Vogon Today

Selected News from the Galaxy

StartMag

The Republic does not enter Italian history with the crowds in jubilation

The Republic does not enter Italian history with the crowds in jubilation

The Notepad of Michael the Great

Today he turns seventy-five. For the second time, due to the pandemic , the birthday is celebrated without military parades and Frecce Tricolori. Maybe it's better this way. Indeed, a certain commemorative rhetoric fails to mention that the Republic does not enter Italian history with the crowds in jubilation and the new tricolors displayed on the balconies. On the contrary, he enters it almost by stealth, with a meager statement from the government. And he enters it with a town divided and troubled by the dozen dead who bloody the alleys of Naples. It is perhaps the most dramatic episode of the troubled debut of republican democracy (Gianni Oliva, The last days of the monarchy , Mondadori, 2016).

The background: on 2 and 3 June 1946 our fellow citizens meticulously queued up in front of the polling stations. The ballot paper in your hands is simple, with a concise title (“Referendum on the institutional form of the State”) and two clear symbols. On the left, the profile of the peninsula and in the center a woman's head with a turreted crown adorned with laurel and oak leaves: above, the word "Republic". On the right, a profile of the peninsula almost identical to the other and in the center the Savoy coat of arms (the shield with the white cross): above, the word “Monarchy”.

When the polls close, almost twenty-five million voters (thirteen million women) participated in the newborn universal suffrage, 90 percent of those entitled to vote. But the count is slow and provides significantly different results from those expected: instead of an overwhelming Republican victory, a controversial victory and a country geographically split in two: the monarchical South, the Republican Centronord. Moreover, the results arrive at the Interior Ministry late. The most timely are those of the southern regions, where the war had long since ended and it had been possible to restore telegraphs and telephone lines. The data is fragmentary and unofficial, but some newspapers are unbalanced by announcing the probable success of the monarchy.

Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi himself thinks the king has made it. The percentages change during the night between 4 and 5 June, when all the data from the North pour in: 54 percent to the republic and 46 percent to the monarchy, a gap of about one million seven hundred thousand votes. The announcement of the result is up to the Supreme Court, but the "turnaround" is a bitter chalice for the losers: the first rumors of fraud spread, the executive is accused of having manipulated the data, the metropolitan legend according to which the minister of 'Interior Giuseppe Romita who allegedly hid in the drawers of the Viminale a million cards reserved for the republic.

The outcome of the referendum, however, displaces the parties of the National Liberation Committee (all pro-republicans, except for the liberal one). They were in fact convinced that the voters would severely punish the "felony" of Vittorio Emanuele III (copyright Palmiro Togliatti): fascism, racial laws, the alliance with Hitler, a ruinous war conflict, on 8 September 1943, the flight to Pescara. Queen Maria José even feared that the monarchy would not cross the 15 percent threshold. Curiously, the wife of Umberto II underestimated how deeply the figure of the sovereign was deeply rooted in the collective imagination of the Italians, many of whom considered the history of the Savoy and homeland history as two sides of the same coin.

In short, that 46 percent could not alleviate the bitterness of the defeated, moreover mocked on the wire. Mountains of appeals are therefore forwarded to the Supreme Court. A group of authoritative professors from the University of Padua, under the aegis of the deputy Enzo Selvaggi, even asks to suspend any decision, as the decree establishing the referendum spoke of the victory of the side that obtains the "majority of voters", and not the "majority of valid votes". Between legal Byzantinisms and political skirmishes, confusion skyrockets. As Vittorio Gorresio, then head of the journalist of Mario Pannunzio's “Liberal Risorgimento” notes, in Rome “the crowd in Piazza Montecitorio asked for the flag, but none were displayed because they didn't know which one”. And, together with the appeals, protests are triggered. Here the Neapolitan masses enter the scene.

On 6 June their awakening was abrupt: while eight out of ten inhabitants had chosen the monarchy (surpassed only by the people of Messina, Catania and Palermo), the majority of Italians had opted for the republic. The Neapolitan prefecture is worried about the possibility of unrest, also because Maria José and her four children had moved to Villa Rosebery the previous day, waiting to embark for Portugal on the cruiser “Duca degli Abruzzi”. The royal family is therefore invited to leave Naples at the first light of dawn. The climate heats up in mid-afternoon, when a throng of women in Piazza del Carmine begins to hurl insults against the republicans "starving the people".

The crowd is dispersed by the policemen, with the threat of using muskets. Shortly after, in via Foria a multitude of university students, armed with bars and sticks, thronged in front of the Garibaldi barracks. They describe themselves as "monarchist militants" and ask to meet the commander. While the gate is closed and the soldiers take their positions, a major argues through the peephole with the ringleaders, who ask for weapons to defend the king from the plot hatched by the Republicans. The officer warns that he is ready to open fire if the siege is not removed immediately: that is enough to restore calm among the most troubled.

