Old Conflicts and New Borders: Chronicles from the Zones of the Anglo-American Landing of 9 September 1943

The armistice of 8 September 1943 and the allied landing on the coast of Salerno represent the “inflection point” in the Italian WWII history. In the diplomatic and military activities the binomial "friend / foe" (and particularly the changes of the concept of "ally"), "front / rear" and "liberator / occupier" reverse. The "escape" of king, his family and part of the ministers to Brindisi, on which the historical debate is more than ever opened; the interruption of the chain of command and the disbandment of the corps; the idea of the "betrayal" of the German ally; the relations among the "wind of the north" and the Kingdom of the South, in the sense of a radical difference in the war experiences between the north and the south of the country and between who achieved freedom with the weapons and who immediately begun to reconstruct new forms of participative democracy, constituted a central theme both in the historiography and in Italian politics. The essay focuses on the reconstruction of the events of 8th and 9th September with a micro-historical view, reporting what happened in the places of the landing in the hours before and after the beginning of the "Operation Avalanche", with some digressions that better delineate the conditions in which the Italian soldiers operated, the local population lived and the way in which they react to a new, unexpected and dramatic event such as the armistice with the Anglo-American forces.