During my early years as a student in Italy in the late 1980s, it wasn’t uncommon for my classmates to invite me to their family’s home for Sunday lunch. Their parents and sometimes their grandparents would join us, eager to ask me questions about the U.S. and tell me about their lives.
Whenever the elders would talk about wartime in Italy, their stories would paint themselves before me like a Neo-Realist film.
Nearly 30 years have passed since then and none of the grandparents are around anymore.
Many of them suffered greatly during the war and nearly everyone lost a loved one, even those progenitors who were card-carrying members of the Fascist party.
Over the course of my travels, I’ve met plenty of right-leaning folks in Italy who are not ideologically opposed to Trumpism. I’ve probably met more who find his policies repugnant. (Their preponderance may be due to the fact that I tend to hang-out with lefties.)
But for all Italians, the images of roundups and raids evoke memories of the rastrellamenti (from rastrello, a rake) conducted by the Fascists and later by the Nazis in their country from 1922-1945.
Few survivors remain today but their children still carry with them the generational trauma endured by their forebears.
One of my best friends in Italy comes from a family that hid Jews in the cellar of their winery during the war (there was a concentration camp nearby). There is a government plaque displayed at the winery entrance honoring their family’s courage. She, obviously, wasn’t yet born. Her uncle, also born after the war, has spoken often of the ways Jews were treated there during Fascism and the subsequent German occupation.
Traveling to Italy for the first time since the election, I discovered that even my most conservative friends are bewildered and nonplussed by the first two weeks of the new administration. They still can’t even seem to wrap their minds around why or how Trump was re-elected.
I can only imagine what their grandparents would say.
Do Bianchi 