Today is a national holiday in Italy, though not one that everybody celebrates. The 25th of April comemorates the liberation of the country from the Nazi occupying forces, and from the Fascist rump government of Mussolini’s Repubblica Sociale Italiana.

Luckily for Berlusconi his new government won’t take office officially until the end of the month, meaning Berluska will be free of official engagements celebrating liberation day. Actually, it makes not a blind bit of difference, given that during his various terms of office over the last fifteen years he has steadfastly ignored what is, arguably, the most important national festival.

But it’s not just neo-fascists like Berluska that steer clear of the ‘resistance’. After decades of cold-war politics, where apologists explained the complex and respectable nature of fascism – allowing former ministers and dedicated followers of fascim like Giorgio Almirante to participate actively in political life (to be fair to Almirante, he did accept Italian democracy – in the 1970s!!) – the ‘resistance’ suffered the direct opposite. A highly-complex movement, made up of comunists, anarchists, nationalists, monarchists, catholics, feminists, farmhands, and factory workers – to list just a few of the different categories – had its complexity glossed over, as it became effectively colonised by a strident left-wing which had effectively been shunted out of power in post-war Italy.

Thankfully there are some serious historians out there researching and publishing work that reflects the complexities of the period – a period in which over 40,000 Italian partisans were killed, and in which over 15,000 civilians were killed by Nazi and Italian fascist reprisals.

If you want to learn more about the Italian resistance, and the complex battle over official memory in post-war Italy, then treat yourself to Alessandro Portelli’s brilliant book The order has been carried out: History, Memory and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome. Ostensibly about the infamous ‘fosse ardeatine’ massacre carried out by the Nazis in reprisal for a partisan attack, the book has a much larger scope examining the origins of the resistance in Rome, post-war attitudes to it, and the strange process that has culminated in the rehabilitation of fascism at the expense of the resistance freedom fighters.