Agaro, a village submerged by an artificial lake in pre-war Fascist Italy

The plan to dam the Agaro river and flood the pastureland of the Agaro valley was announced in 1930. It was part of the Alps electrification process that had started a few decades earlier and had already led to the construction of the Codelago dam creating the Devero lake. The work on the Agaro dam began in June 1936 and was completed in 1937 by the Edison company.Footnote ³ It was to provide 50,000 kWh (kilowatt hours) per year as part of a larger regional project to increase energy production and was hailed as a contribution to ‘the battle for our economic autarchy, desired and directed by the Duce’ (‘battaglia per la nostra autarchia economica voluta e diretta dal Duce’). Footnote ⁴ The dam was also part of the modernist project of the Fascist state and the creation of the ‘New Man’ (Cooke Reference Cooke2005, 120–131), the embodiment of moral and physical strength against nature and backward traditions, re-enacting the greatness of the Roman Empire with the help of modern technology. The Istituto Nazionale Luce made both a cinegiornale and a documentary film about the hydroelectric enterprise (1936–37, film D040402).

The documentary images show the construction site with men working amid an impressive Alpine environment and the commentary provides a wealth of technical detail on such topics as locally quarried stones, sand, transportation systems and the innovative scaffolding used by the Girola enterprise. The language gives the impression of an epic confrontation with nature: the quarry ‘disembowels the mountain and leaves an indelible mark in the landscape’ (‘lasciando un marchio indelebile nella montagna sventrata’). In the background of the images one can see Agaro, a small settlement of transhumant pastoralists of the Walser ethnic group. A silent presence in the images, the village of Agaro is only briefly mentioned as being ‘lapped by the waters’ (‘il borgo di Agaro già lambito dalle acque’), an indication of the success of the operation. Nothing is said about the houses that were to be submerged or the people who inhabited them. Agaro had turned out to be a small but annoying spoke in the wheel of this grand project at a time when many Italians, more or less willingly, still participated in the vision promoted by the Fascist state during what is often called the ‘period of consent’ (‘periodo del consenso’). Except for a minority involved in underground anti-Fascist activities, any unease about what was happening was mainly expressed in the form of isolated civil disobedience. But the Agaro people, marginals among marginals, waged a legal battle and informal resistance against an operation promoted by the Fascist state, delaying the construction of the dam for five years.

The Agaro people were a small splinter group of the Walser communities in the Antigorio Valley (Mortarotti 1979; Zucca 2000, 2003). Originally speakers of a Swiss German dialect called Tisch, they had become partially Italianised in the same way as other linguistic minorities (see Forgacs Reference Forgacs2014, 2). They were marginal both in their distance from the rest of the Walser population and in their relationship to the Italian inhabitants of the Devero Valley, which was strained, despite their closer geographical proximity. More generally, all these mountain people (montanari) were seen as marginal and backward, compared with the people of the plains and the urban centres – a view dating back to their difficult relationship with church authorities in the seventeenth century, including witch trials. Agaro was certainly a remote mountain community, whose people had originally migrated from Wallis in Switzerland. For centuries they had enjoyed a high level of autonomy, secured by local statutes, and they had become the smallest municipality (comune) in the Ossola area. In the 1920s the Fascist state had started to encroach on their way of life – culturally, with the Italianisation of family names, and administratively, with the loss of their municipality status. In 1928 Agaro was merged with Premia, and their mayor no longer officially represented the community. However, Mayor Amedeo Tonzi became even more active than before, resisting in 1930 an administrative rearrangement that would have merged Agaro with Baceno in the Devero Valley and taking on the fight to save his village from being flooded by the planned hydroelectric plant. According to the procedures such a plan had to be submitted to the Italian government and then it had to be publicly posted in the provincial capital, in this case Novara, for two weeks. If no objections were received, the project could go ahead (Brocca Reference Brocca1931, 11). But the Premia municipality had been directly notified only after the time for objections had elapsed (Zucca Reference Zucca2003, 20ff). Ex-Mayor Tonzi responded immediately, but unfortunately too late to comply with the legal terms. However, he was not discouraged: he assembled the community elders and, having hired a lawyer, wrote to the relevant ministry in Rome and to the Genio Civile in Novara, making the case for his community. Both letters are preserved in local archives and argue along similar lines against the project and, failing its abandonment, for a fair negotiated solution:

