Noi non ci saremo - An Italian spin-off of "Protect and Survive: A Timeline"

Chapter III: Seize the day
Part 1



"O quando non vogliamo incrinare il meraviglioso equilibrio di una odiosità senza fine, di una felicità senza il peggio.
E' vero che non vogliamo pagare la colpa di non avere colpe e che preferiamo morire piuttosto che abbassare la faccia."


Claudio Lolli, 1976



The unexpected appearance on TV screens of the signature tune of TG1, in simultaneous broadcast around the one PM of 21th February, had outright caught the attention of all the Italians (or at least of the ones that still were receiving power supply and having a working television set); the composed yet whiter than pale face of Paolo Frajese and the big card on his right, depicting a stylized drawing of a mushroom cloud overlayed on a map of Western Germany, even before the newscaster could have started speaking, had instantly chilled their blood in the vein; the news of the first use of a nuclear device in war since 1945 had simply blown up their hearts and minds. Strokes had occurred in elders or heart condition suffering persons, while suicides (including several homicide-suicide events among married, unmarried and sometimes formerly married couples, even if for some of them could have been more proper talking about jealousy or revenge) would have took away more than 1,200 lives in less than two hours. The rampage had then skyrocketed to a level beyond wildest nightmares, from "Beirut" straight to "Hell". In every major and minor road of the country, congested by anything motor-propelled to a virtual paralysis; in the metropolis as in of tiny villages, plunged into open panic by a now seemingly unavoidable fate; in local political residences, besieged by crowds no less menacing than atomic warheads: people madly punching, kicking, choking, cudgeling, knifing, shooting, running over other people, or frantically selling, buying, stealing, looting, burning things or just idling, praying, crying, screaming, puking, wetting or shitting themselves.

Too many factors beyond responsibility and possibilities of the corps and the agencies involved in civil defense had come between them and their goals: lack of time to coordinate multiple (often contradictory) demands, insufficient facilities, limited available stocks of food, water and specific medical supplies, rising difficulty in transportation and movements in the midst of a collective mayhem; nevertheless they lavished a honorable, genuine effort to at least "do something". In the previous days publications including instructions on how to deal with nuclear attacks had been distributed, together with radio and TV transmissions carrying the same message; a small number of shelters had been drawn out whenever public administration buildings had been found having cleared underground levels; camps for future refugees had been set up in the countryside wherever, according to military, chances of targeting would have been rated as "not likely"; an embryonic stage of dispersion in guarded storehouses for critical assets had been reached.

For those already sealed off, in a basement or in a garage, in a church or in the stock room of a shop, the human kaleidoscope of coping with a growing overwhelming stress had just began to be in full swing.



Alghero-Fertilia Airport - Fertilia (SS), Italy
02:07 PM CET, 02/21/84




<< Onorevoli colleghi, if the common will of the Presidente della Repubblica and the Presidente del Consiglio is to receive clarifications about GLADIO, I do not see what could be wrong with it: as I already said, SISMI should have a documentation able to give all the answers needed>> Andreotti said with a surreal calm to the other Ministri, before turning his gaze to the Gladiatori and quietly continuing <<Therefore I believe that you don't have anything to fear by going along with the Carabinieri of Generale Ducali to your barracks.>>

<< Wait a minute: Francesco is right: neither you, Giulio, nor you, Bettino, are in charge of the Ministero della Difesa>> Spadolini spoke up. << While I agree that we should delve in the question, including, also hum...possible authorizations passed through my office, I suggest to avoid rash measure susceptible to create situations detrimental for everyone>>

<< What's your game, Giovanni? Do not constrain me to dismiss you right now from the government.>> Craxi retorted, openly ignoring the ongoing murmuring between Andreotti and some other members of it.

<< If you do this I will withdraw the PRI from the cabinet>>

<< Ah, what a great loss! Who do you have to withdraw, apart from yourself? Visentini? Mammì? Why not Susanna Agnelli too, provided that you know where that old aunt is ended up.>>

<< Are you going to boot out anyone who don't agree with you and your gang? Do you want also to put up a dictatorship in the process? With you as Duce and the Presidente as the King? Maybe Repubblica was right about...>>

<< Onorevole Spadolini.>> broke in Pertini << I do not allow you to give rise to such horrible comparisons in front of me, I personally fought all of my life Fascism and Fascists, like these bloody thugs standing there with guns aimed at us>>

The Presidente della Repubblica got through the Corazzieri and said them to not follow him. He walked to the middle of the first line of Gladiatori, where a well-maintained middle age man, sporting grizzled mustache and holding a sub-machine gun, was primly staring at him.

<< You thought to be good enough to plot a new coup and executing it better than in 1964 or in 1970, isn't it?>>

The man didn't blink.

