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1931 43) Two Autographs General Volpini And Amedeo By Savoia Hero War IN Africa
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Beautiful original private handwritten letter on headed paper "CASA DI SAR THE DUKE OF AOSTA - THE 1st AID TO THE FIELD", dated MIRAMARE 25 November 1931, cm. 27 x 20.8, on two sides. The text, ALL WRITTEN AND SIGNED BY GENERAL GIOVAN BATTISTA VOLPINI, is interesting and WRITTEN TO A GENERAL FRIEND; IT CONCERNS THE SEARCH FOR DRAWINGS ON AFRICAN THEMES BY THE FAMOUS PAINTER ROMANO DAZZI (Rome 1905 - Florence 1976) WHICH THE PRINCE OF SAVOY WANTED TO BUY, followed by news on the health of their Royal Highnesses and Princess Margherita.IN THE BOTTOM MARGIN A NOTE ALL WRITTEN AND AUTOGRAPH BY AMEDEO DI SAVOIA DUKE D'AOSTA who signs himself amicably 'BOUBY' and in which he speaks of the artist Romano Dazzi himself.
Well preserved.
Important historical relic of these two unfortunate characters, great friends, who both died in Africa in 1941 and 1942.
Giovan Battista Volpini (Verona, 24 August 1883 - Amba Alagi, 16 May 1941) was an Italian general.
He was born in Verona to parents of Piedmontese origin (they were originally from Isola d'Asti) and, following in the footsteps of his father, General Carlo Volpini, he entered the royal army as a cavalry officer. In the war of reconquest of Tripolitania (Libya), with the rank of major, he was entrusted with the command of a Meharist squad (the so-called "Volpini column", initially composed of 500 riflemen and 50 horsemen); he was in charge of it for about 10 years. The Volpini column participated, together with General Rodolfo Graziani, in the reconquest of the Orfella region in 1923. On February 4, 1924, Major Volpini, in command of a thousand fusiliers, 240 Meharists and 70 horsemen, left Nalut on the orders of Governor Giuseppe Volpi to reconquer the Gadàmes region. On the 7th of the same month he entered and reoccupied Sinauen, a place whose importance is given by the fact that it is the only place with water on the route from Nalut to Gadàmes. Following a brief and victorious battle at Bir el Uotia, on February 15 he reconquered Gadàmes. In Tripolitania he met the Duke of Aosta, Amedeo di Savoia, with whom he established a sincere and deep friendship. When the Duke of Aosta was appointed Viceroy of Ethiopia in 1937, the then Brigadier General Volpini followed him to Italian East Africa and became, in the same year, the Duke's first aide-de-camp, Chief of Staff of the Viceregal Government in AOI. and Head of the Viceregal House. He contributed, together with the Duke, to the pacification of the new colonies seeking the collaboration of the subjugated indigenous tribes. After the fall of the capital Addis Ababa by the British army, the Duke and Volpini retreated to the mountain range near the Amba Alagi with 7000 men. Despite their valiant resistance, the Italians, outnumbered in numbers and means, lost positions and the Amba redoubt was encircled by the English forces. On May 16, 1941, General Volpini was sent by the Duke to the British command. During the descent from the mountain, however, he was stopped together with his escort by a group of Abyssinians; after a brief but excited discussion, the Abyssinians allowed the Italian delegation to continue on their way, but struck them from behind immediately afterwards.
The following day the Duke wrote in his diary: Destiny deprived me of the friend, the wise counselor, the companion who for sixteen years had shared his life with me, with his sad and happy days. The tragic fate caused Volpini to fall when the silence of the enemy artillery already marked the end of the war. [...] I have not yet recovered from the blow and I cannot contain my pain. I feel terribly alone and I face these tragic days to the end: sixteen years of life together had created, between him and me, a bond so deep and intimate that nothing could destroy except death. My gratitude to this man, who had dedicated his existence to me, will last as long as I have life. [...] Now for now, he supported me, advised me, helped me. How much nonsense he prevented me: how many good things he showed me: what constant example he gave me every day with his rigid, passionate conduct, dedicated to duty. Calm, cool in form, with a tender and understanding heart. His body was recovered by Major Graham. He was buried on May 19th near Forte Toselli. The main street of Isola d'Asti was named after General Volpini in honor of its origins.
