DANTE AND THE ITALIAN "VENEZIA GIULIA"

There are some interesting studies on the Italian character of the "Venezia Giulia" (called sometimes "Iulian March" in English) according to Dante Alighieri. In fact we all know that Dante -the "father" of the Italian language- defined the eastern borders of Italy in the fourteenth century with this famous phrase in his 'Divina Commedia': "Carnaro ch’ Italia chiude e suoi termini bagna" (Carnaro that Italy closes and its borders bathes; free translation: the gulf of Carnaro in eastern Istria is the limit of Italy). And the southern borders of the Venezia Giulia region are defined by the Istria peninsula & the Carnaro (called also Quarnero) south of the city of Fiume (now officially called Rijeka, but only since 1918).

Map showing in dark green the areas actually populated by "Ladini" (called Ladins in English). In light green are those where the Ladins lived in the early Middle Ages, like the 'Venezia Giulia' east of Udine. 

Indeed officially the Kingdom of Italy's "Compartment of Venezia Giulia and Zara" (which in 1939 included 128 municipalities on a surface of 8,953 sq km and with a population of 977,000 inhabitants: data from the Atlante De Agostini Calendar, 1940) included Istria and the area north of Trieste and Fiume up to the mount Tricorno (called Triglav in Slovenian) in the Iulian Alps. In this "compartment" the southern half (the Istrian peninsula) of the 'Venezia Giulia' could have been divided from the northern half  (the Iulian Alps) by an imaginary line between Muggia (near Trieste) and Abbazia (near Fiume): after WW1 in Istria nearly 3/4 of the population was romance speaking, while in the northern half the slav presence was huge and the neolatins were concentrated in the coast and in the big coastal cities. The following map showed the ethnic percentages in this region in 1939:

Historically we all know that this region is at the center of an area that is the "point of contact" of the 3 main ethnic groups in Europe: the Neolatins, the Slavs and the Germans.....and so it is a place of many rivalries, fights and wars through the centuries since the fall of the Roman Empire.
In fact, the Ladins - at least until the early fourteenth century when Dante visited the area- were a considerable percentage of the population in the region around the Julian Alps and were probably the majority in the area that successively became Italian after World War 1.
Moreover, the region was fully Romanized during the Roman empire but the Slovenians (who are now the majority of the population in the 'Venezia Giulia') appeared - together with their allies/masters: the Avars - around the beginning of the seventh century in the area of the Roman Emona (a city today called Ljubljana). And since then - according to the few religious registers and writings of the time - all traces of the Romance populations that inhabited the city and its surrounding area in the centuries of the Roman Empire have disappeared. Subsequently the Slavs -after the "Black Plague" which enormously decimated in 1350 the autochthonous neo-Latin population of Venezia Giulia, especially around Postumia and Idria- gradually replaced/assimilated during the Renaissance most of the "Ladins" still living in the Julian Alps to the west of Emona.

Emona was the most eastern of the Italian cities of Roman Italy and everything suggests that the indigenous neolatin population was massacred (and in a small part forced to flee). So far, everything was related to the sad events of the barbarian invasions of those centuries: between wars and consequent related epidemics (such as the famous "Justinian Plague"), the population of the Alpine area was halved in a few decades (and there are even scholars who claim it fell to less than one quarter of the original total!).

This advance of the Slovenians, who were enemies of the Christians in those dark centuries, is deduced from the records of the "Metropolitan Church of Aquileia" on the decline and disappearance of its ancient dioceses (Emona, Celeia, Poetovio, Aguntum, Teurnia, Virunum, Scarabantia) in the current Central and Eastern Slovenia (read the interesting essay written in Slovenian or with a google translator

"Slovenian history: From prehistoric cultures to late Middle Ages" of Peter Stih (http://www.sistory.si/publikacije/pdf/zgodovina/Stih-Slovenska_zgodovina_od_prazgodovinskih_kultur_do_konca_srednjega_veka.pdf ).

