Cristini, Luca S. Pax Ducis

How Italy managed to avoid the terrible World War by remaining neutral in 1940

Rome, December 9, 1939. Ottavio Mafaia Foreign Ministry secretary, a member of the National Fascist Party out of necessity, and the husband of a Jewish woman out of loveholds an envelope marked with three red stripes that he is supposed to hand to Minister Ciano. He opens and reads it. He sits in the dark for eleven minutes. Then, he makes a decision. Not out of heroism. Not out of fear. For his wife, Elena. For his son, Giacomo, who might one day receive a draft notice. "Mafai didn't do it for Italy. He did it for his wife and son. And history unfolded accordingly." What he does that nightwithholding a telegram, a minor and technically illegal acttriggers a chain of tacit silence and secret diplomatic maneuvers that, in the months to follow, effectively help keep Italy out of the war. The diaries of Ciano and Bottai, Badoglios reports, and OVRA records confirm it: in 1940, hardly anyone wanted to fight. It took so little to stop it all. Perhaps just a telegram that never reached the right desk. Ottavio Mafai recounts all this from his studio on Via della Lungara in 1958, while trying to determine whether he did the right thing that evening. The answer he finds after twenty years of history, peace, love, and unresolved moral debts is the only honest answer there is: he does not know. He will never know. And perhaps this state of not knowing is the lot of anyone who has kept something important in the darksomething that could have changed everythingand yet went ahead and did it anyway.