Pescina
In his famous autobiographical essay “Emergency Exit” (1949), Silone acknowledged that “everything that I may have written up to now, and probably everything I will write in the future, even though I have traveled and lived abroad for many years, refers only to that part of the country which can be seen from the house where I was born—no more than twenty or thirty miles in any direction.”
The people of Pescina are justly proud of their history and jealous of their cultural inheritance. For centuries the seat of the local bishop, it was the central city of the Marsica region. When the bishop fled after the earthquake of 1915, the bishopric was transferred to nearby Avezzano. Protesting this decision landed the young Silone in court facing a stiff fine. Twenty years later, when that very same bishop was scheduled to officiate over the annual first Holy Communion Mass, he found himself facing an empty cathedral. The flock had neither forgotten nor forgiven their shepherd for abandoning them.
One arrives in Pescina dei Marsi from the drained lake bed of the Fucino plain. Today, most outsiders come via the railroad from Rome, cutting through the Apennine mountain range. “When I came from Rome by the night train,” Pietro Spina recalls, “I realized I was approaching this part of the world by the slightly bitter flavor in the air.” Centuries ago, the people of the area fled the malaria and warring factions of the plain for the relative safety of the mountains. There, small towns cling precipitously to the mountains, remote and aloof, the fear of malaria and war replaced by the peril of earthquakes and wolves.
Although Silone’s childhood home was destroyed by the earthquake, the house he was born in still stands on the old via Botteghe, dark and abandoned in the ancient part of Pescina the writer called “Purgatory.” This was at the top of the hill and “made up of a hundred or more hovels and stables where only the peasants dwelt.” A half century after the earthquake, he could still paint a vivid picture of Purgatory over which reigned “the ruins of an ancient castle.” Today, one wanders amid the ruins with Silone’s words echoing off the walls: “a great rabbit warren of black peasant huts, stables for the animals carved out of the rock, a couple of churches and some uninhabited mansions.” Yet in his time, the town was alive with a persistent vitality: “At the first light of dawn, there began on our street the daily procession of goats, sheep, donkeys, mules, cows, wagons of every description and use, and peasants, making their way down to the plain for the day’s work. And every evening until late the same procession of men and animals passed in the opposite direction, showing clear signs of fatigue.”
The peasant women of Pescina used to gather water from a small spring on a street recently renamed via Poppedio Silo but that all the inhabitants of the town continued to call by its ancient name, Fontamara. Silone recalled,
I drank that water until I was fifteen. When I was small (from five to nine years old) I spent entire days by the spring with the goat or the pig. The spring was not bitter, but the life of the peasants of that neighborhood was very bitter. Fontamara was the road that led to the cemetery and the road that led to the Fucino plain.
Pescina is light-years distant from tourist Italy. Not far from L’Aquila, the town is circumscribed by the Maiella mountains and Monte Velino and situated on the left bank of the Giovenco River. In 1888, the German scholar of classical antiquity Ferdinand Gregorovius wrote that “Abruzzo” was a word that might sound harsh and strange to the ear but that the region itself was “of a singular beauty, proud and majestic . . . One could admire magnificent plateaus and rich plains of pastures and grain, and hills crowned with rocks and ancient cities, many of whose origins are hidden in the darkness of myth, all are the refuge of a hardy and industrious people.”
Silone wryly pointed out that few Abruzzesi would have recognized this portrait of themselves. Worse, the political authorities in Rome had even less of an understanding of the region, as revealed in a curious expedition of politicians and journalists from Rome in July 1909 that set out to “discover the Abruzzo.” Needless to say, Silone sardonically notes, the expedition, with its comic and grotesque overtones, failed; the accounts published in all the major newspapers of the time revealed far more about the politicians and the journalists than the people of the region. Only one writer was honest enough to admit that the explorers had discovered only their own ignorance. But the writer could not resist adding that this failure was reciprocated by the “natives” who failed to demonstrate any desire to make themselves known or to know their guests. Suspicion of the national government coupled with the mass wave of emigration meant that the peasants of the Abruzzo in 1909 knew New York and Philadelphia better than Rome or Milan.
The draining of the Fucino lake in the middle of the nineteenth century, while creating fertile farmland in the valley below (to the enormous benefit of the local lord, Prince Torlonia), was an environmental and ecological disaster for the mountain town. The lake had been responsible for retaining the little warmth necessary during the winter months to ensure the survival of a way of life; now the old olive groves were destroyed and the vineyards often afflicted with infectious diseases, with the result that the grapes oftentimes did not fully ripen. The peasants were forced to gather the grapes before the earlier frosts and snowfalls, with the result that the wine produced was “as sour as lemon juice.” Sadly, “those who produce it are condemned to drink it.” Silone always felt an insurmountable estrangement from Pescina: His depictions of the petite bourgeoisie of the small towns are so pitch-perfect because his family lived that life and shared those values. “Just because you are from somewhere,” he remarked with bitterness to Gustaw Herling, himself an exile in Naples after the war, “does not mean that you can’t be an exile from there, too.”
