I was 20 years old in February 1940, when I left my village to serve as a conscript in the King's Infantry Regiment "Red Ties of Savoy" with destination Cividale del Friuli.

I was already prepared for military life because at eighteen it was compulsory, for a period of three years, to participate in the fascist pre-military exercises which took place on Saturday afternoons in every municipality.

I was the eldest male in my large family; we were eight children and we all worked in the fields, not in the sense that we owned fields and worked them, no, in the sense that we were the ones who broke our backs in other people's fields for a handful of wheat.

How much polenta, just polenta: It was the daily menu, but once a week: fish.

But how? I thought, with all the fish that are in the rivers, why doesn't my mother cook them for us every day?

She gave me the answer: "My son, and who has the oil to fry them?".

Polenta and milk for breakfast, rice scraps in broth for lunch, polenta and vegetables from the garden for dinner.

Wine was the luxury of the celebrated holidays: Christmas, Easter, S. Luigi Gonzaga and S. Matteo, feasts of the patron saints.

It was for this reason that my father and his twenty-one-year-old eldest daughter left. To go to work in Germany for three years and eight months.

They went to collect potatoes; we worked on piecework and those were hard times, when they came back they showed us the sores on their knees from having done that work.

The joke was that the same destination awaited us without our knowledge.

It wasn't bad in Cividale, it was the usual life in the barracks: usual marches, usual rigid instruction, but it wasn't that bad given the poor living conditions I was used to in my Mantuan countryside; I was even paid: I received 0.40 cents a day which was enough for me during those eight months to go to the cinema in Cividale twice, for a few cigarettes and to wash my shirts.

On 8 October 1940, the whole regiment moved to Montenero d'Idria (Gorizia) to the "winter camp" where we were camped in the middle of the woods to prepare for the war that we already perceived was imminent.

There were many winter hardships, the winter was long, and we lived in the snow, in muddy and smelly tents, melting snow for cooking.

We stayed camped for four long months, during which life was similar to that of beasts: dirt, hardship, cold and the constant feeling of the uselessness of so much suffering.

March 1941 my war broke out.

In the spring of 1941, we set off towards the war zone and crossed the borders of Yugoslavia.

There, we were making history!

We headed towards Lubinna in Slovenia without encountering any signs of resistance from the enemy army.

Military life was now familiar, not too bad but then the whole regiment, always with long daily marches, was directed to Croatia to Gospic and Ottociaz, where we remained for two long winters, until 1943, to guard the war zones, a sort of a "peace mission", as it is called nowadays.

We had to maintain tranquility in the conquered areas by suffocating the partisan resistance of the Chetniks and Ustasha.

In May 1942 I returned home on marriage license for a month and in that month I hoped very much that in the meantime the war would end so I could stay at home. Illusion!

In the winter of 42/43 it was cold, a Siberian cold that reached -30° and the grip of the frost made us see green mice.

The guards had to be changed every 15 or 20 minutes in the post because the danger of the Croatian fire kept us busy all the time, day and night.

Maybe because I was from Mantova or perhaps just because my superiors knew my seriousness that at a certain point, I replaced the cook and had a role much appreciated by my comrades who finally ate better despite having the same horrible foodstuffs available.

In the first days of March 1943, with a Marshal, a Sergeant Major and a soldier we went to another city where the Army Corps Command was located, to collect material for our Regiment; but on the return train we were attacked by hundreds and hundreds of Partizans who had placed a mine on the tracks for a war action.

When the mine exploded, the train stopped and at the same time a crossfire of machine guns and mortar began: everything became hell. The four of us got off the train to escape and save ourselves, but the train was without an escort, there were hundreds of Partizans and we, with our small service pistols, couldn't do anything about it, so they made us prisoners.

It was the beginning of my calvary.