THE ITALO-LEVANTINI OF COSTANTINOPLE/ISTANBUL

From the beginning of the 10th century, Italians poured into eastern Mediterranean harbors to purchase spice and silk. Although Muslims invaded the Crusader states in this region, the invasions did not adversely impact their trade activities. Settling down in the East Mediterranean and marrying local non-Muslims, including Greeks, Armenians and Jews, the Italians (and some Europeans, mostly from France and also a few from Spain) made a new social class: the "Levantines" (photos of them:https://www.levantineheritage.com/photo.htm#1). At the time of late Byzantine Empire, there were locals from some Italian cities, including Venice, Genoa, Amalfi and Pisa. In 991 AD, the Byzantine Empire granted trade concessions to foreign populations who were fighting for the bizantine interests. Furthermore, the bizantine's Galata district in the Bosforo strait, where these people lived, had some autonomy: the Levantines (mostly from Genoa) of actual Istanbul settled in Beyoğlu and its surroundings. Beyoğlu was also known as "Pera", which means "pear" in Italian language.

The Galata tower in Costantinople/Istanbul is the main historical symbol of the Italian Levantines

In 1453 AD, when the Ottoman armies invaded Istanbul (then known as Constantinople), there were 600 Italian families in Pera. After the foundation of the Turkish Republic, the Levantine population reached more than 25,000 people in 1927 and most of them were Italo-Levantines living in Istanbul and a few thousands in Smyrna (actual Izmir). Indeed historically there are two large communities of Italian Levantines: one in Istanbul and the other in İzmir (read: https://www.levantineheritage.com/links.htm). At the end of the 19th century there were nearly 6,000 Levantines of Italian roots in İzmir. They came mainly from the nearby Genoese island of Chios in the Aegean Sea. (if interested, read in Italian language more info at: https://web.archive.org/web/20110927134437/http://www.disp.let.uniroma1.it/kuma/intercultura/kuma11pannuti.html).

The migration of Latin families from Chios to Costantinople and Smyrna

When the island of Chios was conquered by the Ottomans in 1566, many families moved to Constantinople and Smyrna. A new current of exchanges in trade and relations begin between the Latins from Chios and Genoa and those of Constantinople. From the study of the Chios’ parochial registries, now conserved in the island of Tinos, and a manuscript, dated between 1825 and 1830, of Giovanni Isidoro, Catholic vicarious of Chios, recounting the dispersion of the populace after of the Turkish repression of 1822, we found the names of some of the old Latin families still present in the island: de Portu, Ferando, d’Andria, Castelli, Corpi, Marcopoli, Guglielmi, Giustiniani, Palassurò, Giuducci (Giudici), Reggio, Roustan.

Curiously, until XIXth century, there wasn’t the issue of nationality as regards to the Latins of Chios under Ottoman government, because there wasn’t a particular capitulation signed after the 1566 takeover, as was made in Constantinople after 1453 between Mahomet II and the Genoese colony. We suppose that these Latins conserved the own nationality, as we have evidence that Latins from Chios, when they migrated to Smyrna, still at the beginning of the XIXth century, were considered with a foreign nationality that was often, as in the case of the Giustiniani, was the nationality form their “original” country, in particular they come from Genoa, therefore: Italian.

After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, some Latin families had found shelter in the Greek islands (Chios, Tinos, Syra, Naxos, Santorini), and when order and calm returned to the city, decided to return to Constantinople. This return migration quickened after 1537, when these islands, one after the other, were conquered by the Turks.

According to the registries of deaths of Saint Maria Draperis R.C. church in Pera, an important parish of Constantinople, from 1800 to 1855, 33.09% of the deceased persons were immigrants from three islands (Tinos 17,48%; Syra 13,43%; Chios 2.18%). We notice that those already established in Constantinople represent only 9.92% of the deaths. The Latins were re-united under a civil and religious body called “Magnificent Community”. This Community, around 1840, was placed under the jurisdiction of the Turkish ministry of the Foreign nations, took the name of “Ottoman Latin chancery” and its activity continued until 1927.

Examining the registries of deaths held at Saint Maria Draperis church, we found in the period from 1800 to 1855, the following names represented Latin families that had emigrated from Chios to Costantinople: Braggiotti, Bragiotti, Carco, Caro, Castelli, Charo, Cochino, Coresi, Coressi, Corpi, Doria, Gaidani, Gallizi, Giro, Giustiniani, Isidoro, Jobini, Jobiori, Justiniani, Magnifico, Marcopoli, Marcopolo, Massoni, Nomico, Petier, Piperi, Renaccio, Tubini, Vegeti, Xenopoulo, Zoratelli.

The foreign Latin Community lived its golden age from 1839, emanating out of the reforms of modernization of the Ottoman Empire, until the abolition of the capitulations with the Peace treaty signed at Lausanne on 24 July 1923. The new Republic of Turkey did not delay in applying a certain number of measures to liberate its commerce from foreign domination and that exercised by the minorities.

The Giustiniani branch in the city of Smyrna, come from of the family Giustiniani-De’ Fornetti (Count Palatino arriving in 1413), decreed a marquis by the Italian Sovereign on 22 February 1893, (recognized as a noble and patrician of Genoa by the Sovereign on 20 June 1891), a family also present at the time in Chios, Genoa, Spain and Sicily.

Finally, to learn in detail about the history of the Levantines, or to be more precise, the Italo-Levantines, we translate the italian essay (https://www.opiniojuris.it/medio-oriente/levantini/#_ftnref11) written by Rinaldo Marmara, Doctor of the University of Montpellier III, official historian of the "Apostolic Vicariate of Istanbul" and author of several books on the subject, in order to reconstruct the fundamental passages and to understand the history of this ancient community.

A family of Italian Levantines in the 1920s

The Italo-Ledvantini: Members of an ancient community, which has its roots in the period of the Crusades and the maritime republics, the Levantines are now disappearing. Origin, apogee and decadence of the Italians of Constantinople.(by, R. Marmara)

The origins

On May 29, 1453, the Genoese handed over the keys to the city of Constantinople as a sign of submission to Mehmet II (Mehmet II Fātiḥ, “The Conqueror”).

Christian Constantinople became Istanbul, the new capital of the Ottoman Empire. The conversion was followed by a provision ("ferman") that ensured freedom of worship for the Christians of Galata/Pera and the re-establishment of the Orthodox patriarchate.

Despite this provision, many Latins fled the city to take refuge on the nearby island of Chios, which was still under Genoese domination, while those who decided to stay became Ottoman subjects. Therefore, we have the presence of people who cannot be classified according to a specific nationality, but who are defined as “Latins” who were subjects of the Ottoman Empire. The Latins could not be defined as a Millet minority (like the Armenians, the Greeks or the Jews) but were considered “Taifé” (class, human group).

Many of the Latins who had fled with the capture of Constantinople, then decided to return to the city over time, but according to the laws of the time they could not have stayed more than a year. Those who extended their stay for a period longer than a year, lost the legal status of foreigner and could not therefore leave the country, becoming in all respects an Ottoman subject.

Mehmet II, for issues related to the development of commercial activities that were mainly managed by the Latins, decided to extend the period from 1 to 10 years with the capitulations of 1535. It is important to explain how important the capitulations were in this area. In those of 1569 there is no longer any mention of the period of permanence in the Empire that should not be exceeded.

The capitulations in the Ottoman Empire were contracts concluded between the Empire and various European powers. The capitulations were binding legal acts by which the Ottoman Sultans granted rights and privileges to the Christian States in favor of the subjects of the latter, present in various capacities on Ottoman territory, as a sort of extension of the rights and privileges that those same European Powers had enjoyed at the time of the Byzantine Empire. In the years following the capture of Constantinople, first Genoa (1453), then Venice (1454) and then later Florence and Ancona, stipulated this type of agreement that favored the development of commercial activities.

The return of the Latins had generated a particular situation. Members of the same family could find themselves with different legal statuses. Those who had decided not to abandon the city after the capture of 1453 were considered subjects of the Ottoman Empire, while those who had escaped and then returned were considered foreigners and thanks to the capitulations enjoyed full rights and privileges. This group of returned foreigners can be called "Levantines".

The word Levantines, meaning “from the Levant”, was initially used by the Venetians, who with a negative connotation indicated those who settled in the East for trade, far from the motherland, and who often managed to gain economic benefits quickly thanks also to the advantages derived from the capitulations.

With the expression Levantines we therefore indicate a group of foreigners who lived in the Ottoman Empire, but to which group do we want to attribute this label? To the Italians, of course, because they were the huge majority in Costantinople/Istanbul.

In bizantine Costantinople there were the Genoese, Venetian, Amalfitan and Pisan "Quarters". They were located just in front of Pera, as can read in the map

The apogee

The reform policies carried out by Sultans Mahmud II (1808-1839), Abdülmecid I (1839-1861) and Abdülaziz (1861-1876) and which go under the name of Tanzȋmât, had as their objective modernizing the Empire, countering the independence aims of the different ethnic groups that composed it, and halting the slow international decline of what would become the "Great Sick Man of Europe".

Sultan Abdülmecid I with the promulgation of the Hatt-ı Hümâyun of Gǘlhâne on November 3, 1839, inaugurated the Tanzȋmât by proclaiming the equality of all subjects of the Ottoman Empire without distinction of religion and nationality. The reforms ensured, among other things, “The guarantee of respect for their lives and their property” and “A regular way to determine the payment of taxes”. The privileges granted to non-Muslim subjects were confirmed and expanded with the imperial rescript of 1856. It is important to underline these steps because, thanks to these reforms and the favorable climate that had been established, a significant number of foreigners arrived in the Ottoman Empire in search of work and better living conditions. Thus, from the mid-19th to the beginning of the 20th century, we witness the apogee of the Latin Community of Constantinople.