But the day is still long, and as evening falls at least five hundred young people head towards the carabinieri station in via Sant'Antonio to take over the armory, counting on the Corps' traditional loyalty to the Savoy dynasty. In response, the marshal who commanded the station, Filippo Cucuzza, fires a few shots in the air for intimidation purposes. The protesters at first disperse, but soon return to the charge and hurl a bomb at the nearby church, injuring a dozen people unrelated to the scuffles. Despite the intervention of the army, they do not stop piling stones uprooted from the pavement, they erect barricades with the carts parked in the courtyards, they line up like tortoises. What is unleashed is a real urban guerrilla, an unusual experience in a country accustomed for twenty years to witnessing only disciplined regime marches.

The riots have been quelled with difficulty, there are numerous bruises and six seriously injured. One of these, the painter Ciro Martino, died before being rescued by the doctors. Naples sinks into the emergency: tracked vehicles patrol the city, the infantrymen sift through every corner in search of the bad guys, the carabinieri interrogate and stop dozens of people. In a meeting with Guglielmo Giannini and other Neapolitan politicians, Romita minimizes what happened: there is no plan to subvert the referendum result, but only the occasional intersection between the social malaise of the humbler classes, anxious above all for the scarcity and rising food prices, and the angry reaction of royalist extremists. Nonetheless, the spark fired in Naples can set the peninsula on fire. The first to be aware of this are the British and the Americans, who through the ACC (“Allied Control Commission”) are closely monitoring events. The head of the Commission, Admiral Ellery Stone, on the evening of June 6 urges De Gasperi and Romita to take all necessary measures to severely repress any seditious act.

In the morning of the following day this "recommendation" is put to the test. On the walls of the Campania capital, posters signed by an elusive "monarchical alignment" are posted, invoking the separation of Naples from Italy and the creation of an independent state led by Umberto II. Around noon, a thousand people celebrating the monarchy gather in Piazza Carlo III. In a flash a huge procession forms, which moves towards the railway and continues towards the Rettifilo chanting "Vi-va-il-re" and slogans against the "referendum scam". There are university students, shopkeepers, artisans, construction workers, laborers, idlers without a profession and even some intellectuals.

The initiative, in which the militants of the “Savoia Groups” stand out, the most combative of the Neapolitan monarchical associations, quickly transforms from a testimony of faith into a muscular exhibition. Arrived near the University, the procession is faced by a barrage of police and carabinieri. First whistles and screams, then the explosion of a hand grenade on the facade of the Albergo Nazionale. The crowd sways fearfully. A soldier, in a panic, releases a bullet from his musket that slashes his chest. The incident exasperates the spirits. Repeated bursts of rifle fire are heard in the air. The demonstrators, now many thousands, then formed two new processions: the largest heads towards Via Roma, the second reaches Piazza del Plebiscito. The whole center of Naples is blocked. The Market Section Police Station is attacked by a handful of violent men. The clashes are very bitter. The wounded fill the hospital wards. A seventeen-year-old port porter lies on the ground with his abdomen punctured by a bullet. Meanwhile, news of other scuffles broke out in Palermo, Bari and Taranto. “At the end of that long Neapolitan day – Romita observes – no one could swear what would happen the next day”.

Meanwhile, Umberto II – pressed by his closest advisers – tries to resist and awaits the ruling of the Supreme Court. The government, on the other hand, is in a hurry and wants to confront the judges with a fait accompli. The political temperature of the country rises dramatically. And the consequences are not long in coming. Also in Naples, on 11 June the monarchist activists take the field again. The main theater of the clashes is now via Medina, where the headquarters of the communist federation is located. To prevent its devastation, some agents fire on the most resolute demonstrators. One of them, Mario Fioretti, is shot to death. The protest movement turns into an explicit insurrectional movement. This is followed by a wild and furious guerrilla, lasting more than three hours: cars set on fire, overturned tram cars, makeshift trenches in the surrounding lanes.

The situation becomes particularly critical for the communist militants barricaded in the federation premises, among which there is a very young Giorgio Napolitano. Giorgio Amendola, at the time undersecretary to the presidency of the Council, pressed the city authorities for an even more energetic intervention. The night passes between the sirens of the ambulances and the thud of the armored cars. The balance is drawn up by the police the following morning: seven dead boys, all under the age of twenty-five; seventy-one injured were hospitalized, twenty-two of which were policemen, carabinieri and soldiers. In the following days there will be other deaths, for a total of eleven deaths, nine civilians and two agents.

On 13 June Umberto II returns to the Quirinale from his accommodation in via Verona. De Gasperi has just been notified of his decision to leave Italy. The departure for the Portuguese exile, however, is accompanied by a proclamation, which the Ansa broadcasts in the evening. In it, the "King of May" accuses the government of having assumed "by unilateral and arbitrary powers that are not its own", and of having "placed it in the alternative of causing bloodshed or suffering violence". On June 16 the newspapers no longer speak of Umberto II, the referendum and the dead in Naples. The titles are all for the unknown cyclist from Trieste Giordano Cottur: he beat his opponents on the Superga climb, wearing the first pink jersey of the “Giro della Rinascimento”.


This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/la-repubblica-non-entra-nella-storia-italiana-con-le-folle-in-tripudio-2/ on Wed, 02 Jun 2021 05:30:26 +0000.