This Slovenian invasion did not stop in the Emona area - located in present-day central Slovenia - but continued (although to a lesser extent, which fortunately allowed the Romance populations to survive) towards north-eastern Italy, occupying over the centuries successive territories which will be called "Venezia Giulia" and "Eastern Friuli". Only in Istria they were stopped, as has been historically documented in the famous "Placito del Risano" of 804 AD. In fact there are testimonies of neolatin presences up to the year 1100 AD in the area of Postumia (actual ​​Postojna), Idria and the upper Isonzo river. In a nutshell, after the Charlemagne decades this Slovenian wave stopped around Mount Tricorno (called "Triglav" in Slovenian): in the east practically everything was Slovenian, but in the west it was only partially. The remains of this first Slovenian "push" can be found in the remaining Slavic populations of the Natisone area in eastern Friuli, where many words of their "Resian dialect" are Romance, testifying to the presence among them of many Romans since their arrival in the seventh/eighth century (and not massacred and suddenly "disappeared" as in the Emona area).

1930 Map of Italian Venezia Giulia, when it had been "redeemed" by Italian irredentists following WW1 victory (note that Carnaro is written "Quarnero")

The famous linguist Bartoli stated that the neolatin peoples (today called "Ladini") were the majority of the population of 'Venezia Giulia' until the year 1100 AD, when the Republic of Venice began to expand in the area. Obviously these calculations are not precise. In fact no one can say with total certainty whether in that year the Ladins were or not the majority in what became the Italian Venezia Giulia in the twentieth century, but certainly they were present in very large numbers. And this contrasts in an impacting way with the current absence of Romance populations north-east of Gorizia! Dante -when was in exile- visited the region at the beginning of the XIV century, but we are not sure about where he went and in which cities he spent some time. For sure we have that he received the inspiration to write the first verses of his masterpiece -the Divina Commedia- from the Postumia caves on the Julian Alps. Indeed, in northern Venezia Giulia, the small city of Tolmino was also known for having probably hosted Dante at the beginning of the XIV century, when the Italian poet visited the eastern borders of Italy and the Postumia caves (from which he drew inspiration for his "Gates of Inferno") . Dante himself on that occasion personally affirmed the Italian character of the Istria-Julian region, according to historian Francesco Lamendola. In fact in Tolmino and Postumia he found many inhabitants who spoke an "archaic Italian", similar to that of Udine, while in Istria he noted that the local dialect was similar to the one spoken in Venice. Lamendola also wrote (in his Italian essay http://www.accademianuovaitalia.it/index.php/storia-e-cultura-delle-venezie/la-patria-del-friuli/2476-dante-e-la-venezia-giulia) that :

"...At the extreme north-east of Italy's peninsula/region there was the largest of the states, if we improperly we want to call them, of northern Italy: the "Patriarcato di Aquileia" ('Patriarchate of Aquileia'), created by Henry IV in 1077 to keep the control of the pass of the Eastern Alps with Ghibelline princes-bishops loyal to him and his successors. Friuli, which had been the seat of an important Lombard duchy and which had, with Berengario I, one of the first kings of Italy (in 888 AD; while in 915 he had even managed to gird the imperial crown) had a feudal Germanic class and, after the disastrous incursions of the Hungarians, it was partly repopulated by some Slavic colonists. At the time of Dante, that is between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Italian ethnic element was slowly regaining the upper hand, after an eclipse lasting two or three centuries; while Udine had become, de facto if not de jure, the new capital of the patriarchs (after Aquileia and Cividale), a city that then knew, also thanks to the influx of Lombard and above all Tuscan merchants, an extraordinary economic and demographic expansion, attested among other things, from a famous novel by Boccaccio....the Patriacato constituted a remarkable entity: it ranged from the Livenza river (north of the Venice lagoon) to the Isonzo area and beyond; it included Cadore, Carnia, parts of Istria including Pola (lost in 1331 in favor of Venice) and -at least until 1295- Trieste itself (which in 1368 made an act of dedication to the Habsburgs to escape the inevitable Venetian conquest ).....The Croats, who had arrived in Istria not before the VI-VII century (after Illyrians, Romans, Ostrogoths, Ávars, Byzantines) never interrupted the continuity between the Italians of western Istria with those of Fiume & the Dalmatian islands of Cherso, Veglia and Lussino (where to this day older people still speak a Venetian dialect); and this is also an undeniable fact.....To the east of the patriarchate, the 'Contea di Gorizia' was nominally under the control of the patriarch...….This was the Patriarchate of Aquileia in the early 1300s, at the time, that is, of the exile of Dante Alighieri. A kind of world apart, very different from the other lordships of northern Italy; a world that is only partly Italian, dominated by German feudal lords, by patriarchs who were also German for a long time (especially during the Ghibelline period)...a world characterized by political aspects, including advanced ones, but inexorably undermined by a structural weakness: the extreme juridical-social backwardness of its peasant plebs, still largely reduced to the poor condition of serfs....It is possible that Dante..traveled in person to these places and listened with his own ears to that rustic accent (the ladin-friulan dialect) that had to hit him so much..."

