Comandante

“We are Italian sailors, we have two thousand years of civilization behind us, and that is how we act.” This was the answer given by the submarine commander Salvatore Todaro to the Grand Admiral of the Third Reich, Karl Dönitz, after he had rescued the crew of a Belgian merchant ship in 1940. According to the laws of war, the commander had every reason to sink the ship and did so, but according to the laws of the sea, he had to save the victims of the shipwreck and did so. It was a difficult choice. His own crew did not understand him, not even the Belgian captain, who would hardly have done so himself, although after the war this captain came to Livorno with part of the rescued crew to congratulate Todaro’s widow and to install a memorial plaque on the tombstone of his savior.

A story about human dignity and nobility, which Todaro showed and which even the commander of the English convoy was imbued with, letting his submarine pass in the direction of the Azores. Why were Edoardo De Angelis and Sandro Veronesi interested in it? You will find the answer in the preface, today the story of Comandante Todaro takes on a new sound, again war, again existential questions: is there a place for humanity in war? Why does our enemy show such total cruelty? However, on the pages of "Comandante" there is no moralizing, instead there is a wonderful story about real events and real people who made the impossible possible, about Comandante Todaro, who was called a magician, who treated back pain with yoga, read Indian treatises and learned Persian. By the way, according to other sources, his answer to Dönitz was more defiant: "Some, unlike me, do not have two thousand years of civilization behind them."

The novel "Comandante" complements the film of the same name, which premiered in 2023 at the opening of the Venice Film Festival, but the prose work reveals this story deeper and more interestingly, although conceptually it coincides with the script. That case when the film is amazingly wonderful, but the book is still better!