Un amore patrigiano

“A reservoir of powerful loves and excruciating pains within the temper of the twentieth century.”

Iole Mancini and Ernesto Borghesi met at the seaside in August 1937. But theirs was not just a summer love: in Italy on the brink of precipice they marry, become partisans in the Gap, and fight the Nazifascists in occupied Rome. Ernesto is involved in the failed assassination attempt on Vittorio Mussolini, the Duce's second son, on April 7, 1944; Iole is imprisoned in the Via Tasso prison, one of the fiercest symbols of the Nazi occupation in the capital where, in an attempt to weaken the Resistance, more than two thousand political opponents, partisans, military personnel were locked up and tortured. Questioned repeatedly by Erich Priebke, the executioner of the Fosse Ardeatine, Iole did not betray Ernesto or his comrades. Divided from each other, they both manage to romantically escape death. Then the war ends, but things do not turn out as Iole had imagined them.

How to come to terms with a hostile fate? At one hundred and two years old, Iole tells with words full of emotion a story of love and resistance to the adversities of life. A story of love and freedom in occupied Italy. Our darkest years told by the last survivor of Via Tasso.