Report on Italy

From the ruins of Monte Cassino to the malarial swamps of the Pontine Marshes, this March of Time film depicts the full extent of Italy’s devastation in early 1945. The issue’s centrepiece shows the aftermath of the Ardeatine massacre - a Nazi atrocity in which over 300 Italians were shot in reprisal for a Partisan attack on an SS regiment. Footage showing the identification of the bodies is followed by film of the trial of Pietro Caruso, the Fascist chief of police who organised the killings.

Staged footage of Mussolini - played by an actor - brooding by his fireplace in his Alpine hideout, sets the scene for this survey of Italy, which depicts a country beginning to come to terms with the consequences of defeat after twenty years of fascism. The priority of the Allied Control Commission in Rome was to prosecute the war in the north: the needs of the Italian population came second. Dramatic footage abounds: from a soldier hammering the fasces symbol from a wall, to soup kitchen queues and ragged bands of partisans and from DDT spraying in the Pontine Marshes to Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti addressing huge crowds in Rome, the film conveys a vivid sense of the turbulent uncertainty of the times.