An appeal was also made by the podestà (local authority) of Premia, worried that the Agaro people, having lost their livelihood and once they had exhausted the moneys of their indemnity, would become a burden on the administration. Remarkably, a case in support of the Agaro people was made in the review of the Italian Alpine Club in 1931 by the engineer Giovanni Brocca (Brocca Reference Brocca1931, 11–14).

The Agaro people resisted for five years but they knew they had lost when they were told on 13 October 1935 that Edison had rented all public pastureland – which it could offer them at a special rate provided they complied with their demands. Work on the dam started in June 1936, but even after this many Agaro people did not really believe that their village would be destroyed. An iconic photograph shows some of the last diehards departing from their flooded house on a boat, leaving everything behind. The families were dispersed in various localities all over the valley. Amadeo Tonzi remained a sort of virtual mayor and his daughter-in-law Velia remembers how he tried to hold the community together, providing assistance in their dealings with the administration.

The floating objects and the remains at the bottom of the lake return in many accounts. Powerful narrative images of those moments travelled through kinship networks and across generations and spilled over into the wider community in the valley. They can be seen most strongly, however, in the accounts of the few who had a direct experience of that dramatic moment and are still alive. Born in Agaro in 1920, Lidia has a vivid memory of the day in which she stood with her family, watching in disbelief as the waters submerged their home: ‘We were standing on the mountain slope, watching the rising water. I was holding onto my mother’s skirt while my little sister, sitting on her arm, was crying that she did not want to go away’ (Interview with Lidia, 15 May 2009). Lidia remembers that the workers on the dam started to harass her: ‘Once, while I was carrying hay, someone started to come after me. At first I did not notice because of the hay on my head but when I realised I ran away … This man later admitted that he had previously killed a twelve-year-old girl.’

The mines used in the dam construction caused fatalities and a lot of anxiety. Lidia remembers:

Lidia remembers the inauguration of the dam, which was not only a public utility but also a monument to the Fascist technological triumph over nature and was therefore celebrated by the presence of the highest authority, the Duce himself:

It was 15 February 1940.

Resistance memoryscape: the massacre of the cableway in Goglio

After the armistice of 8 September 1943, the Ossola area saw a wide range of anti-Fascist activities, both locally organised and instigated by activists from the plains below, who had decided to go ‘into the mountains’ to organise the Resistance. Giorgio Bocca, who wrote a famous account of the Resistance history of this area, observed:

Listing those who made up the passive, automatic resistance, Bocca included the industrial workers at the foot of the valley; locals who had been serving in the army and had returned; people from the plains who had come to this area escaping from the bombing raids; youths from everywhere who were avoiding recruitment into the Nazi and Fascist armies; Jews on the run; and finally the ‘permanent rebels’ (‘ribelli permanenti’), the smugglers (Bocca 1964, 13). Many of the Agaro people fall into this last category, a point to which I shall return below.

