Italian Ucronia
By Raffaele Gaggioli.
My country seems to love the historical genre but not the alternate history genre (known in Italy as “ucronia”). While Italian bookstores are full of works that recount past events, with a preference for the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, and World War II, it’s hard to find any Italian alternate history books.
Of course, this isn’t a problem specific to Italy. The alternate history genre is quite niche and isn’t very widespread in other countries either. Although Italy doesn’t have its own Harry Turtledove, this doesn’t mean that various Italian writers—or those who have lived on the Italian peninsula—haven’t, for one reason or another, tried their hand at writing works of alternate history centered on our country.
The first known example of alternate history can be found in a passage from the work Ab Urbe condita (written between 27 B.C. and 14 A.D.), in which Titus Livius contemplates the possibility that Alexander the Great might have expanded the Macedonian kingdom by heading west after conquering the east. Livio, a proud citizen of Rome, assures readers that Rome would obviously have triumphed against the Macedonian invasion thanks to the natural defenses of the Italian peninsula and the superiority of Roman military techniques over those of the Macedonians.
It would be several millennia before another Italian writer turned his hand to alternative history. In 1813, the scholar Lorenzo Pignotti theorized in his book Storia della Toscana sino al principato that if Lorenzo the Magnificent had not died in 1492, the various Italian states would have been able to repel subsequent foreign invasions. Pignotti even wrote that Lorenzo’s survival would have nipped the spread of the Protestant Reformation in the bud.
In both cases, however, these were merely speculations spanning a few pages or lines rather than works of fiction. It was not until the 21st century that Italian writers began to devote themselves to writing alternate-history novels.
Between 2001 and 2006, Mario Farnetti published the Occidente trilogy, an alternate history in which Italy remains neutral during World War II. The conflict ends in 1944 when Hitler is killed by his own generals, while World War III breaks out almost immediately afterward due to Stalin’s paranoia toward the Western Allies. Mussolini decides to join the new conflict against the Soviets, leading Fascist Italy to dominate most of Europe. The trilogy is set in 1972 in this alternative timeline and depicts Fascist Italy steadily increasing its power, to the point where Mussolini is able to abolish the Savoy monarchy in favour of a new Fascist republic and begin colonising space.
Enrico Brizzi’s L’Inattesa Piega degli Eventi (The Unexpected Turn of Events), published in 2008, has a similar premise, but the plot is decidedly more realistic. As in Occidente, the point of divergence is Mussolini’s decision to remain neutral during the Second World War; here, the Nazis mistakenly shot down an Italian air squadron during the Anschluss, leading to increased hostilities between Rome and Berlin. Although the story begins in 1960, we learn further details through public speeches by Fascist leaders, Italian veterans and propaganda texts.
Despite Italy’s neutrality, in 1944 Hitler orders the invasion of Italy and is assisted militarily by Vichy France. Not only is the invasion spectacularly repelled (there are references to battles in Veneto, the Po Valley and Piedmont), but the victory enables Mussolini to annex parts of France and, in 1948, to oust the House of Savoy, accused of collaborating with the German invaders. In place of the Savoy monarchy, Mussolini establishes a fascist republic, and the power of the Church is also significantly curtailed. Libya, the Horn of Africa, and Corsica are elevated to the status of Associated Republics, technically independent but in practice governed by officials sent directly from Rome.
The book provides few other details on the state of the rest of the world, but despite fascist propaganda, it is clear that Rome is not exactly a great power. By 1960, Italy had been forced to relinquish some of the territories it had seized from France, whilst diplomatic pressure continues to mount from both the Soviets and the United States. Meanwhile, Mussolini is dying and his various henchmen are ready to tear each other apart to take his place.
All this, however, remains in the background of the novel. The narrator is, in fact, Lorenzo Pellegrini, a sports journalist who has the ill-advised idea of sleeping with his editor-in-chief’s married daughter. As punishment, he is sent to the Associated Republic of East Africa (comprising Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia) to cover the regional football tournament. The winning team will then be awarded their prize directly in Rome.
