Diario di guerra, Delia [war diary]

By Giorgia Alù
2024-06-13 07:01:57

_{With kind permission of CO.AS.IT. Italian Historical Society, Melbourne}

Delia. Diario di guerra was penned in Italian by Francesco D’Urbano (1920-1967) during WWII.

The diary’s cover is made of brown cardboard, with visible creases and signs of wear. Its first page is titled “Diario di Guerra” (War Diary), and below the title it reads “Fronte Cirenaica” (Cyrenaica Front) and “Zona d’ Operazioni” (Operational Zone). We can see a drawing of a helmet with a bayonet below it. Surrounding the name and the illustration, there are several official stamps. Its material, condition, and the story this diary tells reveal the various networks of relationships it has touched and connected through time.

Francesco D’Urbano hailed from Fara Filiorum Petri, near Chieti in Italy and participated in military engagements in Greece and Cyrenaica, where he was captured by the British and subsequently detained in India and England.

D’Urbano was one of the more than one million Italian servicemen who, between 1940 and 1947, became prisoners of war and were dispersed across Europe, North America, South Africa, India, Asiatic Russia, Australia, Japan and the Pacific.

Italy’s entry into war in June 1940 placed its African colonies on the front line. The Italian army in Libya (220,000 men) was strong only in terms of numbers but tactically unprepared and logistically disorganised. With the assistance of troops from Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Canada, and France, the British, after a series of battles and counter-offensives, finally forced the Italo-German army to retreat in November 1941.

The failed Italian assault on Egypt led to the capture of 133,000 prisoners. Similar outcomes in Abyssinia and Italian Somaliland resulted in 64,000 more captives by early 1941. Initially, the captured soldiers were held in makeshift prisoner-of-war camps in Egypt and Palestine. The Allies’ victory, however, posed challenges, including the need for food, guards, and accommodation for the prisoners near a volatile war zone. Prisoners were therefore transferred to the different imperial territories, including Australia.

D’Urbano was initially sent to India and subsequently held in a POW camp in England, until 1946. After the war, back in the little town of Fara, D’Urbano once again played music for the town band. A versatile individual, being a musician, artist, and writer, he died in 1967.

D’Urbano’s diary provides a detailed account of daily life of a soldier and military happenings from 17 August to 3 December 1940. Like many soldiers’ diaries, it was assembled from paper and materials available on the battlefields, with a cardboard cover providing protection. With its ritualistic and formulaic daily entries it was a form of timekeeping that could provide cohesion and self-conception for the writer and one that replaced the vaster chronology of the war. The narrative of military events is infused with nostalgia for family in Italy as well as a sense of patriotism that reflects the rhetoric of Fascism typical of many Italian soldiers sent to the front during WWII. Illustrated with both coloured and black-and-white sketches, it depicts military symbols, airplanes, tanks, soldiers, and maps of Egypt and Cyrenaica, showcasing aspects of the battlefields.

It is likely D’Urbano lost his diary during one of the battles in Libya. His manuscript came into the possession of an Australian soldier after D’Urbano’s capture. Despite not speaking Italian, the soldier from Western Australia shared the diary with others, including an Italian priest. In the 1990s, Pietro (Peter) Bertola – a farmer from Western Australia, whose father migrated from Italy to Australia in 1927 and became a goldmine owner in Mt Monger, near Kalgoorlie - donated the diary to the Italian Historical Society in Melbourne where archivists traced its origins. A copy of the text was subsequently sent to D’Urbano’s wife in Italy.

D’Urbano never reached Australia as a prisoner of war. Considered “irrelevant” to the Italian Historical Society at the time,[1] as it did not pertain directly to Italians in Australia (as per Laura Mecca’s letter to Peter Bertola in 1995), this diary nonetheless sheds light on the complex networks of multilingual exchanges that transcended geographical boundaries and, indeed, is relevant to Australia’s multilingual history.

It tells the story of individuals and objects scattered by war. One individual’s journey, driven by war and captivity, spans Italy, North Africa, India and England. As a written record and artifact, the diary, too, transcended geographical barriers independently of its creator, eventually reaching Australia. While initially possibly retained as a war trophy, the diary transformed into a peculiar artifact, a fragment of the past, serving as a foreign memento of historical events that affected people across the world.

This diary, and its afterlife, signifies the convergence of existences and histories: the Italian soldier who wrote it, the Australian soldier who first found it and the Italian Australian people who subsequently took care of it. It marks a unique encounter that transcended linguistic barriers and spanned significant episodes of Australian history, from the gold rush and early twentieth-century Italian migration to Australia, through WWII. Such a convergence continued once the diary was reunited with D’Urbano’s family in Italy through the support of staff at the Italian Historical Society.

As both a lost and found object, this diary is an example of how objects can shape and affect personal narratives and collective memory. It sparked a quest for its origins and meaning, and for closure or reconciliation. For D’Urbano and his family in Italy, it was also imbued with a sense of longing or desire for its return.

Today it serves as both an artifact and text in Italian that, through its materiality, words and pictures, as well as peripatetic story, bears witness to historical events, societal and cultural shifts, as well as multilingual exchanges.

[1] see Letter from Laura Mecca to Peter Bertola, 6 September 1995. CO.AS.IT. Italian Historical Society (IHS), Melbourne.