Rebuilding
Cerasuolo
Is Aid Enough?

The Winter Lines

Cerasuolo suffered greatly during the retaking of Italy by the Allies. The extent of the devastation and long lasting deprivation is evocatively described in the following extract from The Atlantic Monthly dated May 1948.

The writer was William Congdon, a young American sculptor, who joined the American Friends Service Committee in 1946. He gave up his studio work for several years and worked with the Italian Red Cross and the reconstruction project of the Italian Abruzzo.

The ‘Atlantic Monthly’ is an American magazine founded in 1857 in Boston, Massachusetts. It published commentary on abolition, education, and other major issues in contemporary political affairs. The full article can be downloaded from the magazine website; www.theatlantic.com .

It was October 1947 when we began free transportation of building materials in the Volturno Valley. Trees had turned, worn slowly brown by a too long sun. In another six weeks the rains would begin.
Cerasuolo is a section of Filignano, a mountain town of the Volturno Valley, province of Campobasso, Molise-Abruzzo, Italy. It had three hundred people once, mostly Belgians and Scotch, with some French.
As Polish troops dislodged Germans in the early spring of 1944 and closed in on Cassino, Cerasuolo was 40 per cent destroyed. When the Allies had broken through Cassino and were on the march to Rome, Indian troops of the British 8th Army returned. They ordered the evacuation of Cerasuolo and, using it for target practice, destroyed the rest of it.
In 1947, the road still went through Cerasuolo as oblivious of it as if the town had been set on a desert. Weeds clawed at the remains of houses that had forgotten that they were ever houses. No crossing had yet been put over the river where the bridge had been blown up. Not a house had been reconstructed. Nor the church.
As I walked into town, two men stopped bowling along the shadowed wall of the church. From the shadow of the bombed church, a group of men watched me approach. I went over to them.

> “Because I am dressed as a soldier, perhaps because I am an American, you will always associate me with those who did this” I said, pointing to the destruction. “Even though I have come to help you rebuild your homes, you hate me. You say, ‘No one fights a war to help others’. For whatever purpose we fought the war, you think I must be here to fulfill it.”
“We don’t hate you” one of the men said, “we are not grieving because we lost the war, not even because we have lost our home. We are grieving because things have been destroyed in such a way that they will not grow again for ten years; because we have been reduced to a human rag, with nothing left but a little good will.”
“Whose job is the reconstruction of the bridge up at the river crossing?” I asked.
“The engineer’s” they answered.
“Can cars cross the river bed in winter?”
“Not last winter.”

A bridge would mean that the mail bus could come from Venafro and join the two provinces of Frosinone and Campobasso. It would undo the Cerasuolesi’s feeling of being abandoned.
I told them that in a few weeks, I would be back with trucks that would bring cement and lime. I told them that we’d put up a passage across the river. Eyes narrowed as if to measure my words against the promises of the Allied radio during the war.

I told the Assistant Mayor to form a reconstruction committee. There was no priest in the town, but there was a young man who was going off that winter to look for a teaching job. He could write and could help the Assistant Mayor draw up requests for our free transport. I had to know how many bricks to order from the factory at Campobasso, how many roof tiles and iron beams.

The farmers of Cerasuolo wouldn’t sign what they could not read. Anyone could see that every house was destroyed, that they needed bricks, roof tiles, cement, plaster and iron beams. Signing papers smacked too much of the bureaucracy of Fascism. If UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) wanted to help them, well and good, let them bring the materials.

They had always needed so much, these peasants of Southern Italy; to be asked to analyse their needs offended them. As far back as they could remember, men from the city, with little notebooks in their hands, had promised them this and that. And nothing had ever changed — except for the worse. Look at their town, Cerasuolo; it hardly existed. Was this the promised liberation from the Germans?

In 1945, the government promised to anyone rebuilding his house, a return of 60 percent of the construction cost. An estimate had to be made by an engineer of the province. For partial reconstruction, the engineer could authorise an advance on the 60 percent. A man too poor to buy materials could anticipate up to one-third of his estimates. By 1947, I had not heard of a single instance of a man’s completing his house and receiving the 60 percent return.

“How often does the engineer come from Isernia?” I asked.
“We haven’t seen him for three months.”
“How do you expect me to get to Cerasuolo?” said engineer Capotorti when I questioned him. “I have no transport. Why don’t you get UNRRA to give me five tyres for my Alfa Romeo?”
“I will take you in my car every day until estimates are made, and the people can get started rebuilding before the winter” I said.

When I took the engineer to Cerasuolo, he accepted favours from the wealthy, for whom he would recommend priority payment. When the poor reminded him of how long they had waited for promised advances of funds, he answered:

“You will be paid by St Teresa’s Day.”

But after St Teresa’s it was All Saints’ Day. After All Saints’ it was Christmas.

