Testimone di un massacro. Debre Libanos 1937: la strage fascista nel diario di un ufficiale italiano

In May 1937, at the sanctuary of Debre Libanos, the ancient center of Ethiopian Christianity, one of the darkest pages in the history of Italian colonialism was written: a few months after the Addis Ababa massacre, the viceroy of Ethiopia Rodolfo Graziani gave orders to kill about two thousand people, including monks and faithful of the village, believed to be involved in the attack suffered by the hierarch on February 19. A premeditated massacre, the culmination of a complex repressive strategy of the Ethiopian resistance, with which fascism revealed a fully realized totalitarian face. In this scenario, the diary of Attilio Joannas, second lieutenant of the Alpini corps on a mission to Ethiopia in that tragic year, becomes a fundamental piece for the reconstruction of an event removed from national historical memory. For the first time the story is narrated directly in a private document, which goes alongside the official sources and oral testimony as proof of the most serious war crime authorized by the Italian military commands.