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Let us, in conclusion, return to the controversies about Spike Lee’s film, from which I started. I do not here intend, for lack of space, to enter into the merits of the debate about the film. Succinctly, I maintain that every artist should be free to rework, and also literally to invent, or to distort, the historical reality of the facts, preferring his “own” style, suitable for the messages he is interested in communicating. If then the dramatic fiction that caused such a stir— the invention of the figure of the partisan traitor—has produced a good film or not (and, previously, a good novel), and if it has shown respect or not for the feelings and expectations of the survivors, who had warmly welcomed the director to Sant’Anna, is a question that does not concern the logical reasoning of the subject I have been dealing with in this book. I would like to point out, among other things, how the problem of the transmission of more or less distorted historical knowledge through the media—cinema, television, the press, the Internet—is a question that goes well beyond the controversies contingent on the film in question, and on the Italian Resistance, and concerns the nature of those who mould the collective memory—namely, the widespread perception of the events of the past—following the crisis of the agencies that were traditionally the depositaries of such an important task: the school system, and therefore above all the state institutions, but also the political parties and their ideologies.

The start of the Resistance in this area, as in others, was difficult. Small groups of anti-Fascists and disbanded soldiers of the former army found themselves in inaccessible zones, making contact with the anti-Fascists who had remained in the villages and trying to organize some sort of liaison with them. A group of men, later called “Hunters of the Apuan Alps,” gathered in the zone of Ruosina (Seravezza) around pilot officer Gino Lombardi, born in 1920, a student at the University of Pisa. An anti-Fascist by family tradition (his father was a Socialist), he had been a member of Catholic Action, and his formative influences found expression in the varied political allegiances of his men, so much so that it provoked suspicion in other partisan commanders, in the bordering zones, who had Communist leanings. The group, originally composed of about ten people, grew after the various announcements of calls to arms—by the Repubblica Sociale Italiana (Italian Social Republic)—which increased the number of draft dodgers who went into the hills, and so the group came to include over 20 people.