The Patriarcato di Aquileia was completely conquered by the Republic of Venice in 1420, nearly one century after Dante visited it. But we are not sure where he went in this Patriarcate: many historians wrote that he was in Udine, Gorizia, Trieste, Pola, Tolmino and Postumia. However the city where we have the best sure evidence of a Dante's presence is Parenzo (in western Istria). The following is a translation of what Lamendola wrote about this presence of Dante in Parenzo: "...We have a written record of Dante, in Parenzo, dated, as we will see, in October 1308...…...Between the end of the 1200s and the beginning of the 1300s we have a substantial documentation about the presence of Tuscans, especially merchants and bankers, in the Istrian communities on the west coast: from Capodistria, to Isola, to Parenzo, to Pola (as they were numerous, in the same period, in the Patriarchate of Aquileia), giving a significant boost to the city's economic development. A certain number of these had to be made up of political exiles, such as Dante, and not only "white" (pro-emperor) but also "black" (pro-pope), given that in their communes of origin the situation of the two parties was constantly fluctuating.Often the common misfortune induced these exiles to put aside their ideological differences and to establish friendly relations, as Dante himself had done with the poet Cino da Pistoia, who was a Black man disbanded from his city for political reasons. Among the many evidence, particularly interesting for us, is that of a Tuscan Dante, whose presence is attested to Parenzo in a judicial document which bears the date of 4 October 1308.....This is a procedural sentence issued by the mayor of Parenzo, Andrea Michiel, against a certain Matteo di Giovanni Cortese, for illegal fishing in the waters of the bishopric; sentence that ordered the accused to pay a fine of one hundred dollars of small Venetian money. It was pronounced under the new Loggia del Comune; says the document, "presentibus dominis Dante tuscano habitatore Parentii" and an Antonio Peio, a remarkable personage who appears in numerous writings of Parenzo as a notary..........

Historical map of Friuli and Venezia Giulia in the Renaissance. There is to the east of Gorizia and Vipacco ("Vipao") the name "Piuca", the river of Postumia and its caves visited by Dante. It should be noted that after the "Black Plague" of 1350, the area remained depopulated so there are no villages on the map around Piuca (only "Scenasechie", the current Senosecchia): in fact, until Dante's time, the majority of the population around Postumia was "Romance" speaking, but the Plague decimated the region which was repopulated with many Slovenians (who became the area vast majority in the following centuries)

The question spontaneously arises if the "Dante tuscano" is precisely the poet Dante Alighieri. Well, there are several elements that would make you answer in the affirmative, and all of them agree with each other. First, the name Dante, which is a diminutive of Durante, was not very common in those days; second, in the Istrian documents of 1200 the adjective tuscanus undoubtedly indicated the Florentine origin; third, the term 'habitator' designated those who had only a temporary residence, and was used in contrast to 'civis', which qualified those who enjoyed full citizenship; fourth, the appellative dominus was reserved for people of noble or distinct origin (and Dante fell into both categories); fifth, the fact that the name of Dante is placed before that of Antonio Peio, a local notary and "big shot", means that he was a character worthy of the utmost respect...At this point, let's try to make a reasoning by exclusion, and ask ourselves if it is credible that a whole series of significant coincidences is purely accidental: that there was another Dante in Parenzo, in the same years in which the Alighieri was exiled and wandered in disparate places in northern Italy; that this other Dante was, like the Alighieri, Florentine; that he resided in the Istrian municipality only temporarily, and therefore was, like the poet, far from his homeland; that he was like him noble and of considerable social status, or both; that he was worthy, as the Alighieri would have been, to appear on the ruling of the mayor before an eminent citizen, he who was not a citizen. It should be concluded, it seems to us, that this second Dante should have been almost a duplicate of the first, a sort of product of parallel universes!....Such are the arguments with which the distinguished Istrian historian Camillo De Franceschi (Parenzo, 1868 - Trieste, 1953) believes he can confidently affirm that the Tuscan Dante and the Alighieri are the same person, arguments he presented in a trilogy dedicated to the presence of Dante in Istria. And just as convinced has been, in more recent years, another Dante scholar, Francesco Semi, in turn supporter of a thesis already advanced by Vidossich....."

