On 10 June 1940 loudspeakers in Italian piazzas carried Benito Mussolini’s announcement, from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia in Rome, that Italy had declared war on France and Britain. The official newsreel cut to cheering crowds. Four years later, Allied photographers in Naples and the villages north of Rome found children following soldiers who carried food. Both scenes belong to the same war: one records the unity the Fascist government wanted people to see, the other the daily work of staying alive after the front had passed through.

A Fascist home before the war

Italian children had been living inside Fascist institutions for years before June 1940. The regime prescribed a single state textbook for primary schools and imposed standard rituals, and youth organizations such as the Opera Nazionale Balilla, later folded into the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio, extended its reach into Saturdays, summer camps and sport. It wanted children to learn loyalty through repetition, uniforms and ceremony. Official ideals treated women principally as mothers and homemakers, and the regime rewarded large families. Families still had to deal with the demands that policy rarely pictured: finding food, making wages last and, after 1940, deciding whether to leave a bombed neighborhood.

Jewish families faced a rupture before the war began. The Fascist racial laws of 1938 expelled Jewish children and teachers from state schools, barred Jews from the civil service, the armed forces and many professions, restricted property ownership and banned marriages between Jews and non-Jews. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum records that Italy’s Jewish community, numbering roughly 40,000 to 50,000 people, was stripped of rights by its own government years before the German occupation. Foreign Jews were interned in camps such as Ferramonti in Calabria after Italy entered the war.

Bread, the black market and the water line

Italy entered the war poorly supplied with food, fuel and raw materials, and rationing came quickly. In early 1942 the official daily bread ration fell from 200 to 150 grams per person, according to the U.S. Army’s official history of global logistics. A ration was only part of a family’s diet, and delivery and access varied from city to city. Pasta, rice, oil, sugar and meat were rationed too. The black market made access depend more and more on money and connections, and urban families traveled into the countryside to buy or barter directly from farmers.

When the country was divided in September 1943, the liberated south lost its normal supply from northern industry, and distribution controls broke down. Allied military government in Naples faced a city with damaged water mains, sewers and port, a population swollen by refugees, and a black market fed in part by Allied stores. A U.S. Navy photograph shows women and children drawing their water ration in Naples on 7 October 1943, a week after liberation. In the winter of 1943–44 a typhus epidemic in the city was brought under control by the mass dusting of civilians with DDT, one of the first large public-health uses of the insecticide.

Turin, Fiat and the limits of enforced unity

Fiat’s vast Mirafiori complex opened in Turin in 1939. Giovanni Agnelli’s company built it for large-scale production, and the regime used its opening to showcase a modern motor industry. MuseoTorino records that Mussolini’s address to workers at the opening met a cool reception. In March 1943 a strike at Mirafiori spread across Turin’s industrial districts, and MuseoTorino estimates that about 100,000 workers joined the strike wave between 5 and 17 March. Pay and food shortages drove the stoppages, and organized anti-Fascists, especially Communists, also saw them as a way to challenge the dictatorship and the war. The stoppages, often described as the first mass strikes in Axis Europe, spread to Milan.

Allied bombing of northern cities accelerated from autumn 1942. MuseoTorino records about 338,000 people leaving Turin in July 1943, about 48 percent of the population. Some stayed away; others slept in outlying towns or on farms and returned for work. Employers dispersed some operations as well. A worker might report for a factory shift in the city and sleep somewhere else that night. The industrial plant that fed a household with wages also brought the whole neighborhood within reach of the bombers.

Under the bombs

Italy was bombed from the first days of its war, by the British from June 1940 and by the Americans from late 1942. Industrial cities in the north, ports such as Naples, Genoa, Palermo and Bari, and rail junctions throughout the peninsula were struck repeatedly. Claudia Baldoli and Marco Fincardi, in a study of Italian society under the bombs, cite official estimates of around 60,000 Italian civilian victims of bombing. Fascist propaganda blamed Allied cruelty. Baldoli and Fincardi set that propaganda beside diaries, police reports and later memory, and show how the experience of the raids also eroded support for a regime that had promised victory and could not protect its cities.

Milan suffered some of the heaviest raids in August 1943, after Mussolini’s fall, when the British hoped to push the new government toward surrender. Photographs in the gallery below show the cathedral roof, the church of San Babila, the Via Olmetto and Piazza San Fedele after the attacks. On 19 July 1943 American bombers struck the San Lorenzo rail yards in Rome and the working-class district around them, and Pope Pius XII went to the damaged neighborhood that day. The Italian government later declared Rome an “open city,” and the city’s inhabitants hoped the label would protect them; it did not prevent further raids on its outskirts.