The partisans’ battle against the combined Nazi and Fascist forces for the liberation of the area has been widely described in the relevant literature (e.g. Bocca Reference Bocca2005, Reference Bocca2006; Bologna 2006). The Valle Antigorio was the starting point of the partisan group that became known as the Brigata Valdossola, but it was generally considered a backwater in relation to the major confrontations that took place in the lowland areas. Together with Val Formazza, it saw groups of Jews and anti-Fascists passing through its mountain passes to seek refuge in Switzerland (an activity in which smugglers and herders such as the Agaro people played an important part). It experienced the partisans’ liberation that led to the establishment of the Republic of Ossola on 10 September 1944 and became the theatre of a massacre in the last days of the republic. On 17 October 1944, a group of partisans was trying to escape to Switzerland pursued by a group of SS-Polizei. According to the narrative given on the website of the Casa della Resistenza in Fondotoce, which is based on a direct witness account,Footnote ⁶ a number of the group, tired and heavily loaded, decided to take the Goglio cablecar to reach Devero, from where they could continue towards Switzerland via the Arbola Pass. However, the overloaded cabin got stuck. Some of the partisans dared to make the four-metre leap to the ground, but as the Germans realised what was going on, they opened fire with their machineguns, killing four partisans. This was one of the events that came to symbolise the collapse of the Ossola Republic and its reoccupation by Nazi-Fascist forces (completed by 23 October 1944).

In the 1970s, as new emphasis was being given to Resistance memory within a wider political setting, marked among other things by the election of Resistance hero Sandro Pertini as president of the Italian Republic (Cooke Reference Cooke2005, 120), the idea of dedicating a monument to the victims emerged. Augusto Lavazza, a first-hand witness to the killings, who worked in a small bar next to the hydroelectricity plant, joined forces with former Resistance fighters and in particular with Angelo Bersani,Footnote ⁷ an ex-partisan and artist originally from the Varese area who had become famous as Angelo del Devero after he chose to make his home there. In 1974 they proposed the creation of a monument to commemorate the fallen partisans.

In the same year the story was told in a TV mini-series called Quaranta giorni di libertà – Pagine di diario della Repubblica dell’Ossola (Forty Days of Freedom – Diary of the Ossola Republic) produced by Italian state television (RAI). From a tragedy preserved in local narratives, the massacre of the Goglio cableway became a point on the map of the national memoryscape. Since then local narratives have also been reviving this memory by commenting on the discrepancies between ‘what really happened’ and the televised version. A particular point of contention was why the cabin had remained stuck and the role played by the cable operator, represented in the television programme as someone of dubious character. Another controversial detail (omitted in the TV series) was the fact that a partisan commander’s abandoned car had been used by the Germans to reach Goglio. The master narrative of the event had become a canvas for contrasting viewpoints that problematised the divide between Resistance fighters and the local population, with its different positions and recollections.

In 2007 the cableway building was transformed into a Resistance museum, decorated with paintings by Angelo Bersani and inscribed with the following lines:

This is a reminder that the Ossola Republic was often seen as a prototype for the Italian Republic that was founded at the end of the Second World War, and that anti-Fascism is enshrined in the Italian constitution. However, the overall political climate had changed since the 1970s. This was Berlusconi’s Italy and the revisionism concerning Fascist and anti-Fascist history was perceived by many as a real threat (Storchi Reference Storchi2007, 237ff). Maria Grazia Medali, provincial president of ANPI, said at the inaugural ceremony: ‘At this delicate moment for democracy it is necessary to activate democratic vigilance and this has to be done by practising memory. This is now happening in Goglio, where something that will remain has been built’. On the same occasion, Angelo Bersani commented: ‘This is a due act of remembrance, dedicated to the people of Ossola, who fought for freedom – people who have never been thanked enough for what they did’ (both quotes from ‘Museo per ricordare l’eccidio della funivia’ by Renato Balducci, La Stampa 18 October 2007, http://www.isrn.it/).

The same theme is reiterated by the ex-partisan and historian Paolo Bologna. In an article on the Ossola Republic he refers to a statement by the prominent Domodossola intellectual Gianfranco Contini, who played an important part in the 40 days of the Republic:

The theme of popular support of the organised Resistance returns in many narratives concerning this period, sometimes highlighting how this had been crucial, sometimes characterising it as a debt that was never properly recognised, sometimes as a more complex and controversial relationship than that assumed in official narratives. At the same time the publication of accounts concerning other partisan republics such as Montefiorino (Gorrieri Reference Gorrieri1966) elicited a wide range of debates and controversies on the extent and the nature of these ‘free zones’ (zone libere) (Carrattieri Reference Carrattieri2015). This is the background against which disputes around celebrations and memorials are often played out.

