In December 1917 Cavaliere Emilio Eles – Consul for Italy in Australasia since 1913 – based in Melbourne, issued the following order:

All Italian conscripts and reservists resident in Australian and born in the years 1874 to 1899 are compulsorily called to join the colours in Italy. Men exempted from military service in time of peace for having been born in a foreign country or were expatriated before being 16 years of age, and who on or before May 21, 1915, reached the age of 32, are not obliged to answer the call. Further instructions will follow for medical examination and embarkation.

Few did show up and then what follow is a little-known, yet dramatic, episode  of his participation to the forced conscription and repatriation of Italian immigrants of military age, which was carried out with the help of the Australian Government. All those who had refused conscription were declared deserters. The largest forced repatriation of Italians men happened at Broken Hill, outside Melbourne, a mining town with a strong community of Italian immigrants, mostly from Veneto and Lombardy. Consul Emilio Eles, together with the Australian police, rounded about 100 Italians and had them dragged on ships bound for Italy.

Here is a detailed study of what happened there:

http://journals.publishing.monash.edu/ojs/index.php/ha/article/viewFile/621/705

Emilio Eles, at the end of the war, was nominated Consul General of Italy in Hong Kong from  1919 until 1920.

The date of Emilio Eles’s order marks the dramatic days following the defeat of the Italian army at the Battle of Caporetto, also known as the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo River which saw a successful combined offensive of the Austro-Hungarian and German forces decisively breaking through the Italian lines along the northern Isonzo, catching the Italian defenders entirely by surprise.  Even the Austrian-Hungarian-German were surprised – Erwin Rommel and film director Fritz Lang participated in it – as they called it ‘The miracle of Caporetto’. The Italian defeat brought about a change in Government and the dismissal of General Cadorna as Chief of Staff.

Broken Hill is also known in Australia because the only pitched battle of WW1 on Australian soil was fought there. It has gone down in history as the Battle of Broken Hill.

On one side there were two Afghan or Turkish boys and on the others some picknickers and Australian reservists. It was fought on 1 January 1915 by two local residents who opened fire with their hunting rifles on a trainload of picnickers. They recognised the Sultan of Turkey as their supreme religious leader and were heeding his call for a Jihad against the British Empire and its allies. They produced a Turkish flag using rags – Turkey was allied to Germany and Austria -and attached it to ice cream cart before digging a trench on a hill overlooking the rail line between Broken Hill and the abandoned town of Silverton. When a train passed loaded with holidaymakers, the two ‘patriots’ opened fire, killing four people and wounding several others.

The NSW Police and the Militia were called in, while the two fighters moved to a quartz outcrop known as ‘The White Rocks’ using their ice cream cart to carry rifles and ammunition. Eventually, overpowered by Australian fire, their position was stormed; one of them was dead in the assault, while the other was fatally wounded. Among the bullet riddled cart they found a copy of letter they had sent to the Turkish army seeking enrolment.

L’Italia era e resta quella descritta da Guareschi nel suo ciclo dedicato a Don Camillo e Peppone, non tutti hanno letto i suoi libri ma quasi tutti hanno visto i suoi film interpretati magistralmente da Fernandel e da Gino Cervi. La dimostrazione che poco è cambiato dal dopoguerra a oggi è  evidente da quanto sta accedendo nel mio paese natale, Turbigo, settemila anime, posto a 35 chilometri da Milano.

La giunta di centrodestra ha intitolato una via a Ezio Maria Gray. Questo ha provocato una levata di scudi da parte dell’opposizione di sinistra che ha fatto intervenire fior d’intellettuali e varie associazioni di reduci della guerra partigiana (ANPI).

Ezio Maria Gray nacque a Novara nel 1885 e per chi ancora non lo sapesse è stato molte cose. Capitano di fanteria nella prima guerra mondiale; inviato speciale; direttore di riviste e giornali; commentatore radiofonico e prolifico autore di libri che ai suoi tempi raccontavano l’attualità. Oggi sono difficilmente leggibili, pieni come sono d’una retorica che odora di stantio.

Il Gray conobbe il giovane Mussolini poiché dal 1910 al 1912 fu il direttore della rivista La Difesa basata proprio a Forlì, anche se va detto che a quel tempo il futuro Duce gravitava su posizioni anarco-socialiste che il Gray contrastava.

