ABSTRACT
The title of this chapter takes its cue from Merleau-Ponty’s (1996) description of the uncanny feeling of a phantom limb – the longing for something that is no longer there, even though we feel it still ought to be there. Here I use the term ‘region of silence’ to denote the underlying sense of loss experienced during the war, but also the lack of something, the absences felt in the course of the conflict. Echoing de Certeau, we might say that the writing of this book has been an attempt, on my part, to appease ‘the dead who still haunt the present’ (de Certeau 1988: 2); it does not, however, seek to offer them ‘scriptural tombs’ (de Certeau 1988); rather, it seeks to connect their past lives with our own. Without losing sight of the historical specificity of the Italian story within these pages, I have also sought to contextualise it (and myself, and my familial materiality) in a much wider-ranging web of resonance beyond the years of the civil war. I, too, have a place to tell some of this story, but the difficulty was knowing where to begin. The ‘story’ is bigger than I am, after all. So in the end, I focused my storytelling ‘gaze’ on a game-changing event: the Armistice of 8 September 1943, the date in which Italy switched sides. Using this event as a pivotal point to understand wartime experience, I set out to investigate the materiality of practices and processes that had previously been analysed as a political-military phenomenon. The precipitates of that momentous day reach into the present and future in a myriad of complex ways that there was no room to adequately unpick in this book.
