Word: dongo
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After almost four months and nearly a million words of testimony from 381 witnesses, Italy's famed Dongo trial came to a melancholy stop. The government had been working hard to show that the Italian Communist Party had shot and knifed its way into illicit control of "the gold of Dongo"-the $90 million treasure that Mussolini was carrying at the time of his capture and killing by partisans in April 1945 (TIME, June 24). Last week, with about 30 more witnesses to be heard from, one of the seven blue-ribbon jurors. 62-year-old Silvio Aldrighetti...
...morning in late April of 1945, a military convoy snaked its way through a thin rain along the tortuous mountain road that winds from Milan along the side of Lake Como to the Swiss frontier. Near Dongo, 30 miles from the Swiss border, the lead armored car was stopped by a roadblock. Italian partisans, members of the fabled 52nd Garibaldi Brigade, began their search. One of the things they found was a grotesque figure of a man in a swastika-marked helmet with a German corporal's greatcoat draped over his black-shirted Fascist uniform. Two days later...
...Remember." Though the Gold of Dongo has never since been seen, all Italy knows what happened to it: it went to Italy's Communist Party (whose headquarters in Rome is still popularly known as Palazzo Dongo). For more than a decade, in the face of persistent Communist stonewalling, successive Italian governments have been trying to unravel the intricate series of thefts and murders by which the Reds managed to get the treasure out of the hands of the partisans to whose care it was originally entrusted. Nearly two months ago in the marbled Palace of Justice at Padua...
...been a sordid tale of stolen treasure changed to something more tragic. One after another, a series of sad-voiced peasant women, somber in mourning black, told of the disappearance of their sons or husbands, all of whom had known Gorreri-and too much about the Gold of Dongo. Among them was the 63-year-old mother of Luigi Canali, alias "Neri," an idealistic Communist who was murdered a week or so after he signed the original partisan inventory of the treasure. "I remember," said she, "when my son told me, 'Mama, those thieves are ruining everything. I have...
Something of Value. The Padua trial will probably not be completed for months; no one held out much hope that the bigwigs of Italy's Communist Party could ever be brought to book, much less forced to restore the Gold of Dongo. Nonetheless, in the process, Italian Communism stood to lose something of infinite value-the carefully fostered myth that no members of the Italian resistance fought the Nazis and Fascists quite so heroically and unselfishly as the Communists. Said Rome's II Messaggero: "This trial is for history...