I was in the army and based in Pisa where our battalion of officer cadets was guarding the military airfield.

After September 8 1943 and the declaration of war against Germany, my battalion was dispersed, along with all the other military units especially in north-central Italy. In the general confusion that followed, I and a group of army friends all from Abruzzo decided to go home, travelling either on foot or using whatever transport we could find. We made the last part of the journey as far as San Vito hidden in a goods train of the state railway. We arrived in Lanciano towards the middle of September. On the town walls we saw posters put up by the Germans instructing all Italian soldiers to present themselves at the Chieti District command. Those who refused to do so would be shot on sight. Terrible days. I remember, it was September 15, the feast day of Our Lady of the Bridge, patron saint of Lanciano. We went to the cathedral to ask Archbishop Tesauri for advice (later he was to be awarded the Silver Medal for gallantry). He was wearing all his vestments ready to celebrate the religious festivity. He asked us what we were going to do and seeing that we were ready to escape, he encouraged us, and strongly advised us not to give ourselves up but to take to the hills. We knelt down and he gave us his blessing.

Over the following days we decided what we had to do. One of our number, Antonio Cibotti was from Gessopalena, his mother used to be the primary school teacher in the nearby hamlet of Pastini. So on October 5 we took the train called the Sangritana up to Casoli, and from there we walked on to Gessopalena. That very evening the demonstrations against the Germans started in Lanciano but we were not aware of them at the time. It was late the following day before we got the first, confused, reports of demonstrations in Lanciano and the Germans’ repression. In fact, to begin with, the people we met didn’t know where we stood, partly because they were confused by the contradictory information being broadcast by the official radio stations and the clandestine broadcasters. Many couldn’t understand why we had deserted because they couldn’t believe that the army was falling apart.

So people weren’t well disposed to us when we arrived. At that time there were no organised partisans and no idealistic patriots, so we felt that we were being cold-shouldered, as if people were saying: ‘why have you come here to hide when our boys in the army haven’t come home?’. The fact that there were no young men around had struck us too. That first night we were taken in by a friend of the Cibottis. Even he was surprised by our presence because he couldn’t understand how we could have betrayed our army oath. What he said worried us because it confirmed a general misunderstanding of our position: we had sworn allegiance to the King and not to the regime and the King had now declared himself against the Germans. But many people found this explanation too difficult to understand because the situation had become so complicated.

Fortunately for us, all this changed when the posters demanding the obligatory call-up of all able-bodied males were displayed in Gessopalena. There was a lot of confusion and lots more people came to join us in the woods near Pastini. We got the important pieces of news via a clandestine radio which received Radio London (I can’t remember whose it was). From then on, hiding out became easy and we all became friends. We hid in the valley below, Rio Secco, and at night slept in the little school house at Pastini.

That’s how our life as fugitives began. It was to last for a couple of months, during which time we were fed by the local farmers who did everything they could to help us. And by now we weren’t the only ones in hiding. In the middle of October, the Germans carried out rounding up operations in Casoli and all the surrounding area. Lots of middle-aged men escaped to Pastini and Rio Secco. By this time, we had become a fairly numerous bunch and this gave us some comfort. I remember the incredible help we got from the women of Pastini - they were just marvellous. The women in all the farms around (Mattoscio, Turchi, Stella ...) got together to organise lunch for us with all sorts of homemade pasta or dumplings with simple sauces. They put it all into baskets and brought it to us wherever we were hiding during the day: caves, woods, barns. Where I was, there were at least twenty other fugitives that I knew of, but there must have been many more besides. Somebody had some binoculars and with these you could see the village in the distance and the mule track that led to Pastini. Scipio Casari, a lawyer and rather older than the rest of us, was the man we turned to for advice. What he said was always based on good sense. The women had invented an ingenious method for communicating with us during the day: if the Germans were around they hung sheets in the windows, when the coast was clear they took them down. At night we went back to the farms to sleep, but if we heard somebody shouting "Cluck! Cluck! Chickens!" we knew the Germans were there and we had to make ourselves scarce.

Throughout all of this we managed to get news of our families in Lanciano through Cibotti’s father, an old man but a great walker. He came to see us almost every morning. One evening we learned that the allies had arrived in Termoli. We also heard that Germans had raided houses in Gessopalena and the surrounding farms. They were being guided by a young fascist from Paglieta. At the bottom of the Rio Secco we found some German telegraph wires. One of us cut them. Soon after the bodies of two farmers were found. They had been shot. The bodies were laid out in the Church of St Mary Magdalen.