Civitella in Val di Chiana

• 1. Introduction

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  Civitella in Val di Chiana sits on a hillside in the province of Arezzo, in Tuscany, and its streets still trace the outline of a fortress that Lombard soldiers built more than fourteen centuries ago. The town walls follow that same characteristic elliptical shape the Lombards chose when they planted their military settlements across central Italy in the 6th and 7th centuries. Walk the perimeter today and you are walking the blueprint of an early medieval garrison. But the town's history is not only ancient. On the 29th of June 1944, soldiers of the Hermann Goering Division killed 244 of Civitella's citizens in a single day. What drove those soldiers to that valley? Who were the people they killed? And what has the town done in the decades since to hold that memory in place?

• 2. From Rome to Florence

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  Civitella was already settled in Roman times before the Lombards arrived and fortified the hill in the 6th century. Their choice of site was deliberate: the position commanded the whole surrounding territory. By the 11th century the town had passed to the Bishops of Arezzo, who renamed it Civitella del Vescovo, meaning Little Bishop's City. That ecclesiastical chapter ended when war between rival cities reached the valley. In the 13th century Civitella was destroyed in the aftermath of the battle of Pieve al Toppo, a clash between Arezzo and Siena that Dante Alighieri cited in his writing. Arezzo's defeat at Campaldino in 1289 then delivered the town to Florence. Arezzo managed to recover Civitella in 1311, but held it only until 1348, after which it remained the seat of a Florentine podesta, the governor Florence appointed to administer its subject towns. That chain of conquests left Civitella with a layered identity: Lombard walls, a bishop's name, and a Florentine administrator, all stacked on a Roman foundation.

• 3. The Massacre of 1944

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  On the 29th of June 1944, soldiers of the Hermann Goering Division moved through Civitella and killed 244 of its citizens. The official reason given was retaliation: partisans had killed two German soldiers, and the division responded by executing civilians. The scale of the killing transformed the town's relationship with its own existence. In 1963, nearly two decades after the event, Italy awarded Civitella the Gold Medal for Civilian Valour, one of the country's highest honors for communities that suffered under occupation. A local writer named Enzo Gradassi later set down an account of the events that led to the massacre, focusing on two figures identified in the source as the Swede and Giovanni Cau. The town council eventually opened a room of memories so that visitors could engage with what happened that day.

• 4. Justice Across Borders

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  Accountability for the massacre came slowly and ran into the limits of international law. On the 10th of October 2006, an Italian military court in La Spezia convicted SS officer Max Josef Milde for his role in the Civitella killings and in similar events at San Pancrazio. Two years later, in October 2008, the Italian Court of Cassation ruled that Germany was to pay one million dollars to 203 identified victims of the massacre. That judgment, however, did not stand. The International Court of Justice subsequently ruled that Italy was obliged to void the award, on the grounds that enforcing it against Germany would violate the doctrine of state immunity. The ruling meant that the victims who had been named in the Italian court's decision received no payment, and the legal boundary between individual accountability and sovereign protection was drawn in a way that left the outcome unresolved for the families of those 203 people.

• 5. Stones and Scars

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  The Castle of Civitella was erected in 1048 and for centuries stood surrounded by a massive line of walls. During World War II the German army used it as a headquarters, and in 1944 an Allied bombing raid destroyed it. It has never been rebuilt, and its absence from the skyline is itself a kind of record. The church of Santa Maria Assunta has a longer and more repaired history: founded in the 11th century, it was completed in Romanesque style in 1252, restored in 1765, and enlarged in 1875. In 1934 two small side naves were added, only to be rebuilt again after the air raid of 1944 damaged them. The Palazzo Pretorio dates to the 14th century, a period when Civitella was moving between Aretine and Florentine hands. The town's cemetery holds the grave of Muriel Spark, the Scottish novelist, who made Tuscany her home in her later years and is buried in the hillside ground she chose.

• 6. A Town With Sister Cities

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  Civitella in Val di Chiana is twinned with Kampfelbach in Germany and with Ain Beda in Western Sahara. The pairing with a German municipality, given the events of 1944, carries a weight that purely geographic or economic partnerships rarely do. The Gold Medal for Civilian Valour that Italy awarded in 1963 recognized what the town endured; the twinning with Germany represents a different kind of reckoning, one conducted across a municipal rather than a judicial border. The room of memories that the town council opened, and the cemetery where Muriel Spark now rests, both suggest that Civitella has become a place where the distance between past and present is measured in walking distance rather than in years.