Soldiers joking with a young woman

The availability of light and easily portable cameras such as the Leica meant that there were many amateur photographers during the Spanish Civil War. Maurizio Lorandi, an officer from the Trentino region who took this picture, was one of them.

Life at the front was profoundly sexualized. It was a space reserved for men where women were entirely subordinate. Existing gender roles were preserved, but the borders between them were challenged by the exceptionality and uncertainty of war. For many Italian volunteers, Spain began as a happy adventure where the most primal feelings flourished in the absence of the brakes of bourgeois society and values like the fear of conquest and the intoxication of battle were expressed in a vitalist and proudly machista discourse. Sexual conquest was simply a natural prerogative of military conquest and the impunity of victory. As one of them wrote: “We requisitioned all the women, being in mourning counted for nothing. The officers of the garrison wanted to entertain themselves and they had the right”.

Relations with Spanish women were a favourite topic of Italian soldiers and in their letters they described the different models of femininity: single women or widows, Young women from the bourgeois families who took officers into their hoes or who they met in cafes, wartime pen pals, peasant women, teachers and nurses. There were also the wives of prisoners dressed in mourning or the daughters of prisoners lining up outside the gates of the jails. Captain Bassi wrote that “it is even said that some of them die of hunger and exhaustion.” Prostitutes also appear in their letters, letters written to other women: their girlfriends, sisters, and mothers.

Italian soldiers in Spain had a reputation for being womanizers (donjuanismo). “Beautiful Spaniard. Don’t fall in love. Wait for, wait for the valiant Spaniards. The Italians will leave and leave you a baby as a souvenir” went the lyrics of Guadalajara isn’t Abyssinia, a Republican take on the Fascist Facceta nera, that glorified the brutal conquest Ethiopia in which many of the Italians in Spain had fought the year before. In the Francoist zone there were other lyrics making fun of their allies by questioning their virility: “In the trenches, Italian soldiers don’t take off their silk shirts, they wear patent leather insoles, and go down the Street like queers”.

Italian military authorities tolerated, and even encouraged, prostitution. Cities like Zaragoza, where most of the Italian soldiers went during their leaves, were filled with prostitutes. (One of the characters in Leonardo Sciascia’s story “Antimony” said that he “had never seen a city with so many prostitutes”.) The only thing Italian military authorities worried about was venereal diseases. At the same time, anonymous letters warning the soldiers about the immorality of their wives back in Italy began to circulate. These rumours only added to the worries of women who had to take care of the needs of their families while they anxiously awaited their husbands.

FJMS