<< With all the due respect, Presidente, you are just talking nonsense. I am the Generale Galli, Direttore of the SISMI's 7a Divisione and GLADIO structure, of course. There are no Fascist among our men, let alone plotters; what we have done until today was exactly what we were assigned to: fighting with unconventional warfare techniques against the enemy in the occupied zones of the country, exfiltrations of civilian and military personnel of national interests isolated or captured behind enemy lines, gathering of intelligence about intentions of Warsaw Pact's armies. Yesterday I was compelled by Generale Calboni to suspend all the operations and relocate the whole organization here, allow me to say without any real operative justification: but I am an officer and I execute superior orders without discussing exactly as I require from my subordinates. What I am no more inclined to tolerate is having politicians doing their silly games while we are in a damned world war, shouting third-rate fabrications good for Paese Sera or Il Manifesto.>>

<< Generale Galli, don't delude yourself into thinking that I could be afraid by your Xª MAS-style bravado. I asked a wide ranging inquiry on this organization, if you and your men are not involved in any wrongdoing you do not have to fear an inquiry.>>

<< There's no need of an inquiry, Presidente. As Generale Calboni and the Ministro Andreotti just said, probably trying to be in your good graces, you simply have to ask the paperwork, signed by all the Presidenti del Consiglio and Ministri, including the Onorevoli behind you, during more than thirty years of the structure. For the last time, I still do not get the point of this farce and, for God, Ducali and Mendler, why on Earth you are you forcing me to choose between betray our oath preposterously surrendering to politics' wickedness or have again Italians shooting Italians as our father did in the last war?>>

The mentioned officers remained mute, looking as not knowing which way to turn; Andreotti positioned himself between Pertini and Galli, outwardly indifferent to the closeness to the barrel of the Direttore's MAB.

<< I think that all we need now is to calm us down and smooth our not irreconcilable divergences down; there is no need to add further upheaval to the situation we share here, after all. I am not trying to supersede the authority of anyone, but instead I am trying to suggest that we are saying more or less the same thing.>>

He addressed for a moment Craxi and Spadolini.

<< Onorevoli, you're both right: the cabinet has to work together under direction of Presidente del Consiglio but without renouncing to interdepartmental dialogue and avoiding precipitate decisions. >>

He patted Pertini and Galli's shoulders and kept an humble, affable tone.

<< Presidente, Generale: this is a very stressful time for everyone and in a surge of anger it's possible to go beyond our real intentions. Sandro, you have my guarantee that in the documents I am going to show you later, in a safer place as Onorevole Cossiga wisely suggested, you will find exhaustive answers about GLADIO, believe me; Generale, the Carabinieri that will escort us back to your and -from now on- our accommodation are not going to arrest you, quite the opposite: they will cooperate with your men as they ever made.>>

Smile appeared on his face as he finally addressed Cossiga.

<< And let me say it, Francesco: Presidente was right too, we are lucky to not being a military dictatorship; unlike our Generale Galli you don't look very good in uniform!>>

Some giggling happened, weapons were slowly downed; following a mostly non-verbal exchange, it was agreed to put off any further talks, even if some of the protagonists were far from satisfied by this truce. Politicians and military boarded their respective vehicles, headed for Torre Poglina: excited discussions or under breath murmurs continued in the backseats; in one of them a worldly-wise, ferocious DC's Segretario Regionale lectured, with an heavy trasteverino accent, a fresh-faced, clerical-looking staffer

<< See and learn, kid: Giulio has politically knocked out Pertini, Craxi, Spadolini and maybe even Cossiga with a masterstroke. In the eyes of those present they are no more "the most loved President", "the great modernizer", "the honest patriot" or "the painstaking notary": they have become an old crazy geezer, a boastful tyrant, a petty hack, a ridiculous army-loving plotter. I don't know what the fuck will happen now with all this stuff about bombs, missiles etcetera, but I know for sure that the power, the real power, is going to be in his hands soon. Damn, during wartime and without firing a bullet.>>

The following belly laugh and the sharky look of his teeth petrified the young man.



Brescia-Ghedi Airport, Ghedi (BS), Italy
02:07 PM CET, 02/21/84




Three rounds burst into the back of Ravelli's skull tossing hair and grey matter in the air while a gush spurted out his open mouth; the body fell forward, and despite making some quick steps towards the rear, Foster was grounded by the corpse of the Colonnello. Blood was running from the bullet holes and the lips onto the jacket of the Major. The ferrous smell was tang, the stain reached shirt collar.

No one cared to think about the origin of the shots: instinct pulled triggers before brain could hold fingers.

A disastrous gunfight started between Italian and American forces. The latter were retreating inside the command post building shooting back and trying to radio call for help while the sections assigned to protect the vault attempted to break their encirclement attacking from behind. Many VAM conscripts weren't familiar with firearms at all, Carabinieri took and inflicted an heavier toll: in the squelchy soil, lashed by rain, died more than twenty men.

The squadron commander got rid of Ravelli's body and got the entrance trudging on the concrete: he ran to his desk and ducked under it, reached the phone and was about to dial COMFIVEATAF's number when suddenly he had a second thought.

This is beyond folly, unless they had already...My God, if so there is no time to lose.

He could not trust headquarters in Italy, he needed to talk with no less than Bruxelles.


Continue...

 
Mario, for an Italian remembering a little of the '80s (though I was a child) your work is monumental. As far as I read is the best and Italian specific timelines. I'm still wading through Protect and Survive TL (I'm at regicide ... and I can't get it) and the other spin-offs. I want to reread all your post from the begining as all the details are overwelming (as well the easter eggs, like Fantozzi references). Where did you get all these specifics with the military, the politics, and glaudio?

I really hope you continue on. Do you have any ideas on which direction you will be taking? Do you think to limit yourself only to the politics or expand it to the italian society?

