After talking so much about myself, today I’m going to talk about my father, Prospero Del Din. Without him, there is no me. I was lucky enough to have a healthy, robust father. And an even healthier, more robust and courageous mother.
Papa Prospero was born on 10 July 1892—the same day that, in 1943, the Allies landed in Sicily. He was born in Rivamonte Agordino, in the province of Belluno, where his father, my grandfather, was a primary school teacher. My grandfather was the type of man that had a large moustache, like Franz Joseph I of Austria, though I never met him because I was one year old when he died. He had very light green eyes and a severe gaze, so much so that dad was intimidated even by a photograph of him: one day the picture which hung in the bedroom disappeared. He had taken it down! Grandfather must have been quite severe indeed; after all, he had to raise six children on his own. Prospero was the youngest; the eldest was nine years older. Their mother died days after giving birth to my father.
When he was born, Prospero weighed five and a half kilos. He grew up without a mother, meaning his father never got to rest. The two middle brothers, Piero and Luigi, drowned together in the river, and then Anna succumbed to disease. The only one left was my aunt Maria; she was the one who told me all the stories about my father as a child. She only made it to fourth grade, but she was the sharpest one among them. She was a real wheeler-dealer. One day, my father had some trees cut down in the woods he owned, getting paid too little. So, Maria demanded payment in additional wood, which was used to make the armoire that’s now in Sappada.
Dad was easy-going, but he didn’t want to be bothered. When we would pester him with our requests, to get us to stop, he would say: “Look, I’ve got heavy hands. Go ask your mother”. But I remember just one time when I got a spanking because I had said a bad word. I was really little, and mother told me to go apologize to him, and at first, I refused. But eventually I had to obey. In any case, he entrusted my mother with everything, even when he got the orders for military ceremonies, he’d ask her to open them and see what had to be done for the clothing and the decorations. My mother was named Ines Battilana and she was born in Altissimo, a town above Valdagno, where my grandmother had gone to help her father, who had been thrown off a horse he was trying to break. She lived in Recoaro, wife of a district doctor, about twenty kilometres away. I don’t know how she managed to get to Altissimo, there wasn’t even a road at the time, plus she was pregnant. She gave birth to my mother there, no one knows who helped her, and there she was registered. My mother was a strong woman; she lost her mother to typhoid at just 12 years old, and she was the oldest of six.
One day, my father summoned us children for a chat. We were still in Vicenza, and I was in third grade. “I enrolled you in the Fascist Party so as to do you no harm. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have given us the papers to enrol you in school. But I’m not registered with them and I won’t ever be. I’ve already taken an oath of allegiance to the king, and I won’t take an oath to anyone else”. So that’s how we grew up, knowing that the then head of the government had seized power by force.
Even my brother and I’s first communion was in Vicenza. I remember how, that day, my aunt Irma, my mother’s sister, asked my father at the end of the event: “Were you afraid the church would fall on your head?”. “You never know”, he answered. He had walked in one door and left through another without staying for mass. Let’s just say he wasn’t much of a churchgoer, even if he came from a family of die-hard Catholics.
Then, in 1933, we moved to Udine, to Viale Principe Umberto, which is now Viale Volontari della Libertà, between Via Pordenone and Via Ermes di Colloredo. The father of Bepi Francescato, who later became a famous linguist, helped us find a place to live. My father had met him during the war.
Renato and I were “partners in crime”. We were inseparable. We were a year apart. He was the facetious one and I was the chubby but easy-going little girl, the one who, once she got going, couldn’t be stopped.
After the armistice, my brother Renato decided to fight and was one of the founders of the Osoppo Brigades. On 25 April 1944, he was mowed down by a flurry of machine gun fire during an attack on the barracks of the Voluntary Militia for National Security in the centre of Tolmezzo. I learned of his death a month later. I didn’t tell my mother right away because she was already a mess; I wanted to protect her and I didn’t know how to tell her. What could I have done, given that I was alone? I worried she couldn’t withstand the blow. I kept it all to myself until just before I left. In July, I left on a mission to Florence to bring some documents requested by radio message across enemy lines. I told her: mum, it’ll be good luck if you don’t cry. And that’s how it went.
My father had been in prison since 1940 and we had almost no news of him, if not sporadically and after months via the Red Cross and the Vatican. For example, after 8 September, it was easier for my big sister, who lived in Palermo, to communicate with him. And it was via a letter that our father gave us an update: he wrote that Maria was now living with her in-laws, that her husband had been taken away by the Americans, that the grandson was well and growing up. I mean! It was absurd, Italy divided in two. And we were lucky, because on the other hand, nothing came in from Russia.