The Resistance seen from the margins: Second World War memories in Agaro

When I first became interested in the story of the Agaro lake, listening to narratives that exalted the Agaro people’s fight to defend their land in pre-war Fascist Italy and being aware of the Resistance memoryscape of the Valdossola, I assumed a link between the two. Born and raised in Varese, a neighbouring region of Italy which was the birthplace of many partisans who went to fight in the Ossola area,Footnote ⁸ my own frame of mind was informed by two features of the Resistance master narrative (the Vulgata Resistenziale, see Foot Reference Foot2009, 12): the expectation of a direct link between pre-war forms of opposition to the state and organised resistance during the war; and the understanding that the mountain population played a central part in the anti-Fascist Resistance. I discovered that things had been much more complex and contradictory. According to the view from the plains and the urban centres, the mountains were a privileged site of anti-Fascist Resistance; but seen from the mountains, organised resistance was something that was coming to the mountains from the lowlands. The way the Agaro people remember what happened during the Second World War in the same landscape that had witnessed their lake drama is determined by their position as a marginal mountain community and by the complexity of the relationship between the partisans and the local population.

After moving away from their homes in 1937/8, the Agaro people tried to rebuild an existence in different localities of the valley. Many men of the Agaro community had been recruited by the Italian army and sent to various wars: some escaped to Switzerland. However, some of the remaining men and women supported the Resistance through their skills as smugglers and high-altitude herders, although none seems to have played a leading role as a partisan. The Resistance, with its clashes between partisans and the Nazi and Fascist forces, was essentially seen as something that was reaching them from the lowlands. In the narratives, while some emphasise the indirect support their families gave to the partisans, others say, in relation to the war, that ‘they tried to stay out of it’. Lidia remembers:

The subversive events hinted at in interviews took place after the Repubblica di Salò had declared, in November 1943, that all able men had to serve in the army and those who failed to do so would be declared deserters. This move had the effect of increasing the number of ‘partisans’, to include not only those who were involved in the organised Resistance but also all kinds of people, both locals and from elsewhere, who did not want to join the war and fight on the side of the Fascists. Thus the level of involvement with the ‘partisan’ cause became more complex.

Diovole Proletti was born in 1934 and belongs to the Italian non-Walser population of the Devero Valley. He remembers that the situation around Agaro was particularly ‘hot’ because there were partisans who were coming up from Salecchio. Often, however, these were groups of ‘unfocused youths’ or ‘sbandati’ without weapons,Footnote ⁹ who were trying to find a way of escape through the Arbola Pass. Even at the command in Mozzio there were often no proper partisans, just the usual sbandati in little groups, without weapons or even boots – those who at the end of the war were not even recognised as partisans. Remarkably, weapons and boots, and the lack thereof, seem to have been perceived by Diovole as the features defining the partisans’ authority. The well-attested lack of weapons and equipment apparently contributed to the confusion between spontaneous and organised resistance.Footnote ¹⁰ Diovole’s narrative highlights the fluidity and fuzziness of the category ‘partisan’: this theme returns in his account of the death of Massimin Schmid, one of the most famous and controversial Agaro figures, belonging to a family of renowned smugglers and considered by some to be a ‘bandit’ but also often a guide for partisans on their way to Switzerland. When it was suggested to Erminio, the grandson of an Agaro woman and a friend of Massimin’s nephew, that Massimin was perhaps a sort of bandit, he objected:

Again this indicates the difficulty of defining ‘partisan’ or ‘the Resistance’ in these circumstances. Massimin was seen as a local hero by some, but not as part of a wider Resistance movement. What transpires from many accounts is that the behaviour of some ‘partisans’ was sometimes dubious and often the very definition of who was a partisan and who was not, was a point of contention – the negative view of the Germans being sometimes the only common feature between militant partisans, people who refused to serve in the Fascist army, locals who supported the Resistance in various ways and smugglers.