Ezio Maria Gray – il cui cognome tradisce lontane origini anglosassoni – dopo aver abbandonato le sue iniziali posizioni Nazional-Monarchiche passò al regime fascista. Fu deputato, vicepresidente della Associazione Dante Alighieri, Membro del Gran Consiglio del fascismo, ma solo nelle sedute iniziali, e dopo l’8 di settembre aderì alla RSI dove si occupò di propaganda e diresse il Quotidiano del Popolo di Torino. Consegnatosi a Como, nel maggio del 1945, alle locali autorità fu portato al campo di Coltano, ricevendovi una scarica di legnate come benvenuto. Fu poi processato e condannato a 20 anni di reclusione per aver sostenuto il regime fascista con la sua penna, mai con il moschetto.

Palmiro Togliatti, come Ministro di Grazia e Giustizia, nel 1946 promulgò un’amnistia per tutti coloro che stavano in carcere per crimini che oggi chiameremmo ideologici e anche per concorso in omicidio. Il Gray, assieme ad altri fascisti e a vari comunisti, fu rilasciato con la restituzione dei suoi pieni diritti civili entro la neonata Repubblica Italiana. Fu in seguito eletto alla Camera dei Deputi e al Senato e fu fra i fondatori del MSI. Morì a Roma nel 1969.

Il suo nome resta legato a Turbigo per via della villa in cui abitò, Villa Gray appunto, dove oggi ha sede il comune. Ora che ci penso, mi par strano che l’opposizione comunale contesti l’intitolazione di una via mentre accetta di riunirsi settimanalmente proprio nella villa a lui intitolata. Sua moglie fu la poetessa Corinna Teresa Ubertis, nota come Teresah (Frassineto Po, 1874 – Roma, 1964) che pubblicò anche libri per bambini che furono poi tradotti negli Stati Uniti. Una via per lei davvero ci vorrebbe!

 La poetessa Teresah.

Ora vorrei far pacatamente alcune osservazioni, ben conscio del fatto che gli animi sono già riscaldati da entrambe le parti della barricata, con scambi di accuse e d’insulti.

Prima considerazione. Come si può giudicare così male un uomo che è stato amnistiato e assolto da un tribunale – fu accusato dopo la Guerra di aver partecipato all’uccisione di partigiani, lui sporse querela e vinse l’azione legale – e che per tre legislature è stato un parlamentare della Repubblica Italiana, sia alla Camera dei Deputati che al Senato, accanto ai padri costituenti e ad ex partigiani? Se questi lo avessero giudicato come viene oggi giudicato a Turbigo lo avrebbero certamente fatto espellere e condannare, cosa che non fecero. L’opposizione turbighese ha nuove prove da addurre contro di lui? Credo di no, dunque, potranno semmai parlare – dal loro punto di vista – di cattivo gusto e di inopportunità, non di altro. Potranno, poi, se lo vorranno, vendicarsi democraticamente una volta conquistata la maggioranza nelle urne, intitolando una via a Luigi Longo o a Walter Audisio.

Seconda considerazione. Mi stupisco che si spenda così tanto tempo e così tante energie su questioni secondarie come questa, con la guerra in Siria e in Libano, con la disoccupazione galoppante, con una tassazione che strozza i commerci, con migliaia di immigranti clandestini che sbarcano in Sicilia ogni giorno. Noi dunque, dimenticando tutti questi problemi, ci dovremmo mettere a litigare su di un fantasma del passato chiamato Ezio Maria Gray? Conosco l’obiezione che mi verrà fatta: la dittatura e il fascismo potrebbero ritornare se non vigileremo. Capisco questo punto di vista ma credo – come dicono gli inglesi – che stiamo abbaiando all’albero sbagliato. Il gatto se n’è già andato altrove. Se il “Fascismo malefico” di cui loro parlano tornerà non sarà più quel “Fascismo malefico” folkloristico con i labari,  le camicie nere, i balilla e i figli della Lupa. Sarà un qualche cosa di completamente diverso, magari di sinistra. Mi sono spesso chiesto se Mussolini dovesse rinascere che farebbe, dove sarebbe? La risposta che mi do è che sarebbe sicuramente a sinistra, come in effetti fu il giovane Mussolini e assomiglierebbe a un Matteo Renzi.

