From “Red Spain” to Fascist Prison: Italo Orciani’s Spanish Civil War Memoir

In September 1937, Italo Orciani entered the Italian Embassy in Innsbruck, Austria in order to confess to his political “crimes” against Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship. Having just returned from the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, Orciani intended to offer any valuable intelligence he might have had to Fascist Italy’s Interior Ministry. Orciani’s struggles in what he frequently referred to as “Red Spain,” he intended to explain to Italy’s Blackshirted authorities, had sparked a transformation in his ideological worldview. Indeed, after escaping from what he described as the “Bolshevik hell,” Orciani had come to realize that Fascism, and not Communism, offered the workers and peasants of Italy the “justice and authority” required for maintaining a dignified, orderly civilization. After waiting for several days without receiving any reply from regime officials, Orciani resolved to return to Italy on his own and was immediately arrested by a group of Italian militiamen upon reentry. Following a brief stay in a Roman prison, Orciani was sentenced to five years in confino politico (political confinement) on the regime’s Tremiti Islands penal colony in the Adriatic Sea, which is where he wrote his still-unpublished account of his time in Republican Spain: Red Spain! Memoirs of an Ex-Officer of the International Brigades. This paper, therefore, will address Orciani’s experiences in civil war-era Spain as told through the idiosyncratic prism of his campaign to liberate himself from political confinement in Southern Italy. In doing so, we intend to explore the various ways in which some political prisoners in Fascist Italy attempted to navigate and come to terms with the quotidian challenges of their confino sentences by adopting and deploying the regime’s own sociopolitical values and language in their attempts to ingratiate themselves to their Blackshirted captors in exchange for favorable conditions or clemency.