Although it is difficult to establish precisely how many there were, we know that Italian citizens were the largest group of the Levantine community, which numbered around 30,000 out of a total of approximately 900,000 inhabitants of the city.

From the study carried out in various archives, it is possible to establish that families from Italy, including the Timoni, Testa, Chirico, Franchini and Giustiniani, Giudici just to name a few, settled permanently in Constantinople in that period. This group, which over time became a true caste, also by virtue of the transmission from father to son of the office of "dragoman" in the various European and Ottoman embassies or legations, was commonly defined as the “Magnificent community of Pera”, from the name of the neighborhood they inhabited. The success of the Italian element and the Italian language at a diplomatic level in the lands of the Sultan was due to the members of this community.

The Italian community present in Constantinople during its heyday could be divided into three groups. The first was made up of Italians already present in Constantinople, those who came from the greek archipelago and the Jews who had escaped from Spain. The second group, the majority, was made up of new arrivals in the city. The third group was made up of workers looking for work in the large construction sites where foreign labor was sought after.

At the beginning of the 19th century, there were about fifty Italian industrial companies present in Ottoman territory: among these we remember the Ansaldo House, which had built two torpedo boats in addition to repairing and transforming the Ottoman fleet; the Dapei foundries present since 1835, the Camondo brick factory since 1874, as well as distilleries, pasta factories, tailors. There were also eighty commercial houses in Constantinople alone: insurers, bankers, publishers, opticians, the presence and influence of Italians in the Ottoman Empire in the economic and cultural sphere was extremely important, just look at the number of religious institutions such as churches, convents, and then schools, hospitals, orphanages born after the 1867 law that authorized the right to property.

The life of the community of Italian origin took place, in the XIX century and early XX century, around some associations. In 1838 the "Associazione Commerciale Artigiana di Pietà" was born, founded to relieve poor artisans. In 1863 there was the First Branch of the Universal Israelite Alliance and the Respectable Italian Lodge in the East of Constantinople founded under the auspices of the Grand Orient of Turin, and also supported by the ambassador of the Kingdom of Italy. The "Dante Alighieri Society" inaugurated in 1895 which since then has been a center of social and cultural aggregation operating through initiatives such as the establishment of schools, the library, the organization of public conferences and the promotion of the Italian language (please read in italian language: https://journals.openedition.org/diacronie/1785).

The "Società Operaia Italiana" di Mutuo Soccorso was founded in 1863, two years after the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, seven years before Rome was united with the rest of the peninsula. The Società Operaia Italiana was an association in which, alongside ideals and nostalgia, practical actions aimed at mutual support were carried out. Each member was required to make monthly donations to a fund intended to support the less wealthy members. Among the papers kept in the archives of “Casa Garibaldi” as it was renamed, the correspondence between the two Presidents is preserved: Giuseppe Garibaldi the effective one and Giuseppe Mazzini the honorary one.

Among the most important Italian figures who lived in Constantinople we cannot fail to mention Giuseppe Donizetti, author of the first Ottoman national anthem which in honor of Sultan Mahmud was entitled Marcia Mahmudiye, or that of the painter Fausto Zonaro author of works such as The Ertuğrul Regiment on the Galata Bridge, and later appointed court painter, or Raimondo D’Aronco one of the major architects exponent of the Art Nouveau world, or the portrait painter Leonardo Di Mango, whose remains are preserved in a state of abandonment in the Latin cemetery of Feriköy.

The Italian colony, also present in other cities such as Smyrna, developed and lived in Constantinople between the districts of Pera (or Galata), today Beyoğlu, an elegant neighborhood rebuilt after the fire of 1870 where neoclassical and Art Nouveau buildings alternate, and of Pangalti.

The origin of the name of the latter according to some sources comes from "hot breads" due to the presence of several bakeries in the area, but most likely the name comes from an Italian, Pancaldi, who moved from Bologna to Constantinople and in that area opened a café that soon became a meeting point for many Italians.

This cosmopolitan, fluid and creative panorama, however, came to an abrupt end in the first decade of the twentieth century. In fact, the intensified nationalistic pressures on both the Italian and Ottoman-Turkish sides, progressively distanced the two communities and led them to a definitive break during the Libyan war of 1911-12. Previously, during the Dodecanese War, the Italians in Constantinople did not suffer any consequences, the Council of Ministers in fact recommended the Governors of cities and provinces to ensure maximum protection, but with the war in Libya, the Sultan and especially the government of the CUP (“Committee of Union and Progress”) responded to the Italian invasion of Tripolitania by expelling all Italians from the Empire and in particular from Constantinople.

1912 postcard showing some Italo-levantines, refugees from Istanbul, just arrived in Ancona

The Ottoman government decreed the expulsion of all Italian citizens residing in Turkey, with the exception of railway construction workers, clergymen and widows. These measures affected 7,000 Italo-Levantines from Smyrna and more than 12,000 from Constantinople. To avoid repatriation, many opted for Ottoman citizenship. The expelled, who were the majority, were repatriated in the following days to the ports of Ancona, Naples and Bari.

This event marked the beginning of the end of the Italian community in Constantinople. Although many returned after the end of the conflict, the community never recovered to the level of its past splendor. However, in Istanbul, during the twenty years of Mussolini's rule, the "Circolo Roma" and the "Casa d'Italia" were born, as meeting centers for local Italians.

The decline

What are the causes of this decline?

Today (2015) the community has about 5/6000 Italians but the number of true Levantines is about 1500/2000 units.

Rinaldo Marmara (R. Marmara, "Lessico Etimologico delle parole greche mutuate dall’italiano – Gli italiani di Costantinopoli" – Istituto italiano di cultura. Istanbul, 2008) explains that "Being Levantine was a spirit, a culture, even if legally opposed it was a single family, with the same habits and the same way of thinking, of speaking. The true Levantine must be able to speak Greek, as it was the vehicular language of the Europeans settled in the lands of the East, but also French, Italian and Turkish. The evolution of linguistic relations between the Levantines is curious. To fill the gaps in their knowledge of Greek, the Italians Hellenized their words thus enriching the koinè, or the common Greek language".

Things began to change with the birth of the Turkish Republic, both from the point of view of guaranteeing privileges for foreigners, and from a religious point of view.

The Ottoman Empire guaranteed a sort of freedom of worship perhaps greater than that of already secular countries such as France, so it was common to witness processions and public religious functions in the streets of Constantinople. On 29 October 1923 the Grand National Assembly, through the approval of some amendments to the organic law of 1921, proclaimed the establishment of the Turkish Republic and elected Kemal Ataturk as its President. The latter, even before being the father of "Türkiye Cumhuriyeti" on a political level, is to be considered its architect from an ideological point of view. Kemal promoted an essential core of values aimed at remodelling contemporary Turkish society, transforming it into an emancipated and progressive nation. In this perspective of modernization of the country in a Western sense, the ideological system forged by the Kemalist elite rested on six well-known pillars, renamed 'arrows of Kemalism': republicanism, nationalism, populism, secularism, statism and reformism. The process of Turkish secularism takes the name of 'laiklik':it referred in abstract to the rigid separation between State and Churches typical of the model of 'assertive' or 'militant' secularism of French origin.

The decline that began with the birth of the Republic transformed into a rupture with the "Istanbul riots" of 6-7 September 1955, against the backdrop of the conflicts between Turkey and Greece that had continued since the end of the First World War. The pretext was the false news of the fire set on the birthplace of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the seat of the Turkish Consulate in Thessaloniki, Greece, reported in an afternoon edition of the local newspaper Istanbul Express, printed for the occasion in more than 200 thousand copies, which amplified the lie and gave rise to the violence that began to invade Istanbul starting at 5 pm a Pogrom, a premeditated devastation tolerated by the authorities, mainly against the Greek community, but also against the Armenian and Jewish ones.

The violence led to the death of 16 people (13 Greeks, 2 Orthodox priests and one Armenian), there were rapes and forced circumcisions, damage to more than 5,000 commercial activities. The sad images of the devastation of those days were immortalized by a young Ara Guler, the famous Turkish-Armenian photographer, considered one of the fathers of twentieth-century photography. Insecurity and fear pushed thousands of individuals belonging to minorities from Turkey, including many Levantines and Romanians, to abandon the country forever.

Another “social” factor in the decline of the Levantines, in addition to the demographic one, was (according to Rinaldo) the opening towards Turkish society with mixed marriages. “With mixed marriages, that “way of thinking” typical of minorities has disappeared, capable of formulating the same answers to questions that came from outside, which perhaps did not correspond to the truth but was a defense system based on the cohesion of the community".

Notable people

Famous people of the present-day Italian levantine community in Istanbul include:

Sir Alfredo Biliotti

Sir Alfredo Biliotti, who joined the British foreign service and eventually rose to become one of its most distinguished consular officers in the late 19th century. Biliotti was also an accomplished archaeologist who conducted important excavations at sites in the Aegean and Anatolia.

Livio Missir di Lusignano. Historian (his masterpiece is Les anciennes familles italiennes de Turquie).

Giuseppe Donizetti, musicist. He was Instructor General of the Imperial Ottoman Music at Sultan Mahmud II's court

COMMUNIST CHINA IS NOW A POSSIBLE NEOFASCIST STATE

There it is a growing discussion between experts and political historians about the changes that are happening in modern comunist China, a country that used to be a "maoist" (or stalinist) state after WW2. China -as we all know- was a country (under the leadeship of the harsh dictator Mao-tse-tung) where the worst extremism of the communism ideology was being developed in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. And Mao rejected every link with the fascist regime of the "Kuomintang", a Chinese nationalist political party that had an alleged history of fascism under Chiang Kai-shek's leadership.