I think Italy and its society in the Protect and Survive T-L will be extremely intresting. I think the North (especially North-east and the rest Padan valley) will be hit hard. Alpine regions would probably be more survivable but wind up in the Swiss sphere of influence. Rest of Italy will hopefully not hit as hard as U.K. and France, especially there are many small cities unlikely to be hit that may become self dependent: Forlì, Piacenza, Perugia, Pesaro, Arezzo, Terni (though steel works there may make it a target, but if spared you have a working steel works and hydroelectric plant), Viterbo, Aquila, Pistoia, Lucca, Massa, Foggia, Lecce/Brindisi, BAT (Barletta, Andria Trani), Siracusa, etc.
I thinking especially in the red qualirateral: Marche, Umbria, Tuscany, part of Romagna (but also Ambruzzo and N. Latium). It is actually a contiguos regions with strong civil background. Politicaly leaning may make them at odds with Glaudio and the surviving goverment.
The south is more complicated, more NATO bases, less civil sense, and organized crime.

I think Italy, with all it's disadvantages (no planning, a goverment that is more a hindrance than help, internal divisions, disorganization, weak and ineffetive military) has also some advantages when the dust settles:
* As said many small (100K) cities. Many with strong sense of civil local goverment.
* Good agriculture and fertile, fasts crop (you plant now and reap in months), sturdy crops like olive culture, also emergency food like castagne ad ghiande.
* Free fall acqueducts (no power needed, Rome was from the fall of Rome to renaisance just one surviving aqueduct Aqua Marcia I think). Hydroelectric plans. As Earth abides free fall acqueducts and hydroelectric are the most resiliant infrastructure, the first working for hundreds of years the later even decades with none to small maintenance.
* As mentioned, the Carabinieri make an excellent territorial police. Not heavily politicized, local working knowledge. Actually they could be a counterbalance to a renewed Comuni. Colaborating while keeping them in check.
All these, make me think an alternative road for recovery more based on local institutions rather than central goverment (and actually comming at odds with it).

Did you try to make a list or study of hit cities? As mentioned I did some imagination. Military bases, large cities, main infrastruncture (ports and airports), industry would probably be targetted. I got some ideas and like to help you. I'm not posting now for length and time. Reply or PM me so we can put down a list.

Sei un grande,
Dionisio I, tiranno di Siracusa
 
Last edited:
Bentornato.
I'll add here as an interlude to Mario's work (hich'll remain the main narrative, as of political and military effects) a chapter of my writing titled "Vacanze all'inferno" (Holiday in Hell). It'll be a narrative about the struggle for survival of a mixed Northern-Southern Italian family seeking refuge from the end of their world.

Francesco wasn't a man prone to optimism. Since his childhood the basic facts of life had shown him that everything that could conceivably go wrong, probably would. By 12, he was an orphan. His father, a Communist, and, together with the priest, the only resident intellectual in his home town of *Castromolese, had been killed by a nephew of the former Fascist "podestà" and current turncoat DC representative, a couple years after WWII had ended, following a stupid political argument. Shot in the leg, he died by blood loss; Francesco's last remembrance of his father was him, already on the table where a medicine student friend of his was trying to stop the profuse arterial bleeding, giving the young boy of 4 a malt candy and then sending him away sternly. His son wasn't to see him die. Eight years later his mother, a schoolteacher with little time for her very children (a son and two daughters, one older, one younger than Francesco), had died in a tragic, absurd truck accident on a winding mountain road; and this in a region where in 1956 most moved still on the mule, rather than by any kind of engine.
Francesco had grown up with his maternal uncle, Ciro, and her fiancee and later wife, Nunziata. Then he went away to Potenza for study, at the Ragioneria (*professional institute for the formation of clerks and accountants). There he graduated with honors, among the best, while doing odd jobs on summers to help support his sisters, that by then lived with him and other students. He had managed in the end to emigrate, first to Rome, then to the northern town of Busto Arsizio where he evn got a local redhead wife. Not so easily: the local preist made problems, sayoing out loud that such marriages between Lombards and Southerens "wouldn't endure". He and his wife, aptly named Lucia, had to marry in a nearby town. Her parents, simple people, former textile workers, didn't make any difficulty. Two sons, Nicola and Matteo, had made the marriage, if not happy (Francesco had more and more concluded to be ill-adapted to be a family man), at least solid and enduring.