Termino qui con un piccolo fatto storico relativo a quello che forse fu il libro più famoso del Gray, Il Belgio sotto la spada tedesca che raccoglie i suoi reportage da inviato speciale della Gazzetta del Popolo dal Belgio invaso dai tedeschi. I suoi articoli risalgono esattamente a cento anni fa, all’agosto del 1914 e furono poi raccolti e pubblicati in un libro nel 1915. Questo genere di notizie sulla atrocità germaniche furono sempre considerate come una sfacciata opera di propaganda anti-germanica e il negazionismo su quei fatti è ancora in atto ai nostri giorni.

La notizia è che la Cornell University Press Americana ha ripubblicato pochi giorni fa il libro di Jeff Lipkes intitolato Rehersals; The German Army in Belgium, August 1914 uscito per la prima volta nel 2007. Sono 800 pagine dense di fatti e di testimonianze. Pare che le atrocità descritte da Ezio Maria Gray accaddero veramente. Senza alcuna provocazione i soldati tedeschi uccisero 6.000 civili, anche donne e bambini e bruciarono 25.000 case. La cosa fu decisa a freddo, come esperimento – Rehersals significa appunto prove, allenamenti – di una paranoia gestita dall’alto per studiare gli effetti di quel genere di atti terroristici sulle popolazioni civili. Una lezione della quale la Germania fece tesoro e poi applicò negli anni successivi.

When Matthew told her that he had found an ancient burial, while exploring the unknown path, Lili darkened.
Immediately he felt so stupid for not having remembered that Chinese people are always very sensitive when the dead are involved and the respect and fear of the hereafter is one of the most important traits of their culture.
Almost apologetically, he reassured her saying that, when they would ride down the track with the trials bikes, they would have ridden slowly and shown the due respect.
Lili had not appeared happy at all with the clarification that seemed, strangely to him, not having hit the mark.
When the following week-end Matthew and Stephane climbed the hill of the tiger, by the usual track, everything was perfect.
It was really hot and it rained just a little bit the night before. This makes excellent grip for the tires but also raised humidity to almost 90%.
They arrived easily at the top of the hill. The Tian lu hu Park was nothing exceptional when compared to Alpine landscapes where Matthew was raised and to the Canadian ones from whom Stephane came from. However, living in Hong Kong and been able to ride in a desert place with a nice view, was something that made the two trial riders happy.

Technically, the Tiger’s Hill was perfect for trial bikes, with very steep paths but rather “smooth” to allow climbing them with motorbikes.
In addition, the hill was periodically burned down, as it happens since centuries to the hills of Guangdong. Therefore the trails were free from high vegetation that would have made the area impracticable to bikes.
The slopes were sometimes remarkably steep. In fact, when Matthew walked down the path to the bottom and then walked it up again, in his reconnaissance of the previous week, he was quite surprised at how steep it was.

The modern trials bikes and especially the latest generation of tires have reached a very high level of performance that allows climbing up and down, provided of course the rider knows the riding technique, slopes that were unthinkable a decade earlier.
They rode down the path and Stephane seemed hesitant. – Are you sure that here later we will ride back up? –
I do not believe my ears – said Matthew pretending to speak to an audience listening, – the guy has new tires… What do you complain for? I do not recognize you, where is the tough man of the Extreme Enduro gone? –
Stephane looked down, shaking his head, saying nothing and carried on downhill.
Once at the base of the trail, 600 meters in altitude lower, they turned the bikes upward and looked at the climb that awaited them.
It was not an uninterrupted climb. The trail was hundreds, perhaps thousands of years old, following the same logical progression of Alpine trails that Mathew knew well; along the ridge, where this progression was convenient, then moving to the right or left of it, to overcome sections too steep, circling around them. All in the name of efficiency and safety, taking into account the adverse weather conditions that could occur.
-Men did things in the right way for a long time, – thought Matthew watching that piece of art of engineering and experience.
There was only a section perhaps not technically feasible for their skill level.

