when they were out of ammunition and their officers had fled en masse hours earlier without even giving the order to retreat. All three of them had just been called up, having only turned eighteen the previous spring. When the news of the latest triple tragedy reached Bellorotondo, the town was convinced that not a single Palmisano man would survive the merciless war, or the family curse.
The town had always considered Domenico (16) a solid sort, a happy chap who took things in his stride. The crueller among them treated him like a buffoon and made fun of him, but he never complained because he saw no ill intent in their remarks. Those who didn’t know him were always surprised by his irrepressible smile, which made him seem a fool, but was really just a sign of his guileless contentment. As a boy, at home, he was regularly beaten because he was so easily distracted. The teachers at school also often caned him, due to his inability to concentrate. Eventually, all gave up on him and stopped trying to reform him with either whacks or slaps.
As he grew older, they discovered that he wasn’t as simple as he appeared and that he was a tireless, highly capable worker, particularly in the fields, or among the olive trees: he was strong as an ox; patient as the day was long; and the more he worked, the happier he seemed. In the war he also proved himself. He volunteered for the most dangerous operations, never questioned orders and was never afraid. In fact, the idea of dying never crossed his mind. So when the time came for combat, everyone wanted him by their side. In the evenings, in the barracks, he would think about his grandfather, who had always taken him with him to the olive groves and treated him as he would have treated anyone else. He missed him.
‘Looks like we’ll be heading out to dance again today!’ was all Cambrone, Domenico’s bunkmate, said in greeting when he strode into the barracks after his guard duty. ‘They called the captain to the command post. It looks like the Alpenjäger are preparing another attack before the bad weather hits,’ Cambrone concluded, as he stretched out for a rest.
Domenico had already lost count of the times they’d won or lost on those lousy positions high in the Alps, between Venice and Trento. When he saw Cambrone looking at him from his bunk with a frightened expression, he had no idea of the carnage awaiting them. His bunkmate, however, had noticed some unusual movement on his watch and already sensed that on that morning, 4 December 1917, the assault from the Austrian Alpine battalions wouldn’t be just another run-of-the-mill attack.
‘Let me have a look at your girlfriend for a little while,’ his bunkmate said, his voice trembling in anticipation of the battle.
‘You’re going to wear her out,’ answered Domenico with a nervous laugh. He had bought a postcard of a naked lady in Bari, right before boarding the train that would bring him to the front. After two years at war he knew that woman by heart, and he had shared her with half the company. She was posed completely nude, sitting elegantly on a flowery stool, beside an inviting bed with velvety drapery. She had the body of an angel and she had extended her left arm back elegantly, to make her breasts stand gracefully to attention.
‘Always picture perfect!’ said the boys as they assiduously reviewed the girl’s bosom.
Her hair was wavy black silk. It was just long enough for the ringlets to cover the nape of her neck and a big curl also coiled over one ear. Her face rested gently on her right hand, which lay on her shoulder. She had a sweet gaze, focused on some point beyond the camera’s lens. No one in the whole company had ever seen a girl as lovely as her. They all called her Palmisano’s girlfriend.
When the great grey wave of Austrian Alpine troops arrived, the orders and counter-commands came rapidly, and were increasingly contradictory. Soon it was clear to the Italians that the defence of their position would end in disaster, and they began a fully fledged exodus that only bolstered the already overwhelming victory of the attackers and the extraordinarily high death rate among those fleeing. Domenico, however, defended his position for hours, along with Cambrone and another bunkmate, Campana. The three of them had become inseparable and always fought together on the front line. They retreated only when they saw that they were about to be surrounded, and to their shock they discovered that their commanding officers had long since abandoned their positions.
Fleeing down to the valley, there they found the dregs of the battalion that had fled en masse hours earlier. Campana and Cambrone joined what remained of their company, but Domenico kept walking. After two years of fierce combat on the front line, he’d had enough. He’d decided to go home.
It was complete chaos on the roads, and no one bothered to ask him for his papers. Nor did they check that he had tickets or identification on any of the journeys he made by train. But eight days later, when he reached Bellorotondo, the military police were waiting there to arrest him as a deserter.
The next day, when they were taking him to their headquarters in Bari, a few hours from Bellorotondo, he saw his grandfather for the first time in years, standing on the other side of the avenue.
‘Nonno, Nonno!’ he shouted, unable to comprehend why the guards wouldn’t let him go to his grandfather. The young man seemed crazed, he kept screaming. The older Palmisano couldn’t bear it and turned to go, desperate at not being able to hug his grandson or make him understand what was going on. When Domenico saw his grandfather leaving he let out a scream that echoed in the clear air of that frozen winter morning.
‘Nonno!’
