Emiliano D'Alessandro, through concrete narration, the obscure tragedy is told as seen by the protagonists, twelve thousand young men of the Italian army, the mamma’s boys of General Antonio Gandin who were stationed on the Greek island of Kefalonia.
It was the month of September in 1943 when they had to decide if they were to cede their arms to the Germans or resist in honour of the Fatherland: the idea prevailed that you fell on your arms and did not give them up, and so it was!
A fascinating reporting of the Italian past, a useful retrospective that puts into focus an event that is still waiting to be defined as to its role in the history of those years, but also the personal and human situation of Salvatore Di Rado who was still too young to die, perhaps the only one to have survived a firing squad in the Second World War, witness to his own odyssey illuminated by a sudden tormenting love, of a friendship consolidated day by day and of the vision of enchanted places.
Through the protagonist, the symbol of youth sacrificed, abandoned and in the end forgotten, the novel retells the Italian story of a shameless war that the world seems to have wanted to forget. A singular narration where each action is swallowed up by another, then is quickly boiled together in the caricatured cauldron of the story now defrauded by a rampant indifference.
A compelling text, that reawakens civil consciousness, at times brilliant and ironic, but overall an act of truth that reconstructs a tragedy from an original angle that has never been adequately investigated.