It was a short gully, which followed the bed of a dry stream.
The ground was made up of stable and big rocks but then, as if this was not tough enough, it literally reared up for 15-20 meters.
Steep slopes and ground very irregular was a combination acceptable for a biped being but disastrous for a two-wheeled vehicle.
However, there was a solution that Matthew had already checked it out during his exploratory descent the previous week.
At the point of maximum steepness, when the bikes had stopped or tipped over, it was possible to cut horizontally to the left, and then to continue to climb along the ridge, passing to the right of a Chinese tomb and by-passing in this fashion the bastard gully.
Well, it was not something to be proud of. It was cheating for good, something to scandalize Mike, the best trial rider of the club.
But Mike was not there today and a cut of 20 meters, on a climb of two kilometers, was not the end of the world.
They started the climb, Stephane in front and Matthew behind, as they overcame the various technical sections without too much trouble.
When they arrived to the difficult gully that “wants to see the men in the face,” as the toscanaccio Gianfranco used to say, they stopped to drink and to take a breath.
-So far so good, – said Stephane.
-It was you, looser, to doubt of my skills as a ”seguidor”, – said Matthew.
-If you were right or wrong, we’ll see after getting over the gully, Mr. Italian macho, – concluded Stephane wearing back his helmet.
Matthew explained him the line to follow and Stephane launched.
– He’ll arrive there, or he will tip over there- were Matthew predictions.
It was the second option to come true. Stephane went in trouble, lost his balance, insisted, the front wheel raised too much in the air and the speed went too low. Finally he jumped back and his poor faithful bike miserably concluded its run, unharmed, lying on the slope, while Stephane grabbed it to prevent it to slide down.
He turned the bike across, set in motion, traversed for about 10 meters and turning up skillfully he arrived easily a few meters from the beginning of the gully and at the end of the difficulties.
Matthew lifted the thumb to the Canadian and covered the same route, stopping, however, a moment before repeating the same tipping over of Stephane, who, in his heart, hoped for the opposite to have a laugh too.
The Italian turned his bike and was about to mount onto it again when he had a strange feeling.
Like when, at the last moment, you realize that you have someone too close to you and this immediately triggers an instinctive mechanism of reaction, he turned his head toward where he felt this sensation originating and saw, it was less than a blink, something flickering against his side. He had no time to move but only to contract his muscles and felt a heavy blow to the right side of his torso.
A moment later he lost his breath as he leaned his elbows to his sides to endure better the pain that was growing rapidly.
Stephane saw the scene but did not understand what had happened.
Or rather, he understood, because he had seen it, that a large stone had hit Matthew but not from where it came from.
A stone seldom falls without an evident cause. Stephane was away from the falling line and the impact was very violent, therefore the speed implied a certain space of acceleration. However he did not see the stone bounce, neither to roll. It was as it had appeared only a moment before hitting the poor Matthew.
Stephane reached him in a few seconds, he look at Matthew who, with the first breath that he could use, after finally had filled his lungs, told him – What the hell…-
-How are you… what do we do now… I have not moved the rock … –
-It’s ok, – said Matthew – let me just take a breath,
-OK? –  replied Stephane – how can you be ok, you must have broken ribs or worse, that rock was huge and … –
-I tell you it’s ok, I can breathe and there are no fractures, as you can see – he said as he looked to his side.
Three large red lines showed the point of impact on the ribs but there seemed not to be fractures. This did not mean that there could not have been damage to internal organs…
They looked at the stone. It was really big, like a rugby ball.
– Luckily I was not hit with the pointed part, – said Matthew who seemed to breathe deeply and regularly.
– Right, but she was not so lucky – replied Stephane observing Matthew’s bike.
The stone, after hitting the side of Matthew, rebounded and ended up against his bike, hitting the collector of the cooling tube, where this leaves the pump and had it sliced open ​​cleanly. A large shiny stain was spreading under the bike resting on the slope.
-Perfect, – said Matthew, – perfect. At least we are lucky and the sky today is cloudy. Last week, with the sunshine, it was hot like hell here and without a broken bike to push… – uttering these words as to give himself courage, as he watched his poor bike.
At the same moment, it exploded with light, like a room when you pull a curtain at noon.
-Can you please shut up! –
Matthew started to walk, holding his ribs, while Stephane pushed with fatigue the bike for that short stretch sideways.
A moment later, Matthew, all of a sudden, froze.
– Are you ok? -Stephane cried running toward him – I knew it… we need to call someone… you have to go to the hospital-
Matthew was still, frozen, in front of the tomb. Stephane came and stopped too.
– I did not move that stone-
– I know. Although I am not an engineer like you, I’m smart enough to know that stones fall downwards, not upward. –
Still dazed by the impact, Matthew had seen that Stephane was out of the falling line of the gully and therefore could not have been him to move the stone. Because sometimes stones fall because it’s time for them to fall, he had not considered other reasons.
But now that his mind was clearing up, he thought again to that strange feeling, of a nearby presence and to the fact that, up in the mountains, he had seen many times falling stones but if the slope is not vertical, there was always time to hear and see them. The two stared in silence.
They were both convinced rationalists and every idea of supernatural and occult had always provoked desecrating reactions in them, especially on the part of Matthew. But there was none of this. The strange sensation they felt just before started to appear again and they both looked around scared. Then the feeling disappeared.