Then, in what was a mostly quiet life with some safeties - home, family, a job in a bank for a decent petit-bourgeois wage, playing Goriziana billiards in bars winning some prize here and there, having one month paid vacations at the seaside in Liguria and the perspective of old age pension when around 55 - came alarming news from outside. An avid reader of science fiction since youth, he had an idea of what nuclear war could entail. And when sabre-rattling between USSR and USA escalated in the fall on 1983, he watched tv news with growing concern. He had never liked the US, masters of his own country since when they had came as "liberators" during the war. He despised the Soviets, too; years of reading Readers' Digest "Selezione" had exposed even his hard-headed leftism, kept down just enough to avoid been singled out and kcked from work, to heathy doses of biased if real truth about that country and its repression of basic freedoms. Knowing what men sat in the centers of power in Moscow and Washington made him nervous. So one night around Christmas 1983 he spoke to his wife gravely and quietly, in bed as always when touching sensitive subject.
"If this gets worse, yu'll have to get out of here" he had said. "Not a stone will remain in case of war here. My home town, even if I haven't been there for years, is reasonably safe. My uncle and auntie Nunziata are till there, and have space to host you in the event. I've phoned them yesterday, they confirmed me about that". At first, Lucia was dismissive. Anyway, by April there would also be the seaside home they rented six months each year, at Varigotti in Liguria... "Don't know if we can make up to then, and remember that a dozen kilometers up in the mountains from Varigotti there's a NATO base, most secret stuff. I'm sure the Soviets will target it, who knows. I didn't ask my uncle and aunt to host you, it was they who told me to send you and the boys down there if thing get hot" he insisted, whispering under the blankets not to be heard by the sons sleeping in their room a few meters aside.
Lucia, a housewife by choice since giving birth to Matteo, had had a much quieter and lucky life than her husband, on the whole, especially as a child. Some medical problems of her young sons and the recent death of her aunt Giuseppina, a second mother to her, who had died a few weeks before after her third heart attack, had been troubling, but hadn't shaken her optimism. She couldn't believe that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki - she too had seen the images - someone could be so stupid to wage another real war. She too remembered when Americans had arrived in Busto, when she, a child of 3, had seen on the street the big trucks, the tank with the big gun, and her first Negro man, an army chaplain who, captured by her smile, had fondled her red hair saying unintelligible words and gave her a candy before raising her up in her arms to the amusement of other soldiers. Her older sisters had ran away in fear screaming that the Black Man kidnapped her! Was it possible that people who had been so nice as these Americans was now a danger to mankind with their weapons? The assumption was troubling. And if war with those despicable Soviets came, and the Atom Bomb was used, what would be of her children...?
It wasn't until February that she had resigned to follow her husband's advice, which had by then become a peremptory order to leave Busto Arsizio for the south ASAP. he would obviosuly remain to carry on work as usual. As if the world didn't seem headed for destruction. He would find a way south, he assured (while privately thinking he would not). The family separated without much visible drama at Valentine's Day, 1984. A date without meaning for a couple scarcely into romance since long, whose major common tie were their children. Lucia took with self reluctant, nervous 15-years old Nicola and frightened and sensitive 9-years old Matteo, a physically very frail if extremely bright boy, and after a last kiss to her husband, went to the family car, an Opel Manta. There she ans the elder boy crammed an immense amount of baggage, mostly canned food accurately hoarded in the last two months. She then turned the key. It would be a long, long voyage down to *Castromolese, she knew the road having already been there twice since she had married, but in very different circumstances. It would be a difficult trip down the back of the Italian Boot, with the Adriatica highway already jammed by hundreds of thousand of people of Southern descent living in the North who had had the same idea: fleeing down. Far from the possibility of actual war, far from the areas most likely to be hit by the fiery mushrooms of death. It wouldn't be in less than 12 hours, at night, that mother and sons reached the ancient little town, once of Frederick II's favorites southern castles, now only bearing the marks of centuries of isolation, neglect and agricultural poverty within its rolling hills and modest fields. Midnight that it was or not, Ciro and Nunziata were there with their only son, a bearded 30-something also called Francesco, for a brief wordless embrace and a kiss to the boys. The eyes of the couple and their pale faces spoke of a mortal fear.
 
Now this is excellent news. Good to see an update, and impressive writing to boot!:)

Thank you. It took very long, mainly because I write slowly and moreover I do not have much time to spare for this. I appreciate your work with "Land of the Sad Songs", Cold War Finland politics -are at the same time- one of the most neglected and one of the most interesting fields of modern history; let me also say that the multimedia approach -i.e. mixing interviews, fictional textbooks etc.- used through the story is very catchy, so I hope to not bore people with my plain narrative.


Hi Mario, good to see your work again...and good portrait of the skill of Andreotti.

Hi to you, Luke: Andreotti was an heavyweight in the art of leaving burned out positions in order to secure new ones, so I had little to invent.

FORZA MARIO!!!!! Welcome back!!! :)


Keep it up, Mario!:)

Mario, so glad to see you back. :D

You are all welcome, as I already said I'm sorry for my elephantine pace.

Mario, for an Italian remembering a little of the '80s (though I was a child) your work is monumental. As far as I read is the best and Italian specific timelines. I'm still wading through Protect and Survive TL (I'm at regicide ... and I can't get it) and the other spin-offs. I want to reread all your post from the begining as all the details are overwelming (as well the easter eggs, like Fantozzi references). Where did you get all these specifics with the military, the politics, and glaudio?

I really hope you continue on. Do you have any ideas on which direction you will be taking? Do you think to limit yourself only to the politics or expand it to the italian society?

I think Italy and its society in the Protect and Survive T-L will be extremely intresting. I think the North (especially North-east and the rest Padan valley) will be hit hard. Alpine regions would probably be more survivable but wind up in the Swiss sphere of influence. Rest of Italy will hopefully not hit as hard as U.K. and France, especially there are many small cities unlikely to be hit that may become self dependent: Forlì, Piacenza, Perugia, Pesaro, Arezzo, Terni (though steel works there may make it a target, but if spared you have a working steel works and hydroelectric plant), Viterbo, Aquila, Pistoia, Lucca, Massa, Foggia, Lecce/Brindisi, BAT (Barletta, Andria Trani), Siracusa, etc.
I thinking especially in the red qualirateral: Marche, Umbria, Tuscany, part of Romagna (but also Ambruzzo and N. Latium). It is actually a contiguos regions with strong civil background. Politicaly leaning may make them at odds with Glaudio and the surviving goverment.
The south is more complicated, more NATO bases, less civil sense, and organized crime.

I think Italy, with all it's disadvantages (no planning, a goverment that is more a hindrance than help, internal divisions, disorganization, weak and ineffetive military) has also some advantages when the dust settles:
* As said many small (100K) cities. Many with strong sense of civil local goverment.
* Good agriculture and fertile, fasts crop (you plant now and reap in months), sturdy crops like olive culture, also emergency food like castagne ad ghiande.
* Free fall acqueducts (no power needed, Rome was from the fall of Rome to renaisance just one surviving aqueduct Aqua Marcia I think). Hydroelectric plans. As Earth abides free fall acqueducts and hydroelectric are the most resiliant infrastructure, the first working for hundreds of years the later even decades with none to small maintenance.
* As mentioned, the Carabinieri make an excellent territorial police. Not heavily politicized, local working knowledge. Actually they could be a counterbalance to a renewed Comuni. Colaborating while keeping them in check.
All these, make me think an alternative road for recovery more based on local institutions rather than central goverment (and actually comming at odds with it).