In blue the map area of China controlled by the fascist Kuomintang in the mid 1930s

Indeed we all know that communism in eastern Europe and Russia/URSS disappeared in the early 1990s, but remained in China and other countries (like Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, etc...). Consequently, in China there has been an evolution in the local communist party in order to survive. And this evolution seems to have created a country with characteristics similar to the ones that existed in fascist Italy.

Let me explain better: fascism is ruled by a party that controls the economy with "corporativism" (that is made by huge state companies with monopoly in their area of activity) but allows capitalism and the existence of religions to every citizen, communism is ruled by a party and has a state owned economy without allowing capitalism and religion existense. Both political ideologies of communism and fascism promote nationalism and a moderate local ethnicity/racism, with the consequence of promoting militarism. The huge growth of the italian (& german) economy in the 1930s impressioned the actual leaders of China (like Xi Jinping), who commented that without military expansionism (that provoked WW2) the fascist regime in Italy -with corporate government companies (ruling the economy without opposition) and capitalism plus religions- probably would be in power even today.....and this kind of fascist corporativism is exactly what is happening in communist China today!


Of course we have to see in the next decades if the leaders of communist China have learned the lesson of not going to war, risking the end of fascist Italy.....

Furthermore, allow me to remember that years ago I have read an article (written in 2012 by Didi Kirsten Tatlow) of the New Youk Times that questioned if "China is a fascist state". Here it is some interesting excerpts:

Chinese politics is controlled by the Communist Party and its powerful families and factions, so when the son of a former party chief says the state is virtually “fascist,” it’s worth listening.That’s what Hu Deping, son of the late Hu Yaobang, the party general secretary forced to resign in 1987 for being too reform-minded, said to a group of mostly Chinese businesspeople and environmentalists in late 2005, in the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square....Is today’s China fascist? To cite a few characteristics, starting with the one-party state: Since the economic reforms that followed the death of Mao Tse Tung, it has grown immensely wealthy through its state-owned companies, some of which rank among the world’s richest. What was once a poor, authoritarian state has become a rich, authoritarian state.The rights to speak and associate freely remain tightly hobbled despite some relaxation, and some top officials openly scorn democracy. The courts obey the party’s directives.Official slogans increasingly exhort nationalism and “national rejuvenation,” a concept rooted in a mystical sense of nationhood popular with fascist thinkers in the last century.“The signs have long been there,” said Wang Lixiong, a prominent writer and scholar. “I feel there is a very clear trend toward fascism, and the source of fascism comes from the ever-growing power of the power holders.” China is “a police state,” he said, where power rules for power’s sake.The passing of Mao did not lead to power-sharing, it just stripped China of its Communist ideology, and no convincing value system has filled the gap, he said.

Indeed there was a time when China was referred to as a society which was Communist or Post-Communist; today, the terms Authoritarian Capitalist or Capitalist with Asian/Chinese Characteristics are more common. However, there is a new term that appears to be increasingly applicable to the operation of the Chinese state and its impact on the lives of Chinese people and, above all, the education of Chinese youth born in the 1990s and later: "NEO-FASCIST CHINA".

It is increasingly clear that China is the most powerful, mature and internationally accepted "fascist state" in global history and its status as such should cause us all a great deal of studies but also worries.

China communist economy is actually booming, as can be seen in this 2022 skyline of Shanghai

To call contemporary China a fascist state is nothing particularly new. In March 2010, the Taipei Times published an editorial by a J. Michael Cole, which refers to the writings of italian Umberto Eco and english Robert Paxton to match accepted definitions of fascism with the socio-political realities in China. Cole points to the realities of emphasizing the role of the nation in all matters, including sports; a sense of national grievance as the core of national identity; the paranoid control of any potential opposition; and the rise of a "moderate" Han Chinese racism. Cole is right in much of his analysis. But for all its correctness, his analysis from Taipei cannot compare to the sadness & preoccupation that is the lived reality of watching this fascist state unfold before one's very eyes in the center of Chinese power in Beijing.

Paxton provides a useful definition of fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” And this is exactly what is happening in China actually

Fascist states have long relied upon their competitive advantage in attracting foreign investment. Authoritarian control of the labor force and national policymaking makes good business sense. Such was the case with Italy and Germany during the inter-war period and such is the case with China's dizzyingly rapid rise today. The ability of a totalitarian fascist state to control the labor force, suppress dissent and put investment over social welfare makes such states highly attractive to businesses. Such is the case today with China. Coca-Cola's CEO inadvertently demonstrated the fascist nature of the Chinese state when he lauded the “one-stop shop in terms of the Chinese foreign investment agency,” wherein the federal and local Chinese government agencies are competing for investment, with their population paying the cost in terms of reduced labor rights and environmental protections.

Chinese will often accept this as a necessary part of their national development, a development which seems increasingly to benefit only those with power and connections and to increasingly marginalize the common people. One need not look merely at the statements of business leaders, but much mainstream media attention has praised the “efficiency” of the Chinese fascist regime while deriding the clumsiness and inconvenience of states which remain nominal liberal democracies.

As written by Sam Hudson of the University of Cambridge, the issue of Chinese fascism is one which the people of the world must pay much greater attention than they have to date. Too much emphasis is placed on the economic power of China without thought to the origins of this power and the long-term sociopolitical consequences it may have for the world.

The roots of China’s descent into fascism can be traced back to Deng Xiaoping’s ascent to power and economic reforms that openly rejected central planning in favour of market-based economics. These reforms were instrumental in not only achieving China’s rapid economic growth, but also in ensuring a place on the world stage, through opening up the country to global markets. On the surface, these reforms relinquished state power over the economy; but by allowing private enterprise, they laid the foundations for an economy similar to those found in the fascist countries of the 1930s and 40s.

A core facet of fascism is the weaponisation of capitalism to help further the authority and interests of the government. As opposed to Soviet-style centrally planned economics, fascists are quite content with the development of private monopolies and the conglomeration of private businesses, enriching their owners – as long as it is in the interest of the government to do so. The tolerance of the Zaibatsu by the Imperial Japanese Militarist Government, the huge help to the Fiat and the Agnelli group done by Mussolini and the Nazi’s open support of powerful monopolies in Germany such as IG Farben, Krupp and Rheinmetall, pay testament to this. China’s economy is far closer to this form of fascistic weaponised capitalism, tolerating powerful monopolies such as Huawei as long as they continue to silently pledge fealty, than it is to a market-reformed Soviet Union along the lines of Gorbachev’s russian perestroika.

If Dengism laid the economic roots for the development of Chinese fascism, it is Xi Jinping that allowed it to blossom. In 1995, italian Umberto Eco provided one of the most comprehensive definitions of fascism in his essay “Ur-Fascism” - "Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt" (https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Eco-urfascism.pdf). By looking at China’s adherence to the properties that were laid out in his essay, we can quickly see that the Chinese government is at heart, fascist without any doubt.

Anyway, the improvements in this possible neofascist China in the last years are astonishing the world: Let's think -as an example- to the "Maglev" trains that are being created in the 2020s!

The Maglev train network studied for China at more than 600km/hour speed

Finally, what strikes me more is the question: if China has grown to the level of developing "futuristic" Maglev trains in just 30 years (in 1994 it was a mostly underdeveloped country!), what will be able to do in another 30 years, as a possible neofascist state?

"China has the largest network of high-speed railways in the world, covering 95 percent of cities with a population of more than a million, according to the Ministry of Transport. China aims to build 200,000 kilometers of railways, 460,000 kilometers of highways, and 25,000 kilometers of high-level sea lanes by 2035, according to a 15-year transport expansion guideline published in February this year. The network is designed to support the "National 123" transportation circle, which stands for one-hour commute within the city, two-hour trip between city clusters and three-hour travel to major cities nationwide, read the plan. Lu Huapu, director of the Transportation Research Institute of Tsinghua University, told the Global Times that the development of the high-speed transportation system helps China realize the "National 123 transportation circle," which was proposed in the national guideline." G.T.

In 2022 China created a prototype of a Maglev commercial train capable to reach -in theory- nearly 1000 km/hour (https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202107/1229097.shtml)

HISTORY OF NEOLATIN KESZTHELY (PANNONIA)

The survival of romanised people in Pannonia (actual Hungary) during and after the fall of the western roman empire in the fifth century

In the last decades there have been discussions between academics about the existence of a romanised culture and romance language in an area of actual Hungary: the "Keszthely's neolatin settlement" around lake Balaton. For example, initially the Austro-Czech linguist Julius Pokorny suggested that the name of the town of Keszthely could be derived from the Istriot-Venetian word "castei" (castle), but actually some historians deny it.

Furthermore it is noteworthy to pinpoint that Pannonia, a province of the Western Roman empire, was devastated by the barbarian invasions (Huns, Gepidae, Avars, etc.) during the fifth century. In 455 AD the western roman emperor Avitus was able to reconquer all Pannonia for a short period of years, but soon the province was attacked again by the barbarians and this time it was lost forever to the Avars and other barbarian tribes. Only a few thousands romanized pannonians survived the onslaughts, mainly around the lake Pelso (now lake Balaton) in small fortified villages like Keszthely.

This "survived" Romanic population from Pannonia created the Keszthely culture that evolved mainly during the 6th-7th centuries. Its artefacts were made in the workshops of Roman origin located mainly in the fortified settlements of Keszthely-Fenékpuszta and Sopianae (actual Pécs). The Romanic craftsmen worked for their masters (Gepidae and Avars). Indeed under the Avars the roman castle of Fenékpuszta near Keszthely and the surroundings were not occupied so the original romanized inhabitants of the place area lived on undisturbed. They paid food and artisan goods for peace from the Avars in the following decades until around 568 AD.