They looked at each other again and Stephane whispered: – Let’s go –

Paolo Predonzan 

I stop flying Malaysian Airlines more than 10 years ago after an appalling flight me and my wife took from Hong Kong to Australia. We were mistreated on board by the flight personnel, there were delays and we spent a night in a filthy hotel outside KL provided by the airline (it was full of maggots and worms). I sent two letters of complains to the managers of Malaysian Airlines but I never got any kind of answer.

A small indication of the fact that basically the people in charge in Malaysia don’t care much is the fact that they did not change the number of flight number MH17 which is still flying from Amsterdam to KL. Any other airline in the world would have changed this number out of respect for the victims’ relatives but apparently they don’t mind.

By the way this number is considered very unlucky in some countries of the Mediterranean – like Italy – also considering that flight MH17 was shot down on the 17 of July. The origin of this superstition seems to have Roman roots, where on the graves they put VIXI (I lived) whereas by moving the letters you can get XVII. In Naples it stands for Disgrace or Accident with the maximum of unluckiness on Friday (for MH17 it was a Thursday).

The Boeing 777-200 departed Amsterdam at 12.14am local time bound for Kuala Lumpur, 15 minutes later than scheduled, according to flight records. It should have arrived in Malaysia at 6:10am local time, but did not enter Russian airspace when it was expected to. Considering that 2 more aircrafts were shot down in the same month the managers of the Malaysian Airlines should have considered to re-route their plane, Quantas, Korean Airlines and Lufthansa and several others did it already spending 5 more minutes of fuel in exchange of additional safety for their passengers, but they did not. True that Ukranian authorities said that was no problem at 10.000 mt. altitude, but should an airline trust Ukranians authorities who had two airplanes shot down during the previous weeks? And where was IATA by the way, such kind of decisions should not be left to single airlines, IATA should force them to change their route.

From the International New York Times – Saturday-Sunday July 12-13, 2014.

By Robert Cohen

“I don’t care for islands,” D. H. Lawrence once wrote, an attitude I happen to share, though my wife doesn’t, which is how we found ourselves in Sardinia last spring. Whether Lawrence himself actually shared it isn’t clear. At the time (1921) he was living on one island (Sicily), in exile from another (England), and about to embark upon an improvised midwinter trip to a third (Sardinia), which — though he did not much care for travel either — would yield one of his strangest, most original books, “Sea and Sardinia,” with its jittery and bewitching opening: “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move.”

For Lawrence, life was always a drama in media res. He was too impatient to ponder his own motives, too enthralled by movement to wonder if it was toward or from. Wherever he went, he expected, as most of us do, way too much. In his Italian books he sifts through the ashes of postwar Europe, in search of some still-glowing, inextinguishable ember: pre-modern, pre-Roman, maybe pre-human. If the resulting portrait looks less like Sardinia than that other marooned, thorny island, Lawrence himself, this is no surprise. His time there was short. He took no notes (“I am not Baedeker,” he grumbled). He was always lurching ahead to seize some raw, inhospitable truth one either grasps quickly or not at all. “The judgment may be all wrong,” he concedes, “but this was the impression I got.” Photo D. H. Lawrence, in exile from England, wrote “Sea and Sardinia,” about a visit there in 1921. Sardinia has a long history of being subject to impressions. The Greeks called it “Ichnusa,” or “footprint” — when Zeus created the earth, he gathered the leftover pieces, threw them into the sea, and stepped down hard: voilà, Sardinia. Intruders have been leaving their footprints ever since: Phoenicians, Romans, Pisans, Catalans, billionaire yachtsmen, crabby and indolent writers. And yet somehow it has retained its thorny, intransigent particularity — “lost between Europe and Africa, and belonging to nowhere,” as Lawrence put it. It’s that very betweenness, at once central and marginal to history, that drew him. It drew us, too. We came to follow Lawrence’s ink-trail around the island: from Cagliari in the south, through the Gennargentu Mountains, and up to Terranova (now Olbia) on the northeast coast. It is a scrubby, serpentine route, full of breathless switchbacks. But then the same holds true for Lawrence on the page: You’re always veering giddily from fleeting exaltations (the joy of motion, the wildness of the landscape, the generosity of a peasant) to tedious exasperations (almost everything else). Luckily he had his wife along, the formidable Frieda (he refers to her as “the Q.B.,” for queen bee), whose shrewd affirmations provided a foil for his grumbling discontents. My own wife is a formidable and affirmative type, too. Like the Q.B., she doesn’t just admire Sardinia; she savors it. Immediately upon landing in Cagliari she fell in love with it all — the gleaming porticos of the Via Roma, the palm-lined walkways, the stately Pisan towers hovering like sentinels over the rooftops. Continue reading the main story Though Lawrence found the city “all bibs and bobs … rather bare, rather stark,” we were with Frieda. There is an unfussy, lived-in quality to the place, an air of convivial endurance. True, much of the city was leveled by Allied bombs, and it has not exactly been lovingly restored. True, the government is inefficient at best. But Cagliari has been here 3,000 years; it’s not going anywhere. In the evenings we wandered the Castello, the historic district, with its neo-Classical piazza, the Bastione di Saint Remy, from which you can see the whole bay — the boats, the salt flats dotted with flamingos, and the long, lunar-looking Poetto Beach beyond. Couples strolled down Via Manno, kissed on benches under palms. “They pour themselves one over the other,” Lawrence sniffed of the Italians, “like so much melted butter over parsnips.”

