---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Occupation had stilled Florence.
The streets had become barren, picked over by vagrants and street orphans, and the riverbanks hollowed out by artillery shells. In the day, they would scuttle up and down the Arno in search of soldiers to beg or shops to loot. Withered old women took to the bridges that were left, little girls and little boys running about them with no direction or place to be, and begged until their throats were sore. At the checkpoints, the soldiers paid them no heed and simply pushed them along with the encouragement of their raised rifles. Making their ways north from the river, the crones and their attendant orphans found themselves drawn towards a sound that seemed almost ancient to them. To the children, however, it was something so new and so alien that some believed it was the start of another air raid when first they heard. In hushed tones, too weak to cry out, they would sit out by the Duomo and plead under the sound of the church bells. The officers who went to pray there paid them little heed, with few daring to look into the eyes of the people they now ruled. There was little Christian charity from the conquerors who thought themselves “liberators”.
Aside from the bells of the Duomo, few sounds could be heard amidst the debris of the old town. The deafening bombers were gone, thankfully, and the guns had passed south as quickly as they had arrived at Florence’s northern reaches. All that was left was the bells and the odd rifle shot. Sometimes, they were beggars who had pushed the soldiers’ nerves too far; other times, they were pigeons simply flying too close to the river checkpoints. Very rarely, an old Arditi man would take up the cause of resistance himself and rush a patrol armed with but a pistol and a dagger clenched between his teeth. As Nino watched over the Ponte Vecchio, his binoculars gripped tightly to his face, he thought of how many men had been lost in such follies. Adriano, Michele, Faustino, the list went on and on in his head. So many comrades he’d known and lost to the all-consuming anger. He promised to never fall into the same spiral. He could not afford it. Italy cannot afford it.
Over the radio, Nino had heard stories of dozens of Arditi continuing the fight in Venice, Bologna, Milan and all across the Alpine region. The North was the first to face invasion, but would evidently be the last to accept it. The newsreader, a Trentino man, choked on his words as he read out the casualty lists on both sides of the Arditi attacks. When he read out reports of the celebrations welcoming the invasion in Naples and Bari, however, he seemed positively chipper. Whatever keeps his Vienna paymasters happy, Nino supposed. It was not as if anyone beyond the mountain ranges of Alto Adige listened to Radio Libertà, perhaps, but the reports from the South passed up the chain of command more than likely raised a few smiles themselves.
The upper floor of an abandoned shop may not have been his first choice of riverside apartment, but it was merely temporary for Nino. Just a few weeks prior, his entire apartment building was formally “evacuated” and the many floors turned into makeshift barracks. The soldiers, barking their orders in German, called the residents out in their nightclothes and stormed up the stairs, clearing the contents of the apartments room by room. Clothes, mirros, family heirlooms, and various portraits of Mussolini were all tossed unceremoniously out of the windows like waste to the huddled residents below. There were some who reached for their clothes and trinkets first, he remembered, but some also took up their portraits and clutched them tightly to their chests. There is still some good in this country, he thought. Still something worth saving.
A truck rolled up to the Ponte Vecchio, bearing the black eagle and estutcheon upon its canvas, and slowed as it turned into the checkpoint. Its contents were obscured, but huge wooden frames jutted out from beneath hastily wrapped cloth. To the Galleria dell’Accademia, most likely. The regime’s monuments were being torn down all over the country; the great ‘M’ that stood over the Appian Way had been torn down by French engineers and all that remained of Giacomo Manzù’s L’operaio e la contadina – the lauded ‘Red David’ – were two steel feet. Just as the Arditi del Popolo had been wiped out at the Battle of Ponte di Piave, the statues and paintings that commemorated their heroism had been destroyed in great bonfires. Some Italians had joined in – the ‘maladjusted’, as Nino saw them – but it was always the soldiers that lit the flames, standing proudly as portraits of Mussolini, Togliatti, Bombacci and all the rest turned to ash. Nino could not bare to watch the men who had rebuilt Italy after the humiliation of civil war and depression wiped from history. The young will soon forget the people’s republic, as if it was but a fable. The return of the bourgeois art to the galleries of Florence was just the beginning.
“Nino,” Rodolfo said as he placed a hand upon his shoulder. “Have the troop trucks pulled up?”
“Art transports and beggars, that’s all. Are we in position on the northern end?”
Rodolfo nodded, donning his leather gloves and reaching for his rifle. “Roberto and Dardan are by the bridge, Pietro has eyes from the west, and Luca has eyes from the east. Once you’ve seen the troop trucks, I’ll call it in and the Albanian will-...”
“Rodolfo, wait.” Nino pulled up his binoculars. Two trucks pulled up at either end of the Ponte Vecchio checkpoint, soldiers sitting patiently as the guards looked them over and checked beneath the beds. “They’re here!”
Nino threw his binoculars down as Rodolfo rushed into the next room, reaching for the small radio they had placed by the door of the backroom. Rodolfo spoke the code aloud and the words rang in Nino’s mind as he drew up his rifle to his shoulder, calling back to a time when he could say the words with pride – when all the soldiers and workers of Italy could pronounce them as they marched against the Austrians and their French puppeteers.
O la vittoria, o tutti accoppati.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------