Did you try to make a list or study of hit cities? As mentioned I did some imagination. Military bases, large cities, main infrastruncture (ports and airports), industry would probably be targetted. I got some ideas and like to help you. I'm not posting now for length and time. Reply or PM me so we can put down a list.

Sei un grande,
Dionisio I, tiranno di Siracusa

A new reader, that's great. I hope you, international friends of mine, will forgive me for switching to Italian language in order to better address some points.

Grazie mille per i complimenti, in effetti non sono molte le storie "contemporanee" sull'Italia, che solitamente trova spazio -nella sezione post 1900- quasi esclusivamente in cronologie che rigurdano le due guerre mondiali (una eccezione di altissimo livello è Fear, Loathing and Gumbo di Drew).

Le informazioni di carattere militare e politico (Gladio inclusa) sono state ottenute in maggioranza da una ricerca lunga ma -almeno per me- molto interessante su materiale cartaceo oppure cartaceo-e-digitalizzato dell'epoca, a volte di mia proprietà altre volte reperito in biblioteche ed archivi pubblici; testi di una epoca successiva e calibrate consultazioni di siti internet hanno sicuramente aiutato molto a completare il quadro.

Le mie intenzioni narrative sono abbastanza ben definite, e naturalmente nel corso degli eventi successivi alle fasi finali del "confronto" ci sarà spazio per approfondire le dinamiche della "nuova" società italiana.

Qualche osservazione che in realtà è anche un po' anticipazione: ho già una lista, con tanto di mappa regione per regione, che al 99% rappresenterà esattamente cosa sarà colpito da chi e con quale potenza. Per ora è riservatissima :)

Diciamo che l'enfasi da parte dei Sovietici sarà sulle strutture dell'Alleanza Atlantica e sul dispositivo militare italiano, ma va da sé che data la natura del conflitto in diversi casi ciò non farà molta differenza. Ci saranno sorprese sia in positivo che negativo, intendendo con ciò che qualche località sarà "graziata" e qualche altra "colpita per sbaglio", ma sempre restando fermamente nel verosimile.

Il rapporto periferia-centro in senso amministrativo non credo si risolverà in una balcanizzazione della penisola, diciamo che ho già delle idee e propendo maggiormente per situazioni simili (con le dovute specificità) a quelle
intraviste nelle storie dedicate agli altri paesi europei.

A presto!

Bentornato.
I'll add here as an interlude to Mario's work (hich'll remain the main narrative, as of political and military effects) a chapter of my writing titled "Vacanze all'inferno" (Holiday in Hell). It'll be a narrative about the struggle for survival of a mixed Northern-Southern Italian family seeking refuge from the end of their world.

Francesco wasn't a man prone to optimism. Since his childhood the basic facts of life had shown him that everything that could conceivably go wrong, probably would. By 12, he was an orphan. His father, a Communist, and, together with the priest, the only resident intellectual in his home town of *Castromolese, had been killed by a nephew of the former Fascist "podestà" and current turncoat DC representative, a couple years after WWII had ended, following a stupid political argument. Shot in the leg, he died by blood loss; Francesco's last remembrance of his father was him, already on the table where a medicine student friend of his was trying to stop the profuse arterial bleeding, giving the young boy of 4 a malt candy and then sending him away sternly. His son wasn't to see him die. Eight years later his mother, a schoolteacher with little time for her very children (a son and two daughters, one older, one younger than Francesco), had died in a tragic, absurd truck accident on a winding mountain road; and this in a region where in 1956 most moved still on the mule, rather than by any kind of engine.
Francesco had grown up with his maternal uncle, Ciro, and her fiancee and later wife, Nunziata. Then he went away to Potenza for study, at the Ragioneria (*professional institute for the formation of clerks and accountants). There he graduated with honors, among the best, while doing odd jobs on summers to help support his sisters, that by then lived with him and other students. He had managed in the end to emigrate, first to Rome, then to the northern town of Busto Arsizio where he evn got a local redhead wife. Not so easily: the local preist made problems, sayoing out loud that such marriages between Lombards and Southerens "wouldn't endure". He and his wife, aptly named Lucia, had to marry in a nearby town. Her parents, simple people, former textile workers, didn't make any difficulty. Two sons, Nicola and Matteo, had made the marriage, if not happy (Francesco had more and more concluded to be ill-adapted to be a family man), at least solid and enduring.