Whilst his journey begins as a punishment, Pellegrini soon discovers a whole new world he could never have imagined. East Africa is far from Rome and is not considered particularly strategically important, so life in the region is somewhat less controlled by the Fascist government than in Italy. He finds cultures that continue to survive fascist oppression, all-black or mixed-race teams that openly challenge the all-white teams favoured by the regime, and a host of colourful characters.
Many of these characters are Italian, but not quite. Many are from Trentino, driven out and deported from their homes after the Second World War on charges of having collaborated with the Nazis (one of them suggests that Rome deported hundreds of thousands of them from their homes simply to make way for settlers from the south). Others are communists, with their own football team, who openly mock the fascist regime. Then there are even old fascists and colonialists, whose devotion to racial ideology (which of course doesn’t stop them from having native lovers of both sexes), to the House of Savoy or to the regime in Rome – which has long since forgotten them – makes them almost tragicomic, but no less detestable.
Although it is not openly stated, it is clear that the colonial empire will not survive Mussolini. During his journey, Pellegrini increasingly witnesses scenes of violence or open defiance against the authorities in Rome, both from the local population and from many Italians living in the region. Football matches are often used as an outlet for this anger, whilst football teams linked to the Fascist regime and their supporters appear to be in increasing difficulty.
The only criticism that can be levelled at the book is its portrayal of women. There are no female lead characters, and those who do appear are mostly sexualised to the extreme and/or presented as a tiresome problem for our protagonist. In fact, the only woman in the entire book with more than two lines of dialogue is a high-class prostitute who stars in pornographic films.
Outside of literature, the alternate history genre has also made an appearance in Italian comics. Lilith tells the story of a time-travelling assassin who travels to various historical events to eliminate alien parasites. Naturally, her arrival during these events always brings about significant changes. For example, Achilles does not die in battle but is blinded and becomes a storyteller; Commodus survives the plot that, in real life, led to his death; and the Japanese end up colonising much of North America.
Another comic on this subject is issue 240 of Dylan Dog, aptly titled ‘Ucronia’. In this issue, a discussion of the multiverse theory leads Dylan, and consequently the reader, to witness brief scenes from parallel worlds where history has taken a different course. The reader is shown aliens landing on an Earth where life never began, the twenty-first century dominated by religious inquisitions that burnt Einstein at the stake, and other worlds where the ideology of Nazi-Communism seems to dominate the entire planet. It is a rather psychedelic and complicated story which, as in many other Dylan Dog stories, began because a beautiful woman asked the ‘Nightmare Detective’ for help.
Recently, I came across Il Migliore dei mondi on Amazon Prime, a comedy starring Maccio Capatonda. It isn’t a good film and Capatonda isn’t particularly funny, but I want to mention it anyway as it is technically the only Italian alternate-history film I’m aware of.
The plot is fairly straightforward. A man addicted to social media and other modern technologies ends up in an alternate universe where the 1999 Millennium Bug actually happened and the ensuing chaos led to technology being frozen at 1990s levels. Apart from this detail and the destruction of the Colosseum caused by a missile fired by mistake during the chaos, this alternate world doesn’t seem all that different from our own. 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid pandemic did, in fact, occur in this technologically backward world as well.
At certain points in the film, it is suggested that this technological backwardness is maintained on a global scale through rather authoritarian measures. At one point, the police set out to hunt down Capatonda’s character after he is found in possession of a smartphone from our world. Unfortunately, this plotline and other details are never properly explored. The film prefers to focus on the protagonist’s love story with a beautiful, cheerful woman who has no personality other than being beautiful and cheerful, and on railing against modern technology.
In the end, the protagonist decides to return to his original world with the help of Steve Jobs – who was forced to go into hiding in Italy following the Millennium Bug disaster and had become a farmer. The ultimate fate of this Jobs and all the other characters who helped the protagonist after his return to our world is not revealed in the film. After all, the plot once again chooses to focus on his encounter with the alternate version of the woman he had fallen in love with and on his newfound aversion to modern technology.
These are, for now, all the examples of Italian ucronia that I have managed to find. I hope that one day the list will be expanded.
Raffaele Gaggioli is the author of The Red Boot.
Comments