In 2004, Silvio Berlusconi’s government introduced the “Memorial Day” in honor of “Italian Exiles and the Victims of the Foibe.” The commemorations are devoted to Italian refugees who left Yugoslav territory between 1945 and 1960, as well as those killed in the wave of violence following the armistice — known as the foibe, after the sinkholes where many bodies were buried. This “Memorial Day” continues to be marked each February 10, two weeks after International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

For almost two decades, the official pageantry around Memorial Day has served a far-right bid to present a parallel genocide of Italians, supposedly ignored by historians during the Cold War era. Revisionist historians and right-wing ideologues speak of the 4,500 dead and 250,000 refugees as victims of “savage Communist violence.” Each mention of Fascist crimes is sure to prompt right-wingers to mention this forgotten genocide, as if to balance out the Mussolini regime’s own record of mass murder.

Historian Eric Gobetti’s book E allora le foibe? (But what about the foibe?), published earlier this year, seeks to push back against this now pervasive narrative. Investigating the actual mechanisms of the postwar violence, it puts what happened in its proper context. The Yugoslav partisans did not fight a “genocidal” war against Italians as Italians; their violence was directed against members of a fascist regime and ruling class that had invaded Yugoslavia in 1941 in alliance with Nazi Germany.