Salerno was capital of the Kingdom of Italy for five months of 1944, hosting three different governments and King Vittorio Emanuele III.
Salerno was the seat of the Government and Royal Residence from 11 February to 15 July 1944.
In September of the year before, in Salerno and in his gulf one of the most important allied landing operations of the whole war had been carried out: the one that, in fact, took the name of “Salerno boat“.
It was 9 September, the day after the proclamation of the armistice between Italy and the Allies, date that it had to mark the end of the war and that instead it was the prelude of the most dramatic period of war and devastation for our country.
The “Operation Avalanche“, as it was called in code, saw the landing of American and British troops, under the command of the American general Mark Clark across the Gulf, from the small beaches of the Amalfi Coast that had to create bridgeheads towards Nocera, to the large beaches on the left and right of the Sele, which would have constituted the bulk of the landing.
It was a long and bloody battle, with the German troops who defended themselves with order and determination and were repeatedly on the verge of rebutting to sea the men landed. But at the end of ten days of hard fighting, the German troops retreated north of the Volturno River, making the conquest of Naples, the true and great goal of the landing, possible.
It was so that Salerno, also because the front then stopped in Cassino for a year, became the main center of government of Italy liberated and here it was decided to transfer the King and to host the Government Badoglio, which first, after the military occupation, took the administrative control of the liberated Italy, control that had until then been of the occupying military. The King went to live in Raito, in that villa Guariglia which is now a museum of ceramics, while the ministries divided between the Palazzo di Città, where the Presidency of the Council was based, and other palaces, from the Tribunal, where the Ministry of Justice was based, or the Palazzo delle Poste for the homologous ministry, or Palazzo Natella, for the Ministry of Public Works. In Salerno three different ministries were followed, two with Badoglio and one with liberal politician Ivanoe Bonomi.
It was between the second Badoglio and the Bonomi government that there was what was called “turn of Salerno”. The secretary of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti, arrived in Salerno from the Soviet Union where he had resided during the Ventennio, and announced that while waiting to liberate the whole Peninsula, the unity of all anti-fascist parties needed to be set aside the institutional question after liberation. Until then, the parties had refused to cooperate with the monarchy, which was filled with the Regime, but Togliatti made unity against privileged fascism compared to any other requirement.
With the liberation of Rome in June 1944, the capital returned the Eternal City.
During the period of “Salerno Capitale”, the Minister of Education, Giovanni Cuomo, established the Magisterium, reporting university studies in the City.