Map I have created for Wikipedia, showing the romance speaking areas of the Balkans. In blue color is the Pannonian romance, next to the Romanian language area in orange color

After 568 AD new Christian romanized pannonians arrived in the Balaton lake area, probably from the destroyed Aquincum (actual Budapest) and so creating a "mixed-culture" (partially latin, german and avar): the ''Keszthely culture''. The Keszthely-Fenékpuszta fortress became the centre of a 30 km diameter area, where the people buried their dead adorned with jewellery and clothing of Roman-Byzantine origin. They rebuilt the fortress Basilica, where the principals of the community were buried, while their relatives found their final resting places next to the nearby "horreum" (granary).

But some academics (like Peter Straub, Arnulf Kollautz and Sági Károly) have made many critics to the above historical writings and think that all this romance population of Pannonia's lake Balaton -after the fifth century roman withdrawal- disappeared, because of massacres and/or migrations toward the Italian peninsula. Nearly all of these historians lived and/or are related to the decades of communism in Hungary, when was the rule to despise everything from the western world, and -because the roman empire was the forerunner of the actual western civilisation- the presence of latinised Pannonians after mid fifth century was denied. They "forgot" in a typical communist way the existence of Saint Bonosa -for example- a martyr worshipped in those centuries also in Pannonia, as a clear evidence (thanks to a spin with the word "BONOSA" found in a Keszthely's grave of the early sixth century!) and proof of the survival of these romanised Pannonians in the Keszthely area after the fall of the western roman empire.

However, here it is what I have found about, with my research:

Keszthely's History

At Fenekpuszta (Keszthely)..excavations have brought to light a unique group of finds that suggest not only Christians but Romans too.....There are finds such as a gold pin with the name BONOSA proving that some ethnic group of Roman complexion remained at Fenekpuszta (after the barbarian invasions) André du Nay

Celtic People coming from the Northern Alps invaded the northern part of Transdanubia down to the coastline of the Balaton lake in 4000 B. C. They were the first people in this territory, who we know by name. They spread the use of iron, which became the material applied not only for making weapons and jewellery, but also for manufacturing various tools and instruments. It was also the Celts, who introduced the use of the foot-driven potter's wheel. The tribes' aristocracy lived in fortified settlements, the name "Balatonföldvár" refers to such Celtic earthwork. The Celts had flourishing commercial relations with Italy and the Balkans, they even minted coins patterned after Grecian models.

Between 13 and 8 BC Tiberius, the future Roman emperor lead the Romans to invade Transdanubia and they organised the "Province of Pannonia". The important commercial and military road - connecting the capital of the province, Aquincum, with Aquileia situated on the Adriatic - crossed the Balaton at Fenékpuszta and intersected another important route between Sopianae (called Pécs nowadays) and Augusta Treverorum (actual Trier). Along this important route there were several settlements. The tombstone inscriptions and the findings excavated in the cemetery in the southern part of the town prove that there were not only the original Celtic inhabitants but also Roman citizens - first of all merchants - who lived there.

The highly developed Roman industry, agricultural technology and commerce brought about changes in the life of the region. Transdanubia, which was earlier only referred to as 'Pannonia glandifera' (acorn-growing Pannonia) gradually developed to have agricultural scenery. Pannonia under Trajan emperor was a very rich & nice region of the Roman empire. This peaceful development in the first and second centuries got interrupted by series of attacks of barbarian tribes coming from the other bank of the Danube, which started in the 160's. After the derastations in the 3rd century only Fenékpuszta may have been a really significant settlement, in the other regions there might have been some smaller or bigger villas and surrounding farms, some of which had been built about the end of the century. Some of them were with all 'modern conveniences': they even boasted central heating and separate bathing huts.

In the 4th century there came a major change in the life of the territory: Keszthely and the surroundings became quite densely populated, from the Dobogókõ to the Fenékpuszta Halászrét there are cemeteries all over the place. The growth of the population was connected with a grand project - the building of the Fenékpuszta roman fortress, which had 44 outer barbicans, 4 inner gate towers. It measured 377 m by 358 m and the foundations were laid 2.6 metres wide. The buildings needed 85.000 m3 of stone. In spite of the archeological excavations which have been going on for 100 years with some interruptions though, several questions of the history of the fortress have not been answered yet. It goes without saying, however, that it determined the history of Keszthely and the surroundings.

Photo showing the latin "BONOSA" word in a roman hairpin found during excavation of Keszthely ruins & cemetery. "BONOSA" was probably the name or nickname of the woman with whom it was buried, according to scholar Walter Pohl. But Italian historians (like Aiello and D'Ambrosio) thinks it is related to Saint Bonosa, virgin and martyr of Portus near Rome.

The roman commandant's headquarters stood at the intersection of the roads which connected the gates aligning with the cardinal points of the compass. All the facilities, mainly residential buildings, were situated along these roads. Near the eastern gate there stood a 104 m long building, which is believed to have been a mansion but it might have been a farm building. The large storehouse, the horreum, which stood at the western gate, still can be seen. Not far from the horreum one can see the Christian church, which was initially erected at the end of the 4th century. It replaced a building which had been equipped with central heating. The church was rebuilt several times during the centuries becoming an important basilica, but its foundations show us what the last variation in the 7th century looked like. At the place of discovery, you can see the reconstructed southern entrance, with the four rectangular inner gate-towers and the two barbicans. The fortress may have garrisoned a cohort (a Roman military unit; 1/10 of a legion). The fortress defended not only the important road to Italy, it may have served as a storage place of supplies and provisions for the fortresses along the so called 'limes', the Danube borderline of the roman empire. This seems to be proved by the numerous artisan tools, agricultural instruments and raw materials. Earlier it used to be identified with the city "Morgentiana", later with "Valcum", but doubts have risen recently.

In all the bullwark and the building of the fortress there is a burnt layer present everywhere, which may have been in connection with the huge devastation done by the barbarian invasion of 374 AD. The population of the region decreased but it did not become uninhabited. The fortress was quickly restored and it served on providing shelter for the inhabitants even after the 5th century, when the Roman legions and the administration left the province and the whole Transdanubia came under Hun authority, which meant that the Great Migration reached the region directly. The Hun rule lasted only two decades. From this period we only know two rich burial places - those of a mounted warrior and a high-born girl.

Attila died in 453 AD and when in the following year the peoples who had been earlier conquered by him defeated the Huns at the River Nedao, they left the Carpathian Basin for good. In 455 AD, Emperor Avitus managed to restore the Roman rule for a short time but two years later the Ostrogoths occupied Western Transdanubia. The Fenékpuszta fortress was set on fire, the majority of the inhabitants died. The Goths returned a couple of months later and they made the rest of the romanised population rebuild the fortress, which became the seat of their king called Thiudimer.

Image of a Roman Pannonian girl of the sixth century, with decoratrions found in the Keszthely cemetery

His son was Theodoric the Great, who later became the greatest king of the Ostrogoths. Until he went to Constantinople in 461 AD, he must have lived in Pannonia. In 471 AD the Ostrogoths lead by Theodoric the Great left Transdanubia.

The conditions of the following years were rather unstable. The romanised people living in the vicinity moved back into the fortress. At the beginning of the 6th century the Keszthely territory may have been under the influence of the Italian kingdom of the Ostrogoths, however after Theodoric's death the region got under the rule of another German tribe, the Longobards.

They did not occupy the fortress, but they took control of the crossing place, which is proved by their cemeteries excavated in the south of Keszthely and Vörs. They got involved in a long war with the Gepids, who lived in the Great Hungarian Plain, and in 567 AD with the help of the Avars staying at the Lower Danube, they defeated them. However, the Avars proved to be even more dangerous neighbours, so in 568 AD in return for an alliance, the Longobards emptied Transdanubia and went down to Italy. It was during the Avar Empire that for the first time in the history of the Carpathian Basin, Keszthely and the surroundings were under the same authority. But Keszthely and the surroundings were not occupied by the barbarians, so the original romanised inhabitants lived on undisturbed. They paid food and artisan goods for peace.

Actual aerial photo of two remains from Keszthely's roman fort: the basilica is on the top; it was created around 450 AD (the second, at the bottom, is the "horreum")

After 570 AD new Christians arrived here. The Fenékpuszta fortress became the centre of a 30 km diameter area, where the people buried their dead adorned with jewellery and clothing of Roman & Byzantine origin. They rebuilt the fortress Basilica, where the principals of the community were buried, while their relatives found their final resting places next to the nearby horreum.

''At Fenekpuszta (Keszthely)..excavations have brought to light a unique group of finds that suggest not only Christians but Romans too.....There are finds such as a gold pin with the name BONOSA proving that some ethnic group of Roman complexion remained at Fenekpuszta (after the barbarian invasions)''András Mócsy

When the seventh century started, practically all the few remaining romanised Pannonians of Keszthely started to be fully assimilated (by the other people who invaded the region) and disappeared in a few decades.

In 626 AD the Avars were seriously defeated under Constantinople, which was followed by a civil war. The leaders of the Fenékpuszta/Keszthely community had supported those who were later defeated. That was why the Avars besieged and then destroyed the fortress. They made the rest of the population -including the remaining romanised Pannonians- move into the territory of the town centre. The Christian population got under military suppression. The cemeteries in the 7th and the 8th centuries entombed both Avars and Christians but they were buried separately. The different religions did not allow them to mix even after death. The Christian population cut from the outer world created a unique, characteristic material culture, which we know from the findings of the cemeteries near Keszthely. These findings got called the "Keszthely culture".

