It is Liberation Day in Italy, one time the most important date in the calendar of the Republic since it celebrates the fall of Fascism from which it was born. It's the day partisan brigades march - or did. Not a whole lot of them around any longer, and the current Prime Minister has always made a point of being otherwise engaged on this day.

A few years ago the right started suggesting that it was a day for celebrating all fallen in the WWII, including those who fought for Mussolini's short lived but intensely murderous Social Republic of Salò.

One of them was my late uncle. Most of the people that were recruited for Salò were young and impressionable and easily manipulated, and their deaths are as tragic as any young people's death. They often didn't have easy choices. They did, however, as a body, gladly help the Nazis round up Jews and track Allies and they did torture and kill whoever tried to stop them, mostly the above-mentioned partisans.

The above-mentioned partisans, btw, were often just as young, and just as short of choices. Some of them where soldiers who had to hide in a hurry when our then King (last in a line of really piss-poor monarchs and human beings) betrayed them. Some of them didn't wait for Salò or the Nazis to come find them and press-gang them into service.

It's a day for missing Italy, for me.