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FIRST EDITION. 26x18 cm, 322 pages.Editiorial blue cloth with golden titles. No DW. Ex Libris Fernanda De Laurentiis. One of the rarest books after WWII in Italy. An Italian tribunal ordered in 1957 to destroy this book which was in printing, and never publish it again. It contained some information considered top secret. The author was the son of Aristide Tabasso, a secret agent during the war. Aristide Tabasso died poisoned during a dinner in Verona. Few copies were not destroyed and given away. Between spies and roundups A book which is rumored to exist and does indeed exist, but among the rare is perhaps the rarest, it was seized before distribution and never appeared in bookstores, any subsequent reprinting of it was forbidden. A few copies of the original have been saved, five found in a few libraries, plus a couple of digitized copies. Very few other (original) copies have appeared on the market in recent years, and often at staggering figures for a 1957 book. The book reports the testimony of Aristide Tabasso through the pen of his son Franco. Aristide was a secret agent who was privy to the confidential relations between Italy and Britain during World War II. The war had now been over for thirteen years, but the secret and scabrous news contained in the book still made many people of the time tremble. Censorship became as sharp as a guillotine and once the book was seized and destroyed all trace of it was lost, an eye that does not see a heart that does not grieve, with the burning writing gone, the problem no longer arose. Everyone could breathe easy also because there was a ban on subsequent reprinting. An anastatic copy is on the market, with no indication of place nor publisher nor year, this too in a few copies and this too at very high prices. An "impossible" mission The main core of the work refers to Aristide Tabasso's mission, an impossible and very difficult mission, tasked by the Navy's SIS (Information and Security Service) in 1942 to steal secret plans for the attack on Europe and Italy in Massawa, Eritrea. The mission, though extremely dangerous, was successfully carried out, but was then covered up in Rome by the top leadership of the Italian General Staff. Not surprisingly, everyone recognized the great skill of the Italians as high espionage agents far superior to allies and adversaries. Aristide Tabasso's life was one full of twists and turns, dense with intrigue, filled with danger and change. His face appeared like a mask, a malleable mask ready to change shape transforming as needed. Once he completes the mission he was given, he begins a double game against the British and is handed a letter from Churchill that he will take to the King. He went to prison, in Regina Coeli, Rome, first joined the Social Republic, and then became a partisan. An infallible bloodhound, he manages to retrieve the Mussolini-Churchill correspondence, which he will deliver to King Umberto II. But the King, unfortunately, much to his chagrin, will lose the folders. The intrigue is buried and everything goes back to the bowels of the earth where it was jealously guarded. It cannot, therefore, be a simple memoir, upset the plans and bring to the surface what had been buried, or rather censor and hide the truth again. This truth will remain obscure to most because of the impossibility of reading the volume given the very few copies on the market. And yes, it was cold that night.
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