SAVOY AOSTA
,
Amedeo
of, duke of Aosta
.
– Amedeo Umberto Lorenzo Marco Paolo Isabella Luigi Filippo Maria Giuseppe Giovanni di Savoia was born on October 21, 1898 in Turin.
His parents, married three years earlier, were Emanuele Filiberto di Savoia, duke of Aosta (son of Amedeo, king of Spain between 1871 and 1873, and Maria Vittoria Dal Pozzo della Cisterna) and Elena – owner. Hélène-Louise-Françoise-Henriette – d'Orléans (daughter of Louis-Philippe-Albert d'Orléans, Count of Paris and heiress to the French throne between 1842 and 1848, and his cousin, María Isabel d'Orléans Infanta of Spain).
As the eldest son belonging to a younger branch (the Savoia Aosta) of the ruling family in Italy, Amedeo would have had his own dynastic role only in the event that the main branch (the Savoia Carignano) remained empty (as it was in the years between between the 19th and 20th centuries) of a male heir to the throne; any possible speculation in this sense, however, was silenced by the birth, in September 1904, of Umberto di Savoia (the future Umberto II, the 'King of May'). The following year, Emanuele Filiberto's Aostas moved to Naples - in the royal palace of Capodimonte -, therefore away from Turin and Rome, or rather from the cradle of the Savoyard tradition and from the political center of the nation.
Since he was a boy, Amedeo grew up in a less rigid and suffocating environment than that of the Savoy court, as well as more culturally open, thanks to his mother's international profile. He stood out for an easy-going, dynamic if not really restless character, disrespectful of the strict rules of the class to which he belonged. It was perhaps also for this reason that in 1907, at the age of nine, he was sent to a boarding school in London, St. Andrew's, where he learned to obey, but also managed to form an independent personality; he also learned to speak English fluently, something unusual at that time not only in the circles of the Savoy court but more generally in the Italian ruling class.
Military training was at that time normal for a prince of the reigning house, even if of a cadet branch, so, once Amedeo returned to Italy in 1913 - who in those years, as heir to the duchy of Aosta, had the title of duke of Puglia – he was enrolled in the Nunziatella military school in Naples. By tradition, if the king's son served in the infantry, the eldest son of the Aostas was destined for the artillery.
On May 24, 1915, Italy entered the war. On 2 June Amedeo, not yet seventeen, applied for enlistment as a volunteer soldier; he was assigned to the horse artillery regiment (called 'voloire', 'flying' in Piedmontese dialect), and four days later he was already in the war zone. For two and a half years he found himself on the front line, in the Carso plateau (Monti Santo, Sabotino, Vodice, Hermada) and in that - generally more peaceful from a war point of view - of Asiago (Val d'Astico, Monte ledge); finally - after the rout of Caporetto in October-November 1917 - it was moved to a safer area, at the artillery command of the XXVII Army Corps, which was located in the rear.
During the conflict, Amedeo experienced a rapid rise in rank: in 1915 he passed in just one semester first from volunteer soldier to corporal (August), then to aspiring officer (October), finally to second lieutenant in effective permanent service 'for war merit' (December); in 1916 he was appointed captain, again 'for war merit'. He earned a bronze and a silver medal. But above all, when he was on the front, his tendency, not very 'hierarchical', to stay with his men of the 34th field artillery regiment, to eat with them, to participate with them in the hardships of life in the trenches was striking: in short, to share and not just to command. It was an unusual attitude for an Italian officer of the time, and even more so for a member of the reigning house. All this began to create an aura of legend around him.
Amedeo only left the theater of operations on 6 September 1919, when the fighting had been over for almost a year; he was therefore among the last to be demobilized. That was only the first of the reasons that kept him away from the fiery post-war climate. His restless temperament, far from worldliness and little lover of royal pomp, did not allow him to stay still for long. Fascinated for some time by the stories of his uncle Luigi - duke of the Abruzzi, but above all an African explorer and colonial entrepreneur -, starting in the autumn of 1919 he accompanied him on a long journey to Somalia. In that colony, and more generally in Africa, Amedeo saw a possibility of exotic life and a frontier of (white) freedom far from European formalities and the dramas of war.