At that time, Keszthely was the centre of the region because the Balaton's bay reaching out in Hévíz's direction got so much peat-bogged and so created the need to bear a road. The Fenékpuszta crossing lost its importance for a thousand years, its role was taken over by the much narrower crossing at Balatonhídvég. At the end of the 8th century under the reign of Charlemagne, the Francs overthrew the Avar Empire and they invaded Transdanubia (where all the romanised Pannonians have already disappeared). The Christians living around Keszthely quickly took over the western Christian customs, which among others meant that they buried their dead without grove furniture so now it is impossible to identify them.

Roman Pannonia's detailed map showing the "Limes Pannonicus" and -at the center- the lake Balaton (lake Pelso in latin) with Keszthely/Fenékpuszta.

Map showing the full Pannonia (including the Iaziges territory, east of the Danube river, as a "Client state" in pink color) inside the Roman Empire under Constantine the Great in 323 AD

ITALIANS OF SAO PAULO (BRASIL)

The Italians in the brasilian metropolis of Sao Paulo/San Paolo.

All of us know that the city with the most Italians in the world is not Roma (the capital of Italy) but Sao Paulo in Brasil. In the metropolitan area of Roma there are nearly 3 million Italians, but in the one of San Paolo (as is called in Italian) there are nearly 6 millions (the double). Of course only one million are "real" Italians born in Italy or Italo-brasilians with also the Italian passport, but they are more than half the actual population of this huge brasilian city (that has nearly 11 million inhabitants). These Italians of San Paolo are in many cases the descendants of one of the biggest emigrations in History: the Italian diaspora of the last two centuries.

The skyscraper "Italia" in downtown Sao Paulo, built by the Italian community of San Paolo in the 1960s (when was the tallest in south America, with nearly 170 meters of altitude and 50 floors)

In 1877 the great migratory movement of the Italians has not yet begun, but the presence of Italians in São Paulo was already significant: there were at least 2 thousands of them (the first small group -from northern Italy- settled in the area during colonial times under Portugal rule). Ten years later, in 1887, there were 27,323 Italians in the city and the following year the wave of migration was overwhelming: there were 80,749 Italians and they occupied in equal numbers the city and the state of the same name. In 1890 there were 24 thousand Italians in the city alone: one third of the inhabitants.

In 1916 the Italians were 187,540, or 37% of the city population of nearly 400,000 inhabitants, according to official census.

After some years working in coffee plantations, many Italian immigrants earned enough money to buy their own land and become farmers themselves. But most of them left the rural areas and moved to cities, mainly São Paulo. A very few became very rich in the process and attracted more Italian immigrants. In the early 20th century, São Paulo became known as the "City of the Italians", because 31% of its inhabitants were of Italian nationality in 1900. Indeed the city of São Paulo had the second-highest population of people with Italian ancestry in the world at this time beginning the xx century, after only Rome. In 1901, 90% of industrial workers and 80% of construction workers in São Paulo were Italians. Most of them participated actively in the industrialization of Brazil in the early 20th century.

Photo of Count Matarazzo, a poor Italian emigrant who was named "Count" by the King of Italy in 1926 and had 20 billion dollars worldwide when died -after becoming a very rich industrialist of San Paolo- in 1937. He was one of the richest man in all LatinAmerica (80 years later, in 2017, these $20 billion were worth the equivalent of 220 billion of 2017 US dollars! More than the 2017 Sao Paulo state GDP!)

Others became investors, bankers and industrialists, such as Count Matarazzo (if interested, please read in italian: https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/francesco-matarazzo_(Dizionario-Biografico)/), whose family became the richest industrialists in São Paulo by holding the property of more than 200 industries and businesses (in Rio Grande do Sul, actually 42% of the industrial companies have Italians roots and in the San Paolo State the percentage is similar but a bit less).

Count Matarazzo died in 1937, when was the fifth most rich man in the "western capitalist world"!

Italians and their descendants were also quick to organize themselves and establish mutual aid societies (such as the "Circolo Italiano"), hospitals, schools (such as the "Istituto Colégio Dante Alighieri", in São Paulo), labor unions, newspapers as "Il Piccolo" and "Fanfulla" (for the whole city of São Paulo), magazines, radio stations and association football teams such as: "Clube Atlético Votorantim", the old Sport "Club Savóia", Clube "Atlético Juventus" of Italians Brazilians from Mooca (old worker quarter inside the city of São Paulo), "Esporte Clube Juventude" and the great clubs (which had the same name) "Palestra Italia", later renamed to "Sociedade Esportiva Palmeiras" in São Paulo.

In 1920, nearly 80% of São Paulo city's population was composed of immigrants and their descendants and Italians made up over half of its male population. In 1900, a columnist who was absent from São Paulo for 20 years wrote "then São Paulo used to be a genuine brasilian city, today it is an Italian city." Furthermore, after WW1 the Governor of São Paulo said that "if the owner of each house in São Paulo display the flag of the country of origin on the roof, from above São Paulo would look like an Italian city".

It is noteworthy o pinpoint that Sao Paulo served as the adoptive home of 56% of the Italian immigrants who arrived in Brazil between 1886 and 1934 (the last year of huge emigration from Italy before WW2).

For reasons of practicality, Italian immigrants tended to settle in the urban neighborhoods of Sao Paulo with other Italians of similar regional origins. Literary scholar Mario Carelli (in 1985) affirmed that familial relationships and kinship ties led Neapolitans to Bras, Calabrians to Bixiga (previously known as "Bexiga," or "bladder," in Portuguese), and Venetians to Bom Retiro. Carelli also notes that these neighborhoods, as well as Barra Funda and Belenzinho, were positioned in the valleys of the Tiete and Tamanduatei rivers and within easy access of Sao Paulo's railways (for going to work). The area in which the Italian immigrants settled constituted the "cidade baixa," or the working-class ghettos of the city. The neighborhoods, particularly Bixiga, boasted affordable rent and property values, although the living conditions were precarious initially in the first half of the XX century.

Indeed in 1920 in San Paolo there were 1,446 companies and industries in the hands of italians enriched, who gave work to more than 9,000 "poor" italians emigrants.

Italian emigrants in the ''Hospedaria dos Imigrantes'' (Immigrants Hospital), in 1895 São Paulo.

Historian Angelo Trento (in 1989) affirmed that there were as many as 170 Italian-language newspapers circulating throughout the state of Sao Paulo. Of those, Trento attested that the vast majority of the publications, from 140 to 150, were published by and directed towards Italians residing in the State's urban capital.

Furthermore, Italian language & dialects have influenced the Portuguese spoken in some areas of Brazil like the State of Sao Paulo. Italian was so widespread in São Paulo city that the Portuguese traveler Sousa Pinto said that he could not speak with cart drivers in Portuguese because they all spoke Italian dialects and gesticulated as Neapolitans.

The Italian influence on Portuguese spoken in São Paulo is no longer as great as before, but the accent of the city's inhabitants still has some traces of the Italian accents common in the beginning of the 20th century like the intonation and such expressions as "Belo", "Ma vá!", "Orra meu!" and "Tá entendendo?". Other characteristic is the difficulty to speak Portuguese in plural, saying plural words as they were singulars like in the italian language. The lexical influence of Italian on Brazilian Portuguese, however, has remained quite small.

The Italian influence in Brazil affects also music with traditional Italian songs and the merging with other Brazilians music styles. One of the main results of the fusion is "Samba paulista", a samba with strong Italians influence, that has a Brazilian rhythm and theme but (mostly) Italian lyrics. Indeed Samba paulista was created by Adoniran Barbosa (born João/Giuseppe Rubinato), the son of Italians immigrants. His songs translated the life of the Italian neighborhoods in São Paulo and merged São Paulo dialect with samba, which latter made him known as the "people's poet."

There is no doubt that Italian Fascism in Sao Paulo was a remarkable movement in the 1930s, with thousands of members and followers, but it disappeared after WW2. However in San Paolo in the 1930s and until 1942 all the newspapers in italian were controlled by the italo-brasilian fascists supported by Count Matarazzo (please read in italian: https://web.archive.org/web/20121116054510/http://www.asei.eu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=178:gli-italiani-in-brasile-vid-parte&catid=65:articoli&Itemid=250)

According to Maria Luiza Carneiro Tucci, the "Fascio di Sao Paolo" was formed in March 1923, approximately 6 months after the fascists took power in Italy, with huge success among the Italians of the city. This was confirmed by its quick spread to other cities and Italian communities. In November 1931, a branch of the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro that had existed in Italy since 1925 was founded in São Paulo and put under the control of the Fascio di Sao Paulo, which was responsible for spreading the fascist doctrine among the local italian popular classes. Another important institution at that time was the "Circolo Italiano di Sao Paolo", formed in 1910 and continuing today, which aimed to preserve and disseminate Italian culture to Italian-Brazilians and Brazilians in general. In the middle 1920s, the fascist doctrine began to infiltrate this community through the influence of the 'March on Rome veteran' Serafino Mazzolini, Italian consul to Brazil.

These three Italian institutions, and several more, along with their members, were spied on, persecuted, and sometimes even closed by the brasilian "Estado Novo regime" under the allegation that they were "conspiring against the Brazilian State" by orders of the fascist government in Italy. Some members were arrested; one of them, Cesar Rivelli, was expelled from the country. Indeed, after the Brazilian declaration of war against the Axis powers in 1942, for example, the traditional Dante Alighieri school of São Paulo, in that time frequented by students of Italian background, had to change its name to "Colégio Visconde de São Leopoldo," returning to the formal name only after the war was over.

