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When a naval history buff learns that a film dedicated to the heroic commander Todaro and his submarine Cappellini is being worked on in Taranto, reproduced specifically for filming, his eyes cannot fail to sparkle. However, a doubt immediately creeps into him: is it possible that an Italian hero of the Second World War, one who fought the war wanted by Mussolini and passed to the infamous X Maxcan be exalted in a contemporary film?

Reading the “director’s note” at the bottom of the presentation of the film, however, this sentence leaps to the eye: “The truly strong human being is the one capable of reaching out to the weak”. But is it Pope Francis or Commander Todaro? Hence the suspicion: do you want to see then that the film on Cappellini will be yet another opportunity to give us a sermon on the reception of migrants? When we then read that the screenplay of the film is by Sergio Veronesiwhich has also made a forthcoming book out of it, and says that he was inspired by the first months of the yellow-green government of 2018, suspicion becomes certainty.

While waiting to see the film by Edoardo De Angelis, which in any case promises to be compelling, let’s reconstruct some fixed points of the story from which it takes its inspiration. Italy enters the war in 1940 with the fifth Navy in the world by number of units and their size. Without radar, and without adequate coordination with the Air Force, without flotillas of torpedo bombers, but with a lot of courage and a lot of patriotism.

We are in October 1940 when the commander of the Cappellini submarine, Salvatore Todaro, sinks a Belgian freighter, the Kabalooff the Canary Islands. And he repeats a gesture already made by the Malaspina submarine of Commander Leoni on 12 August of that same year with the British tanker British Fame: he tows the launches with the survivors of the sunken merchant ship towards the first safe port. What makes the case of the Cappellini unique and heroic is that during the towing of one of the two lifeboats of the Kabalo carrying 26 men, the planking of the lifeboat broke and Captain Todaro decided to embark the castaways and sail for four days towards the island of Santa Maria of the Azores (neutral country) where they were landed. Despite the rescue of the shipwrecked, the sinking of the Kabalo will be one of the causes of the declaration of war on Italy by the Belgian government in exile.

The Todaro affair was not isolated. Of course, his humanity put the submarine at risk of sinking with all his men, but it was part of the Navy’s code of honor. A humanity perhaps also corroborated by what he will reveal Junio ​​Valerio Borghesethe commander of the X Mas, in which Todaro entered in 1942. The black prince will define him, in fact: “Singularly initiated into theosophical problems”. A man of profound spirituality, therefore, who died aboard a vessel of the Mas on December 14 of that same 1942. But also endowed with the extraordinary spirit of sacrifice characteristic of the great commanders of submarines during the war, immortalized in the splendid “Above of us the Ocean by Antonino Trizzino” (Longanesi, 1962). Just think of the equally heroic Carlo Fecia di Cossato, in command of his Tazzoli, who committed suicide in 1944, after “the ignominious surrender of the Navy”.

These figures, but also the memories of seafaring life on board the Italian submarines published close to the war (I am thinking of “A submarine has not returned to the base” by Antonio Maronari), they describe a world extremely distant from contemporary ideological manipulations. A world made up of values ​​and codes of conduct that make the operation of transforming these “Samaritan pirates” into icons of a sort of pro-migrant Italian pietas anti-historical.

Those men didn’t dream of a world without borders, identities, nations. Without weapons and without war. On the contrary, they died for a nation, to defend values ​​and borders, for ideals that today we would consider superfluous or retrograde. Or they died, like Carlo Fecia di Cossato, in the name of a “revolt against the baseness of the hour”. The hope is that, beyond the revisionisms, the film about Commander Todaro can help Italians regain possession of a history of heroism – military as well as humanitarian – largely removed. And give back to the nation those men in their authenticity, and in their apparent contradictions. Without using it to flaunt ideological concepts that they would never share.