As well as deciding what level of support to give to the partisans, another source of tension was food. Sometimes people willingly shared what they had, but sometimes they felt that providing for hungry partisans was an imposition. Maria, who was born in Agaro just before the village was flooded, remembers:

Shifting memories and memorials

Tonino Galmarini, who moved to Devero in 1961 from his native Gallarate, remembers how he first heard about the events at the cableway shortly after his arrival, when no monument or museum commemorated them. These came later, instigated by ex-partisans such as Angelo del Devero,Footnote ¹¹ and partially reframed the way in which events were remembered and narrated:

The divide between Resistance fighters and the population, with its different positions and recollections, was often reflected in Tonino’s much later narrative which he derived from the locals’ accounts and often found confusing and contradictory. He was trying to give a faithful rendering of the gossip and anonymous chit-chat – ‘the voices’, as he put it – and commented in more general terms:

The story of Zoppetti’s bull recurs in slightly different versions in various accounts, sometimes suggesting that Zoppetti was reimbursed at the end of the war, more often highlighting the unredeemed debt and the waste. This was not a unique incident, as partisans had to rely on the local population for food – purchased, offered or confiscated (Revelli Reference Revelli2005). However, the case of Zoppetti’s bull seems to have acquired a particular symbolic value.

Why did people choose to remember the story of a bull? Like many other stories, this gave a clear sense of the cultural gap between local people and partisans, with their respective visions and priorities. The emphasis on the extraordinary qualities of Zoppetti’s bull and the meaninglessness and waste of its killing is very much part of this narrative and the way it travelled across the valley (and beyond) up to the present day. Commenting on the narratives that highlighted the divide between the organised Resistance and the population and complicated the interface between them, Tonino observed:

This observation is reminiscent of Giorgio Bocca’s experience:

Most important of all, these young activists turned partisans had to learn the local sense of place, and the same dexterity that made it possible for shepherds and smugglers to read their landscape and its changes. Paolo Bologna, ex-partisan, local mountaineer and Resistance historian remembers:

Tonino noticed some local mistrust of the partisans, who were sometimes seen as incompetent and, because of this, occasionally almost partially responsible for what they and the local population suffered – recalling Portelli’s observations with regard to the Fosse Ardeatine (Portelli Reference Portelli2003). He said:

By reviewing ‘the voices’ and elaborating on them from his viewpoint, Tonino was rooting himself in his adopted homeland and contributing to its sense of history. He then picked up the issues of the memorial to the cableway massacre:

Often referring to the popularity of the book Il sangue dei vinti (Pansa Reference Pansa2003) and the ‘revisionist’ understandings of the Resistance promoted by some of its interpretations, he was deeply aware of how fragile the Resistance legacy had become (Foot Reference Foot2009, 182).

The afterlife of Agaro and the cableway station as arenas for converging and diverging memories

Tonino was the first person from whom I learnt the Agaro lake story. He heard it first while looking at the glittering waters of the lake and people had started to tell him: you know, there is a village at the bottom of this lake. Intrigued, he asked for more information, discovered local accounts and documents and, later, historical research. He came to this conclusion:

The Agaro people seem to stand for something that moves Tonino deeply and resonates with his own life choices. In 1961 Tonino had chosen to come and live at Alpe Devero after a peripatetic life across Europe, leaving behind the industrialised Lombardy suburbia where he was born. In order to get an education his children had to walk and take the Goglio cableway to reach Croveo, the next village with a school. On a regular basis they all would be exposed to the voices of the Goglio massacre while waiting for the cabin: first the simple ‘voices’, then the memorialisation through the monument, and finally – after the cableway was taken out of service – the museum. Even though for the locals Tonino remains a patachitt, an ‘outsider’, he became deeply rooted in this landscape through the narratives he collected over 40 years. It was a tapestry of memories woven through his own views and aspirations: his love for the mountains, his relative independence from the urbanised and industrialised world and his anti-Fascist political ideals within a ‘history that involved us all’ (Interview with Tonino, 17 July 2011).

