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25 July1943
The Fall of Fascism
Author
Famiglia Bacigalupo
Format
9,5mm
Credits
Music by Lorenzo Valdesalici

"Vento, vento portami via con te" (Wind, wind take me away with you), these are the verses of the famous song, verses that many have long addressed to the Duce with the variant "wind, take him away with you", And on 25 July 1943, three years after the entry into the war that brought disasters and disillusionment, Benito Mussolini is pilloried by the Grand Council of Fascism that he himself created - and by the King - The Regime falls and the crowds take to the streets. Even at the Military Hospital in Loano, a locality on the Ligurian coast near Savona, the news is taken well. The new directives are immediately implemented and someone gets the idea of filming those first moments, with a sarcastic mockery of the old rules. Hence the abolition of the Roman salute. Those who still do it out of habit are reprimanded as if it were a matter of politeness. And then there is the erasure of signs of the regime. A man removes the image of the Duce from the wall. This sequence, shot in military settings, is the work of military doctor Giuseppe Bacigalupo and is taken from a valuable documentary on hospital life during the war. It must not be easy and is meant to be downplayed. Moreover, the war is unfortunately not over. The Military Hospital rests on the structure of the Colonia Marina Vittorio Emanuele III and Elena di Savoia. In the future, the building will change its use to become a high school, on the walls of which portraits of dukes and marshals, but not photographs of the Presidents of the Italian Republic will no longer be affixed. A question of civil and democratic education.

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