Modern photo of the Postumia Caves, considered by many scholars to be the inspiration for the "Gate of Inferno" in Dante's Divine Comedy

Furthermore we have to pinpoint that Parenzo, the capital of venetian western Istria in the XIV century, is located not far away from the Postumia Caves. And if Dante lived temporarily in Parenzo, it is extremely probable that he went to visit (only 50 miles away!)  these famous caves, from where -according to many scholars- he got the inspiration to write the first verses of his "Divina Commedia" (when entering inside the 'Inferno'). Finally we have to remember that there it is another written document about the presence of Dante in Tolmino & Postumia, done by Jacopo da Valvasone  in the first half of the XVII century. But it is not well accepted by some scholars.

However the Dante's decription of the mount "Tambernicchi" near the Postumia caves, called now Monte Pomario (in Slovenian: Javornik), is extremely precise and could have been done so well only if he had seen it personally, according to Cesare Marchi in his famous book "Dante in esilio".

JEWS IN CAMPAGNA INTERNMENT CAMP

THE JEWS IN THE CAMPAGNA INTERNMENT CAMP (1940-1943)

Many Italian Jews from the northern Italian"Venezia Giulia" region were sent -during the first years of WW2- to the internment camp of Campagna, a small city in southern Italy. These Jews (some were from Trieste and Istria-Dalmatia, but many others were not Italian-born) in 1943 survived the "Holocaust" in this internment camp, where they were helped by some inhabitants of this ancient southern Italian town. One of those who gave most help to them in those terrible last months of 1943, when Italy surrendered to the Allies (who landed on September 9, 1943 on the beaches of Salerno, a few dozen kilometers from Campagna), was the mayor of Campagna - Carlino D'Ambrosio (uncle of my father).

In August 1940 was done this photo showing the Italian Jew Bruno Pincherle (a doctor from Trieste forced to stay in the internment camp of Campagna) wearing glasses in the center of the photo, surrounded by local friends of this little city.