Actually 45% of the Italians in San Paolo came from Northern Italy, 34% from Central Italy regions, and only 21% from Southern Italy. Brazil (and San Paolo, of course) is the only American country with a large Italian community in which Southern Italian immigrants are a minority. The italian regions from where they mainly came are Veneto and Friuli/Trentino, followed by Campania and Lombardy.

An italian-brasilian family (the Rizzoli) in 2012

The following are translated excepts from the book "Gli Italiani in Brasile" of Matteo Sanfilippo (published in 2009):

After the Second World War, Italian emigration to Brazil once again recorded a significant positive balance. In 1946 emigration amounted to just 603 units (against 97 repatriations), but already the following year it exceeded 4,000 (against 1,142 repatriations) and in 1951 9,000 (against just over 2,000 repatriations). In the meantime, the dispute between Italy and Brazil over assets seized from Italian citizens during the war has been resolved and the agreement ratified in Rio de Janeiro on 8 September 1949 provided for the establishment of a mixed colonization and immigration company, financed by Italy also using the capital newly released in Brazil. In 1952-1954, 17,026, 14,328 and 12,949 emigrants left the Peninsula respectively, while adding the data for the three years, the overall repatriations did not exceed 10,000 units. The movement of departures began to decline in 1955 (8,523 emigrants against 2,592 returns), but remained above 1,000 units until 1962, when, however, the returns were 1,477. During the remaining sixties the migratory balance was always negative and departures from Italy were less than a thousand. This figure was exceeded again only in the mid-1970s, when net migration briefly became active again.

After the Second World War, Brazil was the third Latin American pole of attraction, preceded by Argentina and Venezuela, for Italian emigrants. However, the Italian-Brazilian community was unable to really increase its numbers. From the 1950 census there were 44,678 naturalized Italians and 197,659 immigrants with an Italian passport. Three-quarters of this presence was concentrated in the state of São Paulo, the remaining quarter was divided between the federal district, Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais and Paraná. Ten years later the percentage was more or less the same, even if the age of the population of Italian origin had decreased slightly, although the over-fifties still predominated.

In fact, the new wave of immigration did not achieve great results, also because the attempt to restart agricultural colonization failed. The disorganization of the Brazilian state and the harshness of living conditions on the farms or on the border prevented any effort from being successful. The only immigration flows that therefore worked were those linked to the industrial and commercial sectors and to the reunification of family units. However, the migratory experience was much less lucrative than in the past and returns to Italy were numerous.

Divisions within the community also played a role in this failure, which obviously did not exclude cases of individual success. To the now gangrenous conflicts between anti-fascists and fascists (these were among other things strengthened by the many who abandoned Italy as soon as the war ended to avoid retaliations and sought a new homeland in Latin America) were added those between the new and the old emigrants. The former did not believe in the values of the latter and above all they emigrated to make a quick fortune, therefore they had no intention of giving in to employment blackmail and wanted to immediately obtain the best possible working conditions. Furthermore, they did not join the associations of the old, considered leftovers from a now vanished era, especially those of a more parochial nature. In exchange, the old welfare associations did not care about those who have just arrived and in many cases even refused to help them. The only moments of cohesion between old and new, but not without contrasts, were linked to humanitarian initiatives in favor of Italy, such as the collection of funds for the victims of the flood in the Polesine.

On the other hand, the integration of new arrivals into Brazil was hindered not only by economic difficulties, because after all the country, even in its worst moments, was still considered to have great potential and therefore immigrants were not frightened by the recurring crises, but also and above all from the political one. In 1950 Vargas was re-elected president and launched a series of development plans, which, however, did not take off. Four years later he committed suicide, opening a new period of great confusion. In August 1961, for example, Janio Quadros, elected not even a year earlier, resigned, declaring that the forces of reaction prevented him from intervening in any important decisions. Finally, in 1964 the armed forces deposed President João Goulart (formerly Quadros' deputy), accusing him of sympathizing with the communists, and opened a true dictatorial phase.

The Brazilian political upheavals and the type of brutal development imposed on the country by multinationals with American and European capital or by a capitalist class with very little social sensitivity have certainly influenced the nature of Italian immigration. In the sixties, farmers no longer arrived looking for land, but from that decade the Italians moving to Brasil were mostly artisans and specialized workers and in some cases graduated individuals.

Dancing italian-brasilian group (made of descendants of Italians emigrated from Italy's Trentino region), celebrating the "2012 Festa dell'emigrante"

ITALIAN CEFALONIA (WITH ITACA & ZANTE)

There was a period of time when the Greece 's western islands (usually called "Ionian islands") were devastated by the Middle Ages invasions and wars and so lost most of their original greek population: not only the island of Corfu (the greek "Kerkyra") seemed to be dominated by the nearby Italians (who largely colonised the island after the year 1100 AD) and so would be forever italian (or italianised, because the area was and is greek), but also -in minor proportions- the islands of Cefalonia ("Kephalonia"), Itaca ("Ithaca") and Zante ("Zakynthos").

Greece in 1388 AD. Note that Venice possessed Corfu and Creta, while Florence the Attica region around Athens and the other Ionian islands were in the "County Palatine of Cefalonia".

The Ionian islands remained under Byzantine rule after the end of the Roman empire, before being caught up in the wars of powerful European families (mainly Italian and French). Zante, Cefalonia and some of the smaller islands were conquered by the Normans of southern Italy in the 12th Century. Indeed from the late 11th century, the Ionian Islands became a battleground in the "Byzantine–Norman" Wars. The island of Corfu was held by the Normans in 1081–1085 and 1147–1149, while the Venetians unsuccessfully besieged it in 1122–1123. The island of Cephalonia was also unsuccessfully besieged in 1085 AD, but was plundered in 1099 AD by the Pisans and in 1126 AD by the Venetians. Finally, Corfu and the rest of its byzantine theme except for Leucas were captured by the Normans under Guglielmo II of Sicily in 1185 AD.

Although Corfu was recovered by the Byzantines by 1191 AD, the other islands henceforth remained lost to Byzantium, and formed a "County Palatine of Cephalonia and Zakynthos" under the sicilian admiral Margaritus of Brindisi. The County Palatine of Cephalonia and Zakynthos existed for four centuries, from 1185 to 1479 AD as part of the Kingdom of Sicily. It is noteworty to pinpoint that the title and the right to rule the Ionian islands of Cephalonia and Zakynthos was originally given to the italian Margaritus of Brindisi for his services to Guglielmo (William) II, King of Sicily, in 1185 AD. He ordered many of his sailors to move from southern Italy (mainly from Brindisi) to the Ionian islands with their families, in order to control better this territory.

In 1267 AD, Charles of Anjou, French King of Sicily, took the island of Corfu and attempted to replace the existing Orthodox religion with the Catholic one. Orthodox Christians were persecuted and all churches converted to Catholic churches. Many colonists from catholic Italy moved to the island, starting the ethnic group now called "Italian Corfiots" and located mainly in Corfu city. But the attempt of conversion fell and Corfu returned under Venetian rule in 1386 AD. Corfu stayed under Venetian domination for a long period of more than four centuries until 1797 AD, during which a large number of buildings, monuments, and other constructions were built becoming the symbols of Venetian/Italian architecture in Greece.

The italian Tocco family conquests & possessions in the Ionian islands in the XIV century

The County Palatine was governed by three families (who moved some families from Italy and France to repopulate the Ionian islands): the italian Orsini, the french House of Anjou and the italian Tocco family. The rule of the family of Tocco lasted for 122 years, up until 1479, when Ottomans captured Cephalonia, Zante, Lefkada and Ithaca. However the Turkish rule in the three islands of Cephalonia, Zante and Ithaca was short-lived. In 1481 AD, two years after the beginning of the Turkish rule, Antonio Tocco invaded and briefly occupied Cephalonia and Zante but he was soon driven out by the Venetians. Zante was officially recovered by the Venetians in 1485 AD. Then, Cephalonia, after sixteen years of Turkish occupation (1484–1500), became part of the "Stato da Màr" of the republic of Venice on 24 December 1500, with the Siege of the Castle of St. George. Finally, Ithaca, following the fate of Cephalonia, was conquered by Venice in 1503.

After Venice captured Cephalonia on 24 December 1500, the administration of the defense of all the islands was delegated to an official seated in Corfu. This official was being referred to as "the General Provveditore of the Three Islands" ("Provveditore Generale delle Tre Isole") and resided at the fortress of Angelokastro from 1387 AD to the end of the 16th century. The Three Islands refer to Corfu, Zante and Cephalonia. The Venetian equivalent for "Ionian Islands" is "Ixołe Jonie", the Italian being "Isole Ionie".

We know that before the XIV century the island of Corfu was populated by greek speaking inhabitants in the country & the villages, however the capital (Corfu city) was nearly fully venetian speaking. But this changed when the Turks wanted to conquest the island: the Ottomans in 1537 AD were not able to conquer the capital (and so most of the venetian speaking citizens survived the war) but did terrible massacres in the island's hinterland - while deporting as slaves nearly all of the christians living there (some estimates are terrible: the enslaved were more than 22,000 and so the Greeks of Corfu were reduced to a minimum of survivers).

Italian Tocco family's Coat of Arms, when ruled the "County Palatine of Cephalonia & Zante"

As a consequence of these Ottoman attacks & huge enslavements (that were done not only with Corfu, but also with all the other Ionian islansds) when the central Ionian Islands were captured by Venice their population was very low and Ithaca was completely uninhabited. To address this problem, a small colonisation to the islands took place. Catholic Italians from Italian "Terraferma" (and a few Corfiot Italians from Corfu) with some Orthodox Greeks from the "Stato da Màr" were transferred to the islands as part of the colonisation. The phenomenon is well attested for Cephalonia, after whose conquest in 1500 AD the island was colonized not only by civilian but also by military (called "Stradioti") refugees from the lost Venetian fortresses of Modon and Coron. Furthermore the island also received an influx of Italan families from the Venetian-ruled island of Crete, just conquered by the Turks.

