Festa della Liberazione.

Despite having lived in Italy for five years, I still forget that they do things differently here. I knew that the 25th was a public holiday, but I forgot that unlike England it remains one even when it falls on a Saturday. It’s not transferred to the following Monday. Consequently, we drove to Battente, one of the two large out-of-town shopping centres in the county town, Ascoli, only to find it was closed. On the other hand, the supermarket in our small local market town, Comunanza, was open. La Festa della Liberazione is a controversial event, made the more so by elements in Berlusconi’s government. Fini, the Italian foreign minister and leader of AN, the former neo-fascist party, wants those who died fighting for the Nazi puppet regime, Mussolini’s rump Republic of Salo, to be commemorated equally with the partisans who fought against the  Germans. On the road between Montefalcone and Santa Vittoria there is a plaque fixed to the wall of a farmhouse. I stopped one day to see what it said. It commemorates a partisan shot on that spot by the Germans. On the other hand, another nearby village, Monte San Martino, has a plaque commemorating a fifteen year old  boy shot by the partisans. As was the case in France, the liberation provided a chance for old scores to be settled: people denounced to the authorities as pro-German by those who had a personal grudge against them when in fact they’d been nothing of the kind. If I had had to make a choice, I like to think I’d have been on the partisans’ side. Thank God, in England we never had to choose. Although Le Marche is a fairly left-wing area there are pockets of neo-fascism, the Ascoli ultras being a notorious example. One day the door to my wine-merchant’s storeroom was open. He’s a very pleasant chap, Umberto Eco’s doppelganger, who always gives me a discount, and a large one when I buy local wine to take to Dave and Sue’s in Burgundy. Imagine my surprise then, gentler reader, when I saw the ‘Mussolini Calendar’, sporting a large picture of il Duce, hanging on the storeroom wall. In his defence, Italian fascism was marginally less vile than its German counterpart - at least until Mussolini moved from being Hitler’s mentor to his puppet and enacted the  racial laws in 1938.

   We went to Lupo’s for a lunch celebrating not the Liberation but the first anniversary of his taking over the locanda. Sat with Maria the postlady, her husband, two sons, English daughter-in-law and small grandchildren. Even taking into account the calamitous collapse in sterling - thank you Blair, you sanctimonious git, for not joining the euro - the meal was still good value: four courses plus mineral water, wine ad lib, and coffee for 15 euros a head. And Maria’s family, despite having plenty of company of their own, were kind enough to include Stanlio and Olio in their conversation. Being out of practice at lunch-time drinking, after leaving the restaurant, the rest of the day was a bit of a blur!