. The historical background of the Jews in WW2 Italy, according to what Giuseppe Pulin wrote (read for more information http://www.dalrifugioallinganno.it/camisano/pp13-52.pdf) ,can be resumed with these excerpts: "....at the beginning of the second world war 41.300 were the Italian Jews.... Additionally there were 9,800 foreign Jews on Italian territory .... After the enactment of the racial laws of 1938 a few thousand Italian Jews left Italy (like the brilliant exponents of Italian physics Bruno Pontecorvo, Bruno Rossi, the Nobel laureates Emilio Segrè, Salvador Luria and even Enrico Fermi, who had a Jewish wife). Those who remained found a new life a bit easy, at least for the first few times. The discriminated ones were doing slightly better, while foreign residents were forced to leave Italy. The over-65-year-olds and those who had married to an Italian spouse could have remained ... By 20 September 1939 6,480 Italian Jews had left, however 2,486 had flowed into Italy (they were foreign Jews fleeing Germany, Poland and Yugoslavia)….. During 1941 the initial expulsion plan was set aside for objective impossibility due to the ongoing war and so on October 28th of that year, just over 7,000 foreign Jews -blocked- were present in Italy. Upon Italy's entry into the war, between departures and incoming arrivals, the balance of foreign Jews present in the peninsula had settled on 3,800 units. About 2,200 others would later join them, coming from areas under Italian military control (Slovenia, Dalmatia, Albania, Dodecanese, Libya) who were exceptionally allowed to enter Italy. In 1941 there were 7,369 foreign Jews interned in Italy and in April 1943 there were 6,832. In Italy, therefore, until the month of September 1943, civil internment was expressed in the two options of free internment camp (intended as a delimited and controlled space) and confinement (compulsory residence obligation in a given country) ... In the Campania region, four "internment" camps were created: Campagna, Ariano Irpino, Monteforte Irpino, and Solofra .... In the fields listed there were various types of internees ranging from opponents to the regime, to enemy subjects, to Gypsies, to allogens and of course to both Italian and foreign Jews. The latter were mainly found in the fields of: Alberobello (Bari), Ateleta (Aquila), Campagna (Salerno), Agnone (Campobasso), Carana (Cosenza), Ferramonti Tarsia (Cosenza), Gioia del Colle (Bari), Isola del Gran Sasso (Aquila), Marsiconuovo (Potenza), Montefiascone (Viterbo), Osimo (Ancona), Sforzacosta (Macerata), Terranova di Polino (Potenza), Tortoreto (Teramo), Tuscania and Valentano (Viterbo). Of these camps for Jews, the most important were those of Campagna and Ferramonti where in 1940 there were already about 400 Jews interned in the camps. "
Photo of the caserma San Bartolomeo (a former late XIV century convent), that was used as internment camp in Campagna

. The largest and most important of the internment camps for Jews in southern Italy was that of Campagna. Only male Jews were interned in this small city of eleven thousand inhabitants, located nearly 40 kms east of Salerno in southern Italy. The first prisoners were 340 men captured in different parts of Italy. The majority of these were Jewish refugees who came from Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Dalmatia & Fiume, because Italian fascists were not harassing them like were doing German nazis; later another 100 were added, and so there were also some English, French, Russian, Turkish, Romanian and Latvian citizens with a group of 40 Italian Jews (almost all from the north-east of Italy). The number of internees, during the three-year period, varied considerably between 430 (February 1941) and 160 (September 1943).
Among the camps established by the fascist regime in June 1940 in existing buildings destined to welcome foreign Jews, the largest was that of Campagna; in the first months after it entered service it already hosted 430 men captured in different parts of Italy, including some English and French and a group of 40 Italian Jews (many from Trieste/Fiume and Istria/Dalmatia). However, the latter were all transferred to other camps after a few months. In November 1940 the number of foreign Jews had fallen to 230, in February 1941 to 170, to reach the lowest level in April 1942, with only 112 men. By November their number had risen to 170, and in the last months before the liberation by the Allies, which occurred in September 1943, it was around 160. About two thirds came from Germany and Austria, the rest were mainly Polish, Czechs or Jews of Fiume (actual Rijeka) who become "stateless". It is noteworthy to pinpoint that in those 3 years there were no deaths of Jews in the Campagna internment camp.


On June 16, 1940 the first internees arrived in Campagna, which were also received by Carlino D'Ambrosio (mayor of Campagna, then called Podesta') and by the Bishop of Campagna, Giuseppe Maria Palatucci. The were interned in two ex-convents: the Caserma San Bartolomeo and the Caserma Immaculate Conception.
Bruno Pincherle, a doctor from Trieste, was one of the first Jews interned in Campagna and remembered in a book (read https://books.google.com/books?id=j67hCBV1yNsC&pg=PA26&lpg=PA26&dq=ebrei+triestini+nel+campo+internamento+di+Campagna&source=bl&ots=mk3arbHBMa&sig=ACfU3U2VY8ReHzauOcYHMWMVsFDUx_kyMg&hl=it&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjxisu9gvjnAhVoTd8KHVpGAy0Q6AEwEXoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=ebrei%20triestini%20nel%20campo%20internamento%20di%20Campagna&f=false how well he was treated by the local population. Pincherle was one of the Jewish doctors who began to cure the inhabitants of the place, although it was prohibited by Fascism. And he even used to have lunch at his friends' house in Campagna! Moreover, almost the whole town contributed to helping and protecting the internees. This attitude of the inhabitants of Campagna towards the interned Jews caused the then secretary of the National Fascist Party, Adelchi Serena, to write a letter to the local police chief in the autumn of 1941, in which he complained about the "too much freedom in which the Jews interned were living at the Campaign concentration camp, and demanded consequent measures by the regime's police forces". Additionally, it should be remembered that Pincherle, an expert of the history of Jews in Italy, often affirmed to his friends in Campagna that at the famous "Schola Medica Salernitana" there were numerous medical Jews and that in Salerno in the twelfth century there was the most numerous Jewish community of southern Italy: according to Rabbi Beniamino da Tudela in 1165 as many as 600 Jews lived in their small neighborhood of Salerno - a city which in that century had less than seven thousand inhabitants (please, read in Italian https://www.lacittadisalerno.it/cultura-e-spettacoli/gli-ebrei-fecero-grande-salerno-1.2380411 ).