Venetians, being Catholics, retained the privileges enjoyed by the Latin bishopric of the islands under the Count Palatine dynasties. The Catholics were not numerous, and during the Venetian period, they were mainly concentrated in Corfu, Itaca and Cephalonia. Most of them were descendants of Italian settlers but there were some conversions by Greeks to Catholicism.

After the terrible 3 tentatives of the Ottomans to conquer Corfu the researchers Mancini & D'Ambrosio think that in the 1580 census nearly 80% of the island inhabitants were venetian speaking and catholic, concentrated in Corfu city - while the other areas of Corfu were nearly totally depopulated. Something similar happened after the occupations of the other Ionian islands by the Turks: probably in those years Cephalonia had 2/3 of the population that was venetian speaking and catholic, while Itaca had a something similar percentage (but Zante had only around 35% of "italianised" inhabitants). So, we can say that these 3 islands (Corfu, Cefalonia and Itaca) were italianised at the end of the "Cinquecento" (at least we can say: more or less -because, of course, we have no precise statistical data about).

POSSIBLE POPULATION -according to "Paparrigopoulos, Constantine (1860). History of the Greek Nation, XI"- in 1580 in the islands of:
1) Corfu/Kerkyra................ (16000, of which 14000 venetian speaking)
2) Cefalonia/Kephalonia... (18000, of which 13500 " )
3) Itaca/Ithaca ................... (300, of which 250 " )
4) Zante/Zakynthos.......... .(14000, of which 4500 " )
Nota Bene: At least half of the venetian speaking population in Cefalonia and Zante was bilingual (greek-venetian), meaning they were Greeks partially "italianised" (or were descendants from at least one Italian relative, like a grandfather).

But the Republic of Venice welcame -after the Ottoman attacks & conquests in the XVI century- many refugees from the continental Greece conquered by the moslem Ottomans and so the islands were soon "flooded" by Greek christians. As a consequence when the republic of Venice ended in 1797 AD the orthodox Greeks were the majority in all the Ionian islands, with the only exception in Corfu city.

For example, after the collapse of the "Hexamilion wall", which was supposed to act as a defense across the Isthmus of Corinth; and hence, protect the Peloponnese, Leonardo III Tocco made an agreement with Venice to accept 10,000 refugees from this region. Leonardo III Tocco and his realm was increasingly vulnerable from Ottoman Turkish attacks. These refugees consisted of Greeks, Arvanites/Albanians and some Venetian officials & administrators (many with their families) and most of them were settled in Zante & Leucada. However Zakynthos was captured by the Ottoman Empire in 1478 AD, but conquered by the Republic of Venice in 1482 AD and remained for 3 centuries free of the Turk domination while mostly greek populated.

In the last two centuries of Venice domination of the Ionian islands, the greek speaking inhabitants grew in percentage, while the venetian/italian speaking diminished, remaining only in the upper class categories, related to military and administrive control. But with the weakening of the Republic of Venice, many italian speaking families preferred to go back to the italian peninsula to live without the danger of Ottoman attacks or conquests.

Only in Corfu city this reduction was minimal (one worldwide famous Corfiot Italian was Felice Beato, photographer born in Corfu city -or Venice, according to a few historians- in 1833: see photo of him in 1866 to the left)

The years when the Ionian islands were "italian" or "italianised" were over forever.....even if the italian irredentism (note that Ugo Foscolo -one of the Italian Risorgimento fathers- was born in Zante) appeared powerful during Mussolini's rule in the late 1930s/early 1940s.

if interested about these fascism years, please read my "Corfu italiana" (https://researchomnia.blogspot.com/2024/04/).

ALPI OCCIDENTALI (POSSIBLE NEW ITALIAN PROVINCE DURING WW2)

There are only a few studies -like the one done by D. Rodogno ("Fascism's European Empire: Italian Occupation During the Second World War". Cambridge University Press, 2006)- about the tentative to create the italian province of "Alpi Occidentali" (and another possible small province on the french riviera coast: the "Alpi Marittime"). This happened after the Italian occupation of southeastern France in 1940, during WW2 (if interested in further detailed info, please read in french: https://books.openedition.org/pur/130170#anchor-toc-1-43).

Here it is what I found in my researches:

Map of occupied southern France in 1940. In green the areas in the Alps annexed to Italy and in yellow the territory "demilitarised", but controlled by Italy in southeastern France (probably to be in future the "Provincia delle Alpi Occidentali"-after the end of the expected victorious war). It is painted in grey lines the area (up to the Rodano river) occupied by Italy from November 1942 to September 1943 and that was formerly part of Vichy France.

In 1940, Italy on 10 June declared war against Britain and France and on 21 June Italian forces entered South Eastern France. It was quickly occupied Mentone on the coast, but on the mountains it was more difficult the conquests for the Italian troops. However on the 24th of June France and Italy signed an armistice effective the following day and allowing the Italians to retain the gains of several small communes as well as Menton. Additionally, a demilitarized strip 50 km wide from the French side of Mediterranean Sea to the Swiss border was agreed to be under the control of a specially established Italian-French Armistice Commission under the supervision of German and Italian officers.

In summer 1940, the Italian Armistice Commission ("Commissione Italiana d'Armistizio con la Francia", CIAF) produced two detailed plans concerning the future of the occupied French territories, according to historian Davide Rodogno:

Plan 'A' presented an Italian military occupation all the way to the river Rhone, in which France would maintain its territorial integrity except for Corsica and Nizza.

Plan 'B', proposed by senator Francesco Salata, the director of a section of the ISPI dedicated to Italian territorial claims, encompassed the Italian annexation of the Alpes Maritimes (including the Principality of Monaco) and parts of Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Hautes Alpes and Savoie. The territory would be administered as the new Italian province of "Alpi Occidentali" with the town of Briançon (Italian: Brianzone) acting as the provincial capital (please read: https://archive.org/details/fascismseuropean0000rodo/page/90/mode/2up).

In addition to Nice and Corsica, the Italians planned further territorial claims to impose on defeated France. The problem of Italy's western border was raised as early as August 1940 with a limit that reached the Varo river, but included Antibes and substantial adjustments to the Alpine border up to Mont Blanc. A second project - that of Senator Francesco Salata, director of a special ISPI series dedicated to Italian claims - added direct dominion over the Principality of Monaco. On 19 October 1940, in a letter to Hitler, Mussolini stated that the time had come to establish the metropolitan and colonial borders of tomorrow's France, reducing it to proportions that would prevent it from starting to dream of expansion and hegemony again. The 850,000 Italians who formed the largest mass of foreigners in France, said the Duce, would be repatriated for a total of at least 500,000 in a year.

The Italian and German territorial acquisitions would have removed another four million inhabitants from France. The peace treaty would have reduced France to a state with 34-35 million inhabitants, with a tendency to decline further. As for acquisitions of a metropolitan and colonial nature, he added: "They are limited to Nice, Corsica and Tunisia. I don't count french Somalia because it is a classic desert". Among the numerous plans for the dismemberment of metropolitan France, one of the most complete and detailed was drawn up in 1942 by the Italian Armistice Commission with France (CIAF). It proposed a Plan A and a Plan B which were developed starting from the assumption that the military occupation would in any case remain a transitory phase awaiting victory.

Pietro Badoglio reads the conditions of the Franco-Italian Armistice (24 June 1940) to the French delegation at the Villa Incisa outside Rome.

Plan A, or «maximum project for the occupation of mainland France up to the Rhône and Corsica», was also called the «general governorship». He envisaged a regime of military occupation, with unimpaired sovereign rights, except for Nice and Corsica, where the Italians would settle "firmly in the corners of civil organisation". French legislation would have remained in force, but all provisions contrary to Italian interests would have been suspended. Extraordinary legislation would be carried out through the proclamations of a supreme commander or governor, while the French civil authorities and officials would continue to exercise their functions, unless replaced by political, military or public order needs. The prefects, their heads of cabinet and the sub-prefects would have been exempted, while the subordinate officials and administrators of the municipalities, departments and other minor local authorities would have remained in service. The administrative structure would have been composed of a governor general, a superintendent for civil affairs, eleven provincial governors, assisted by civil commissioners and extraordinary commissioners and, finally, a high commissioner for the principality of Monaco.

Plan B, in the event of implementation of the Plan B, the superintendents for Civil Affairs would have introduced the Italian legal system and provided the administration cadres of the new province of the Western Alps: prefecture, sub-prefecture and provincial offices (Civil Engineering, Finance, Post Office, Instruction). In Corsica, a general would have immediately replaced the French prefects and vice-prefects with civil commissioners to be installed in Bastia, Corte, Sartene. Other commissioners would be appointed in Grasse, Barcelonnette and in the two districts of Bourg-Saint-Maurice and Modane, thus ensuring the functioning of the dissolved local authorities. To make this plan operational, 326 officials would have been enough.

It is noteworthy to pinpoint that Rodogno wrote also about the possibility of creating another small italian province around Mentone and Nizza: the "Alpi Marittime", to be added to the Liguria region (while the "Alpi Occidentali" was going to be added to the Piemonte region).

Furthermore, Mussolini started a process of italianisation in the occupied areas since 1940, with opening of italian schools and prohibition to speak french officially (only italian was allowed).This process of italianisation was most successful in the city of Mentone, that had nearly 90% of italian speaking inhabitants in summer 1943. And was also opened again by the italian fascists a local newspaper/magazine (the "Nizzardo", closed by the French in the XIX century, when Nizza was given to France by the Savoya's "Regno di Sardegna"), that proved to be totally nationalistic -because it was in the editing hands of the local italian irredentists.

