to gather numbers and trying to carry on with their lives as best they could. The baptism of fire came at the end of November when they blew up a freight convoy that had halted on the railway. For Gianni, there had been no crisis of conscience. ‘I opened fire without emotion,’ he says. ‘It was just something I had to do.’ There were now about twenty of them in all. Each one had now crossed their own personal Rubicons, and with it came the usual hazards outlaws have faced throughout the ages: a price was on their heads; and they were forced to take to the mountains for good, living in the barns of sympathetic contadini, or in caves, never in one place for long. Following threats, even Gianni’s parents were forced to keep constantly on the move.
By the spring of 1944, their numbers had swelled to several hundred, as the first two deadlines for joining the New Republican Army passed and more and more young men avoiding the draft headed to the mountains instead. Most were frightened young men, but as the band grew so did the dangers – dangers that Lupo was initially slow to act upon.
At the end of the following January, Olindo Sammarchi – known as ‘Cagnone’ – one of the original members of the band, betrayed Lupo to the Fascists. On his information Amedeo Arcioni, a Republican spy, was sent to infiltrate the Stella Rossa. Although Arcioni’s real motives were soon discovered, Lupo dithered over what to do with him, refusing to accept his old friend Cagnone’s treachery. Instead, that night Arcioni was taken to a hide-out along with Gianni, Lupo and a third partisan called Fonso. Lupo was on watch while Gianni and Fonso slept. It was a cave they used regularly and to make it more habitable, they had lined it with wood. Lupo had stuck his dagger into the wood above them and was watching at the edge of the cave when Arcioni went out to relieve himself. On his return, he snatched the knife and lunged at Lupo, catching him in the arm. Lupo’s shouts for help woke Gianni instantly. Jumping up, he tried to pull off the traitor, but in the resulting tussle, Arcioni managed to get the better of him and was forcing the dagger ever closer to Gianni’s head until the point pierced the skin on his forehead. Just at the moment when Gianni thought his time had come, Lupo, together with Fonso, who had by now also woken, managed to come to his rescue and between them they were able to pin him down. After that there was no more hesitation. ‘We took him outside,’ says Gianni, ‘and we killed him.’
Another blow came on 6 May when Lupo’s brother, Guido Musolesi, was arrested. Since the previous autumn, he had been helping his brother’s fledgling band of partisans by working undercover with the local Fascist headquarters – the fascio – and feeding information back to the partisans. On the same day, a squad of GNR went to the Musolesi family home at Ca’ Veneziani, arrested Lupo’s parents and burnt the house to the ground. All were later sprung from jail, but these events had hardened the partisan leader. Unsurprisingly, he developed an often excessive distrust of others – one that on occasion led to a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ attitude, as Carlo Venturi discovered almost to his cost on his arrival on Monte Sole a fortnight later. The life of a partisan was brutal, and on Monte Sole there was now only one law and that was the say-so of the Stella Rossa and Lupo.
If the Stella Rossa gave the impression that they were making it up as they went along and somewhat preoccupied with fighting vendettas against local Fascists, then that was because that was precisely what was happening. Nor were they alone. Lots of groups of partisans had been emerging all over German-occupied Italy, learning as they went along and often paying for their mistakes with great casualties in the process – just as the 8th Garibaldi Brigade had done in April 1944. What was needed was guidance and a system of control and unified organisation. This was beginning to emerge, however, thanks in the first place to the undercover anti-fascist parties that had come to life once more.
Although political opposition had been banned during the Fascist era, underground parties had continued, albeit in extremely clandestine circumstances. The largest of these was the Italian Communist Party, and during the months before Mussolini’s fall the PCI and these other differing political groups had begun to organise themselves more actively in Rome and in other major cities. No sooner had Mussolini been deposed than six anti-fascist parties declared themselves. In addition to the Communists, there were the Socialists – once a major force in Italy before the Fascists took power; the Christian Democrats; the Liberals; the Labour Democrats; and the Action Party – a new organisation that took its name from Giuseppe Mazzini’s party during the age of Italian unification. None, not even the Communists, had any great strength and they held little sway during the days before the armistice. Furthermore, they all had quite different agendas. The Communists, Socialists and the Action Party, for example, were all vehemently anti-monarchist as well as anti-fascist, while the other three were far more divided on this issue. The Liberals were even positively right-wing. However, despite these differences, following the flight of Badoglio and King Vittorio Emanuele III on 9 September, delegates of these six parties came together in Rome to form the Committee of National Liberation – Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, or CLN – with the aim of leading the resistance against German occupation and the Neo-Fascists. The president of the CLN was the former Socialist prime minister and now leader of the Labour Democrats, Ivanoe Bonomi.*
Throughout the autumn the CLN helped set up clandestine committees in northern Italy, and in January, the main Rome committee gave the Milan CLN the authority to become the ‘official’ clandestine government of the north and the supreme organ of the resistance movement. With this change, the Milan CLN became the National Committee for the Liberation of Upper Italy – Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale per l’Alta Italia – otherwise known as the CLNAI.
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