The soldier guarding Domenico rammed his rifle butt into Domenico’s stomach, knocking him out with a second blow to the head. Only then was silence re-established and were they able to get into the car.
The next day he saw his grandfather again at the military court in Bari where he was being tried. He couldn’t understand why his grandfather didn’t speak, but he reasoned that if he was there it meant he still loved him, and he again gave his famously irrepressible smile, which didn’t flag even when the military judge sentenced him to death.
‘Don’t cry, Nonno. The war will be over soon!’ Domenico shouted to him when they pushed him on to the train that was to take him back north, to return him to the custody of the officers of his company. His grandfather watched him from the other side of the platform. It seemed to Domenico that he had shrunk.
The trip back to the mountain plateau was much faster than the route he had taken down to Bellorotondo. Two days after leaving Bari he reached Vicenza, and by the next day they had already taken him to Asiago and from there to the Col del Rosso, where they had sent what was left of the troops decimated in the disaster of 4 December. A new captain quickly assembled the firing squad from the few survivors in Domenico’s unit, including Campana and Cambrone.
When the captain gave the order to fire, the members of the firing squad found themselves faced with Palmisano’s innocent smile – he still didn’t understand what was going on – and they shot into the air.
‘Fire!’ shouted the irate captain for a second time.
Again they intentionally missed their target.
The officer threatened the firing squad with a revolver, but the soldiers stood up to him.
‘For the love of God, Captain …!’ protested Campana. ‘Domenico has saved our lives a thousand times. Less than a month ago, he took out two machine guns that had us cornered in Valbella, all on his own …’
‘Shoot, damnit! Shoot! I am following orders. If you don’t fire immediately, I’ll have the lot of you court-martialled!’
They started to cry and shoot at the same time, and when Domenico collapsed, they could still hear him saying goodbye: ‘I’m tired, Nonno. Take me home.’
Curled up on the ground, he shook violently, the sight sending a shiver down the spine of every soldier watching. Then, finally, he stretched out his legs and stopped twitching. His comrades surrounded him and lowered their heads to bid him farewell respectfully.
Cambrone was the first to break the silence. ‘Son of a bitch!’ he shouted, staring straight at the captain. He started shooting, in a rage, at Domenico’s inert body. And as he fired he thought about the many contemptible officers who had led them from defeat to defeat through the Alps and who had now forced them to execute their best friend, who had died without understanding what was happening to him.
When the circumstances surrounding the death of Domenico Palmisano – that good egg – reached the town, his grandfather hanged himself from an olive tree.
Giuseppe Fu Francesco (17) had convinced himself that nothing more could happen to him, and he spent the night arguing his theory to his fellow soldier on watch as they shared the eagle’s nest from which they had to control that particular Alpine pass. The January full moon lit up a crystal-clear night and the snow of the last few weeks refracted the light, sending it up to all the mountain peaks. It would have been a magnificent sight if not for the fact that Giuseppe was terrified at the piercingly low temperatures that the north wind further sharpened. He had never imagined that the cold could be so painful.
‘If there is divine justice, then I’m untouchable,’ he declared with conviction. ‘At the start of the war we were twenty-one Palmisanos and now there are only nine left! We are protected by the other twelve’s misfortune.’
They had hidden Domenico’s execution from Giuseppe Fu Francesco, and they also hadn’t said anything to him about his other three cousins felled at Caporetto, so he still didn’t know that he was now one of only five survivors; for him the last family death had been Cataldo’s (12). The other young man on watch didn’t answer. When earlier they had been walking to their post, Giuseppe Fu Francesco had realized that his companion for the watch wasn’t much of a talker, so he turned the conversation into a monologue that went on through the entire night. He couldn’t come up with a better way to combat the cold and sleepiness.
When the day began to dawn he said, ‘We can rest easy. They won’t be back today.’
He went over to his companion, who still wasn’t responding. When he grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him to wake him up, the soldier’s body slipped from his hands and fell to the floor of the trench; only then did Giuseppe Fu Francesco notice the dried blood around the wound left by the bullet that had pierced the man’s neck. It must have been from the attack they had fought off the evening before: he’d been talking to a dead man all night long.
He didn’t even know his name. He closed his eyes, crossed himself and looked at the soldier meditatively, the way the officers did during funeral ceremonies. Then he picked up his rifle, slung his rucksack over his shoulder and started to walk down the mountain, because they should have been relieved hours ago. When he reached the camp there was no one there. His unit must have fled in such haste that they hadn’t even alerted them. He continued walking all alone, searching for points of reference between peaks that were completely foreign to him. In Bellorotondo, every hill, gully and bit of terraced land had a familiar name, but here he was lost. Ever since he had been sent to the Alpine front, he’d moved from one mountain to another, but he’d never known their names. Suddenly, he heard someone shout, ‘Halt!’
