In this episode, I attempt a difficult encounter: one with figures that, because of my personal and political history, I have habitually placed in the camp of the “enemy.”
Drawing inspiration from the Tarot card of the Sun, I explore the themes of honor and duty—not as abstract or institutional values, but as embodied experiences: often tragic, almost always ambiguous.
The story brings together three upright soldiers, Queen Victoria, German tourists, and family ghosts. The aim is neither to praise nor to condemn these figures, but to integrate light and shadow into a chiaroscuro that continues to seek justice while ceasing to pretend innocence.
This is a story about how, although we can rarely choose the roles that life assigns us, we retain full freedom in how we interpret and inhabit them.
Underlying this narrative is a sharply critical stance toward the bipolar conception of politics that dominates today—rooted in Carl Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction—a critique that will be further developed in the next episode.
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Previous episode: Episode 19: Lunatica
And you will have the honour of much cry, Hector
until the blood shed for one’s homeland
be saint and wailed upon, and till the Sun
keeps shining on over the human misfortunes.
(Ugo Foscolo, Dei sepolcri)
Viperetta’s carriage glides down onto the Fiesolan terrace of San Francesco like a hot-air balloon, all fan-noise and sparks of sugar.
I feel gravity return to my bones: the Earth is always a little rude when it takes you back.
Deleuze steps down first, adjusting his collar with philosophical displeasure.
“Watch out for roles,” he tells me. “They are elegant cages.”
Guattari echoes him, blowing lunar dust off his glasses:
“And for honor. It’s the heroin of social control.”
Viperetta quickly smooths my hair, with a gesture that is both farewell and warning:
“Welcome back to Earth, Mantis. Never forget this: when they ask you to be good, what they really want is obedience.”
She winks, pulls a lever, and the carriage corkscrews back into the sky like an impatient origami.
I am left alone with the cold of the stone and the view of Florence waking up.
The Sun—slow as a sentry at the end of a night watch—is rising for roll call.
I decide to enter the church of San Francesco and wander through its cloisters; I need slow steps, and stones that do not judge.
While I sit in meditation beside an olive tree, I glimpse—on the other side of the small cloister—three figures seated like inverted monuments: alive in posture, yet still as bas-reliefs.
They are three carabinieri.
I recognize them immediately—not by their uniforms, but by the look of those who have made irreversible decisions. Their names are carved in marble a few dozen meters below:
Alberto La Rocca.
Vittorio Marandola.
Fulvio Sbarretti.
They are called the Martyrs of Fiesole.
The men who handed themselves over to the Nazis in place of ten civilians and were executed for having become partisans.
They look at me in silence, with that expression—half wary, half paternal—that soldiers reserve for civilians when civilians are thinking too loudly.
One of them, perhaps Alberto, murmurs:
“Don’t make us saints.”
Another adds:
“Or idiots.”
The third shakes his head:
“It was honor. But honor is a trap that sometimes works—and sometimes kills you.”
I stiffen.
“I believe in the gesture you made,” I say. “But not in the world that demanded it of you, nor in your uniform.”
Alberto hints at a smile:
“Then welcome to the light—where even the good ones, if you look closely, are a little frightening.”
A ray of sunlight cuts the cloister in two: light and shadow, evenly divided.
They sit exactly on the boundary.
I feel I must not stay too long: this is not a place to collect medals, nor to ask too many questions.
I raise the collar of my jacket and thank them in silence. I am about to leave when one of them says softly, almost as a plea:
“Whatever you do… make your own choices—not the ones someone, from a safe place, calls duty.”
I look them in the eyes and see no propaganda. Only youth that did everything it could.
And it is then that I understand: we do not always choose our historical task. In fact, we rarely do. But we can always choose how to interpret the role we are given—following the script not out of obedience, but out of love for what is still worth defending.
Outside, the sun is higher.
I feel the three carabinieri draw closer behind me like a silent escort—shy and proud at the same time.
“We’ll walk with you for a stretch,” Alberto says. “Then you’ll leave us behind. We can’t cross the boundaries of Fiesole.”
And so we begin the descent. Four pairs of legs in single file: me in front, and them—the three gentle martyrs—watching over my back.
