Gianni Oliva thinks Italy should come to grips with its past

Writer Gianni Oliva reflects on the role of Americans in Italian history. Does the landing in Sicily toward the end of the Second World War make them "invaders or liberators? Allies or enemies? After the war, our national memory celebrated the anti-fascist Italy, the resistance, the country that won alongside the Americans. We are stuck in this interpretation, in which the Americans are the allies of the antifascists and the resistance, who were, in reality, only a minority. Our country thus felt exempt from a real reflection on its past. ... There are very few studies of this period of our history and on the landings. The period that runs from the first American landing in 1943 up to the end of the war in 1945 is still the subject of national debate today. ... Maybe we still haven't confronted it correctly, not from the perspective of a victorious country, but as a defeated one."

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