On the morning of July 27, 1943, a mother in a village in Piedmont, Italy sent her young son out on an errand. The family had just learned from a cryptic radio news broadcast that Benito Mussolini had been deposed and arrested, and she wanted to know more. So the son, a gangly 11-year-old, went to a nearby newsstand to pick up a newspaper.
Writing about that episode many years later, the boy recounted the multiple shocks he experienced that fateful morning. One, he found newspapers, but their names were all different now to the ones he was familiar with. Two, a quick glance at the headlines told him the newspapers were reporting on the same event, but differently from one another, something he had scarcely seen before that day.
Again, each paper carried on its front page a statement signed by six political parties: Democrazia Cristiana, Partito Communista, Partito Socialista, Partito d’Azione and Partito Liberale. Where had all these different parties sprung from, he wondered. Born and raised in Fascist Italy, the boy had up until then known that each country had only one
— source thewire.in | Anjan Basu | 31/Jul/2021