Finally, we must remember that the "french départements" occupied entirely in November 1942 southern France were: Alpes-Maritimes; Basses-Alpes; Hautes-Alpes; Isère; Savoie; Haute-Savoie; the Var; and Corsica; while those occupied partially were Ain; Bouches-du-Rhône; Drôme; and the Vaucluse.

Map showing the Italian attacks and conquests in summer 1940

The following are excerpts from the very detailed and interesting “The Italian Occupation of South-Eastern France, 1940-1943” written by Niall MacGalloway (https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10023/10858/NiallMacGallowayPhDThesis.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y):

“The Italian Occupation of South-Eastern France, 1940-1943”, by Niall MacGalloway

The nature of the Italian zone of occupation makes it a difficult subject to examine. At different points during the war, the Italian zone of occupation encompassed different territories, making it difficult to talk about a single zone at any one time. Instead, the zone can be broadly divided into two temporal distinctions: those territories occupied from the signing of the Italo-French armistice in June 1940; and those territories which only came under occupation from November 1942.

The initial zone of occupation comprised of only 83,217 hectares and 28,473 inhabitants, the overwhelming majority of whom lived in the border town of Mentone. Mentone and the occupied communes in Savoie, Haute-Savoie and the Alpes-Maritimes remained the extent of the Italian zone of occupation until the Allied landings in North Africa prompted the Axis powers to occupy the remainder of unoccupied France in November 1942.

Prior to this invasion, Italy’s initial possessions had been treated as de facto annexed territories. The expansion of the zone of occupation brought a further eight départements under the control of Rome in their entirety, and another three were partially occupied. Nonetheless, even after the expansion of the zone of occupation, the territories initially occupied by Italy continued to be treated as annexed territories and were governed by different laws and by different agencies. As a result, it is possible to speak, if not of two separate Italian occupations, then of an Italian occupation with two distinct sections. Although governed by separate agencies, the two sections of the Italian zone of occupation existed simultaneously.

While the Italian annexed territories were subject to Italian law, this was never imposed on the occupied territories. Nonetheless, Italian organisations of law and order were present in these territories and Italian commanders did give orders to French administrative organs. In reality, of course, the Italian military presence in the region made it difficult for most mayors and public servants to ignore the wishes of the Italian military entirely. The Vichy government’s policy of collaboration with the occupiers in the hope that it would produce favourable results may also have created an atmosphere where such actions were acceptable. Unlike the annexed territories, however, any actions designed to co-operate with the Italian authorities were carried out thanks to the pragmatism of local government officials, rather than because they were legally obligated to do so: the legality of the Italian presence in the occupied territories had no real legal basis, especially in the armistice terms.

Despite her grandiose pre-war territorial ambitions, Italy opted for an initially small zone of occupation, most likely based upon pragmatism and economic and military realities. Italian troops were stationed inside the Linea verde (Green line), which roughly corresponded to the final position of the Italian troops.

Those territories stationed behind the Linea verde represented the extent of the initial zone of occupation, and the limits of Italy’s policies of annexation. French civilians were permitted travel within the limits of the Linea rossa (Red line). In practical terms, this covered almost the same area as the Linea verde, but encompassed small additional tracts of territory designed to compensate for mountain routes that were impassable in winter. The Linea viola (Purple line) represented an area fifty kilometres from the frontier which was to be completely demilitarised by the French army.

The armistice was also to be rolled out over a number of months, with demilitarisation of the Linea viola given the highest priority. In addition to these zones, a final Linea azzurra (Blue line) stretched far beyond the limits of the zone of occupation which gave Italian authorities the power to inspect French facilities as far afield as Lyon, Marseille and Toulon as well as Corsica.

Italian troops in Mentone, after the conquest.

Davide Rodogno has shown that by 1942, a time when Italy was practically starting to subordinate to Germany, two plans – Plan A and Plan B – had been established.

Plan A, also entitled “General Governorate”, foresaw a military occupation in which France would lose territorial sovereignty in the Nizzardo and Corsica, which would become Italian. French administrative staff would be dismissed, while 594 Italian officials, plus all Italian organisations, such as the carabinieri, would be sent to France.

Plan B envisaged an amalgamation of the Alpes-Maritimes and Monaco. Parts of the Alpes-deHaute-Provence, Haute-Alpes and Savoie would create the new province of Alpi Occidentali, containing 76,000 inhabitants with its capital at Briançon. This would become a full province of Italy, though difficulties were anticipated due to the sentiments of the population and communication issues. Corsica would be made autonomous, but dependent upon Italy.

Italy became increasingly aware that many of the territorial expansions that she made came at the behest of Germany. In France, the expansion of the zone of occupation to the Rhône was made possible only by the German diktat given to Pétain only hours earlier. Nonetheless, Italian subordination to Germany was once again demonstrated by the fact that Germany occupied the key cities of Avignon, Marseille, Lyon and Toulon (this city was inside the area under italian "control"!)>

Italy was determined to pursue her own policies in France. The most obvious example of this is the Italian policy towards Jews in the zone. In the years immediately following, scholars believed that the Jews were deliberately “saved” by the Italians. Italian anti-Semitism did not exhibit the same exterminatory drive that developed in Nazi Germany.

Davide Rodogno’s Plan A and Plan B for the future incorporation of French territories were certainly one way to "Italianise" areas of France, but it was not enough for Italy simply to declare the existence of new provinces. Plan B was arguably the more extensive of these two options and involved the amalgamation of the Alpes-Maritimes and the Principality of Monaco, which would presumably be re-styled as "Alpi Marittime". Tracts of the Alpes-deHaute-Provence, the Haute-Alpes and Savoie, would also be combined in order to create another new province: "Alpi Occidentali".

Despite the capital of this new province being placed at Briançon, it is likely that the region would gravitate towards Turin as the most dynamic city in the immediate vicinity. Although Nice was a growing urban centre, both Turin and Genoa were larger and benefitted from Italian policies designed to push these new provinces towards Piedmont and, to a lesser extent, Liguria.

In red the new limits of italian borders in Mentone (area west of Liguria that was united to Italy), after the conquest in June 1940.

Finally I want to pinpoint that at the outbreak of war, France was home to around 900,000 Italian citizens, but the real size of the Italian diaspora was far higher. There were also 500,000 Italians naturalised as French citizens during the 1930s, and many more who held dual French and Italian citizenship. In the department of Alpes-Maritimes, for instance, italian officials estimated that around 40% of the population of the department was Italian, and a further 40% of French citizens were of Italian descent. That means that 80% of the population in coastal areas like Mentone & near Nizza was clearly with italian roots directly or indirectly.

Because Italian nationality was passed down from the parent, regardless of place of birth, many people possessed dual French and Italian nationality. When war erupted, Italy began vigorously to assert its citizenship claims and consequently some men of the occupied areas served in the Italian Army.

And we must also remember that many thousands of Jews moved to the Italian zone of occupation to escape Nazi persecution in Vichy France. Nearly 80% of the remaining more than 300,000 French Jews took refuge there after November 1942, according to historians Paccini and Semelin. Indeed in January 1943 the Italians refused to cooperate with the Nazis in rounding up the Jews living in the occupied zone of France under their control and in March prevented the Nazis from deporting Jews in their zone.

In April 1943 German foreign minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop complained to Mussolini that "Italian military circles... lack a proper understanding of the Jewish question.". Quickly the italian marshall-general Cavallero answered saying that «The excessess against the Jews are not compatible with the honor of the Italian Army (Gli eccessi contro gli ebrei non sono compatibili con l'onore dell'esercito italiano.)»

Italian help to Jews after occupation of southeastern France in November 1942 (from https://www.holocaustrescue.org/chronology-of-rescue-by-italians):

Beginning in November of 1942, the Italian Army and Foreign Ministry officials occupy and administer eight French departments east of the Rhône River, in southern France. A French government remains in place, but the Italians control the area. In these Italian zones, French Jews and other refugees are protected right up until the Italians leave the war in September 1943.

Italian forces refuse to enforce any anti-Semitic measures in their zones. They refuse to allow any forced labor camps in their occupation zones. Further, the Italian occupying Army prevent any arrests or deportations of Jews in their area. As word spreads, thousands of Jewish refugees flee into the Italian zone. More than 50,000 Jews move to the Italian zone by July 1943. Twenty to thirty thousand of these are non-French Jews. Many of the Jews gravitate to the area around Nice (Italian "Nizza").

In order to prevent concentration of Jews in one area, refugees are sent inland to villages (like Saint-Martin-Vésubie) and even resort areas in each of the Italian occupied zones.

The Nazis strenuously protest these actions to Mussolini and representatives of the Italian Foreign Ministry. Mussolini's ministers and generals (like Cavallero) persuade him not to accede to the Nazi demands for deportations.

For nearly 10 months, Italian diplomats and the occupying military forces thwart the Nazis' "final solution" in southern France.

The following Italian diplomats were active in rescue of Jews in southern France: Gino Buti; Alberto Calisse, Consul in Nice; Guido Lospinoso, Interior Ministry Official and 'Inspector General of Racial Policy,' Nice; Vittoriano Manfredi, Consul in Grenoble; Augusto Spechel, Consul General in Nice; and Consul Vittorio Zoppi. In Paris, Consul General Gustavo Orlandini; and Vice Consuls Luciolli and Pasquinelli.

Two photos of French jews crossing the Alps north of Mentone while escaping to Italy in September 1943, after the German nazi took control of southeast France from the Italian army.