I completed missions for the Allies and I asked the English for the release of my father, because my mum told me: not money, not travel; ask that your actions be rewarded with your father coming home. She knew that was how it was done, she had seen it in World War I. And in four days, from Yol Camp in northern India, dad returned to Italy. But his trip there, to that camp, had taken months, with an incredible journey from Greece to Libya, a ship to Bangalore and then along the entire Indian peninsula from south to north as far as Punjab.
When he returned, we met in Bari. After almost four years of prison, he looked thin to me, but physically he was well. It was terrible because I had to give him the news about Renato’s death. I asked the officer who had accompanied him if he had told him; he said no. Who else was going to tell him? It was up to me and I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone. He was inconsolable. I held his hand all night long, it was agonizing to see him like that. It’s easy to say how wonderful it is to still be here, but you need courage to be able to live after some things. That pain left its mark on him and everything else too. Today I wonder if perhaps it had been a mistake to bring him back when Italy was in that state; after all, he was doing OK at the POW camp, but who could have known? When they arrested him in Greece he was in a gurney, and they had beaten him too, you can see his swollen face in the mugshot. In his last letter, he had written that he didn’t even so much as want to walk outside the camp, as, after the armistice, the English had allowed him to do. That long detention was weighing on the state of mind of a rather vivacious man of just 51 years.
He returned in early October of ’44. The photograph of us together was taken on the street in Rome, it must have been November. I was wearing an English uniform because it was the only suit I had. My hair was really long, I gathered it in a braid and then wrapped it twice around my head, so I looked put together all day long.
My father learned of my mission only after the war. I didn’t tell him anything because I had been sworn to secrecy. But there was a day that I went to visit him, I think in November. He was in Puglia and we saw a Polish aviation officer who had been the aircraft commander on my first “adventure”, the one in which we came back with a single engine: one had caught fire and the other two had failed, and we had a full load to boot. The official told my father that I was an extremely brave woman. And you know what my father told him? “Her? She’s reckless!”.
I gleaned all this information about my father from his stories and his letters. There was a journal too, a poorly bound blotter that had been destroyed by mistake, no longer to be found. But the folder with all the mountaineering undertakings, the records, the drawings done while he was in the Yol POW camp, those made it. They’re all there. He gathered them up and kept them safe, and they’re here reunited in the original folder, unpublished. Only a short report appeared in 1954 in the CAI’s monthly magazine with his signature and that of Giovanni Pilla, the mountaineer who reached the peak of the Dhauladhar massif as the lead climber, at 5,200 meters above sea level. Pilla was the chemist from San Donà di Piave; he had been freed after the war ended. He and my father saw each other often and I got a mountain of gifts from him for my wedding. It was clear he really cared about my father.
After the armistice, the English had agreed to let the officials who had remained loyal to the legal government of the king to temporarily leave camp. They put dad in charge of the mountaineering team and they helped him get the materials to organize and coordinate expeditions. He didn’t climb the peaks because he was getting on in years, and a terrible nephritis contracted in Africa had made him weak. Actually, he could have avoided taking part in World War II. Instead, he decided to leave for Albania because he couldn’t bear the idea of being separated from his soldiers, the ones he had trained. Antonio Beltrame, his orderly, wanted at all costs to go with him, because he knew about his health problems and he wanted to be there for him. We know that on the front, in the middle of the snow and with dry food, dad was so unwell that he couldn’t even put his boots on, his feet were so swollen. Unfortunately, in the end it caused him more pain because Beltrame, who dad always said acted like a son to him, went from being a co-prisoner at Yol to being taken to another camp where he died in an accident. That’s destiny for you.
The last trip we went on together to the mountains was on 29 June 1947. We climbed up to the Gilberti mountain hut, on Mount Canin. I had been many times in winter, but never in summer. On the trail, two Englishmen caught up to us and, thinking they were clever, went straight up in the middle of the slushy snow, there was still a lot of it, getting stuck with every step. My father saw they were in trouble, but he wasn’t very strong anymore and so he said: “Go help them”. So, I went up and I tried to explain to them what to do, but they were two “pains in the neck” and they didn’t understand. In the end, we helped them and we too reached the mountain hut, for the last time.
My father passed away in 1974. Today he rests at the family tomb in Udine, with mum, who passed in 1980, and the Carniellis, my husband’s family. Renato is the only one in Tolmezzo. My mother would have wanted him here, but how could we have taken him away after all the honours the Carnic people have bestowed upon him? They were there, en masse, at his funeral, despite being threatened by the enemy. His death was my father’s greatest sorrow, and every time he said that I had been brave and lucky, I knew that, in his heart, he was thinking of Renato, who hadn’t been as lucky as me.