Giuseppe/Pino Levi Cavaglione (1911-1971)
by Lidia Maggioli e Antonio Mazzoni
Son of Aronne/Nino Levi and Emma Cavaglione, he was born in Genoa on February 27, 1911. After the end of the war and fascism, he added his mother’s surname to his own.
A lawyer by profession, in 1937 he contacted Carlo Rosselli in Paris to fight alongside the Republican International Brigades in Spain. He was discovered by infiltrators and returned to Genoa, under police surveillance. A file under his name is kept at the Central Political Records Office, where he is listed as one of approximately 160,000 anti-fascists.
On May 10, 1938, he was arrested and served three months in prison, after which he was sentenced to political confinement, which, under the Duce’s Act of Clemency, was reduced from the prescribed five years to approximately 19 months. Passing through the municipalities of San Severino Rota (Salerno), Fuscaldo (Cosenza), and Nocera Inferiore (Salerno), he remained confined from the end of July 1938 to February 27, 1940.
Like many anti-fascists and Jews, immediately after June 10, 1940, the date that marked Italy’s entry into World War II, Giuseppe Levi was arrested again and sent to internment. His first destination was the Urbisaglia camp at Villa Giustiniani-Bandini, where he arrived on June 26.
The Villa soon filled with political opponents, some of whom would later share Levi’s internment in the Pesaro area: Giorgio Ottolenghi, a Venetian resident of Turin, Odoardo della Torre, from Livorno, and Ivo Minerbi from Ferrara. In Urbisaglia, the four were housed in the attics of the Villa, as Bruno Pincherle, a Trieste internee, recalls.
Giuseppe Levi was tormented by the inertia of his days in the camp and by the thought of his parents, who in vain renewed appeals to the authorities to reunite him with his family. In addition to his broad political and cultural interests, the young lawyer loved photography, and despite the ban, he took precious photographs of places and people in Urbisaglia. This documentation also spanned the previous period of confinement and the subsequent stages of his internment.
Due to health problems, on October 5, 1940, the internee left Villa Giustiniani-Bandini and was transferred to a municipality in the Province of Pesaro where he could receive treatment. He also attempted to borrow books from the Vieusseux Library in Florence, but the restrictions and controls imposed by the fascist authorities excluded all the reading material the internees wished to access.
The first station was Apecchio, followed by Sassocorvaro, which had an infirmary. His stay was short, as Levi was punished with expulsion for making comments unwelcome to the regime while speaking confidentially with another inmate. Sent to the South, he first visited the concentration camp of Gioia del Colle (Bari), then that of Isola Gran Sasso (Terme). After the war, he denounced the fellow inmate who had betrayed him—and who had also led to the twenty-year prison sentence of another inmate, Vittorio Sermoneta, then held in Camerino (Macerata)—but by then the inmate had met his tragic end.
In May 1941, Giuseppe Levi was again sent to the Pesaro area. He spent an initial period of confinement in San Leo, then in Piandimeleto, where he stayed with other Jews and anti-fascist politicians with a friendly family who allowed their guests to listen to Radio London at night. In the next town, Pennabilli, Levi was appointed Delasem representative due to his capacity to coordinate his group of comrades, some of whom were foreigners.
From there he was transferred to Macerata Feltria, still in the Pesaro area, where he remained for almost a year. In the town, he lived with numerous co-religionists, including Albert Alcalay, a young Yugoslavian architect and painter who later emigrated to the United States. In the memoirs he published upon his release, Alcalay remembered the Genoese lawyer, a staunch opponent of fascism, with admiration. Some moments they shared are recalled with emotion, including New Year’s Eve 1942, when they were all elated by the news of the Allied successes at El Alamein in Africa and rumors of the Russians’ strenuous resistance at Stalingrad.
Giuseppe Levi would continue to be held in two more municipalities, Cagli and Sant’Angelo in Lizzola, for a total duration of approximately three years. Released after September 8th, 1943, by the Badoglio government, he left Genoa, this time voluntarily, to join the partisan groups of the Castelli Romani, which he joined in October 1943, becoming their military commander. His close friends Marco Moscato/Moscati and Alberto Terracina told Levi of the raid on Rome on October 16th and, the following month, of the arrest of his parents by the Germans in Genoa. Aronne/Nino Levi and Emma Cavaglione would perish in the Nazi concentration camps, as would numerous relatives.
As a partisan leader, Giuseppe Levi demonstrated contempt for danger, unconditional dedication, and great tactical intelligence. Some sensational acts of sabotage against the German army, including the attack on the “Sette Luci” Bridge on the night of December 20-21, 1943, are effectively described in the protagonist’s diary, published by Einaudi in 1945 under the title Guerriglia nei Castelli Romani. The following year, Cesare Pavese expressed appreciation for the work’s intense account of partisan life, dedicating a review to it, while director Nanni Loy adapted it into the film Un giorno da leoni in 1961. (Raiplay).
In the introduction to the second edition of the diary, dated January 1971, Giuseppe Levi offers readers a painful assessment of his own human experience, hoping for a new era in which “man’s hatred towards man will disappear forever.”
Bibliography
Lidia Maggioli – Antonio Mazzoni. Il ponte sette luci. Biografia di Giuseppe Levi Cavaglione. Metauro, Pesaro 2012.
Pino Levi Cavaglione. Guerriglia nei castelli romani. Il Nuovo Melangolo, 2023 (prima edizione Einaudi, 1945).