1941: Balilla Comes Back, This Time Against the Regime

Fascism had made Balilla its own symbol, going as far as naming the regime’s youth organisation after him. But the boy of Portoria belonged to everyone. In a poem of October 1941, "A-o Balilla", Edoardo Firpo relates – through the words of a friend – a scene in Genoa’s piazza Pammatone: a small crowd laughing under its breath in front of the monument, from which an anonymous sign has just been removed. It said, in Genoese, that the real Balilla was back – and that the statue could step down from its pedestal.

In wartime Genoa, two lines of Genoese were enough to turn the regime’s rhetoric upside down.