Memorial Day of Neapolitan Pride

On 30 September 2020, a special plaque was unveiled. The date was not chosen at random: it marks the last day of the Four Days of Naples (27-30 September 1943), during which the population drove Nazi German troops out of the Neapolitan capital.

A highly symbolic day: in 1943, Italy was split in two after the Allied landings in Sicily and the south, with Nazi troops joining the fascist forces after 8 September to “resist” the Anglo-American advance. Naples immediately saw the first small ‘skirmishes’ between Italians and Germans in the days immediately following the armistice, but on 12 September, with the decision to deport thousands of people, the imposition of a curfew and the surrender of weapons, a strong anti-Nazi-fascist sentiment began to spread among the population. With the public execution of several soldiers and carabinieri, the population increasingly sided with the uprising.

On 27 September, the city rose up in revolt: the actual fighting lasted four days and, for the first time, the Germans were forced to negotiate surrender not with an army but with insurgents. On 30 September, the Nazis left the city, but not without revenge. Hitler's order to reduce Naples ‘to ashes and mud’ before the retreat was not carried out, but the troops tried: the cannons from the hills of Capodimonte bombarded the entire area between Port'Alba and Materdei before the retreat. The precious resources of the State Archives were set on fire in the Montesano villa in San Paolo Belsito where they had been hidden. For the Germans, the retreat was accompanied by a bloodbath. But the Neapolitans have since remembered those four days of fighting, which earned the city the gold medal for military valour.

Text:
‘The city of Naples to its daughters and sons who have always fought – as in the Four Days of 1943 – for the defence and progress of our country’.

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Source

• Text: TracesOfWar
• Photos: Ferdinand Bovenschen