At the age of sixty-five, Silone could still recall with crystal-clear clarity the first time he went beyond the confines of the village. His father consented to take the young boy, perhaps not yet ten, down to work in the fields five miles from town. The experience caused him to feel that he had passed the threshold of childhood into adulthood. Leaving home before the sun was up, father and son set out silently to work. On looking back over his shoulder, Silone was granted an unexpected panorama of the town: “I had never seen it as a whole before, outside myself, with its own valley. I hardly recognized it: a pile of houses jumbled together in a crack in the barren mountain.”
Although Silone left Pescina for Rome as a seventeen-year-old youth and returned only sporadically, the town left an indelible impression on his psyche and his writing. He once returned and found a ten-year-old boy wandering the ruins of “Purgatory.” Silone had known the boy’s grandfather, the local postman. In trying to explain why he left, Silone tells the boy that life is made of choices—“some good and some less good”—and that one of his choices was to live far from Pescina. The boy, justifiably suspicious, asks, “But do you like Pescina?” As a light flickered in his eyes moist with emotion, Silone replies, “Pescina for me is everything: it is my life, it is my homeland, it is my family, it is in my dreams, it is a part of me.” Only many years later did the boy discover the identity of the old man.
Exiled in Switzerland in 1930, hounded by an increasingly bitter struggle with the Italian Communist Party and the Communist International, tormented by an exchange of letters with a Fascist police official, told by his doctors that he was fatally ill, and plagued by mental illness to the point of suicide, Silone wrote Fontamara, a poignant and powerful novel set in his hometown, “so that at least I might die among my own people.” It was a village like many others, “but to those born and bred there, it is the universe, for it is the scene of universal history—births, deaths, loves, hates, envies, struggles, and despair.”
In a 1937 letter to the German writer and translator Rainer Biemel, Silone contrasted his own mental topography of the Abruzzo with that of another native son, Gabriele D’Annunzio. Drawing from Greek mythology, Renaissance imagery, and the primitive painters, D’Annunzio has given us beautiful, marvelous, and se
nsuous—but superficial—descriptions of the Abruzzo. Comparing D’Annunzio’s Abruzzo to his own portrait in Bread and Wine, Silone wrote to Biemel, was like comparing the visible and the secret face of southern Italy.
Pescina, which had a population of no more than five thousand at the time of Silone’s birth, is like innumerable other towns in the region, each one unique yet all sharing a common history of deprivation and hardship. L’Aquila, the provincial capital, was the town of the hermit Pietro da Morrone, called to the papacy by warring factions of aristocratic Roman families, taking the name Celestine V in 1294, who would inspire Silone’s The Story of a Humble Christian (1968). Nearby Sulmona is renowned for its sweets. Cocullo celebrates the feast of St. Dominic on the first Thursday of May with a procession carrying the saint’s statue draped by a mass of live, writhing snakes. Pescina’s one claim to fame would be as the birthplace of Cardinal Jules Mazarin (born Giulio Raimondo Mazzarino), chief minister of state of King Louis XIV of France. In fact, the Mazarin house sits a mere stone’s throw from what is left of the Silone home. Two more different men can hardly be imagined. Mazarin, first apprentice then successor to Cardinal Richelieu, represented everything that Silone fought against his whole life: the arrogance of those in power, the contamination of the church with secular power and its subsequent corruption, the contempt of the ruler for the ruled.
The houses of Pescina seem to huddle together for protection and warmth. For much of the twentieth century, most were one-storied with a single opening that served as door, window, and chimney for the hearth. Some houses had unpaved floors and had to shelter not only husband and wife and several children on a massive matrimonial bed, but sometimes livestock as well. A few families of the petite bourgeoisie, like the Tranquillis, had homes of two or even three stories. In these lived the local gentry: mayor, pharmacist, doctor, schoolteacher. The more modest homes were refuge for the contadini (peasants who owned scattered pieces of land) and braccianti (day laborers without any land at all who gathered in the piazza every day seeking work).
The one main road through the town witnessed an exodus every morning as men and animals made their way to the Fucino plain below, often leaving while it was still dark. After their departure, their place would be taken by carts from the local bauxite mine, rumbling through the streets.
Ruins dominate the town. Peering down from the mountain like two haughty old aunts are the remains of the Church of San Berardo and the ravaged castle of the baronial del Balzo family. For Silone, it was a town and region poor in civic history, dominated by a Christian and medieval past. Its only monuments of note were churches and monasteries and “its only illustrious sons were saints and stonecutters.” The human condition there has always been particularly difficult, with suffering given primacy of place as “the first of natural calamities.” For those who were determined not to be trampled by fate or overwhelmed by suffering, two ideals beckoned: the humble meekness of St. Francis of Assisi or the quixotic rebelliousness of the anarchists. The mysticism of a Joachim of Fiore, in which Christian charity would replace the laws of men, found more adherents in the Abruzzo than the theoretical Marxism of Antonio Gramsci. Far from being perceived by Silone as insignificant or as a burden in a secular age, this mystic Christian tradition was of fundamental importance, which had not been sufficiently understood. It was, he insisted, “a real resource, a miraculous reserve.” The politicians were ignorant of it, while the priests feared its power. Only the “saints and stonecutters” knew it intimately.
