The invisible materialities of the Italian resistance movement during World War 2

In the Italian civil war of 1943-1945, the sides in the conflict were deeply uneven. Their poetics was fundamentally, ontologically different. On the side of the Fascists and the Germans, we are dealing with traditional army strategies and fighting tactics. The resistance fought a downright guerrilla warfare. The Germans and Fascists had formal headquarters, barracks and physical, emplaced strongholds; the Resistance had none of those things – the Resistance was transient, placeless, and invisible. They had to be, because buildings and base camps were potential death traps. Due to the very nature of the organization and strategy of the resistance, material culture in the strict sense is scarce. The partisans had to leave no traces of their passage, lest the local population be punished or suspected of collusion with the ‘rebels’. The partisans had to learn to disguise their presence wherever they went. That is why when we think about the materiality of the resistance, we tend to engage with the absence of things, bodies and places, rather than a presence. And yet, doing a sensory ethnography of the resistance movement entails encountering and engaging with conflict experience through remembered things, loved things and mourned things. Besides conceptualising stories and places of conflict as part and parcel of a complex wartime materiality, this paper also considers physical remnants of the resistance struggle – for instance, sketches, letters and photographs of desolate ruined villages as co-constituting identity, emotion and memory with the storytellers