The Love Correspondence
Peppino regularly sent love postcards to Manfredina.
This correspondence was the result of the peculiar epistolary phenomenon of the "war godmothers", women who were assigned to correspond with a soldier on the front. If the main objective was to provide moral support to the young men at war, these exchanges often evolved into intimate conversations, confessions of love and, once returned home, into long-awaited marriages. This was the case with my grandparents.
The photos and the official postcards of the Italian Army I found in the archive make up the fragmentary mosaic of a love story that grew up between home and the front, an intimacy mediated by the propaganda images of the fascist regime.
Along with their love contract, my grandparents signed another one: never to speak again about the painful period of their youth during the fascist regime and the war.
