Ordinary Heroes Resist Fascism in “The Bishop’s Villa”

A cobbler may seem an unlikely choice to narrate a war story. Compared to the dominant narratives of the Second World War’s victors, the confounding histories of countries like Spain and Italy can require more imagination to sympathize with the choices that ordinary people were forced to make amidst the chaos of war. Sacha Naspini’s The Bishop’s Villa makes it clear that any goal of remaining neutral during wartime becomes a self-defeating delusion when even subtle acts of complicity or complacency are enough to nudge the most unwilling of citizens, including cobblers, toward heroism or cowardice. 

The cobbler of Naspini’s novel is René, a man whose disfigured hand is a blessing that keeps him from military service, but is also a magnet for ridicule from others who dub him Settebello after a lucky trump card featuring seven coins in the Italian game Scopa. René insists on going about his work fixing shoes for the town, including soldiers garrisoned at a nearby seminary being used to detain Italian Jews, until his long-time friend and crush Anna disappears, presumably to fight with the partisans. When others inquire about Anna, René must decide whether to cover for her and risk his own life, or follow her into the hills. 

Unable (or unwilling) to join the younger, more able-bodied partisans, René decides the best way for him to resist is to sabotage his own work for the soldiers of the seminary, “The nails were so rotten that the boot might fall apart at any moment and turn into something resembling a slipper.” The narrator notes that, “René had used the same technique with nuns’ shoes.” But even such small acts of resistance have much bigger consequences for René and those he comes to trust. 

Naspini’s cobbler presents a perfect fictional dilemma, but many other names mentioned throughout the novel are very real characters in history. The militant political leader of the region Alceo Ercolani, Bishop Paolo Galeazzi who leased the seminary out to the fascists, and even Marshal Gaetano Rizziello who served as director of the seminary turned concentration camp and whose signature appears on the lease all influence the fates of Naspini’s characters without ever appearing in scene themselves. The combination of fact and fiction adds to the sense that whatever happened at the seminary in 1943 aligned the Catholic clergy with Fascist government authority in ways that left the people of the area in truly impossible dilemmas. 

Compared to the work of those real-life partisans turned writers like Italo Calvino, Cesare Pavese, and Elsa Morante, whose war-themed writings were informed by their personal experiences with anti-fascist resistance movements, Naspini appears more interested in how his own generation understands the stories of friends, family, and public intellectuals who lived after the war with the choices they made during it. The timing of Naspini’s novel is no coincidence. Even as nationalist conservative movements seem to be gaining momentum in different parts of the world, stories like Naspini’s can be read as both homage to human resilience in the face of evil and warnings against the societal tendencies that led to state-sanctioned genocide less than a century ago.  

Of over a dozen novels that Naspini has published over the last two decades, only a handful have been translated into English so far. Clarissa Botsford’s translations of Naspini’s work include the crime thriller Oxygen (2021), Nives (2021), a story about a widow who replaces her dead husband with a chicken, The Bishop’s Villa (2024), and The Malcontents (2025). In addition to working as an editor and art director, Naspini’s multidisciplinary career includes collaborations in screenwriting for both film and TV, a graphic novel, and even a video game. Though the subject matter of Naspini’s work varies between projects, themes of complex family dynamics and explorations of the conditions that lead to criminal violence appear frequently enough to be noticed. 

In an Author’s Note that follows the novel’s final page, Naspini brings the fiction back to present relevance with this description of his hometown, “Grosseto holds an unusual honor: during the entire period of the Holocaust, it is the only diocese in Europe to have signed a legally binding rental contract for a prison camp.” The legally binding contract between the Catholic Bishop of the diocese and the Fascist Italian Social Republic led to the deportation and murder of nearly 200 Italian Jews before the allied armies could reach the region. With The Bishop’s Villa, Naspini exhumes a historical scenario from the collective Italian conscience with great clarity and empathy in order to dispel any tidy narratives about the war and the roles that ordinary citizens played in both perpetuating its evils and resisting it. While stories like Naspini’s may not be able to prevent future atrocities, they offer hope that even the lowliest cobbler is capable of fighting back, even if only by nailing in the occasional crooked nail. 

FICTION

The Bishop’s Villa

Written by Sacha Naspini

Translated by Clarissa Botsford

Europa Editions

Published on November 19, 2024