Letter from Lt. Dario Grixoni to his parents

The letters written by Italian soldiers in Spain are an extraordinary source for learning about the experience of war. The hundreds of thousands of letters that were censored, withheld, or sent to military courts because they could cause the loss of morale and defeatism on the home front, present an intensely depersonalized experience, where the individual gave way to the collective, we of comrades and officers. For the combatants, writing was the only direct connection they had to the home front, the final refuge of identities threatened by a precarious and hostile environment, an escape valve for their pain and fear. The act of writing helped repair the continuity of their existence, of feelings and family and community ties at a time they suffered a violent rupture. In this way, writing letters was a form of therapy after traumatic events.

This explains the almost obsessive need to receive letters, and the obstinacy in writing them. The awaited moment of mail call, when soldiers seek to be on their own and in silence so they can read their letters, appears in almost every account of war. Or, on the contrary, the desperation and immense solitude when lattes don’t arrive, a hunger no less painful than physical hunger because it maintained the dramatic tyranny of the present.

The letters of those semi-literate soldiers, full of spelling mistakes, embodied the written version of their dialects. Unless they asked others to write their letters for them. They turned to stereotypical formulations taken from letter-writing handbooks published during the war. They tried to write about things that couldn’t be conveyed: combat, violence, death, or as in the letter shown here, the monotony of the long days of inactivity while they awaited orders, a nerve-wracking, daily routine that often led to physical and psychological decline.

Lt. Dario Grixoni, an only child, wrote 120 letters to his parents between the time he embarked in the port of Gaeta on 31 January 1937 and his death in combat on 22 July 1938 at Benafer (Castellón) during the Battle of the Levante. He was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valour in March 1939. However, his last request, that his remains be returned to Genoa, was not realized because of rules that prohibited the repatriation of the bodies of people killed in wars outside of Italy. He was buried in the cemetery of Castelserás and his remains were later transferred to Italian Military sanctuary in Zaragoza without the permission of his parents.

FJMS