The Sun casts long shadows along Via Vecchia Fiesolana behind us, while Florence waits at the bottom of the slope. The road is a steep tongue of stone, narrow and slick, plunging toward the city with a clear warning: don’t get distracted or you’ll roll all the way to the Duomo.
I walk slowly, with the three carabinieri marching silently behind me, as if guarding the rear from some unknown ambush.
Halfway through a sharp bend, two German cyclists appear: chrome helmets, blond mustaches, bicycles gleaming like armor from the future, perfectly fitted technical suits—the very prototype of German efficiency on holiday.
They cross my path. They observe me. They calculate:
Risk of collision? None.
Risk of embarrassment? Medium.
And so one of them raises his index finger and says solemnly:
“Attenzione! (In Italian)”
He points to the ground in front of me.
A pile of dog shit, perfectly aligned with my next step. An organic device ready to gravely compromise my dignity.
I stop. Look down. Sigh, smile, and return the courtesy:
“Danke schön!”
Behind me, I feel the Martyrs of Fiesole tense their muscles—the conditioned reflex of those who have seen the enemy up close.
But then—one of them hints at a smile, brief and surprisingly human:
“Even invaders… can do good things, when they want to.”
The other two nod, as one does when confronted with a paradox that light forces you to see.
The two Germans salute with an involuntary military gesture and resume their climb, buoyed by their quadriceps and their international courtesy.
I continue my descent with a lighter step, carefully avoiding the scatological traps of fate.
The three carabinieri follow me, more relaxed now, almost amused.
And I think that perhaps history is made of tragedies, yes—but also of tiny acts of attention! that keep us, the living, from slipping back into the worst.
At the bend near Villa Medici, the road opens just enough to let a solitary bench breathe.
Seated on the stone is a young woman—too young for the weight of her name—painting watercolors.
The green of the olive trees and the golden-gray of the Florentine afternoon blend on the paper like emotions that have not yet learned politics.
Beside her, a small radio crackles out old jazz, one of those gentle trumpets that dance with silence.
The three carabinieri, until now upright and disciplined, stiffen like statues under contrary winds.
Vittorio spits out the word:
“See what happens when power is given to a woman of German stock: the British Empire!”
I raise an eyebrow. On “German,” I might even be tempted to agree—that inheritance in the blood I know well—but on “woman,” a growl rises behind my teeth.
“Oh come on, my dear… she didn’t choose her fate. It was drawn for her—just as yours were drafted. No one ever asked you whether it was a good day to die.”
Alberto silences him with an elbow to the ribs:
“Calm down. If you’re born an heir, you play the hand you’re dealt… as long as you manage not to die from the wrong card.”
And suddenly the whole history comes back to me, like an image developing in a darkroom:
A child shut inside a palace, the last hope of a dying dynasty.
Educated for the throne like a Tibetan monk trained for meditation. A life rehearsed, not lived. And then, when everyone around her fell… she remained standing.
“She played the cards she was given,” I say. “And she didn’t lose the game.”
The martyrs glance at one another. They seem reluctant to grant her too much. But they cannot deny her the merit of having survived her role.
I step away from them and walk a few paces forward.
The girl paints, absorbed, her face lit by a Sun that reveals her attentive beauty.
She pauses. Sets her brush on the edge of the paint box. Tucks a rebellious curl behind her ear with the embodied grace of someone who has never been allowed to be publicly disheveled.
I raise my voice just enough not to startle her:
“Good morning, Your Majesty.”
She turns.
I look at her, and my breath catches.
She does not have the austere face of statues: her eyes are alive, the eyes of a girl who somewhere in her heart might have preferred to run barefoot among the olive trees rather than rule half the world.
She smiles at me, with an incredibly human shyness.
“My name is Victoria,” she says. “I don’t yet know whether I’ll become queen.”
Seated on the bench, she offers a slight smile—one that asks for nothing—and then makes an almost imperceptible gesture: a finger to her lips. Silence.
She turns up the radio slightly. From the grain of the old speaker comes a song I don’t know, slow and sweet like a drunken nostalgia, singing of Gin and Coconut Water—a melody scented with invented oceans and clandestine evenings.
Then, with the natural ease of someone who distributes comfort, she hands me a joint rolled in a sheet of newspaper.
“So you don’t think too much,” she says. “Or so you think better.”