After a few days, there being “little to see” in Cagliari, the Lawrences moved north to Mandas on the interior railway, the Trenino Verde, a toylike affair that “pelts up hill and down dale … like a panting, small dog.” Alas, that train no longer operates in the off-season, so we rented a car, a betrayal of Lawrentian values — namely hunger, bad light, and sharing space with people who annoy you. On the good side, the drive takes only an hour, with luminous views of the Trexenta hills, full of olive trees and tall, droopy-barked eucalyptus. Mandas is a stony little place, with one treeless main street. When Frieda asked what one does in Mandas, the locals told her, “Niente! At Mandas one does nothing. At Mandas one goes to bed when it’s dark, like a chicken. At Mandas one walks down the road like a pig that is going nowhere. At Mandas …” In truth there are some things to do in Mandas, according to Agostino Porcedda, the congenial fellow who runs the Antica Locanda Lunetta. The place has been in his family since Lawrence’s day — the “quite pleasant woman” who fed the Lawrences was Agostino’s grandmother. He proudly showed us her picture, along with a brochure for the Festival D. H. Lawrence, which takes place every August. He directed us to an excellent agriturismo where, unlike the Lawrences — who in the impoverished Sardinia of their day couldn’t find anything but cabbage soup and hard bread — we ate and drank like Vikings: prosciutto, pecorinos, mutton, culurgiones (potato-and-mint-filled dumplings) and seadas, enormous dessert raviolis drenched in miele amaro, bitter honey made from arbutus flowers. Then we collapsed back at the locanda, happy to be collapsing in the same place the Lawrences collapsed. Except it turns out the Lawrences collapsed in another building entirely, next to the station. Agostino directed us there in the morning. It looked remarkably unchanged; also deserted. There was a David Herbert Lawrence plaque on the street. Inside the tiny station were two more. It seemed a lot of plaques for a guy who spent one night there, but we dutifully took photos of them all. Continue reading the main story On the road to Sorgono we stopped off at Su Nuraxi, the vast Bronze Age complex excavated in the 1950s. Nuraghic culture, endemic to Sardinia, dates back 4,000 years; its hive-shaped stone towers, thousands of them, still lie scattered around the island. Of these, Su Nuraxi is the largest. A fractal web of houses, atriums, mills and canals, it is the most advanced, most hauntingly mysterious site of its time. Which is to say it’s exactly what Lawrence was looking for: a place to “smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens.” Photo The Bronze Age complex of Su Nuraxi. What he found instead was … Sorgono. (“Blessed is he that expecteth nothing,” he wrote of Sorgono, “for he shall not be disappointed.”) Everything about the twisting, snakelike ascent through the Gennargentu (Barbarie, the Romans dubbed it, after multiple failures to subdue its inhabitants) seems otherworldly: the scrubby oaks, the cork trees, the sullen gong of sheep bells echoing down the slopes. But then you arrive in Sorgono, and what do you find? More niente.