Then, in what was a mostly quiet life with some safeties - home, family, a job in a bank for a decent petit-bourgeois wage, playing Goriziana billiards in bars winning some prize here and there, having one month paid vacations at the seaside in Liguria and the perspective of old age pension when around 55 - came alarming news from outside. An avid reader of science fiction since youth, he had an idea of what nuclear war could entail. And when sabre-rattling between USSR and USA escalated in the fall on 1983, he watched tv news with growing concern. He had never liked the US, masters of his own country since when they had came as "liberators" during the war. He despised the Soviets, too; years of reading Readers' Digest "Selezione" had exposed even his hard-headed leftism, kept down just enough to avoid been singled out and kcked from work, to heathy doses of biased if real truth about that country and its repression of basic freedoms. Knowing what men sat in the centers of power in Moscow and Washington made him nervous. So one night around Christmas 1983 he spoke to his wife gravely and quietly, in bed as always when touching sensitive subject.
"If this gets worse, yu'll have to get out of here" he had said. "Not a stone will remain in case of war here. My home town, even if I haven't been there for years, is reasonably safe. My uncle and auntie Nunziata are till there, and have space to host you in the event. I've phoned them yesterday, they confirmed me about that". At first, Lucia was dismissive. Anyway, by April there would also be the seaside home they rented six months each year, at Varigotti in Liguria... "Don't know if we can make up to then, and remember that a dozen kilometers up in the mountains from Varigotti there's a NATO base, most secret stuff. I'm sure the Soviets will target it, who knows. I didn't ask my uncle and aunt to host you, it was they who told me to send you and the boys down there if thing get hot" he insisted, whispering under the blankets not to be heard by the sons sleeping in their room a few meters aside.
Lucia, a housewife by choice since giving birth to Matteo, had had a much quieter and lucky life than her husband, on the whole, especially as a child. Some medical problems of her young sons and the recent death of her aunt Giuseppina, a second mother to her, who had died a few weeks before after her third heart attack, had been troubling, but hadn't shaken her optimism. She couldn't believe that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki - she too had seen the images - someone could be so stupid to wage another real war. She too remembered when Americans had arrived in Busto, when she, a child of 3, had seen on the street the big trucks, the tank with the big gun, and her first Negro man, an army chaplain who, captured by her smile, had fondled her red hair saying unintelligible words and gave her a candy before raising her up in her arms to the amusement of other soldiers. Her older sisters had ran away in fear screaming that the Black Man kidnapped her! Was it possible that people who had been so nice as these Americans was now a danger to mankind with their weapons? The assumption was troubling. And if war with those despicable Soviets came, and the Atom Bomb was used, what would be of her children...?
It wasn't until February that she had resigned to follow her husband's advice, which had by then become a peremptory order to leave Busto Arsizio for the south ASAP. he would obviosuly remain to carry on work as usual. As if the world didn't seem headed for destruction. He would find a way south, he assured (while privately thinking he would not). The family separated without much visible drama at Valentine's Day, 1984. A date without meaning for a couple scarcely into romance since long, whose major common tie were their children. Lucia took with self reluctant, nervous 15-years old Nicola and frightened and sensitive 9-years old Matteo, a physically very frail if extremely bright boy, and after a last kiss to her husband, went to the family car, an Opel Manta. There she ans the elder boy crammed an immense amount of baggage, mostly canned food accurately hoarded in the last two months. She then turned the key. It would be a long, long voyage down to *Castromolese, she knew the road having already been there twice since she had married, but in very different circumstances. It would be a difficult trip down the back of the Italian Boot, with the Adriatica highway already jammed by hundreds of thousand of people of Southern descent living in the North who had had the same idea: fleeing down. Far from the possibility of actual war, far from the areas most likely to be hit by the fiery mushrooms of death. It wouldn't be in less than 12 hours, at night, that mother and sons reached the ancient little town, once of Frederick II's favorites southern castles, now only bearing the marks of centuries of isolation, neglect and agricultural poverty within its rolling hills and modest fields. Midnight that it was or not, Ciro and Nunziata were there with their only son, a bearded 30-something also called Francesco, for a brief wordless embrace and a kiss to the boys. The eyes of the couple and their pale faces spoke of a mortal fear.


Molto interessante e scorrevole, credo inoltre che si meriterebbe una discussione tutta sua :)
 
Hi to you, Luke: Andreotti was an heavyweight in the art of leaving burned out positions in order to secure new ones, so I had little to invent.

Still a real good portrait and well written...i almost hear the theme of the Sting (aka la Stangata :p)





Grazie mille per i complimenti, in effetti non sono molte le storie "contemporanee" sull'Italia, che solitamente trova spazio -nella sezione post 1900- quasi esclusivamente in cronologie che rigurdano le due guerre mondiali (una eccezione di altissimo livello è Fear, Loathing and Gumbo di Drew).

Le informazioni di carattere militare e politico (Gladio inclusa) sono state ottenute in maggioranza da una ricerca lunga ma -almeno per me- molto interessante su materiale cartaceo oppure cartaceo-e-digitalizzato dell'epoca, a volte di mia proprietà altre volte reperito in biblioteche ed archivi pubblici; testi di una epoca successiva e calibrate consultazioni di siti internet hanno sicuramente aiutato molto a completare il quadro.

Le mie intenzioni narrative sono abbastanza ben definite, e naturalmente nel corso degli eventi successivi alle fasi finali del "confronto" ci sarà spazio per approfondire le dinamiche della "nuova" società italiana.

Qualche osservazione che in realtà è anche un po' anticipazione: ho già una lista, con tanto di mappa regione per regione, che al 99% rappresenterà esattamente cosa sarà colpito da chi e con quale potenza. Per ora è riservatissima :)

Diciamo che l'enfasi da parte dei Sovietici sarà sulle strutture dell'Alleanza Atlantica e sul dispositivo militare italiano, ma va da sé che data la natura del conflitto in diversi casi ciò non farà molta differenza. Ci saranno sorprese sia in positivo che negativo, intendendo con ciò che qualche località sarà "graziata" e qualche altra "colpita per sbaglio", ma sempre restando fermamente nel verosimile.

