Partisan Memories
Stuart Hood recalls his involvement with the Italian partisans in 1943-44, and is surprised by the way events in which he participated are memorialised.
On the night of January 3rd, 1944, three weeks before the Allied advance was thwarted south of Rome by strong German resistance at Anzio, a partisan group was sleeping in a barn near a cluster of peasant houses called Valibona. It lies high up on the Calvana – a bare mountain ridge in Tuscany which runs down from the high Appenines towards the plain around Prato. On either side is a deep valley. In one, the river Bisenzio flows alongside the railway line to Bologna. In the other, today, is the Florence-Bologna autostrada.
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