[On April 26, 1945] an eight-man partisan patrol ... walked down the mountains skirting the west shore of Lake Como to Domaso, a town near the north end of the lake. Their leader was Count Pier Luigi Bellini delle Stelle, a handsome man of twenty-two, with a mustache and a Mephistophelian beard and a law degree from the University of Florence. His father, a Cavalry colonel, had been captured by the Germans in 1944 and had died of maltreatment in prison.
The partisans around Como were Communist-controlled but neither Bellini nor his second-in-command, twenty-year-old Urbano Lazzaro, were Party members and, in fact, were strongly opposed to Communism. Like so many others in similar Communist-dominated groups, their main objective was to fight Germans and Fascists and help bring peace again to Italy.
Bellini's patrol had come to town only to get tobacco, but were surrounded by a mob which hoisted them up in triumph. The war is over! a dozen voices shouted. Bellini went into an ice cream shop and heard a radio announcer say, "The Allies have crossed the Po; the German Army is in retreat ...."
....Bellini decided to act. He wrote a letter to the commander of the nearby Fascist garrison at Gravedona, demanding surrender before 9 P.M., and then told a girl to ride her bicycle down the lakeside highway toward Como and give the ultimatum to the first soldier she met. Similar notes were sent to other Fascist and German garrisons.
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