A form of
historical revisionism which emerged under the
post-war republic, it was argued that Italian soldiers had been "good" or "decent people" (
brava gente) who had acted with humanity and compassion, supposedly inherent Italian values, in contrast to their ideologically motivated and brutal
German allies. In particular, it argued that the Italians had not participated in, or even had opposed, the
Nazi persecution of Jews in occupied parts of Eastern Europe.
Hannah Arendt supports the myth by maintaining that
Italian Jews had been protected by the "general, spontaneous humanity of a people of ancient civilization". By extension, the term is sometimes applied to describe popular beliefs about the
Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–36) or non-Jewish responses to
the Holocaust in Italy. The concept is based on the benevolent characteristics of the Italian people, such as to make them potentially immune from inhumanity towards the enemy in war or towards colonized nations, and capable of guaranteeing Italians special indulgence in return from other peoples.
Pierluigi Battista defines it as: In contrast with Battista and others who trace the rise of the myth to the post-World War II period,
Angelo Del Boca points out that its origins are older and date back to the beginning of
Italian colonial expansion (1885), in which the country, the last to start it among the European powers, programmatically attempted to show itself different, more human, a bringer of civilization, strong as it was in its history. This led to the affirmation of the phrase, distorted by the
Eritrean population, of
bono italiano ('good Italian'). ==In popular culture==