Mario Cervi, a latter-day Corelli
What quality does a journalist who gets sent round the world as a correspondent for a newspaper or television station need? «A strong stomach,» says 81-year-old Italian journalist and writer Mario Cervi, who was in Thessaloniki last week at the invitation of the Italian Cultural Institute, which was holding an event about the real Captain Corelli. And how does a love story born in the flames of war get made into a book or film? «First, the protagonists have to want it to happen,» says Cervi. For years Cervi and Indro Montanelli, who died last year, were a famous duo. Now he writes articles for a newspaper published by the brother of Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, and says he can’t talk about that: «I’m not neutral, I belong to a circle close to the Italian prime minister.» With many successes to his credit, Cervi is the most suitable person to attend the meeting, since he has had similar experiences to the fictional Corelli. An officer in the Italian army, Cervi was in Greece during World War II. Escaping from the Germans, he sought refuge with a Greek family, fell in love with the daughter, was recaptured and taken to a concentration camp. When the war was over, he returned to Athens to get the woman and take her back to Italy, where they still live together. Cervi told the story, recounting the tumultuous war years in the first person. He was mobilized after the Greek-Italian war and sent as an infantry officer to a regiment charged with guarding the coast of occupied Greece. At the armistice of September 8, he was serving in Athens. He was arrested by the Germans but managed to escape while they were marching him away. «I went to an Italian engineer that I knew. He kept me for a few days and he and a doctor friend of his introduced me to other people. That’s how I ended up at the house of a family in Pangrati; it was the family of my wife to be.» It was a time of terrible hunger, but the family still kept him and protected him. «It was 1944. Then one day, since the people who had kept me and looked after me were in danger, I presented myself to the Germans, but I didn’t tell them I was an officer.» They sent him to do forced labor in Germany, but during the journey to Vienna, typhus broke out on the train, perhaps because the prisoners had been in contact with Russian captives. The disease is usually fatal, but Cervi survived. He didn’t forget his experiences, and when returned to Athens in 1946 he married the daughter of the family that had helped him. Among the many essays he later wrote is «The History of the War in Greece,» which has been translated into English and published in England and the United States. It casts the Greek army in a heroic light. «The Greek-Italian war is one of the darkest pages in Italy’s military history. It was a useless, shameful war that had negative consequences,» he says. Though his life could easily be made into a screenplay, he rejects the suggestion with surprise. As for the much-discussed film «Captain Corelli’s Mandolin,» which was filmed in Cephalonia and attracted a lot of criticism, Cervi comments that films are not historical documents. A film might be based on real events, but being spectacle, it then resorts to fantasy. Cinema and fiction are beautiful, but they are not reality. As Cervi sees it, reality is something else – much tougher and more complicated. Furthermore, following the Olympics funds will be available for public works outside Attica, developing the property market in other towns at Attica’s expense.
