WE, THE ALPINI
The tallest man in the 77th Company: from Montenegro to Toulon, from the Col de Tende to Salce, and then a life given to his village
He stood one metre eighty, and no one in his company was taller. It was his captain, Gaudenzio Campanella, who gave him the nickname that stayed with him all his life: «Velico», a word that, as his testimony explains, «in Slavic means precisely the tallest». That is how the Col Maòr remembers him: in 2005 it recorded his testimony, and in 2010 it said farewell to him as a founding member of the Group, a veteran and a survivor of the war.
From Vittorio Veneto to Salce
Silvio Toffoli was born in Vittorio Veneto on 11 June 1921. In 1939 he came to Salce with his family and his seven brothers and sisters, to farm land owned by the Giamosa estate. He hardly had time to settle in: on 25 January 1940 he was called up.
On 14 January 1941, after training, he was assigned to the 77th Company of the «Belluno» battalion, 7th Alpini Regiment. By May he was a corporal. The Col Maòr also records his service number, 9665, and two crosses of merit.
Montenegro
On 16 October he embarked at Bari and landed at Kotor, bound for Montenegro. His unit operated around Bioče, some fifteen kilometres from Podgorica, against the Yugoslav partisan formations, and guarded the Italian concentration camp where prisoners were held.
In his 2005 testimony Silvio does not hide the harshest side of that war. It was there that he saw the first dead: the bodies of soldiers of the Val Natisone battalion, which had been cut off and which his unit was meant to relieve. From December 1941, attached to the 249th Company of the Val Leogra battalion, he took part in sweep operations reaching up to 120 kilometres deep. In one of them some seventy comrades were captured; only thirteen managed to escape, in June 1942, and on their return they had to undergo a long interrogation. In the sweeps of spring 1942, he recalls, men captured with weapons were shot, while the unarmed were sent to the camp.
Toulon, Monte Carlo, the Col de Tende
On 20 August 1942 the unit returned to Italy. From Turin, in mid-November, it was sent to Toulon on the French coast, under Lieutenant Colonel Giovanni Lucchetta, to fit the beach with concrete beams against landings.
The armistice of 8 September 1943 caught him in Monte Carlo. From there the journey home began: the Col de Tende, where on 12 September he managed to obtain civilian clothes; then, in small groups, each man on his way home. To avoid Belluno station, watched by those looking for scattered soldiers to enlist them for the Third Reich, he got off earlier and walked the last stretch. At midnight on 15 September he was in Salce.
«But the most dangerous period», he confided in 2005, «I spent here in Belluno, from 8 September ’43 until the end of the war»: a mere suspicion was enough to put one’s life at risk.
Work, the village, the Group
After the war he went back to farming, at Cerentin in Col di Salce. In 1966 he joined Comedil in Ponte nelle Alpi, where he worked until he retired in 1982.
The Col Maòr describes him as a man who was always there when the village needed him. A volunteer of the «Scola dei Mort», he looked after the cemetery for many years; he was an administrator of the village dairy cooperative; and he was one of the founders of the «Mutua delle vacche», the cattle mutual of Salce that from 1960 helped families who lost an animal, sitting on its first board. He went hunting until he was eighty.
He was a founding member of the Gruppo Alpini of Salce. In 2000 the Col Maòr photographed him in Possagno with Luigi Serafin, a comrade from the «Belluno» found again after fifty-seven years; in 2002 it told of his meeting with Martino De Toffol, also of the 77th, seen again after sixty years. At the assembly of 27 November 2005 he received the certificate for the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war, among the Group’s veterans.
The village’s «living memory»
In October 2010 the Col Maòr remembered him with these words: Salce was losing «an important member who represented the “living memory” of our village», and the Group an exemplary member who had given the best years of his youth «to build a free Italy, an Italy of solidarity».
What remains of Silvio Toffoli is a war testimony told without rhetoric, a photograph of a young Alpino and the mark he left on the institutions of his village. If you hold other photographs, letters or memories of «Velico», please write to the Gruppo Alpini Salce: every piece of information will be checked before it becomes part of the story.
📚 From the papers of memory
- Roberto De Nart, «La testimonianza di Silvio Toffoli — Con il 7° Alpini in Jugoslavia nel 1941-42», Col Maòr no. 2, June 2005 (in Italian), p. 8.
- C.E., «Ricordando Silvio Toffoli — Socio fondatore, ex combattente e reduce», Col Maòr no. 3, October 2010 (in Italian), p. 3.
- «I nostri ex combattenti», Col Maòr no. 4, December 2005 (in Italian), pp. 8-9.
- Paolo Tormen, «La mutua dei bistian», Col Maòr no. 1, March 2005 (in Italian), p. 6.
- Col Maòr no. 5/2000, p. 7 (Possagno, with Luigi Serafin) and no. 4/2002, p. 7 (meeting with Martino De Toffol), in Italian.