And the doctor Bruno Pincherle used to add that in the "Principate of Salerno" (where Campagna was located) the Jews were well-liked and accepted since the Middle Ages and the Longobards centuries.

The Italian government gave the following official "Gold Medal" award to Campagna's citizens  (in September 2006 ): 

Medaglia d'oro al Merito Civile

«La popolazione di Campagna, sfidando i divieti e le minacce di punizione e rappresaglie e dando testimonianza di elevati sentimenti di solidarietà e fratellanza umana, si adoperò per alleviare le sofferenze, dare ospitalità e, talvolta, favorire la fuga degli ebrei internati nel campo di concentramento ubicato in quel Comune. Mirabile esempio di eccezionale abnegazione ed elette virtù civili. 1940 - 1943» — 1940 - 1943 Campagna

Furthermore, it should be highlighted that the bishop of Campagna Palatucci did his utmost for the moral and material assistance of the interned Jews, managing to save about a thousand of them from deportation to the Nazi extermination camps and receiving numerous appreciations later (read http://nuke.cittadicampagna.com/Cultura/Articoli/CarmineGranito/LaCittàdiDachaucommemoraGiovanniPalatucci/tabid/192/language/it-IT/Default.aspx ). The Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial honored him in 1990 as "Righteous Among the Nations". Further information can be read at http://paulonpius.blogspot.com/p/campagna-camp-bishop-and-archives.html . Finally, the podesta' Carlino D'Ambrosio and some local fascist authorities, who kept the many activities of aid to interned Jews hidden from the higher authorities, must also be remembered. Indeed I want to pinpoint that there was an opposition inside the Italian Fascist Party ("Partito Nazionale Fascista") to the alliance with Nazi Germany. This opposition was ruled by two famous fascists: Gabriele D'Annunzio (the poet-fighter who inspired Mussolini) and Guglielmo Marconi (who received the Nobel for creating the "radio"), but lost power & importance after 1938, when both of them died. Carlino D'Ambrosio was a member of this opposing group and always rejected the Hitler's attacks against the Jewish people. Remembering the Podesta' Carlino D'ambrosio
Let me now remind you of "uncle Carlino", my father's uncle who became mayor of the town of Campagna. I consider him the member of my family who reached the highest levels, being mentioned in many books (and circles) for his help to the Jews in September 1943. I remember him -when I was a high school student and personally knew him in the 1960s - like a very affable and polite old man. He spoke little, but I immediately noticed his ability to be appreciated socially, being accepted by friends as group leader without reservations (as by all of us, his relatives). A quality that was typical of a born politician.
My father always told me that Uncle Carlino had the same qualities of "forming a group and leading him" as Uncle Mimino (my father's brother who was the soul and the engine of the best football team in Venezuela in the sixties and seventies: the "Deportivo Italia").
In fact writers like Gianluca Petroni and Adolfo Ricci remember him in the following passages of their books on Jews interned in Campagna during the Second World War:

