This place, we felt, was safe enough, for no road reached it, only muletracks twisting down into the green desolate valley.
SILLICO, pictured on the cover of this edition, was remote and extremely parochial, but like many of the mountain villages it was linked by emigration to the wider complex world. Two figures flit across Medd’s stage in his telling of the brief stay there after leaving Roggio, bit players in his drama but of central significance to the conflicted local history of Resistance and Civil War.
The village priest arrived. He was the real organiser behind this help to escaped prisoners in Sillico.
Don Guiglemo Sessi, a native of Massa Carrera beyond the mountains, for the whole of his life the priest of this hamlet of 300 souls and its tiny neighbour Capraia, was thirty-six in 1943 and already ten years a priest to the shepherds, sharecroppers and few landowners of his parish. A cultured man who took a degree in literature from Pisa University and knew the intellectuals of Lucca, he was also a stubborn orthodox Catholic and an ideological monarchist who nevertheless had little time for the present King. Neither openly for nor against the Fascist regime, when it fell he followed the dictates of his faith and stood with the persecuted and the refugees: sheltering Jews, political dissidents and Allied escapers. Don Sessi’s choice would cost him ecclesiastical preferment after the war, when he refused his Bishop’s request to testify in favour of the Fascist governor of Lucca at the latter’s trial.
Two months after Simms and Medd had passed through Sillico, Don Sessi was arrested for helping escapers but was released on the intercession of senior Churchmen. He returned immediately to his old activities and in 1944 developed close contacts with one of the famous partisan commanders, ‘Pippo’ Ducchesi, to the extent that a German patrol called on the priest to ensure their safe passage up and down the mountain.
His luck nearly ran out in early 1945 when a Fascist-German patrol arrived to arrest him. Such an order in the febrile closing days of Fascism in Italy could well have meant death. Hostages were being taken and shot in reprisal for partisan attacks.
He convinced the German soldier detailed to escort him that he had to collect a stout pair of shoes from the presbytery. The German must have been either very well disposed or very dozy. Telling the soldier to wait in the main room, Don Sessi went into the kitchen, from there to the church, from the church to the street and to the woods. A day later he crossed the frontlines to safety.
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About nine o’clock, while we were digesting our supper over the kitchen fire, our good lady’s husband walked in. He was in business in Lucca… He was a typical Fascist, the hard bony face, the sleek black hair, the smooth blue suit with overpadded shoulders. We recognised him at once for one of those cold ruthless types whose object was to keep in well with both sides and swim with whatever current caught him.
Mario Bianchi was indeed a Fascist, and in 1944, despite already having helped many escapers, would join the ‘Black Brigade’ (Brigada Nera) of Fascist volunteers formed to fight the partisans. His name is bound up with the atrocity at Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, some 8 miles to the west of Sillico, of September 23rd 1944, when a party of Brigada Nera, high on alcohol and fear, took revenge on innocent bystanders for a botched partisan attack on their billets which had wounded seven. Eight civilians were taken by the Fascists from their daily work and summarily shot down.
Bianchi was known in Sillico as a mild man. Eyewitnesses to one of the murders on the September 23rd described him as refusing to join in shooting at a corpse and there is no account of him taking part in the killings. He was nevertheless a volunteer member of Brigada Nera and he was there. This was enough to seal his fate.
Against this familiar black and white stereotype must be set his standing in Sillico and Capraia where, a graduate teacher with some knowledge of medicine, he was known for his readiness to go out of his way in time and money to help fellow villagers and to be someone who ‘would not hurt a fly’. His loyalty to his village seems to have been unquestionable, his practical help to Allied escapers demonstrable – how harsh is Medd’s judgement of him?
Towards the end of 1943 Bianchi had his house by one account ‘full of English’ and denounced the German reward offered for turning escaped POWs in. A veteran of the Fascist March on Rome, he was nevertheless arrested and interrogated. When released, he opened his house again to escapers and yet, as we see above, he was present at the murders at Castelnuovo.
Immediately at the end of the war he was required, as an ex-Fascist, to report for compulsory reconstruction work. He was abducted from that work by ‘persons unknown’ and never seen again.
Like several others, his body lies undiscovered to this day in the chestnut woods of the mountains, mute testimony to the trauma that did not stop with peace.
Andrew Adams
April 2019