He returned to Italy in October 1920; at almost twenty-two, despite having various experiences behind him – which would have marked him for life – he had not yet obtained his school leaving certificate. To this end he went to Palermo, where in 1921 he obtained his baccalaureate. He then continued his military studies at the Military Academy in Turin, a city he loved and from which he was able to practice some of his passions, including mountaineering, climbing, for example, the Matterhorn and Becca di Grain.
He then disappeared for more than a year, from October 1921 to January 1923. It was later learned that he had stayed in the Belgian Congo under a false identity (that of Amedeo della Cisterna, from the surname of his paternal grandmother) and as a simple worker, in a company owned by an English entrepreneur, an acquaintance of his mother. It was, after the fighting at the front and after the trip to Somalia, a further formative experience for Amedeo, certainly very unusual for a European prince.
Back in Italy again, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law in Palermo and graduated, rather quickly, with a thesis on colonial law,
The basic concepts of the legal relations between modern states and the indigenous peoples of their colonies
. In his dissertation, presented on December 4, 1924, he hoped that "a solidarity of life and works would be created, an intensification of cooperation and mutuality between the social elements" and that the colonization work would resolve itself into an "organ of progress , educating the natives to ever higher needs", declaring himself for "the denial of the enslavement of the natives and the selfish exploitation of their territory".
Between October 1925 and January 1931 Amedeo took part, with the rank of lieutenant colonel, in the final phase of operations for the 'reconquest' of Libya by Italian troops (in October 1912 - when, after the war against Turkey, the Treaty of Lausanne had assigned the country to Italy – only part of the country was actually occupied). In those years Amedeo alternated semesters in the theater of operations and (starting from April 1926) semesters at the War School of Turin (he had meanwhile passed from artillery to infantry), in order to complete his military studies, essential for further career advancements. In Libya he was assigned to the indigenous 'meharisti' (i.e. mounted on dromedaries) units and worked between Buerat el-Hsun, in Gran Sirte, in Mizda, in Fezzan, from Zella to Nufilia, from Tagrift to Murzuk, up to participating in the occupation of the Kufra oasis (January 1931); it was thanks to these operations that he earned the title of 'Saharan prince'.
In the same frenetic years of commitment, not satisfied with being a good horseman, swimmer, fencer, mountaineer, etc., Amedeo also devoted himself to flying. If in July 1926 he had already obtained his pilot's license, between 1928 and 1931 he obtained specializations as a pilot of military aircraft of various types (Fiat CR.20, 30 and 32, IMAM Ro.1, 37 and 41, Savoia- Marchetti SM.79 and 81, Piaggio P.32, Caproni AP.1 and others). Gunner, colonial soldier, now a pilot, Amedeo could represent in those years the icon of a modernist and military vitality.
It was in this period of alternation between Libya and Italy that Amedeo met his cousin Anna d'Orléans (born in 1926), with whom he married in Naples on November 5, 1927 and with whom he would have the daughters Margherita (1930) and Maria Christina (1933).
Meanwhile, after being promoted to colonel (1928), in March 1929 he finished his studies at the War School of Turin - which began, as mentioned, in April 1926 - which he wanted to complete (an old passion of his) with courses at the School of maritime warfare (1929) and the Aeronautical Institute of Higher Culture (1932).
In January 1931 - the Libyan resistance in the region of Cyrenaica was crushed - the period of operations in Libya also ended for Amedeo, as mentioned. He returned permanently to Italy, where from 12 February he was in command of the 23rd field artillery regiment, based in Trieste; in fact, they wanted to keep him away both from the Savoys and from the regime. A few months later, on July 4, his father, Emanuele Filiberto, died and Amedeo inherited the title of Duke of Aosta.
In Trieste Amedeo settled, together with his wife, in the castle of Miramare, where he resided permanently for more than six years, from April 1931 to November 1937. They were years of bourgeois quiet, but they served him to practice the passion of flying. In fact, he obtained the transfer from the infantry to the air force, then directed by Italo Balbo, who on 2 May 1932 entrusted him with the command of a land reconnaissance wing (the 21st) and then a fighter one, and in the following years allowed him to carry out a very rapid career (brigadier general commanding the 3rd air brigade in 1934, air division general commanding the 1st division Aquila di Gorizia in 1936, and finally, in December 1937, air team general). Of this period in Trieste we remember a visit to Germany at the end of 1936, during which he met Hermann Goering and Adolf Hitler; to an utterance by the latter on the expansionist programs of the Reich and the Nazi regime, he seems to have answered ambiguously that according to him fascism and Nazism were not goods for export.
