Pino Lella was never at Casa Alpina in Motta, after September 8, 1943. I know it from personal knowledge, because I was there. I already wrote, and Lella has never been able to show a photograph of his stay and of his brother Mimmo in Motta.

I've already written about the totally absurd description of the ski descent by Pino from Pizzo Groppera, with the violinist miraculously hanging from his back.

Sullivan says that the two had arrived on skis up to "less than a snowball's throw?" from the trees, that is from the border.
In fact, the descent to the lake that did not exist then, because actually the dam was built after the war and inaugurated in 1962, could only take place up to the point marked on the map. Nowadays there is in fact a double chairlift, and the downhill run cannot reach the current dam, which today, but not then, is a Swiss enclave in Italian territory, crossing five or six deep valleys. You can see it even better from the photograph, showing the current lake.

"Click to enlarge

Three kilometers as the crow flies with about 1200 meters (4,000 feet) of vertical drop to reach the valley's bottom, then six kilometers in the snow to reach the trail that from 1790 meters rises to 2169 of the Furgga pass, the only pass on the border ridge. Not quite the same as "a few tens of meters".

A novel should follow reality more closely, but that is not the point.
The serious and unacceptable thing is that Sullivan claims, seconded by Pino Lella and now exploited by his son Mike, that it is all true, thus creating a hero who doesn't exist.

Sullivan was inspired by my articles, and in addition by a book even more extravagant than his, "Father Luigi Re in the legend" by Enrico Bertazzi, published in '97 more than thirty years after the death of Father Luigi, where he fantasizes about a raid by the SS. Sullivan too talks about this raid, incredibly under the command of Colonel Walter Rauff, head of the Gestapo in Milan, arrived in Motta with a van and some trucks full of SS. Very similar in the two books the admiring reaction of the German commander, at the sight of Father Luigi's Franciscan bedroom.
In reality the track from Madesimo was not passable by car, not even off-road and, more importantly, the raid had been hypothesized and feared but never happened, as described in the short chapter "THE TREASURE" of one of my old, and more than once cited article. A total fabrication.

The story of the recruitment of Pino Lella in the Nazi Todt Organization, apart from the huge blunder of considering that the Italian army was still in Russia when the unfortunate campaign had ended a year earlier with the battle of Nikolajewka, of which we have spoken in the previous article, is suspicious.
Lella, born in 1926, turning 18 on June 1, 1944, had no military obligation, in fact the notorious Edict Graziani of November 9, 1943, which established the death penalty for those who had not joined the ranks of the new RSI army, in addition to reprisals against families, it concerned only men born in 1923, 1924 and 1925.
But, according to Sullivan, Pino Lella enlisted as volunteer, in fact he obtained a recommendation to enter the Nazi Todt Organization.
That Pino and Mimmo Lella were part of the Resistance, as the book says, has no objective confirmation, nor any formal certificate issued by ANPI (National Organization Partisans of Italy), in whose archives there is no trace of such a participation.

No moral judgment is intended here.
There was the war that had just seen the terrible Russia Retreat with a hundred thousand dead, there were bombings: in Gorla, a suburb of Milan, an elementary school had been gutted by the American B24, with 184 dead children, plus 20 dead between teachers, caretakers and the director.
There was also the Liberation War against the Nazis and the Republic of Mussolini (T.N. RSI).
Everyone did what he believed his duty to be, or just to survive.
So many partisans had gone to the mountains to free Italy from the fascist dictatorship, but others only to escape the Graziani edict.
And among those who fought for the RSI there were those who, born under fascism, considered Mussolini a god and fought to remain faithful to the German ally, betrayed by the armistice, and those who had resigned themselves to enlist to avoid worse troubles.
No moral judgment but, again, let's not invent heroes who do not exist.

Franco Isman

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  November, 9, 2019