When the estimates were made, I drew up requests and contracted for materials at Campobasso. But when funds were available, the civil engineer put Cerasuolo in sixty-third place on the bank paying list. Sixty-two other individuals and units would have to be advised of credit by the bank and would collect before Cerasuolo could get its money. When I protested, Cerasuolo was reassigned to first place on the payment list.

“Cerasuolo has always been the poorest town in the province” the engineer objected. “It has contributed nothing. The Cerasuolesi are shepherds who hike to Naples at Christmas time to play their pipes and beg in the streets and in the churches. You will learn not to help people like that.”
“Towns like Cerasuolo will always be a burden on the province until we awake them to responsibilities and opportunities of being co-members of a provincial family” I said.

That night I went to Cerasuolo. It was raining. The town crier went from house to house calling the men to the church, where I was waiting. One by one they came, dark shapes across the rubble.

“I have been in the Cerasuolo area for three weeks” I said to them. “I have brought no materials because you could not buy them. You could not anticipate them until estimates were made. When the estimates were made, funds were not available, Filignano refuses to collect from Campobasso. Five hundred thousand lire are yours. Go to Filignano, all of you together, and demand it”

As I was leaving, the Assistant Mayor came out to the car. It was dark and still raining. He put his hand on my arm and said:

“You must not get so excited. You must remember, we are Italians.”

Engineer Capotorti took another sweet from the tray offered by the Assistant Mayor’s wife.Rain dripped in the narrow alley below the window into the grotto where the old woman Rosina D’Onofrio lived. For eight months she had lived in the grotto beneath the Assistant Mayor’s house. Hunger and exposure had blinded her in one eye.

She could not rebuild her own house because the contractor in charge of building the housing project was living there with his assistants. They had rebuilt the house sufficiently to live in it, yet not to the point where the owner could claim it. (The contractor was ousted, an estimate was made for the remainder of the work, and we carried materials for Rosina D’Onofrio.)

As we stood by the window looking down into the wet alley, over the grotto of the blind woman, Capotorti said to me:

“You are doing a great harm to these people. Such freedom as you are giving them is like giving a man dying of thirst a whole glass of water.”
“I will respect your objections” I answered, “as soon as I see evidence that you are willing to give him any water at all.”

I administered the funds myself. I paid for the materials in the name of each recipient. Receipts were signed, and sent to the civil engineer, who deducted the amounts from the eventual 60 per cent reimbursements. The trucks began to move, and for a few weeks materials poured into Cerasuolo.

Then all private work and work on the housing project was suspended for lack of iron beams. There were strikes in America. All the materials that we had carried lay unused around the ruined houses of Cerasuolo. No one would start to rebuild until he had the materials to finish.

Trucks from Naples toured the Volturno Valley selling old furniture. The Cerasuolesi, knowing that the prices of their materials had been deducted from the eventual 60 percent returns, thought there was little chance of getting the iron beams, for I was soon to leave the project.

And so for the Neapolitan furniture they bartered the bricks and tiles that had been secured at transport free prices from UNRRA. The rains had begun and, at night, first frosts. On top of the Mainardo there was snow. I was dining with a contractor from Rome in charge of the housing projects on the Isernia area.

“The poor” Mosetti began, “are worse off than before. You have taught them to distrust us. You have diverted government funds. You have tied up all the materials in factory in Campobasso. You have housed nobody and you have prevented me from doing so.”

“I failed because I was everywhere blocked by your bureaucracy” I said. “Which is our excuse for the fact that in Italy you can’t get things done in a hurry,” said Mosetti.

“We started this project,” I said, “with the idea of restoring the forgotten peasant of Italy to a responsible place in Italian society. With such encouragement as our free transport, instead of lazily waiting for the government to build housing project, each man might have the possibility of building his own home.”

“Poverty is an ancient habit of the Southern Italian,” said Mosetti. “He accepts it as he accepts the rain that ruins his crops.You can arouse the farmer to want to improve his conditions, but he knows that in the context of Italian society it will not be possible for him to do so. He knows that when you go, things will be the same as they have always been.”

After a moment, Mosetti continued, “If you would enlighten the Southern Italians, you must create the surroundings in which they will see the advantage of working together for a better life. Everyone has lost so much in this war, our life has become so precarious, that no one thinks beyond himself.”

The original title for this article was: Is Aid Enough? William G. Congdon (1912-1988) returned to New York after this assignment but subsequently emigrated to Italy and settled in Milano. He spent his last years in the Benedictine Abbey at Cascinazza.

Wartime Damage

These photographs show the widespread level of damage and devastation that occurred in Cerasuolo. The photograph at the top of this article was taken in January 1944 after the fighting had moved further north following the hostilities of late 1943.
If the initial level of destruction was not massive enough, it was further worsened when, after the front had moved forward to Cassino and beyond, an Indian battalion evacuated what was left of the community and used the town for target practice for the next several months.

This view of the main piazza was taken in 1952 from the vantage point of the campanile on the church. Some eight years after hostilities, the town still shows little sign of reconstruction.