While Amedeo was flying, in 1935-36 the fascist regime had occupied Ethiopia and 're-founded' the Empire. In mid-1937 Benito Mussolini came to the conclusion that he had to replace General Rodolfo Graziani as governor general and viceroy of Ethiopia. But with whom? Who could be viceroy in Italy?
The idea of asking the Duke of Aosta to make himself available for the job probably arose within the Ministry of the Colonies. The various pretenders to the office, it was thought, could not have opposed the appointment of a member of the ruling family. Furthermore, his name could also have suited those who did not want anything to change in Ethiopia, since it was assumed that Amedeo - due to his character and lack of specific training - would have limited himself to being the 'king joist'. As one of his biographers wrote: "How would the Duke of Aosta have fared, a good soldier as well, a nice young man, but not an expert in political affairs, let alone administration?" (Values, in
Amedeo Duke of Aosta
, 1954, p. 59). Amedeo, somewhat surprising, accepted. Perhaps the well-known passion for Africa prevailed in him, even if his absolute lack of managerial and administrative experience made him objectively hostage to the colonial bureaucracy and the government of Rome.
An intelligent propaganda, which had some basis in reality, immediately tended to distinguish Graziani's past from Amedeo's present, presented as the epitome of the good colonial father, a solicitous supporter of the interests of indigenous subjects: there is no doubt that many of the intentions of the new viceroy went in this direction, but their concrete application must be carefully evaluated by the historian.
In some points Amedeo was able to impose himself: for example by definitively dismissing Graziani, who would have liked to remain with the position of supreme commander of the armed forces of East Africa. Instead, in other points it could not (or was not able, or would not) impose itself. He did not succeed, for example, when Rome sent him General Luigi Cavallero, precisely for the post of military commander, who, as Amedeo was able to ascertain, often made choices different from his. In some respects, Amedeo was helped by the continuation of the enormous flow of funding that the regime continued to direct towards the new colony for reasons of prestige. But it was certainly difficult to pass from the policy of direct and exclusive domination by the Italians desired by Mussolini and Graziani to the policy of paternalistic collaboration that Amedeo had dreamed of in his degree thesis, and which he nevertheless tried to put into practice in some ways. Finally, on some points, at least as far as we know today, Amedeo simply kept silent: in fact, it was precisely during his period of government that Fascist Italy inaugurated the colonial racial legislation, decreed (as is well known) the year before that which saw the regime initiate anti-Semitic legislation.
In reality Amedeo was substantially a victim, albeit a participant, of the regime's policy which by accepting the position of viceroy he had - perhaps generously and naively - thought he could change. Taking office as governor general and viceroy of Ethiopia on December 21, 1937 - when the regime had already been formally linked to the Reich in the Rome-Berlin axis for over a year -, Amedeo watched with growing concern as Europe drifted into war .
Exactly what he had feared happened. On June 10, 1940, Fascist Italy entered the war on Hitler's side; on the same day Amedeo was even appointed general designated in the air army. After some (deceptive) first Italian local successes, East Africa was the first territory attacked by British Commonwealth forces, and the first patch of 'Italian' (colonial) soil to be lost, at the end of November 1941. In the defeat, the halo of hero was sewn around Amedeo: 'the hero of Amba Alagi' (the mountain massif of northern Ethiopia where he resisted, surrounded with his men by overwhelming British forces, for four weeks, in the April-May 1941).
