2024-04-06 08:20:36
Bolzano. Surrounded. beaten, stripped. a smashed eye. blood from the head. thrown into the Tiber. finished with rowing strokes. the body then hung upside down. walter veltroni chose the story of dono carretta, director of the roman prison of regina coeli, to tell the chaos of 1944. the rome of the attack in via rasella (23 march), of the massacre of the ardeatine pits (24 march). Rome liberated by the Americans (4 June). fascist Rome that suddenly awakens as anti-fascist. who is looking for someone to blame for the bombings, the war, the massacres. the scapegoat who must be slaughtered to defuse anger, restore order, soothe the pain. except that, on September 18, 1944, Rome, he chooses the wrong victim. all this (and much more), Veltroni, former director of the unit, vice-president of the council and mayor of the eternal city, now a full-time writer, has put it into his latest book “la condemnation” Published by Rizzoli.
Veltroni, who was Carretta?
«Until September 8, 1943, he was a man aligned with the regime. he didn’t have a party card, he was in the rear, but it’s clear that they don’t want you to run a prison if you’re not politically reliable.”
He had a reputation for being tough. He tolerated the violence of a particularly brutal fascist guard towards political prisoners…
«It was organic to the dictatorship. he was part, like the majority of Italians, of the gray area that was camouflaged between complicity, quiet living and indifference. after September 8th, Carretta opens his eyes and takes sides. he does it with courage, using his position to help those who fought against the Germans and fascists. he lets Pertini and Saragat escape from prison. shortly before the Americans arrive, he frees the prisoners to save them from the Nazis’ reprisals. his son, who ended up in a German concentration camp, had refused to join the social republic. in short, Carretta understood many things about the true essence of fascism.”
When Kappler asks for a list of 50 prisoners for the reprisal in Via Rasella, what does he do?
«The Rome police commissioner Pietro Caruso chooses the names, yes, a fanatical fascist, a true criminal, plunderer of Jewish property, zealous executor of German orders, colluding with the Koch gang. Carretta makes a thousand excuses to save everyone he can, sending them to the infirmary. After the liberation of the city, Caruso is arrested. On Monday 18 September 1944 he goes to trial at the Palazzaccio. Carretta was one of the prosecution’s witnesses. He had to nail it for the Fosse Ardeatine.”
What happen?
«The wait for the trial was very high. Already in the early morning hundreds of people were pushing at the gate waiting to enter. There was a climate of chaos, of revenge, a palpable violence ready to explode. Hatred dominated towards the opportunist hierarchs, the spies, the torturers. Every Roman had someone to mourn. The crowd burst into the courtroom like a ferocious pack. The confusion was such that the hearing was immediately postponed. A decision that further inflamed spirits. There was the search for another scapegoat to sacrifice on the spot.”
Cart?
“Yes. Carretta, that day, puts on his good suit. The jacket, the tie, the carefully slicked hair. He greets his wife. He leaves the house convinced that he is doing the right thing…”
And instead?
«As soon as he arrives in front of the court, someone, among that crowd disappointed by the postponement of the hearing, mistakes him for Caruso (who instead was safe, protected by the carabinieri). The crowd sways, insults him, pulls him by the jacket, pulls him by the hair. He tries to defend himself. He shouts: “It’s not me, it’s not me Caruso”.
But the crowd doesn’t listen…
«She’s deaf now. A woman, Maria Ricottini, screams that her son was killed by the Nazis because of her. She points her finger in his face. This accusation ricochets from mouth to mouth. People tug at him, drag him down the stairs into the square. Even others, who recognize him for who he really is, begin to blame him for the deaths of his family members in Regina Coeli and the Fosse Ardeatine. Carretta is kicked and punched. With one blow they smashed his left eye socket. It’s a lynching.”
Only two people try to save his life: a policeman and a tram driver…
«Yes, the carabiniere, Lieutenant Giambattista Vico, tries to put him in a service car. He almost succeeds, but then the crowd surrounds the car and pulls Carretta out. Vico sees him walking away immersed in an impenetrable magma of arms and legs.”
They lay him on the tracks, block the oncoming tram, order the conductor to run him over…
«They tell him to “make sausages out of it”. But he refuses. His name was Angelo Salvatori. He was a member of the communist party. Salvatori realizes that that lynching has nothing to do with justice. He shows the crowd his PCI card. He says: “I’m not a fascist and I’m not a murderer.” He gets out and removes the crank that sets the tram in motion, so that no one dares to kill Carretta by crushing him.”
The crowd lifts Carretta from the tracks…
«They carry him bodily to Ponte Umberto. By now he is shirtless, in his underwear. A simulacrum of man. Beaten, reviled, vilified. They throw him into the Tiber. Carretta goes up and down like a float. She gasps and resurfaces. His face is swollen, blood pours from his head, his eye is smashed, but he is alive. He can still be saved…”
But it doesn’t happen…
“No. He clings to a kind of fence that crosses the river. Some young people who were sunbathing in swimsuits swim to him. The people on the bridge are waving and screaming. Kill him! Kill him! Carretta tries to pull himself out of the water by pulling himself onto the fence. He begs for help.”
And those?
«They make him let go. They send him back into the murky water. Carretta, overwhelmed by the current, reaches a boat. The men on board finish him off by rowing, hitting him on the head. He loses consciousness and sinks, face down, into the river. His body, recovered from the Tiber, was dragged across the pavement and hung by the feet from the railings of Regina Coeli. A body in underwear. An outraged body dripping blood. An image that anticipates Piazzale Loreto by a few months. The autopsy will confirm that he drowned.”
Meanwhile the wife arrives…
“Yes. The scene that opens up before her is terrible. Donato upside down half naked. She cries among people who laugh and mock her. She is shocked. Her husband, who had got back into the game, who had risked his life against the Nazi-fascists, also exposing his family, met the end that belonged to the man who should have been accused in court that day: Pietro Caruso.”
The director Luchino Visconti is also in front of the court. With a crew he must film the phases of the trial for the Allies. Instead he films a lynching…
«The terrible images of Caretta surrounded and beaten will be edited, but without the final stages of death».
Why?
«They were too strong (and also embarrassing) for the Italy born from the Resistance. For political expediency, for a sort of self-censorship, it was decided to eliminate them.”
Did anyone pay for Carretta’s death?
No. After the war, a sham trial was held which ended with symbolic sentences. It turned out that Maria Ricottini and the man who had accused him of sending his children and relatives to their deaths in the Fosse Ardeatine had lied. They were unstable and unreliable people, who had influenced themselves.”
The masses can be scary…
“Yes. This is why certain populisms scare me, the easy recipes that always indicate a culprit to be eliminated in order to miraculously restore order.”
To tell the story, she uses the narrative device of a journalistic investigation commissioned, today, in 2024, by the editor-in-chief of a newspaper to a young new hire…
“Yes. Giovanni, the boy, puts Carretta’s name into Google and shows up days later with a well-documented piece on Ferdinando Carretta. A perfect piece but… on the wrong Carretta.”
Ferdinando Carretta, the twenty-seven year old who killed his mother, father and brother in Parma in 1989…
“Exact. When the young reporter realizes the mistake, he understands that he has to do an investigation the old fashioned way. Less web and more real life. He recovers the documents of the trial, retraces the places on foot, studies personal stories, searches for witnesses, identifies himself with those years, with the Rome of eighty years ago. And he asks himself a question: what would I have done?
2024-04-06 08:20:36