Il rapporto periferia-centro in senso amministrativo non credo si risolverà in una balcanizzazione della penisola, diciamo che ho già delle idee e propendo maggiormente per situazioni simili (con le dovute specificità) a quelle
intraviste nelle storie dedicate agli altri paesi europei.

A presto!

Perchè ho la strana sensazione che io e la mia famiglia quì siamo polvere radioattiva ( sono di Bologna)

Trans: Why i have the feeling that me and my family here are radioactive ash ( i'm from Bologna)
 
Maybe or maybe not, Luke; it's undisputed that OTL & TTL 1984 Bologna hosted some interesting military targets like the HQs of TRIESTE brigade and the 7a Zona Militare, leaving apart the "bonus points" for crippling an important national railway junction.
 
Bentornato.
I'll add here as an interlude to Mario's work (hich'll remain the main narrative, as of political and military effects) a chapter of my writing titled "Vacanze all'inferno" (Holiday in Hell). It'll be a narrative about the struggle for survival of a mixed Northern-Southern Italian family seeking refuge from the end of their world.

Francesco wasn't a man prone to optimism. Since his childhood the basic facts of life had shown him that everything that could conceivably go wrong, probably would. By 12, he was an orphan. His father, a Communist, and, together with the priest, the only resident intellectual in his home town of *Castromolese, had been killed by a nephew of the former Fascist "podestà" and current turncoat DC representative, a couple years after WWII had ended, following a stupid political argument. Shot in the leg, he died by blood loss; Francesco's last remembrance of his father was him, already on the table where a medicine student friend of his was trying to stop the profuse arterial bleeding, giving the young boy of 4 a malt candy and then sending him away sternly. His son wasn't to see him die. Eight years later his mother, a schoolteacher with little time for her very children (a son and two daughters, one older, one younger than Francesco), had died in a tragic, absurd truck accident on a winding mountain road; and this in a region where in 1956 most moved still on the mule, rather than by any kind of engine.
Francesco had grown up with his maternal uncle, Ciro, and her fiancee and later wife, Nunziata. Then he went away to Potenza for study, at the Ragioneria (*professional institute for the formation of clerks and accountants). There he graduated with honors, among the best, while doing odd jobs on summers to help support his sisters, that by then lived with him and other students. He had managed in the end to emigrate, first to Rome, then to the northern town of Busto Arsizio where he evn got a local redhead wife. Not so easily: the local preist made problems, sayoing out loud that such marriages between Lombards and Southerens "wouldn't endure". He and his wife, aptly named Lucia, had to marry in a nearby town. Her parents, simple people, former textile workers, didn't make any difficulty. Two sons, Nicola and Matteo, had made the marriage, if not happy (Francesco had more and more concluded to be ill-adapted to be a family man), at least solid and enduring.

Then, in what was a mostly quiet life with some safeties - home, family, a job in a bank for a decent petit-bourgeois wage, playing Goriziana billiards in bars winning some prize here and there, having one month paid vacations at the seaside in Liguria and the perspective of old age pension when around 55 - came alarming news from outside. An avid reader of science fiction since youth, he had an idea of what nuclear war could entail. And when sabre-rattling between USSR and USA escalated in the fall on 1983, he watched tv news with growing concern. He had never liked the US, masters of his own country since when they had came as "liberators" during the war. He despised the Soviets, too; years of reading Readers' Digest "Selezione" had exposed even his hard-headed leftism, kept down just enough to avoid been singled out and kcked from work, to heathy doses of biased if real truth about that country and its repression of basic freedoms. Knowing what men sat in the centers of power in Moscow and Washington made him nervous. So one night around Christmas 1983 he spoke to his wife gravely and quietly, in bed as always when touching sensitive subject.
"If this gets worse, yu'll have to get out of here" he had said. "Not a stone will remain in case of war here. My home town, even if I haven't been there for years, is reasonably safe. My uncle and auntie Nunziata are till there, and have space to host you in the event. I've phoned them yesterday, they confirmed me about that". At first, Lucia was dismissive. Anyway, by April there would also be the seaside home they rented six months each year, at Varigotti in Liguria... "Don't know if we can make up to then, and remember that a dozen kilometers up in the mountains from Varigotti there's a NATO base, most secret stuff. I'm sure the Soviets will target it, who knows. I didn't ask my uncle and aunt to host you, it was they who told me to send you and the boys down there if thing get hot" he insisted, whispering under the blankets not to be heard by the sons sleeping in their room a few meters aside.
Lucia, a housewife by choice since giving birth to Matteo, had had a much quieter and lucky life than her husband, on the whole, especially as a child. Some medical problems of her young sons and the recent death of her aunt Giuseppina, a second mother to her, who had died a few weeks before after her third heart attack, had been troubling, but hadn't shaken her optimism. She couldn't believe that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki - she too had seen the images - someone could be so stupid to wage another real war. She too remembered when Americans had arrived in Busto, when she, a child of 3, had seen on the street the big trucks, the tank with the big gun, and her first Negro man, an army chaplain who, captured by her smile, had fondled her red hair saying unintelligible words and gave her a candy before raising her up in her arms to the amusement of other soldiers. Her older sisters had ran away in fear screaming that the Black Man kidnapped her! Was it possible that people who had been so nice as these Americans was now a danger to mankind with their weapons? The assumption was troubling. And if war with those despicable Soviets came, and the Atom Bomb was used, what would be of her children...?
It wasn't until February that she had resigned to follow her husband's advice, which had by then become a peremptory order to leave Busto Arsizio for the south ASAP. he would obviosuly remain to carry on work as usual. As if the world didn't seem headed for destruction. He would find a way south, he assured (while privately thinking he would not). The family separated without much visible drama at Valentine's Day, 1984. A date without meaning for a couple scarcely into romance since long, whose major common tie were their children. Lucia took with self reluctant, nervous 15-years old Nicola and frightened and sensitive 9-years old Matteo, a physically very frail if extremely bright boy, and after a last kiss to her husband, went to the family car, an Opel Manta. There she ans the elder boy crammed an immense amount of baggage, mostly canned food accurately hoarded in the last two months. She then turned the key. It would be a long, long voyage down to *Castromolese, she knew the road having already been there twice since she had married, but in very different circumstances. It would be a difficult trip down the back of the Italian Boot, with the Adriatica highway already jammed by hundreds of thousand of people of Southern descent living in the North who had had the same idea: fleeing down. Far from the possibility of actual war, far from the areas most likely to be hit by the fiery mushrooms of death. It wouldn't be in less than 12 hours, at night, that mother and sons reached the ancient little town, once of Frederick II's favorites southern castles, now only bearing the marks of centuries of isolation, neglect and agricultural poverty within its rolling hills and modest fields. Midnight that it was or not, Ciro and Nunziata were there with their only son, a bearded 30-something also called Francesco, for a brief wordless embrace and a kiss to the boys. The eyes of the couple and their pale faces spoke of a mortal fear.
Good interlude, basileus!:)
 
