November is a melancholy month made even more so in this centenary year marking the end of the First World War. Italy celebrates this anniversary on the 4th rather than 11th November since that was when the hostilities in the Dolomites and the Isonzo valley ended. This conflict between the young Italian state and the old Austro-Hungarian Empire registered as gruesome a rate of mortality as that on the Western or Eastern fronts. As elsewhere across Europe, most Italian towns have a memorial to their local dead from both this and the subsequent tragic conflicts of the twentieth century.
The local impact of the First World War is still visible in the Linea Cadorna, a line of trenches and machine gun emplacements straddling the peaks of the mountains around Como and marking the frontier with Switzerland. That defensive line was never needed. Como was however tragically embroiled in the last years of the Second World War when the town had become a favoured residence for many fascist leaders, their families, mistresses and assorted unsavoury bullies and hangers-on.
The civilian population, enlarged by the escapees from the unrelenting bombardment of Milan, witnessed the dying days of the nazi-fascist regime and the blood-letting that followed its immediate overthrow. Those days brought tragedy on both sides of the political divide with summary justice often meted out with little discrimination.
It seems appropriate to personalise this season of remembrance by recording the tragedies that marked those horrendous days in Como β and to identify the sites and structures where various acts of horror took place, if only to remind us all that, even in locations as beautiful as ours, our recent history has been punctuated by the grossest acts of inhumanity.
The cruelties of the past need sometimes to be brought to current attention in the hope that they may never be repeated. Before the armistice of September Como seemed to have been spared the worst of war deprivation, and even later managed to avoid most of the allied bombing maybe due to its proximity to its border with neutral Switzerland. The population suffered deprivations from the strict rationing, the ongoing callousness and favouritisms of the fascist state and of course the bullying, torture, imprisonment and deportation to Nazi labour and extermination camps of its social and political enemies.
