Letter from Rome/Paddy Agnew: Early one morning in mid-June 1940, Fascist police came knocking at the door of the Pirani family in Via Marche, Rome. The police had an urgent communication for the family, telling them that Mr Pirani was to be sent into internal exile in an isolated part of faraway Basilicata in southern Italy.
A few days earlier, on June 10th, Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had declared war on the Anglo-French Allies.
The alleged crime for which Mr Pirani was being sent into exile was that he had been seen and heard some nights earlier in a Roman restaurant, drinking a toast to the salvation of Nazi-occupied France. The Piranis were also Jews.
As a successful lawyer and a first World War veteran, Pirani snr was not without contacts, both in the Vatican and among some less hardline members of the Fascist hierarchy.
He gathered together his family - wife, three children, two sisters (who had lost their jobs because of the 1938 anti-Jewish Racial Laws) and mother - and headed off to the provincia of L'Aquila in central Italy.
That was the beginning of a four- year-long odyssey through tiny villages in the Abruzzo and onto Pescara on the Adriatic coast.
They lived sometimes in "friendly" homes, sometimes in the parish priest's house and even, as Nazi SS troops closed in at one dangerous moment, in a cave along with other desperate fugitives.
For the Pirani family, harrowing though their experience was, things worked out well. They escaped the SS and thus avoided being sent to Auschwitz or Buchenwald.
At least 5,900 Italian Jews were not so lucky, dying in concentration camps after being deported by Nazi-German and Italian forces. According to Liliana Piciotto's The Book Of Memory, more than 7,800 Italian Jews were deported during the second World War.
Of these, 2,444 were arrested by the Germans, 1,951 arrested by Italian forces and 332 arrested in joint Italo-German operations.
Furthermore, of the 332 Jews who died in Italy, 102 were arrested by the Germans, 33 by the Italians and 10 jointly.
The need to recall the above figures and indeed the need to retell the tale of life on the run for the Pirani family (recalled by journalist Mario Pirani, who was 15 at the time the Fascist police came knocking at his father's door) were recently offered by way of riposte to a remarkable assertion by the Italian Prime Minister, Mr Silvio Berlusconi.
In an interview with English journalists Nicholas Farrell and Boris Johnston - an interview which Farrell stands over, having taped it - Mr Berlusconi allegedly said: "Mussolini never killed anyone. Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile. His was a much more benevolent dictatorship (than that of Saddam Hussein)."
Barely were the prime minister's words in print (in La Voce Di Rimini) and inevitably the Jewish community, intellectuals and historical institutes registered vigorous protests.
"The (Italian) Fascist regime did not make extermination camps for the Jews but certainly it contributed to creating them," Amos Luzatto, president of the Italian Jewish community, said.
In an appeal signed by writers, journalists and academics, it was argued that Mussolini's racial persecution was merely the most "repugnant" aspect of a dictatorship that was marked by the violent repression of the opposition, the abolition of individual and collective freedoms and the destruction of "all forms of democracy".
Mussolini's alliance with Hitler and the subsequent "folly" of Italy's entry into the war were tragedies which hit the entire Italian people, the statement concluded.
So then, was this just another of Mr Berlusconi's celebrated gaffes? Or did he mean what he said?
Are we looking at the first stages of an ongoing process, aimed at rehabilitating Mussolini, just as Mr Berlusconi himself back in 1993 rehabilitated the MSI, the party that was heir to the Mussolini tradition and which is now a senior government partner under the name of Alleanza Nazionale?
Is it true, as latter-day apologists for Mussolini claim, that the regime enjoyed widespread popular consensus?
Even if this were true, does this in any way justify its co-responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust?
In the age of televisual, mass-media, populist democracy, these might well be questions which a younger generation of Italians would do well to consider.
"For, what is the worth of human life unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?" (Cicero, Orator)