A new reader, that's great. I hope you, international friends of mine, will forgive me for switching to Italian language in order to better address some points.

Grazie mille per i complimenti, in effetti non sono molte le storie "contemporanee" sull'Italia, che solitamente trova spazio -nella sezione post 1900- quasi esclusivamente in cronologie che rigurdano le due guerre mondiali (una eccezione di altissimo livello è Fear, Loathing and Gumbo di Drew).

Le informazioni di carattere militare e politico (Gladio inclusa) sono state ottenute in maggioranza da una ricerca lunga ma -almeno per me- molto interessante su materiale cartaceo oppure cartaceo-e-digitalizzato dell'epoca, a volte di mia proprietà altre volte reperito in biblioteche ed archivi pubblici; testi di una epoca successiva e calibrate consultazioni di siti internet hanno sicuramente aiutato molto a completare il quadro.

Le mie intenzioni narrative sono abbastanza ben definite, e naturalmente nel corso degli eventi successivi alle fasi finali del "confronto" ci sarà spazio per approfondire le dinamiche della "nuova" società italiana.

Qualche osservazione che in realtà è anche un po' anticipazione: ho già una lista, con tanto di mappa regione per regione, che al 99% rappresenterà esattamente cosa sarà colpito da chi e con quale potenza. Per ora è riservatissima :)

Diciamo che l'enfasi da parte dei Sovietici sarà sulle strutture dell'Alleanza Atlantica e sul dispositivo militare italiano, ma va da sé che data la natura del conflitto in diversi casi ciò non farà molta differenza. Ci saranno sorprese sia in positivo che negativo, intendendo con ciò che qualche località sarà "graziata" e qualche altra "colpita per sbaglio", ma sempre restando fermamente nel verosimile.

Il rapporto periferia-centro in senso amministrativo non credo si risolverà in una balcanizzazione della penisola, diciamo che ho già delle idee e propendo maggiormente per situazioni simili (con le dovute specificità) a quelle
intraviste nelle storie dedicate agli altri paesi europei.

Thank you for the tip of "Fear, Loathing and Gumbo".
Grazie della dritta di "Fear, Loathing and Gumbo"

As said your research is excellent and you must have an excellent memory. It's curious where human curiosity may bring you.
Come detto la tua ricerca è ottima e devi avere un'ottima memoria. E' curioso dove può portare la curiosità intelettuale.

I guess you have much of the fate of Italy already in your mind. The enphasis on NATO structure makes me think that the soviets will throw at Naples enough nukes to impress even the Vesuvius.
Imagino che quindi avrai già una buona idea della sorte dell'Italia. L'enfasi su strutture della NATO mi fà pensare che i sovietici butteranno tanta di quella robba su Napoli da intimorire il Vesuvio.

Regarding the local-central conflict I too don't think of a Balkanization. Just as an Italian I don't trust these four in Sardina...
Per quanto riguarda il rapporto periferia-centro non credo nella balcanizzazione neanch'io. Da italiano non mi fido molto di quei quattro in sardegna ...
Perchè ho la strana sensazione che io e la mia famiglia quì siamo polvere radioattiva ( sono di Bologna)

Trans: Why i have the feeling that me and my family here are radioactive ash ( i'm from Bologna)


I was 9, almost 10 yr old and lived 20Km southwest of Rome. I remember when there was still the cold war that in the family we discussed a newspaper article that in case of a nuke on Rome we'll die in 30 days from fallout. But I guess we'll be hit by nukes to nearer targets: Italcable (<1km), Fiumicino, Pratica di Mare, Cecchignola (10Km ca)
All'epoca avevo 9 anni ... quasi 10 ... e vivevo a 20Km sud ovest di roma (Acilia-Casalpalocco). Mi ricordo, quando c'era ancora la guerra fredda, di aver parlato in famiglia di un articolo sul girnale che calcolava che una bomba su Roma centro ci avrebbe fatto morire in meno di un mese dal fallout. Probabilmente saremo morti prima dalle bombe su obiettivi più vicini: Italcable (<1km), Fiumicino, Pratica di Mare, Cecchignola (10Km ca)
 
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