Previously Amedeo had made another choice, heroic in his own way but also tragic and less known. Apparently, in December 1940, General Gustavo Pesenti - commander of the Juba River sector (on the border with the British colony of Kenya) - would have asked Amedeo to admit the impossibility of an Italian military victory in Africa and therefore to propose to the British a separate peace which alone, according to him, would save the Empire – and perhaps Italy – from war (Del Boca, 1982, rest. 2001, p. 392). Amedeo would have refused: he could not think of betraying his king and Mussolini with a choice that did not seem suitable for a duke of Aosta. That said, despite knowing that he had no hope of receiving aid from Italy, Amedeo, having assumed command of the armed forces of the colony, after the aforementioned short period of limited offensives, commanded the strictest defence. Having beaten his troops everywhere, he ordered the few remaining men to carry out an extreme defense in two 'redoubts', at Gondar and at Amba Alagi, in an attempt to engage as many opposing forces as possible and to prevent them from being brought to the other African front of fascist Italy, the one between Libya and Egypt. British victory in East Africa was taken for granted, but at least attempts were made to slow it down. In the meantime, the promotion to army general gave him little satisfaction, on February 12, 1941. The Amba Alagi only fell on May 18, 1941; after having refused surrender several times, in the end Amedeo accepted it, but obtained the honor of arms from his adversaries (and after the surrender he refused to flee, on the occasion of what was perhaps a moment of distraction from his captors), while the Gondar redoubt, commanded by General Guglielmo Nasi, fell only in November. At that point, even formally East Africa was lost.
As for the soldiers of East Africa, and for quite a few civilians, the doors of the prison camps also opened for Amedeo. He was now an important hostage in the hands of the government in London, where even someone began to delude themselves of being able to use him in the future as a substitute for King Vittorio Emanuele III. His was not a gilded captivity, and Amedeo remained - albeit in a small house all to himself - in the Donyo Sabouk camp in Kenya, together with other Italian prisoners, sharing many of their sufferings and hardships.
Unfortunately, the area of the field was malaria and this favored the resurgence in him of this disease - contracted previously -, combined with typhus. Together with the many deprivations inherent in imprisonment, it created complications and a sudden aggravation of the clinical picture which, after a hospitalization that was perhaps not timely (and which in any case, even if it had been, could hardly have changed the general course), on March 3, 1942 led to the death of the not even forty-four year old Amedeo of Savoy. He was buried in the Italian military cemetery of Nyeri, Kenya, next to his soldiers.
The death of a prince of the ruling house, even of a junior branch, was not a matter to be passed over in silence. The propaganda of the regime accused Great Britain of barbarism, military publications incensed 'the hero of the Amba Alagi', and the circles closest to the Aostas - and the circles most sensitive to the colonial myth - set aside the icon (warlike and exotic) of the 'Saharan prince' to emphasize that of the moderate, 'good' colonialist. As in all myths, there were true aspects in this one too, but overall it was a false or falsifiable myth: after all, Amedeo had participated in the campaigns to reconquer Libya, he had helped fascism by accepting the post as viceroy of Ethiopia, he had kept silent on the racist colonial legislation, and had not wanted to go over to the side of the anti-fascist powers, deciding to fight to the end the war promoted by fascism.
A biographer wrote of him words that should be pondered: «Duke Amedeo did not have a political temperament; he was essentially a man of action. In fascism he saw, like many others, the patriotic side, the means to give the country a discipline that made it a block of an ideal of greatness. For this purpose it seemed reasonable to sacrifice even a little freedom" (Valori, in Villa Santa
et al.
, 1954, p. 99).
Of course, he had made many of his choices while maintaining an independent, open, unusual profile for a Savoy, and in many ways irreducible to the regime for which he then fought until the end: this is his personal drama, the tragedy of his story. A story which, in order to be known in full, however, should be studied on the original sources of the House of Savoy Aosta, and in particular on the diary that Amedeo is said to have kept practically all his life from a very young age: a text of which some pages have been published, but in neither scientific nor reliable forums. The diary could perhaps be found in the archives of his heirs, who - if this hypothesis is correct - have never divulged it up to now, thus acting - if, we repeat, this hypothesis were confirmed - like the main enemies of memory and of a fair consideration of their ancestor.
(Source: Treccani.it)
Giovan Battista Volpini (Verona, 24 August 1883 - Amba Alagi, 16 May 1941) was an Italian general. He was born in Verona to parents of Piedmontese origin (they were originally from Isola d'Asti) and, following in the footsteps of his father, General Carlo Volpini, he entered the royal army as a cavalry officer. In the war of reconquest of Tripolitania (Libya), with the rank of major, he was entrusted with the command of a Meharist squad (the so-called "Volpini column", initially composed of 500 riflemen and 50 horsemen); he was in charge of it for about 10 years. The Volpini column participated, together with General Rodolfo Graziani, in the reconquest of the Orfella region in 1923. On February 4, 1924, Major Volpini, in command of a thousand fusiliers, 240 Meharists and 70 horsemen, left