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is name was Ilio Capozzi. He was an Italian soldier who, after the armistice of September 1943,
1
chose
to keep fighting alongside the Nazis against the Anglo-American allies and the Italian Partisans, until
the very end: the defeat of Fascism and the liberation of Italy. Capozzi’s choice was the same as that
made by tens of thousands of young Italians who had grown up in the Fascist regime—the
balilla,
as
they were called, who followed Mussolini to his last stronghold in Salò to kill and die, as one of themwrote bit-
terly.
2
They were both guilty executioners and victims of the suffocating dark militaristic rhetoric of the times
in which they had grown up. Capozzi’s story, however, is different and extraordinary, not because of what he
did in the Second World War but because of how he ended up dying in a distant country twenty years later.
The Dominican Republic considers Capozzi a national hero. He was granted a posthumous naturalization,
soon after his death in combat in the days of the April 1965 Revolution and the following U.S. invasion. He is
buried in the central cemetery of Ciudad Nueva, in Santo Domingo, on Independencia avenue. On the tomb-
stone, a simple plaque reads: “Comandante Ilio Capocci - 1965”. The error in the name’s spelling is almost
symbolic. Little is known about Capozzi’s life in the country where he died, and almost nobody has heard of
him in the country where he was born. It is a story that deserves to be told, though, not only for its intrinsic
historical interest but also for the significance of Capozzi’s uncommon choices, still as relevant today as they
were 55 years ago.
Capozzi was born in Rome in November 1918
3
into a middle-class family with no military tradition; he
studied and became a young man during the two decades the Fascist regime lasted (1922-1943). He fought in
the Second World War, but it is unclear in which units or on which fronts. After the 1943 armistice, he chose
to enlist in a unit of the Luftwaffe, the Nazi air force, where he specialized in sabotage actions.
4
However, he
ended up fighting the Partisans, in one of the most brutal pages of the Italian civil war. When northern Italy
was liberated and the war ended, Capozzi disappeared for more than three years;
5
perhaps he was taken pris-
oner, or perhaps he went into hiding to escape the fate that befell not a few Fascist fighters: prison or summary
execution. Finally, he returned to Rome. In the 1950s, he married a primary school teacher a few years older
than himself, Elida Arcangeletti. They had two children: Annaluisa, who died as a child in 1967, and Alessan-
dro, who today is 62 years old and still lives in Rome. His skinny, hollow look reminds one of his father’s, seen
in the last photos taken during the days of the Dominican Revolution.
After several odd jobs, Capozzi in 1954 became assistant concierge of the Plaza, on Via del Corso, one of
the most upscale hotels in Rome at the time. Those were the
dolce vita
years; Alessandro remembers he once
saw a photo of his father with former Argentine President Juan Domingo Perón, the two of them sitting on
a Vespa scooter. He enjoyed good pay and good tips, but a life too quiet perhaps and a few family upsets. In
CHAPTER 19
The Choice of Freedom:
Ilio Capozzi and the 1965 April Revolution
By Giancarlo Summa
Director of the United Nations Information Center for Mexico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic
•
Photograph of
Manuel Ramon Montes
Arache with Ilio Capozzi,
Italian military, trainer
of the frogmen, 1965.
© Archivo
General de la Nación