A curious calm

It is true that among educated people there is a good deal of anxiety; everyone listens four or five times a day to the radio and eagerly buys the foreign papers; most reserve officers have been called up and now six classes of recruits (about one and a half million men) and the navy and air force are fully mobilized. But in the popolino—so terrified last September and even at Easter—there is a curious calm. “Don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen!” says the hairdresser, as he sees me reading the papers. “You’ll see, the Duce will stop the war at the last moment,” says the taxi-driver. At the performance of La Traviata in Piazza della Signoria the moonlit square is packed with a gay, apparently carefree crowd. . . . “Look what Fascism has done for our people!” says a young officer as we walk home. “Compare their calm with the feverish tension in France and England!” But it isn’t exactly calm. It is a mixture of passive fatalism, and of a genuine faith in their leader: the fruits of fifteen years of being taught not to think. It is certainly not a readiness for war, but merely a blind belief that, “somehow,” it won’t happen.

—From Iris Origo’s diary, August 29, 1939, published in A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939–1940

Photo: Piazza della Signoria, circa 2017