“A dreary hole!” Lawrence muttered. “A cold, hopeless, lifeless, Saturday afternoon-weary village.” The food was bad. The bedsheets were stained. People cheerfully relieved themselves on the street. “Why are you so indignant?” the Q.B. asked. “It’s all life.” Frankly, I had indignations of my own in Sorgono. We, too, arrived on a Saturday afternoon. There was nowhere to eat and nothing to do, other than lounge by the lifeless station, reading Lawrence’s catalog of complaints. But then I looked up to find the very “pink-washed building” with the very same name (Risveglio) as the horrible inn in the book. “It can’t be the same one,” I said. “There’s no plaque.” “Of course it’s the same,” my wife said. “Let’s go in.” Six brawny young men with faux-hawks hung out in the doorway, drinking Ichnusa beers, and observing us in a desultory way. “Let’s not,” I said. My wife marched right in. All six guys filed in behind her, like a spaghetti western, many of which were filmed close by. Inside, the pallid bartender was polishing glasses. I slapped a euro on the bar and ordered two macchiatos. Then in my grunting Italian I asked if this might be the same Risveglio from D. H. Lawrence’s day. For a moment everyone just looked hostile. Then they all started talking at once. The bartender said his grandmother owned the place then. Another guy said no, that was a different owner. The bartender demurred. A guy named Salvatore took over translation duties, fielding comments from the others, who all seemed to be cousins. It was our own Festival D. H. Lawrence. To settle the matter I pulled out my copy of the book; then the bartender pulled out his copy, and laid it over mine like a trump. Everyone laughed and bought us drinks. We were ready to move to Sorgono ourselves. It’s all life, as the Q.B. said. We continued then, in better spirits, up the road to Nuoro, winding through the mountains, past Gavoi and Tonara, the “sun-sweetened” villages that Lawrence so admired. The trees were dwarfish and tough. The shops were full of knives. This was banditi country. True, the banditi are said to have retired, but then why were the road signs riddled with bullet holes? “Only the Italian words,” my wife pointed out. “The Sardo’s untouched.” Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Nuoro, however, looked placid and tame. Nuoro was home to the Nobel laureate Grazia Deledda, whose novels Lawrence so admired, but her modest birthplace was closed. We walked around aimlessly, seeing the place through his eyes, but of course through Lawrence’s eyes “there’s nothing to see.” This is no longer quite true — there are two good museums in town — but by now it had taken on the sound of a mantra. “Sights are an irritating bore,” he wrote. “Happy is the town that has nothing to show.” The rest of the journey, in that and every other sense, proved happy indeed for Lawrence, and for us too. Because there was little to see in most of these towns. In Sardinia, you might say, the towns themselves are not the point. So what is, then? Maybe it’s the calm that descends, on the coast road to Olbia, at the first sight of Tavolara, a massive lump of rock looming above the shoreline, draped in a cloud all its own. Like Su Nuraxi, it seems a remnant of some older, less user-friendly world. This is my description, by the way, not Lawrence’s, though at this point they may have begun to blur. Why shouldn’t they? Lawrence too brought books along with him, which colored not just what but how he saw. The more we open ourselves to the new, the more of the old floods in with it. Perhaps that’s why, by the end of our trip, we were feeling even more moved by and protective toward Lawrence’s Sardinia than we were relieved to be free of its hammering intensities. Why, after all, did he come here? “A heart yearning for something I have known, and which I want back again.” Possibly, in the end, for all the appeal of “unknown lands,” what drew him here was not so unknown. It’s there to be glimpsed in the fields around Mandas, like “the bleak parts of Cornwall”; the “English countryside” near Gavoi; the “wide, almost Celtic landscape of hills” north of Cagliari. Despite his wanderings in exile, Lawrence, like most of us, never entirely left home. And meanwhile stony old Sardinia remains unconquerably apart. The judgment may be wrong, but like the man said, that was the impression I got.

A new volume containing a small part of the still secret Mitrokhin Papers will be soon printed.

The book also reveals that Soviet agents stashed weapons and communications equipment in secret locations around Nato countries. Included is also a map of Rome showing three caches, along with instructions for finding them. It is unclear how many such weapons dumps have been tracked down by Western authorities. It contains a list of 10.000 names of spies who were working for the soviets.

Upset about the changes which were made by the new leadership (not enough communist in his opinion) he went knocking at the US Embassy in a unknown State of the Soviet Republic but was turned away. He then went to the British where a junior diplomat sat him down and asked: “Would you like a cup of tea?”Andrew said: “That was the sentence that changed his life.” The Brits realized almost immediately what a great catch he was.

His complete archive was them shipped to England in 1992 even if no one knows how were they able to do it. One the British agent organizing the shipment was Richard Tomlinson – later expelled from the MI6 and hunted down by Margaret Thatcher – who later published a book in 2001 The Breach  in Moscow.