".....I arrived in the courtyard of the "Olindo Guerrieri" boarding school in Campagna where I was immediately welcomed and accompanied, with the related equipment, to the place assigned to me, and helped by a couple of bold young men who expressed themselves in a language unknown to me. But it wasn't long before I got to know the story of those young people, and their other friends present there, almost all graduates or university students: I saw them in the evening in the refectory when, wearing a white coat, they began to serve us with the non-lavish dinner ... And so I came to know that those young people, the most adult of whom was called Abraham, were Jews and had been "settled" in that college with the function of table attendants and not only, because they were also employed in the various tasks that required the dormitories and others outbuildings of the building. Later I understood that those young Jews were there, among the collegiate of Campagna, to escape the racial laws promulgated by Fascism and with the full approval and consent of the owner of the college, as well as Podesta 'di Campagna, Mr. Carlino D’Ambrosio, and of other political authorities and religious eminences of the place, since the boarding school was officially directed by an excellent priest - Mons. Alberto Gibboni - part of the Curia and parish priest of the cathedral ... "

I remember that this boarding school 'Olindo Guerrieri' was owned by Uncle Carlino since 1936 (I think, but I'm not sure about the exact year) and it was temporarily closed in the terrible days of the surrender of Italy and the landing in Salerno of the Allies: in September 1943.

".....The internees (in the Campagna internment camp) were able to receive visits and enjoy assistance, in food, clothing and money, offered to them by DELASEM. (Delasem, the Italian Jewish refugee agency, worked to help provide food, clothes and money to supplement the official government allowance of Lire 6.50 per day) ….Among the prisoners there were many Jewish doctors who began to treat the locals, despite being prohibited by Fascism. Among the various inmates, the Russian painter Alessandro Degai was also imprisoned, who painted several works, giving them to various citizens. All the prisoners were free to move through the streets and houses of the town ( The internees had permission to move around the town of Campagna daily for six hours). Local police, led by police commissioner Eugenio de Paoli and supported by 30 Carabinieri (police officers of a lower rank), maintained camp surveillance. The relationship between the internees in Campagna camp and the local population was good – sometimes too good, as they were welcomed by the Campagnesi as friends. Friendship ties were created and so many inmates dined at the home of local friends. This also involved the mayor Carlino D'Ambrosio and the local fascist authorities who kept the activities hidden from the higher authorities...…. An essential role had the bishop of Campagna, Giuseppe Maria Palatucci and his nephew Giovanni Palatucci, Quaestor of Fiume, who by sending as many Istrian Jews as possible to the Camp, saved hundreds of them from the extermination camps. .... To alleviate their detention, a library was set up, a football team that periodically played with external teams, a small theater and an internship bulletin. A small synagogue was also set up in the barracks of San Bartolomeo and, for a period, at the invitation of the bishop, an interned pianist (Bogdan Zins, an internationally famous polish pianist) played the organ in the main church during Sunday mass. On September 8, 1943, when the allied troops arrived in the southerners, fascists and German troops placed near Campagna, in an attempt to make reprisals, went to the former barracks to execute the detainees. Once on the spot they found no one, as previously informed by the inhabitants, the internees were made to flee into the mountains. ...."

Photo of the Jews interned in the S.Bartolomeo caserma in summer 1941, surrounded by friendly Italian carabinieri (What a difference with photos of Jews interned in Nazi camps in Germany!)

IN MEMORY OF CARLINO D'AMBROSIO

And now allow me to add something that is not mentioned in the texts that I have read: Uncle Carlino - according to what his brother (my grandfather Luigi) told me - ordered all the fascist soldiers and policemen stationed in Campagna on the night of September 8 ( when Italy surrendered) to stay locked in their barracks. At the same time he (risking his life for this decision) ordered one of his trusted attendants to leave all the doors of the cells of the Jewish detainees in the Campagna internment camp open, so that they would flee -without any obstacle- to the mountains around Campagna before the German Nazis arrived (who would immediately send them to the camps of extermination in Germany). In this way all 160 Jews locked up in Campagna were saved.

Uncle Carlino was offered an official recognition (as a "Righteous") after the war by Jews residing in Israel (some of them had survived thanks to him) but nothing was done because he had joined the Fascist Party (the one and only in my family) and the Israeli authorities did not allow this kind of honorific to a member of this Party.
May Carlino D'Ambrosio rest in peace. For me and my family he is a "Righteous" and deserves all eternal respect.