For all the vividity of my imagination, I cannot truly know what it would have been like to fight in the Italian Civil War. A standard history textbook does nothing to further my understanding of what fighting in that terrible war within a war would have been like, for while it is filled with numerical facts and data, it does not speak to the realities of fighting in war. War is a collection of the countless motivations and actions of every soldier, nurse, and civilian involved in the conflict. For that reason, to truly understand what it must have been like to fight in the Italian Resistance, one of the least unified entities fighting in the Second World War, it is vital to read individual accounts of the conflict. Reading a singular account
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To Calvino, when he saw the clothing of other partisans, it was a strange experience, “when you see how many different things you are all wearing, clothes of every color, odd bits of uniforms, but how recognizable and alike we are, too, the same tears where our clothes tend to come apart” (‘Memories of a Battle’, The Road to San Giovanni, 82). In fact, one of his sharpest memories from April 25th, 1945 was when he was “limping because of an abscess on my foot (from the moment the frost had hardened and crumpled the leather of my boots, my feet had constantly been plagued by sores)” (Calvino, ‘Where Was I on 25th April 1945’, Hermit in Paris, 176). The partisans’ clothing is not even discussed in Partisan Warfare, although there are several photographs and artistic renditions of Italian partisans’ clothing. The latter are a far cry from what Italo Calvino described. In Appendix A, the clothes are clean and well put together, with no holes or stains. The photographs might be easier to consider accurate, but there is still a host of issues with them. The quality in most is too grainy to see whether or not there are any tears, but even so, the majority were taken while the soldiers were posed, not while marching or fighting. Despite being able to see physically see them, these photographs do not have the same level of desperate detail …show more content…
The majority of his essays are only a handful of pages long and tend to involve more philosophical rumination than descriptions of day-to-day life in war. Part of this may due to the fact that Calvino wrote about the war as a memory test — “almost thirty years later, now that I’ve finally decided to haul in memory’s nets and see whats inside” (Calvino, ’Memories of a Battle’, The Road to San Giovanni, 78). The longest work he wrote on World War II, Into the War, takes place four years before he joined the Garibaldi brigades. This is rather strange, as most other partisans who went on to tell their stories discussed their actual activities in the war. In 200,000 Heroes, Leon Weckstein — an American GI who fought alongside many Italian partisans in World War II— is far more specific. Weckstein tells stories of “an incident that led to to the narrow escape of his Partisan associate” (109), of battle tactics and lost friends. It is vastly different from Calvino’s internal crisis on whether he is “saving the past or destroying it” (Calvino, ‘Memories of a Battle’, The Road to San Giovanni,
To Calvino, when he saw the clothing of other partisans, it was a strange experience, “when you see how many different things you are all wearing, clothes of every color, odd bits of uniforms, but how recognizable and alike we are, too, the same tears where our clothes tend to come apart” (‘Memories of a Battle’, The Road to San Giovanni, 82). In fact, one of his sharpest memories from April 25th, 1945 was when he was “limping because of an abscess on my foot (from the moment the frost had hardened and crumpled the leather of my boots, my feet had constantly been plagued by sores)” (Calvino, ‘Where Was I on 25th April 1945’, Hermit in Paris, 176). The partisans’ clothing is not even discussed in Partisan Warfare, although there are several photographs and artistic renditions of Italian partisans’ clothing. The latter are a far cry from what Italo Calvino described. In Appendix A, the clothes are clean and well put together, with no holes or stains. The photographs might be easier to consider accurate, but there is still a host of issues with them. The quality in most is too grainy to see whether or not there are any tears, but even so, the majority were taken while the soldiers were posed, not while marching or fighting. Despite being able to see physically see them, these photographs do not have the same level of desperate detail …show more content…
The majority of his essays are only a handful of pages long and tend to involve more philosophical rumination than descriptions of day-to-day life in war. Part of this may due to the fact that Calvino wrote about the war as a memory test — “almost thirty years later, now that I’ve finally decided to haul in memory’s nets and see whats inside” (Calvino, ’Memories of a Battle’, The Road to San Giovanni, 78). The longest work he wrote on World War II, Into the War, takes place four years before he joined the Garibaldi brigades. This is rather strange, as most other partisans who went on to tell their stories discussed their actual activities in the war. In 200,000 Heroes, Leon Weckstein — an American GI who fought alongside many Italian partisans in World War II— is far more specific. Weckstein tells stories of “an incident that led to to the narrow escape of his Partisan associate” (109), of battle tactics and lost friends. It is vastly different from Calvino’s internal crisis on whether he is “saving the past or destroying it” (Calvino, ‘Memories of a Battle’, The Road to San Giovanni,