He had just been taken prisoner by an Austrian patrol.
A week later Giuseppe Fu Francesco reached a prison camp to the east of the small Austrian town of Mauthausen, and he discovered to his horror that the Italian captives there were dying by the thousands in horrible pain and suffering. The guards rationed the food and gave the prisoners only what was sent from their own countries via the Red Cross. The Italian top brass considered those who allowed themselves to be captured cowards and traitors and refused to send them any supplies.
In the camp, he found his cousin Michele (18), who was dying from Spanish influenza. He was one of the more than a hundred thousand Italians who had been taken prisoner in the disaster at Caporetto. Giuseppe Fu Francesco had time only to hug him and close his eyes. A week later, he himself succumbed to starvation, without understanding why his people had abandoned him.
Angelantonio (19), who only had sisters, missed home the most of all of them. And he was the one sent the furthest away, to the Champagne region of France. On the front at the Marne he was so homesick that he started to lose his mind. The Italian soldiers in General Albricci’s 2nd Army Corps had trouble understanding what the hell they were doing there, on a French front. No one had explained to them that after the Caporetto fiasco the Italian Supreme Command had asked the Allies for help: five French and English divisions had come to Italy’s aid and, in return, to symbolize the reciprocity of the alliance, close to forty thousand Italians were sent to Champagne and the Chemin des Dames.
That was how Angelantonio found himself in a hellish trench in the Vrigny forest, near Reims, surrounded by magnificent vineyards, charged with defending Point 240 to the death, as it was bombed non-stop by the German artillery’s howitzers. From his trench, turned to mud by the horribly bad weather, Angelantonio saw columns of civilians evacuating the capital of Champagne, fleeing from the collapse of the cellars where they had taken shelter from the German bombardment since the start of the war. He also saw his trenchmates fall one by one, flattened by shells or poisoned by gas, from which the masks the Italian army provided – merely some gauze soaked in a sodium carbonate solution – were no protection.
Soon he began to display strange behaviour, and around the Feast of Corpus Christi in 1918, he lost his mind. One night when he was on watch and everyone was trying to take advantage of the artillery truce between the two armies to get some rest, he confused the rats running between the sets of barbed wire with an attacking enemy detachment. He ran, shouting, to wake the company. Disconcerted, the Italians and the French, who were sharing a trench, started to shoot at the enemy lines and soon after, the German positions returned fire, without really knowing what was going on. After an hour of exchanging gunfire, in a manner more hysterical than effective, Captain Monfalcone called for them to cease firing.
‘Go back to sleep. I don’t see any movement, and it doesn’t look like they’re preparing an attack.’
The next night, Angelantonio mistook an owl for the covert signs of another surprise attack and he woke the company up again. Half an hour after a fierce shootout, in which no one was killed but the nerves of the soldiers on both sides were shredded, the Italian captain decided again to call for a ceasefire. Calm settled over the Vrigny forest, but few of them were able to get back to sleep.
On the third night, before curling up under his blanket, Captain Monfalcone, a philosophy student from Lucca who was also unsure as to how he’d ended up in Champagne, called Angelantonio over.
‘Look, Palmisano, if you think they’re attacking us, let me know. But unless you want me to have you executed right here, don’t wake the whole company up again.’
The captain hadn’t even closed his eyes before he heard a shout. ‘For Italy!’
He leapt up and saw Angelantonio running, all by himself, towards the enemy positions. Since Angelantonio had been told not to wake the others, even if he thought they were being attacked, he’d decided to launch his own counteroffensive. The German sentries sounded the alarm and when the soldiers saw a single man approaching with his gun drawn, they aimed their weapons, concentrating all their rage on to that madman who wasn’t letting them sleep. They riddled him with bullets. Angelantonio shuddered in a macabre dance, and when the Germans stopped shooting he fell to the ground. An expectant silence hovered over both trenches. Both sides were wondering what would be the next twist in that outlandish succession of events.
‘Thank you!’ shouted Captain Monfalcone to the German trench, in a burst of sincerity. He immediately sensed that he shouldn’t have said it, but it was already too late. He ordered his men back to bed.
‘Tomorrow we’ll try to recover the poor chap’s body. Now let’s try to get some sleep.’
On the night of 29 June 1918, the company of Ignazio (20) – the youngest of the Palmisanos, not yet eighteen – was asleep in a clearing in the woods at the foot of the Col del Rosso, just above the patch of land where six months earlier they had executed poor Domenico. Unaware of his proximity to his brother’s remains, at dawn, he played a decisive role in the reconquering of the highest and most symbolic of the Tre Monti. Ignazio died a hero, victim of a stray bullet just as he was reaching the peak and the Austrians were about to surrender their position.