Torturing Mario: A Selection from Taras Grescoe’s Possess the Air (2020)

“For Mario Vinciguerra, mailing a letter had become an act fraught with peril. The dozen stamped envelopes he was carrying in an inside pocket contained mimeographed copies of the eleventh Alliance National newsletter, with another of Lauro’s impassioned appeals for the rejection of Mussolini and Fascism. . . .

Bocchini’s secret police had tracked the postmarks of previous National Alliance newsletters to an approximately two-square kilometre zone of the old city. Within this perimeter, plainclothes agents were lurking near every mailbox. The Piazza del Fico happened to fall just within the western edge of that zone. As he walked away from the mailbox, Vinciguerra was approached by two men, who flashed badges and demanded his identity papers.

What happened next is recorded in a report in the Central State Archives. ‘Stopped and searched, he was found in possession of a small pack of envelopes containing the aforementioned circulars, already stamped and ready to be mailed. Subjected to the most stringent interrogations, Vinciguerra retreated into the most obstinate silence.’

The interrogations were beyond stringent; they were brutal. Vinciguerra was taken to a nearby police station, where he was beaten, stripped naked, and left on the roof on a night when temperatures dropped to within a few degrees of freezing. The following morning, he was transferred to Regina Coeli, which happened to be located just a few hundred yards from where he’d left his daughter waiting for him. An OVRA torturer drove tiny spikes under his fingernails and into his legs. When he refused to talk, he was boxed so hard on the side of his head that his eardrum ruptured, leaving him permanently deaf in the right ear.

The Fascist tortures, which would continue with repeated lashings with a cat-o’-nine-tails, failed to break Vinciguerra. He refused to implicate Lauro or any other collaborators, and insisted he bore sole responsibility for the National Alliance.”—Taras Grescoe, Possess the Air: Love, Heroism, and the Battle for the Soul of Mussolini’s Rome (2020)