During the 2024 Avalanche Day in Battipaglia, an exhibition has been organized in occasion of the 80th anniversary of “Salerno Capitale”—the period from February to June 1944 when Salerno hosted the Italian government (link). Just a few kilometers away, the Greek government-in-exile also settled for a time before returning to Athens in the fall of that same year.

The exhibition will be open to visitors from September 10 to 16 at the headquarters of the Mubat association, located at Via Spineta 104, along the Battipaglia coast (inside the Spineta Hotel), right on one of the beaches that served as a landing site during the Allied invasion.

The exhibition is only a part of an ongoing project that began this year and is set to continue into the next. A collaboration is currently underway with other municipalities in the province to create a broader representation of the Italian Campaign and its origins in Salerno. For this reason, the original title of the exhibition, Salerno Capitale, has been changed to Lands of Remembrance: Salerno and the 8th Army

it was in Salerno that Togliatti made a choice which greatly influenced the events that followed. In agreement with the Soviet Union, he decided to postpone the question of the monarchy to the end of the war, considering the victory against the Germans as a priority. It was an extremely unpopular decision in his party, but he managed to compact the front that opposed the Nazi-fascists, a front which also included areas of monarchical inspiration.

The king then yielded to pressure from the allies and on 5th June he appointed his son Umberto lieutenant of the Kingdom. The change brought about the resignation of the Badoglio government, but the newfound unity of the anti-fascist front prevented a new appointment in Badoglio to which Ivanoe Bonomi was preferred. The Bonomi government was made up of important personalities such as De Gasperi, Benedetto Croce, Togliatti Saragat and with that settlement on 22nd June the path that would lead to the Constituent Assembly and the Referendum between the Monarchy and the Republic began.

The lieutenant legislative decree of 25th June 1944, n. 151. sanctioned that “the Italian population” were granted the right to elect “a Constituent Assembly to deliberate the new constitution of the State”, in order to choose “the institutional forms”.

On 8th July there was the last act in Salerno of that government with the formalization in the Official Gazette of a text of law that indicated such a process to be carried out at the end of the war.

On 15th July the Bonomi government meets again for the first time in Rome.