We are a country without memory. In some cases he doesn’t want it, but generally he doesn’t have the pleasure and duty of remembering his story. And to celebrate the memory, deeds and spirit of those who contributed.
I think so when I read “Comandante”, the novel by Edoardo De Angelis and Sandro Veronesi for Bompiani, dedicated to Salvatore Todaro, the commander of the submarine Cappellini, who, after the sinking of a Belgian cargo ship – for a while a neutral one On October 16, 1940, Nation – a ship that was already carrying war supplies – rescued shipwrecked people off the Azores, who were seen as such and no longer as enemies. An action that went against the orders of the then allied Germans and reinforced the response Todaro himself gave to Admiral Karl Dönitz when he scolded him for not being able to afford to be Don Quixote of the seas. “The others don’t have two thousand years of civilization behind them like I do.” We are Italian.
Nevertheless, the authors would do well to remember this man who did not live long, for war does not forgive. And they do so with an atypical book that balances between the screenplay (a movie is coming) and the narrative, showing the reader the faces of the voices – the commander, his wife, the crew members and others – following one another side to side . A gallery of men and women who enliven Cappellini’s journey, from the moment he set sail from La Spezia on September 28, 1940 to October 19, 1940, when the survivors of the Belgian cargo ship Kabalo landed in the Azores .
“Rina, love, today is an auspicious day. Today we and our enemies saved each other together,” Todaro wrote to his wife. I hear her voice. “We are at war, yes, and I know it very well: but we are not only at war. We are at sea. And we are men. And the sea also has its laws, as does being human, war or not…”. No one is left at sea, and then the land takes its course.
A book to be read, an episode to be rediscovered, a man to be rediscovered.
– Commander, Edoardo De Angelis – Sandro Veronesi, Bompiani, 160 pages, 16 euros
