Italo Calvino's "The Path to the Spider's Nest"

Set in a small town on the Ligurian coast during Mussolini's regime, Italo Calvino's "The Path to the Spider's Nest" is a story of a boy named Pin, who is a cobbler's apprentice. Pin gets caught up, almost unwittingly, in the battle of his times.  Pin lands up with the Italian resistance (partisans) who are engaged in war with the Germans and Mussolini's Black Brigade. But this is not a story about the war raging outside, it is above all a tale of the war and scars that each individual carries within oneself.  

Each member of the ragtag band of resistance fighters that Pin joins has his own fight: Dritto, the team's captain is a man who would like to be in command and be respected, but he knows that he is just a mere pawn in the hands of his superiors;  'Cousin' is a man who bears the scar of a wife who cheated on him and denounced him to the Germans; Pelle is an aimless and lost young man who had joined the resistance but defects later to the Black Brigade; Carabiniere is a part of the resistance to wipe out his darker past of having worked for the State.  As Kim, the Brigade Commissioner observers, these men fight not for a better future but to simply vent their hatred that is "due to a resentment they have dragged along with them since their childhood, and which may be either lively or dormant. It comes from the squalor of their lives, the filth of their homes, the obscenities they've known ever since babyhood, the strain of having to be bad. All that becomes hatred, an anonymous, aimless, dumb hatred, which finds expression in firing machine guns, making prisoners dig their own graves, and in a bitter yearning to get to grips with the enemy." 

Italo Calvino mastery lies in preserving the dark undercurrent of complex human emotions beneath the smooth surface of this simple narration of a boy searching for a true friend, one whom he will show where the spiders make their nests, but is caught up in the dramatic world of the grown-ups that seems beyond his comprehension.