Stories were once heard in families around a fire while winter raged outside. Today, that same warmth is also sought in the warm voices that inform us, passing through headphones, to our eardrums. Stories, no matter where or how, always share an epicness of their own. A hero or a group of heroes,a great challenge or a great enemy, someone or something to save, you have to foundational values that remain with us. The stories told at our microphones for the Poetry for Resistance project are no exception. Our goal is to tell the story of resistance in Bari and Puglia and the artistic movements that helped bring it about. Resistance is something we not only had in Italy, but also in Germany, Spain and Portugal, four European nations that share the misfortune of having had Nazi-fascist dictatorships.
For the first two podcast episodes, we turned to two experts on the history of those years: Nicola Signorile, from the board of the National Association of Italian Partisans in the province of Bari, and Annabella de Robertis, a popularizing archivist for IPSAIC and frequent voice of the Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno and Rai Storia.
In the first episode with Nicola Signorile we focused on Radio Bari, which in September in 1943 would become the first free radio station in Europe along with the BBC. In a Bari that had just liberated itself from the Nazis (note that it had liberated itself, the Americans would arrive only three 24 and 48 hours later) radio was a key element in telling the story of the liberation movement. Radio Bari had been established in the 1930s, under the wishes of the regime, to culturally hegemonize the other side of the Adriatic to which its parabolas were directed. There were multiple languages of broadcasting, mainly Italian, Greek and Albanian; content, on the other hand, was monolithic about the grandeur of the regime. It is no coincidence that even today Italian is widely known in Albania; after Radio Bari, Balkan equipment would also receive Rai broadcasts for years. The radio was restored thanks to the intuition of two young Bari men under the age of thirty, destined to remain in the city’s history: Michele Cifarelli and Peppino Giuseppe Bartolo, who found support from the Anglo-American psychological warfare officer Major Ian Gordon Greenlees. This passage, which may seem trivial, is a key point in our story around the fire. Cifarelli and Bartolo are not just any two guys; they trained in the city’s underground salons, communicated with the underground press, and have well-structured their own anti-fascist and pro-European value system that is also the child of Cifarelli’s experience as a political prisoner. When the fleeing Nazis begin to destroy the public infrastructure, the two will rescue the radio by taking it apart piece by piece. But Greenlees is no ordinary military man either. He had lived for years in Florence, knew the Italian language very well and had been educated on the texts of Dante and other Italian poets. Youth, restless and eager for action, meets the awareness of an educated man capable of seizing an opportunity. The radio will also have a fundamental function: to record the first assembly of the National Liberation Committees held at Piccini on January 28 and 29, 1944. In an Italy still suffocated by the World War and the civil war between the Resistance and the fascist Salò republic, Bari’s free radio became an attractor for intellectuals, artists and musicians from all over the country. In this Nicola Signorile has unleashed on us a very long list of painters, writers and actors who would pass through the City of Bari during that period. Special space deserves Rosa de Napoli, a Neapolitan actress, among the voices of Radio Bari, who with her husband Armando Scaturchio will give life to “Il sottano,” a meeting place for an anti-fascist educated class. Il Sottano will continue its activity until the 1950s, a source of ideas and a prairie of freedom for the many artists who will pass through Bari.
The reader will forgive me for summarizing Nicola Signorile’s story so briefly. The point of these lines is to make you curious and run your fingers over the surface of your smartphone in search of the first episode of our podcast where you might satiate your curiosity.
