Piero Tarticchio today fully recounts in a book coming out for «Mursia», Sono scesi i lupi dai monti, his life as a witness to the horrors of Tito. A symbolic story, in the tragedy of those Italians: Julians, Istrians and Dalmatians. «A page torn for too long in the book of our history» said President Sergio Mattarella on the eve of the Day of Remembrance 2019.

Piero remembers the funeral, a large black catafalque and Don Angelo's coffin on top. He held his father's hand, without knowing that less than two years later it would be his turn. On May 1945, 8, Tito's troops had also occupied Gallesano, a handful of kilometers from Pola, in lower Istria, then Italy. Two days later, an official from the popular committee had shown up at the shop seizing everything, even the license. Lodovico Tarticchio was just a merchant, he had never worn the black shirt. He had only one crime: being Italian. Piero, 2 years old, was woken up at XNUMX in the morning, terrified by the banging on the door. The henchmen went straight up to the room and ordered him to get dressed and prepare to follow them for an "interrogation." They took him away, first to the prisons of Dignano, then to who knows where.

Many years later, no one knows what abyss swallowed him. One day his mother set out to look for him. But that search put her in danger too. So she ran away, empty-handed, with the child. Piero had a backpack with a tin tank and the Jungle Book, Lucia put in it the prayers of her husband, of whom there was no longer any news.

Can a man, "a good man", disappear into thin air, without leaving a trace? This question has accompanied Piero throughout his life. The answer is "yes", it was possible, in Istria in 1945. And before that it had happened to others. Piero tells of having overheard from conversations in the kitchen, of the tragic end of a 23-year-old student, daughter of the local mayor, kidnapped, raped and thrown into a sinkhole while still alive: Norma Cossetto. And he tells of his grandfather, who had read about the torture inflicted on Giuseppe Cernecca. "The wolves have come down from the mountains" his grandfather had commented bitterly.

Piero Tarticchio is now an 85-year-old man, yet in him there is still that child who, lost, looks into the eyes of his father taken away with wire around his wrists: "It was as if he was saying to me: I will always be with you". Every year, on All Souls' Day, Piero returns to Istria: "I never knew in which foiba his poor remains are, I bring a flower and say a prayer in the most unadorned tomb of a randomly chosen cemetery". A whole life has passed, a life of testimony without bias, years of commitment to keep the memory alive. A stubborn battle against oblivion and denialism. Memory is Piero's homeland. His father rests there.

Alberto Giannoni
Source: The newspaper – 07/02/2022