(by Francesco Cerri) - MADRID - On Benito Mussolini's orders, Barcelona was hit by three days of carpet-bombing of Barcelona in 1938 during the Spanish Civil War, from 10 PM on March 16 to 3:19 PM on March 18. The Savoia-Marchetti three-engined Italian bombers dropped 44 tonnes of bombs within the space of 41 hours on the population of the Catalan capital. The massacre hit women and children especially hard and killed 900 people overall, injuring some 1,500 others. The bombing of Barcelona has been almost forgotten in Italy, but is one of the worst incidents of Italian fascism under the future dictator Benito Mussolini and its involvement against the Spanish Second Republic, suffocated in the blood of the Civil War (1936-39).



A documentary by the Spanish journalist Monica Uriel presented at the Memorial Democratic della Generalitat di Catalunya in Barcelona has drawn the spotlight back to those days. The victims' families have asked Italy for an apology along the lines of the German one in 1999 for the Guernica massacre perpetrated by Nazi fighter planes, immortalized in a well-known painting by Pablo Picasso. In 'Barcelona, Ferida Abierta' ('Barcelona, Open Wound'), Monica Uriel uses archival images from the Filmoteca de Catalunya, historical analyses and the memories of a woman who was a young girl then to reconstruct the sufferings of civilians in Barcelona, one of the last pockets of resistance to Franco's advance, backed by Mussolini and Hitler. The order to ''hammer'' the 'Red' Barcelona, already attacked by the Italian sea vessel 'Eugenio di Savoia' in February 1937, came directly from the Duce in a telegram to General Velardi, head of the Aviazione Legionaria stationed in Maiorca. ''Begin tonight violent actions on Barcelona, with hammering spread out over time.'' The Marchetti-Savoia were sent over the virtually defenseless Republican city in waves, every three hours. The bombing campaign was interrupted only after international protests, on Franco's orders in another telegram to Velardi: ''Urgent.



Generalissimo orders suspension bombing''. The Barcelona attack was the first instance of carpet-bombing of a civilian population of a large European city in history. On the request the AltraItalia association of Italian in Spain, in 2013 Barcelona's Audiencia Nacional opened a criminal investigation for war crimes and asked for the Italian authorities' assistance - which, according to the lawyers for plaintiffs Newton Bozzi and Jaume Aseus, was not forthcoming.



''In 2015, the Italian judiciary ruled that the Spanish letter rogatory was over, arguing that the defense ministry 'is not able to provide' the list of Aviazione Legionaria pilots,'' Uriel said. Thus, 75 years after the Barcelona bombings, ''Italy has not yet apologized. The film ends with a meeting between Alfons Canovas, the son of José, killed by Italian bombs, and Rosina Costa, daughter of Luigi, one of the Italian pilots. ''You can forgive,'' Canovas says. ''Forget, never.''