Near the cableway station stands the Little Red Church (La Chiesetta Rossa). Like the monument to the victims of the massacre (and later the mural paintings in the museum) this was largely created by Angelo del Devero, the communist partisan and artist, Tonino’s friend. At first sight the church seems an improbable convergence between committed communism and Christian religiosity. After the war Angelo had tried to work in his native area, Varese, but he found it difficult because he was followed by his reputation as a communist partisan and it was the time of the so-called ‘desistenza’ (Cooke Reference Cooke2005, 120–131), a period of disengagement from and even veiled opposition to the Resistance and its values. In the 1960s he settled in Devero, spending almost three decades of his life there and becoming known as ‘Angelo del Devero’.

While in the 1970s the recollection of the Goglio massacre was being memorialised (especially by witnesses and former partisans) in the place where it happened, another form of memory started to be discovered by those people who had left their mountains and, having become relatively affluent, decided to return to them by restoring old huts and ancient places linked to their ancient herding life. In 1975 Giulio Deini, the son of one of the Agaro inhabitants, returned from Limone, Piedmont, where he had made some money in the tourism industry, and started to restore some of his pasture huts on the way to Agaro. Others gradually started to do the same. Ausone, which had been semi-abandoned, was revived and the roof was replaced on its little church. Erminio, the Ausone inhabitant who had previously told us his version of the story of Massimin Schmid, recalls:

In 1995, when the Agaro lake was drained, Andrea della Balma (Dino), Dante Schmid and Erminio Anderlini organised a helicopter to recover the columns of the Agaro shrine and deposited them in Ausone, where they eventually became part of the altar of the local church. The festival of the patron saint in July has thus also become a commemoration of the Agaro village and of the epic of its inhabitants.

In 2010 a local MP was invited to attend, which he happily did. He belonged to Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party and was glad to be able to relate to this emerging localism. The death of the Agaro village was here seen as an unavoidable casualty of the modernisation process, largely sanitised of any reminder of the Fascist state against which its people once waged battle before anyone else dared to do so. Since 2008, another festival has celebrated the Walser community and the Agaro legacy, at Costa, one of the ancient pastoral settlements of the Agaro people: this event is gaining popularity rapidly, with its feast of polenta and sausages, the mass in the restored chapel and a race run along the ancient pastoral route. Near the chapel a Walser flag offered to Costa by the mayor of Premia flies proudly, and next to it a Lega flag. The memory of Agaro currently seems to be largely the domain of the ethnic revival promoted by a network of Walser communities across the Italian/Swiss national boundary as well as the localism promoted by the Lega Nord and Forza Italia, the centre-right political forces: a world incommensurably distant and diverging from the memory practices that recall the anti-Fascist resistance, largely the domain of the institutions, the ANPI and left-wing adherents.

On 17 October 2014, a public celebration at the Goglio Cable Car station concluded a month of commemorations dedicated to the seventieth anniversary of the Ossola Republic and the Resistance (http://www.repubblicadellossola.it/repubblica_ossola/). A crowd had streamed out of buses coming from the entire region. Some old partisans remembered events, controversies and triumphs of 70 years earlier. Sharing an exclusive sense of belonging as real ‘partisans’ and yet divided by ancient disputes, they seemed to belong to a world apart. A historian read the moving account published shortly after the end of the war about the short life of the youngest of the victims, from his school desk in Turin to the Ossola mountains. However, one of the onlookers, a descendant of the Agaro people, commented:

Tonino was in a corner brewing coffee for all these temporary guests …