Growing up under Mussolini.(History)(interview with John Maneschi)(Interview)

JOHN MANESCHI'S Italian father and Australian mother met and married in Europe. The Depression brought them back to Milan, where John was born in 1932. He was an engineer in Australia and abroad. He lives in retirement at Mosman, Sydney, where Robert Murray interviewed him in July.

WE MIGHT AS WELL start with the date which sticks in my mind, which was the date of the declaration of war by Mussolini on England and France. I was attending the Gonzaga Institute, a private school run by the Christian Brothers in Milan. On that particular day, a Monday I remember well, there was an announcement from the principal through the classrooms on the PA system: "Boys, this is an important day in the history of the Fatherland. Everybody can go home because this afternoon at three o'clock the Duce is going to speak on the radio and we've been asked to send everybody home." I thought this was a good way to start missing out on some school, because normally we would be working right through until four o'clock. So we went home, and when I got home to our apartment building, everybody was in great excitement and the caretaker said we had to put the flags out. There was going to be a big speech and we hadn't put our flags out for a long time. That was a rule under Fascism that every house had to have its flag, to be flown by law on various national occasions. So the flag, a big long banner, was put up on the terrace. We lived on the fifth floor.

At about 2.30 or so, some of my father's colleagues--he had invited colleagues from the factory to come and listen to the speech--proceeded to sit in the living room. He sent the maid down to buy some bottles of beer for the men, which was a very strange thing because my parents never drank beer. It was a first. It was about three o'clock, and my father had recently bought a fairly expensive radio set, which he then proceeded to try and tune--he never could quite get the tuning correct--to get it tuned for the station of Rome to get the speech of the Duce when it came.

We all gathered around. The speech was very famous and it has been broadcast, repeated many times. It was basically announcing that Italy was now engaged in some sort of great struggle for existence, because the Mediterranean was being closed off--the British and the French were closing off the Mediterranean, and we had to make a stand at this point.

He called on everybody in the community to support him, and that included us children, because since the age of six I had been a member of the Mussolini Youth, which was something like, I suppose, the Boy Scouts, except it was a much more military affair. We all wore little uniforms. My school chose to have us as part of the navy. We all wore sailors' uniforms with our Fascist badges, and we had received quite a bit of indoctrination over several years, on the exploits of the Italian Army in Africa, in Ethiopia and in Libya. So we were asked also to be supporters of the declaration of war. All we had to do as was to go every Saturday afternoon--it was compulsory--to a parade of Mussolini Youth in our various uniforms, and then sing Giovinezza, the triumphal hymn of the Fascist party. Quite a few songs were used, and some of them were very good. They were stories for youth.

After the speech my father and his colleagues sat around very quietly. Nobody said anything, and my mother broke into tears. She ran out of the room because it meant that Italy was at war with England and she was Australian--Australia was really still considered part of England. My father went and comforted her. It was a striking day and the details are still clear in my mind, though I was eight years old.

For the next couple of years, nothing changed in Milan very much. Life went on as before, except that in the news, of course, we would now hear about army movements and bombings being carried out on Malta, and pretty soon the French Army had surrendered. The Italian Army had gone to safeguard the colonies in Africa, Libya and ...