Grandi, King Vittorio Emanuele, the Duce and the caricatural reductions of “The Long Night”

The problem of truthfulness in a narrative of a historical subject constitutes a topic of age-old discussion not only for historiography, but for all those fields, literary and artistic, which, by mixing history and invention, bring the dimension of verisimilitude into play.

That this theme is not a simple exercise in style, but responds to interests that are still alive and vital, is well demonstrated by the recent discussion on the controversial Napoleon by Sir Ridley Scott. It is therefore not surprising that the success of the fiction The long nightbroadcast on Rai Uno last January, was accompanied by harsh criticism, which focused not only on some anachronisms, but also on the accusation of substantial historical unreliability.

The fiction, in fact, presents the events of July 25th as the product of the action of Dino Grandi, one of the main hierarchs of Fascism, depicted with the typical traits of the positive hero, interested only in the good of the country, contrasted with an excessively caricatural, prisoner of the external forms of the character he himself invented for the use and consumption of Italians. Among the main sources of the screenplay would appear to have been the two volumes that Grandi published a few years before his death: 25 July. Forty years later (1983) and My Country (1985).

The rhetoric of self-absolution

Two works that sparked heated discussions among historians at the time. Well written and of undoubted interest, they must however be read with the necessary critical approach, to avoid accepting, without realizing it, the rhetoric of self-absolution present in them. Precisely this work of revealing the different possible readings of the events of those terrible days seems absent in the sequences of the Long night. Otherwise, for example, the reduction of the role of the Duke of Aquarone, minister of the Royal Household, who several scholars have identified as the true demiurge of those dramatic days, might not be explained otherwise. The 1943 plan was, in fact, the re-proposal of what the Duke had already designed in 1940 to avoid Italy’s entry into the war (then, however, the protagonist had to be Ciano).

When watching the six episodes of the drama, one often has the sensation of being faced with a sort of melodrama. The characters, in fact, all appear drawn with strong lines, as perhaps a nineteenth-century librettist would have done. I have already said regarding the ‘hero-villain’ dichotomy for the Grandi-Mussolini couple; but how can we not see, for example, in the prefect De Cesare a miniature Scarpia, who gives the best (or worst) of himself in the kidnapping of the hero’s wife? Not to mention the king.