The Balilla monument in Genoa
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1941: o Balilla o torna, stavòtta contra o regimme

1941: Balilla comes back, this time against the regime

An anonymous sign on the monument, a poem by Firpo: the myth reclaimed from Fascism.

Fascism had made Balilla its own symbol, going as far as naming the regime’s youth organisation after him. But the boy of Portoria belonged to everyone. In a poem of October 1941, "A-o Balilla", Edoardo Firpo relates – through the words of a friend – a scene in Genoa’s piazza Pammatone: a small crowd laughing under its breath in front of the monument, from which an anonymous sign has just been removed. It said, in Genoese, that the real Balilla was back – and that the statue could step down from its pedestal.

In wartime Genoa, two lines of Genoese were enough to turn the regime’s rhetoric upside down.

Bibliography

  1. Edoardo Firpo, «A-o Balilla» (ottobre 1941), in Tutte le poesie, a cura di Bruno Cicchetti ed Eligio Imarisio, San Marco dei Giustiniani, Genova 2004, p. 373.
  2. Fiorenzo Toso, La letteratura ligure in genovese e nei dialetti locali. Profilo storico e antologia, vol. VII, Il Novecento, Le Mani, Recco 2009, pp. 23–30.
  3. Alessandro Guasoni, Poesia in ligure tra Novecento e Duemila, Cofine, Roma 2019, pp. 42–50.
  4. Alessandro Guasoni, “Edoardo Firpo (1889–1957)”, in Antologia da lettiatua ligure, Conseggio pe-o patrimònio linguistico ligure, 2024–.

Image: Incisore sconosciuto, Wikimedia Commons · Public domain