Pax Ducis (English version)

“A novel that poses the most difficult question in 20th-century Italian history: what would have happened if, due to a series of fortuitous events, Italy had managed to stay out of World War II?”

Rome, December 9, 1939. Ottavio Mafai, a secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a member of the National Fascist Party out of necessity, and the husband of a Jewish woman out of love, holds an envelope with three red stripes that he was supposed to deliver to Minister Ciano. He opens it and reads it. He remains seated in the dark for eleven minutes. Then he makes a decision. Not out of heroism. Not out of fear. For his wife Elena. For his son Giacomo, who might one day receive a draft notice. “Mafai didn’t do it for Italy. He did it for his wife and his son. And history unfolded accordingly.” What he does that night – holding back a telegram, a small and technically illegal act – triggers a chain of agreed-upon silences and secret diplomatic maneuvers that, in the months that follow, will effectively help keep Italy out of the war. The diaries of Ciano and Bottai, Badoglio’s reports, and the OVRA’s records confirm it: in 1940, almost no one wanted to fight. It took so little to stop it all. Perhaps a telegram that never reached the right desk. Ottavio Mafai recounts all of this from his studio on Via della Lungara in 1958, as he tries to figure out whether he did the right thing that night. The answer he finds, after twenty years of history, peace, love, and unresolved moral debts, is the only honest answer available: he doesn’t know. He will never know. And perhaps this ignorance is the condition of anyone who has held something important in the darkness – something that could have changed everything – and did it anyway.

By Luca Stefano Cristini, 222 pages
English text

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