One armistice, very different streets

The Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 brought the war onto Italian soil, and on 25 July the Fascist Grand Council and the king removed Mussolini. When the armistice with the Allies was announced on 8 September, German forces occupied most of the peninsula, disarmed the Italian army and sent hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers to Germany as military internees and forced laborers. German troops installed Mussolini at the head of the Italian Social Republic in the north. In Naples, an uprising from 27 to 30 September drove German forces from the city before Allied troops arrived from Salerno on 1 October.

In occupied districts farther north, German authorities and Italian Fascists hunted Jews, partisans and men who evaded the labor and military drafts. Other Italians hid deserters, carried messages or sheltered escaped Allied prisoners of war, of whom tens of thousands walked out of camps after the armistice. The U.S. National Archives preserves the postwar claims of these civilian helpers, with names, addresses and surviving notes from escapees. Choices made at a farmhouse door could carry the death penalty. German reprisals against civilians, such as the killing of 335 men at the Ardeatine Caves in Rome in March 1944, were meant to make sure people knew it.

The armed Resistance grew into a movement of tens of thousands of partisans in the mountains and cities, supplied in part by Allied air drops. Women served as couriers, nurses, organizers and fighters; Italian researchers have documented their roles in what was also, in part, a civil war between Italians. In January 1945 a British commando team was dropped with supplies to partisans in Val Portule on the Asiago plateau. The insurrection of April 1945 freed Milan, Turin and Genoa before Allied troops arrived, and partisans captured and shot Mussolini on 28 April. Italy commemorates its liberation on 25 April.

Families without men

For many Italian households the armistice brought a new absence. German forces disarmed Italian units across Italy, the Balkans and Greece, and roughly 600,000 soldiers who refused to fight on for Germany or the Social Republic were sent to camps in the Reich. Germany classified them as “military internees” rather than prisoners of war, which denied them the protection of the Geneva Convention, and put most of them to forced labor. Tens of thousands died. Their families often had no news for months. Other men were away as prisoners of the Allies in North Africa, India, Britain and the United States, or were hiding in the hills to avoid the Social Republic’s call-up.

Women carried the household economy through these years. They stood in bread lines, traded on the black market, traveled long distances on foot or by bicycle to buy food from farms, and protested publicly when rations failed; demonstrations by women over bread and the cost of living occurred in northern cities in 1943 and 1944. The Women’s Defense Groups, founded in late 1943 in the occupied north, linked such protests to the Resistance, organizing aid for partisans’ families and political prisoners. For Italian women the war also ended with a new right: they voted for the first time in national elections in June 1946, when Italians chose a republic over the monarchy.

Rome: roundup and rescue

On 16 October 1943 German police rounded up Jews in Rome’s old ghetto and across the city. The Jewish community records that 1,022 people were deported to Auschwitz, of whom only 16 survived. Arrigo Finzi and his family had moved from Milan to Rome; after learning of the impending roundup, family members hid with friends. Arrigo and his brother Gilberto later moved into a concealed attic at the church of San Gioacchino, with help from the engineer Pietro Lestini, and received food through a high window at night from January to May 1944. They then hid in a seminary until Rome’s liberation. Rescue depended on repeated decisions by people willing to share shelter and food.

Fame could also be a cover. The cyclist Gino Bartali used his training rides to carry false identity documents for a rescue network linking Catholic clergy and Jewish organizers in Tuscany and Umbria, hiding papers in his bicycle’s frame. In 2013 Yad Vashem recognized him as Righteous Among the Nations. When Allied troops entered Rome on 4–5 June 1944, crowds gathered in St. Peter’s Square, and Pope Pius XII addressed them from the basilica balcony on the evening of 5 June. The occupation of the north lasted almost another year.

Allied soldiers who fought through Italy, including the Canadians at Ortona in December 1943 described in the Canada chapter, saw civilian hunger at close range, and many letters home describe children begging for food. The previous chapter covers Italy’s former ally; the next chapter turns to the third Axis power. The record of persecution in Italy and across Europe is summarized in The Holocaust by the Numbers.

Gallery · 7 photographs · select to enlarge

Milan, Naples and the north

Sources and further reading

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