I take it, inhale a few times, and feel the world soften a little at the edges.
The clouds above Florence dissolve into pastel. I hand it back with a small nod of thanks. She returns the gesture like a queen who demands no reverence—just a girl who has learned to govern silence as well.
I stand up—it’s time to go—and as I put my jacket back on, my gaze slips downward, toward the bend in the road.
The three carabinieri who had escorted me there are standing still, but they are not looking at me. Their eyes are fixed on the base of the bench, where, carved like a carefully chosen word, there are small black-and-white photographs of my family.
They do the simplest and strangest thing I could have expected: they salute. Not a military salute of propaganda, but a respectful bow.
Guido and Giuseppe—my grandfathers, alive for me only, and for those eyes that know how to recognize them—are there like a portrait that breathes.
The carabinieri bend slightly and whisper, barely audible, “Honor,” and the sound is less heavy than I had feared. Then, with a movement that seems choreographed by an invisible director, the three turn toward the sky.
A sharp gesture, a small blessing; they straighten up, salute once more, and walk upward as if reporting for duty elsewhere.
Viperetta’s voice calls them with a flick of her hand; they smile, gain altitude, and dissolve like blessed smoke into the blue.
“We have to go back up,” says an increasingly translucent Alberto, serious but with a hint of irony that seems to tell us, our patrol here is over.
I remain still for a moment, then turn to my grandfathers, as if they were sitting on the grass beside the bench and not only in my memory.
Guido adjusts the newspaper he does not have, glances at the radio, then looks at me with that diplomatic smile he always had—half understanding, half irreverent.
Giuseppe scratches the back of his head, still carrying the posture of a stationmaster who never stopped serving timetables and tempers. They rise—in my mind I feel them truly walking—and come to sit beside me.
“So,” Guido says, as if we were resuming one of our conversations on a train, “what did the three good lads tell you?”
“That honor can be a trap,” I reply.
Giuseppe shakes his head, but his eyes shine. “Honor is a simple thing: it tells you how to move when you have no alternatives. But you—Margherita—you’re not made to live only on ready-made alternatives.”
I look at them and burst out laughing—a laugh that is half tears, half relief. “I’m an anarchist,” I say. “It’s the only form of government I can practice.”
Guido nods in agreement, as if we had written it in the margin of a secret notebook. “Then be an anarchist. And remember: justice and order are not the same thing. Justice means holding broken pieces together so they don’t wound others.”
Giuseppe adds, more bluntly and affectionately, “And remember too that duty doesn’t die if you set it aside for a while. It rests, and becomes useful again when it truly matters. That’s how we learned—not out of obedience, but so as not to leave the living without care.”
We talk about roles we don’t choose, about how fathers and mothers pin inheritances on us that weigh like waterproof cloaks, about how some of us wear them until they die and others fold them into a pocket and choose to live.
The conversation is slow; every word is a step along the path. They explain their idea of honor to me: something that has nothing to do with ideology, but with service—a service that loses its meaning when it becomes exclusive, when it asks some to die so that others may live in privilege.
“So?” I ask at last, my voice trembling just a little.
Guido takes my arm and squeezes it, with the assurance of someone who has fixed suitcases and hearts alike. “We’ll walk with you for a bit,” he says. “Up to home. Then we’ll return to our stones.”
We set off, me in front with my grandfathers at my side, their steps accompanying me like familiar metronomes.
Via Vecchia Fiesolana swallows us a little more: olive trees, gates, walls that tell a century’s worth of stories. The words we exchanged hang in the air like seeds waiting for soil.
At a certain point, I look back: the bench is empty, the radio has stopped playing, and Victoria’s figure has already blended into the light of dusk. The three carabinieri have vanished beyond the clouds. There is silence—but it is the same silence that listens when truth no longer needs to shout.
I walk on with my grandfathers beside me, and I feel that even though our roles are assigned by others, there is always a space—small, rough, beautiful—in which we decide how to carry them.
And I choose to carry mine with an open hand, rather than a clenched fist.
“Know this, Sancho: one man is no more than another unless he does more than the other. All these storms we encounter are signs that the sky will soon clear again and things will improve, for it is not possible that either evil or good should last forever; and therefore, since evil has lasted so long, good must now be close at hand.”
(Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote)
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