ABSTRACT
Resistance was the key, as it were, to understanding the opposition and rejection by people across frontiers of the occupation and oppression of a destructive, inhumane and bloodthirsty regime. Above and beyond social-cultural and political interpretations of what the Resistance was, this chapter reasserts the spatial and the sensual in the conflict unravelling in central and northern Italy between September 1943 and May 1945. Placelessness is the closest the English language can get to the sense of being despoiled of one's village. Mountain dwellers and those inhabiting the borderlines between Italy and the Reich-administered buffer zones were the ones most likely to survive. The author suggests that familiar sensoria also changed, and that an added strain on the senses characterized much of the activity of the armed Resistance – whose active members were guerrilla fighters in constant need to fend for themselves. Precariousness and constant danger required armed partisans to be constantly on the move.