Smuggled out of Russia, Mitrokhin spent the rest of his life in Britain under a false name and police protection, dying in 2004 aged 81. The world did not learn of Mitrokhin until Andrew published a book based on his files in 1999.

Only a small part of the papers have been made public.

The files describe Guy Burgess as “constantly under the influence of alcohol”, while Donald Maclean was “not very good at keeping secrets”.

The files list undercover agents sent to then-Czechoslovakia to infiltrate the dissidents behind the 1968 Prague spring pro-democracy uprising. Others targeted the entourage of Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, who would later become Pope John Paul II.

Former diplomat Mario Vattani publishes his first novel in Japanese.  The title will be “River of Fire and Perfumes”.

This is a work of fiction and history which moves on two distinct levels, covering a period between 1866 and 1945, a sort of ‘Noh’ representation, using the author’s own words.After the Japanese edition of this book, Vattani hopes to find an Italian editor.

Between 1866 and 1945 a great passion blossomed between two newly created countries – Japan and Italy – which were timidly appearing on the international scene. It was a close relationship which was abruptly ended in 1945 because of a terrible war fought on the same side, but ended in tragedy. That was the end of the political and military attraction, but the cultural passion goes on in our days.

With this book, Vattani wants to relive the memory of a bygone epoch, with its lights and shadows, starting with the earlier contacts made by private merchants coming from Torre del Greco to sell corals and pearls and with Piedmontese gentlemen buying silk

Mario Vattani in 2003 discovered Japan touring it for months with his motorcycle and keeping a diary about what he was seeing and experiencing.  Born in 1966, educated in an English college and, besides English, he is fluent in French, Japanese and German. He has married a Japanese lady, and they have two children.

Mario Vattani became famous in Italy – for some infamous – in 2012 with his removal de vehementis, by the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Giulio Terzi di Sant’Agata, from his post of Consul of Italy in Osaka  The minister had no courage to help him out of a media storm in which he had fallen. He did not even gave him a phone call  to show some solidarity, normal among colleagues, after an unprecedented  journalistic onslaught.

Terzi di Sant’Agata first recalled and then suspended Vattani from the diplomatic service, speaking about ‘Fascists who cannot be part of the diplomatic service’ all of that because Vattani was caught playing rock music with a band known as ‘Sotto Fascia Semplice’ at the Casa Pound of Rome and then a single picture emerged in which he was offering a fascist salute to the public. The Italian left-wing press wanted him lynched, calling him names and inventing episodes of his past which had never happened.When the media storm subsided he was cleared by a tribunal of all those non-existing charges which had been hurled at him but, acting like a real gentleman, immediately resigned from the Foreign Affairs Ministry, after 20 years of service.

We wish to Mario Vattani the best of luck with his first-novel and we hope to be able to get a copy of it in Japanese and then post a review it here in English.

Alessandro de Pedys – arguably the best Italian Consul in Hong Kong and Macau, ever – has been appointed Ambassador of Italy for Poland.

This is a very prestigious and well deserved appointment. Poland is a key Country within the European chequer and being nominated Ambassador there brings great honour and great obligations. We wish to congratulate Alessandro for such appointment and we are certain that he will discharge his duty with diligence, displaying his usual loyalty to Italy.

Alessandro De Pedys was born on 26 September 1961 in Rome, where he earned a Business Administration degree in April 1986.

He joined the diplomatic service in 1989, and was assigned to the Secretariat of the Service for Legal Affairs, Diplomatic Disputes and International Agreements. In 1992 he was appointed Second Commercial Secretary at the Embassy of Italy in Seoul.

In 1993 he was promoted, and in 1996 he was assigned to London as First Secretary. In 1999 he was promoted Counselor of Legation. In 2000 he returned to Rome, and became Head of the II Office at the Press and Institutional Communication Service. In 2002 he was nominated Deputy Head of the delegation appointed to organise the Italian Presidency of the European Union in 2002.

Between 2004 (year of his promotion as Embassy Counselor) and 2007 he was outposted to the Diplomatic Counselor’s Office of the President of the Republic, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. Between February 2007 and 1 March 2010 he served as Consul General in Hong Kong and Macau.

Promoted Minister Plenipotentiary, he returned to Rome as Head of the Private Secretary’s Office of the Under-Secretary of State of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, , a role he had discharged  for the current Under-Secretary of State, Marta Dassù.