Italian World War II memoirs

The boat-Giuseppe Finzi, built by OTO in Livorno and commissioned in 1936, was one of the three ocean-going submarines of the Calvi class, among the largest submarines of the Regia Marina (84 meters long, they displaced 1,331 tons surfaced and 1,965 submerged; armed with two 120 mm guns, two machine guns and eight torpedo tubes). All three participated in the battle of the Atlantic from the summer of 1940, based in Bordeaux, France (where an Italian submarine base, called “Betasom”, had been created); after an initial deployment in the North Atlantic, they were much more successful as isolated raiders off the Caribbean and in the central and southern Atlantic, in 1942 and early 1943. They collectively sank 29 ships, totalling 161,118 GRT; more than half of these successes were achieved by Tazzoli alone, whereas Finzi was the least successful of the trio, sinking five ships for 30,760 GRT. I tell about her final fate at the end of the diary.   The man-Amleto Sommaruga was born i...

Francesco Alliata di Villafranca, a young member of the old Sicilian nobility, had been called up for service as a Sub-Lieutenant in the Sixth Army. Having always had a burning passion for filmmaking, he had managed to persuade his superiors to put him in charge of a small Army film and photographic unit; in this role, he found himself in Sicily, his birthplace, at the time of the Allied invasion. He was not the only member of the Alliata family to participate in the battle for Sicily: his cousin Giovanni Alliata di Montereale was also serving as a Lieutenant in the 54th Infantry Regiment, 54th "Napoli" Division, and would be wounded in action and captured on 13 July 1943, near Solarino. Francesco Alliata narrates his experience of those days in his autobiographic book “Il Mediterraneo era il mio regno: Memorie di un aristocratico siciliano”. He had already been stationed in Palermo for many months before the Allied landing, witnessing the increasing intensity of the Allied...