Soldier in Greece

• … and they used to rinse clothes in the Ombrone
• After September 8th 1943
• Between the twenties and thirties
• Corrado Capecchi, military internee
  • A medal (at last) for Corrado
  • The joke of the military internees
• Five places of Romanesque Carmignano
• Friar Bocci, at the beginning of the twentieth century
• From archaeologists to farmers
• Gino Balena
• Gino di Fico
• Historical shops in Carmignano
• In the name of Jesus and Saint Peter, may the sty go away
• Liberation day
• Matteucci, the ‘forgotten’ bishop
• Soldier in Greece
• Stories from a school notebook
• Stories of donkeys and jockeys
• Stories of mayors and town councils in Carmignano
• Stories of our home
• Stories of war and displaced persons
• The Battistina and other scary stories
• The colours of the rioni
• The Golden Roster
• The last sharecropper in Carmignano
• The siege in memory of the Princess
• The tree of liberty in Carmignano
• Ugo Contini Bonacossi
• Vittorio’s bicycles
• When the river Arno was fordable ..
• When they were digging pietra serena between Arno and Ombrone
• The colours of Carmignano, a small guide for tourists
  • Ancient churches and abbeys. Montalbano, a crossroads for pilgrims.
    • San Giusto al Pinone
    • San Jacopo in Capezzana
    • San Leonardo in Artimino
    • San Lorenzo in Montalbiolo
    • San Martino in Campo
    • San Michele amarcord
      • San Michele, the theater takes to the streets
• Itineraries for just a few days or more
  • Walking through history and nature
  • A Sunday devoted to the discovery of Artimino
  • A few words about the hamlets of Carmignano
  • The Fontina and Castagnati Lake
• Guides to download

War memories out of a drawer, unearthed, wondering between archives and flea markets stalls, and a story, with all his photos, which inevitably creates in the minds of those younger ones, who didn’t live those years, scenes, scents and locations of a film like “Mediterraneo”. It is Filiberto Palloni’s war, born in 1911, a farmer from Campiglioli in Seano.
“Images of Africa, Greece, England and Normandy paraded on television. “I have been there, my father sketched every now and then” his son Valerio tells. And then down a string of Greek words. But we never gave it much weight. “Then Filiberto died in 1992, Valerio a few years later retired. And partly to kill time, partly not to think about anything else, he turned into an archive rat and bookworm. Not without surprises. “My father always recounted to have been in the military for hundred months. And indeed, the reality is very close to that goal, he says. But who would have imagined that he had also been awarded a gold medal and a cross of merit, as well as escaping the German revenge, after September 8, in the Aegean Islands and to have later escaped from a Nazi prison camp in France and then subsequently brought to England? “. His eyes sparkle when Valerio remembers all these events: perhaps he would have wanted to pay more attention to his father’s whispers . Behind the dining room table, four crammed shelves welcome an avalanche of books about the Second World War.

But Filiberto, like many other young men, had also participated in the African campaign: left from Naples on October 3, 1935 and returned home on July 13, 1936.And that’s where he was decorated with the gold medal, that Valerio has never seen. In December 1940 he was recalled to service as a sergeant of artillery and on January 1, 1941, with Alpine hats, flannel shorts, and wearing sandals he departed from Bari to the island of Samos, on the Greek front. He would return home only on January 27, 1946. In the middle there was a short 36 day leave, the escape to the bush with all the troops there to save themselves from the Germans ( he gave a Greek shepherd his nice watch, Valerio remembers, in exchange for food and hospitality for everyone.

And those weeks spared perhaps my father and his friends to die like the soldiers of Kefalonia), then the capture by the Germans on November 22 and the transfer to France in April 1944, to work along the railways. In August Filiberto escaped, on 4 September the Allies arrived and he surrendered to them. He was taken to work in England, where due to a mining accident he was injured and needed surgery. He requested a pension, but when he came back to Italy, his request was rejected. Then in 1967 came the Cross of Merit. But the greatest desire of Valerio would be to go to Greece, to Samos where his father was. A friend of his son brought him a photo: he holds it together with another one, much more yellowed, taken during the forties and the island does not seem to have changed much. (Wf)