Pescina, like all these mountain towns, has its own internal complexity, paradoxes, and irony. After having seen the mountain that hovers over the town in the distance for several hours from the town’s piazza and narrow lanes, I decided to make the ascent. Upon touching the rose-colored stone, it unexpectedly broke off in my hand. At the age of seven, Silone and his family moved to another house, near the town’s central piazza. That house was destroyed in the 1915 earthquake. Today, a local office of the CGIL, the Communist-dominated labor union, is next door. Across the piazza is a fountain built in the Fascist era. The Silone archive, donated to the town by his widow in 2000, is housed in what was once a former Franciscan convent, marking the spot where St. Francis visited the town in the thirteenth century. The convent was converted into a Fascist jail in the 1920s.
“I was born in 1900,” Silone wrote in 1940 while in Swiss exile with his typical ironic humor, “in the month consecrated to the Virgin Mother of God, roses, and donkeys. This last circumstance has, unfortunately, had a great influence on my destiny.” Silone often wrote—and biographers have often repeated—that he was born on May 1, the day consecrated by the Catholic church as a holy day to St. Joseph, patron saint of carpenters and workers, and by the Socialist parties of Europe to more contemporary workers. Surely he reveled in the fact that his birth date attempted to reconcile the two great ideologies of his life. (Yet as the town historian Diocleziano Giardini pointed out to me, Silone was actually born on April 30 and registered at the local church on May 2.) Silone’s father, presenting himself at the town hall a day after his son’s birth, wished to enter the patriotic names of Mameli or Cairoli as Silone’s given name but the mayor objected: They were not recognized Christian names. Exasperated, Paolo Tranquilli replied that they should give the infant the acceptable name of the mayor, Severino, but the town secretary, present in his official capacity, offered his own, Secondino, and so Silone was burdened with a name that roughly translates in the local dialect as “jailer.”
In an essay published in 1938 in Partisan Review, Silone insisted that his first memory of childhood went back as early as his weaning. Local custom dictated that mothers wishing to wean their children from the breast smear their nipples with coal. The unsuspecting child, when confronted with the life-nurturing breast suddenly disfigured, would recoil in horror. “I remember the combination of terror and disgust with which I discovered those mysterious marks on her maternal breasts. It was the first tragic moment of my life.” Three years later when the youngest son, Romolo, was to be weaned, Silone was a spectator at the cruel rite of passage. While Romolo wept and howled, his mother remained silent and impassive. When Silone revealed to his mother that he remembered his own weaning and how he was shocked at how she could so deceive him, she sought to defend herself by explaining that it was time for him to be weaned. The older son was neither convinced nor consoled.
In an interview with the writer Iris Origo, Silone described his mother and maternal grandmother as “two grave, remarkable women, serious and extraordinary,” the dominant influences of his childhood. That maternal grandmother would become the model for the indomitable Donna Maria Vincenza Spina in two of his novels. When Origo asked if there were any photographs of the women, Silone—perhaps sardonically—told her that photographs were a frivolity, taken only for passports and tombstones.
One summer evening in Rome, struggling to sustain a conversation, Silone asked Irving Howe when he had become a Socialist. At age fourteen in the Bronx, Howe replied. Silone burst out laughing, “You too!” Although separated by thousands of miles of ocean, the melancholy boy from the Abruzzo and the Jewish kid from the Bronx recognized that “some thread of shared desire had linked our youth.”
Silone often switched between the two registers of tragedy and comedy when writing about his own life. In 1940, he joked that “there were three great events of my adolescence: the appearance of Halley’s Comet with the expectation of the end of the world; the epic war against the Turks for the conquest of Tripoli; and the cholera epidemic of 1911. When I have learned to write a little better than I do now and above all when the fear of those events has passed, perhaps I will recount them.”
Secondino was the third of seven children. His father, Paolo Tranquilli, was a small landowner and the youngest of seven brothers; his mother, Marianna Delli Quadri, was a weaver. From his father, Silone inherited a stubborn nonconformism and a burning rage against all forms of injustice. Once, seated at the front st
eps of the family home, Silone witnessed a forlorn man being dragged away by the police. The young boy was amused by the spectacle and turning to his father said, “Look how funny he is!” Paolo Tranquilli was furious. Pulling his son to his feet by his ear, the father admonished him to have pity on the miserable wretch. “What have I done wrong?” asked the child. “Never make fun of a man who’s been arrested!” the father insisted, “Never!” “Why not?” “Because he can’t defend himself,” replied the father. “And because he may be innocent. In any case, because he’s miserable.”
Paolo Tranquilli came from a family that was not desperately poor, possessing land in the Fucino plain. Silone once described his father as “the most restless” of the seven brothers, “the only one with any proclivity to insubordination.” These men were “tall, strong and solemn, the oldest wearing long beards, and they all had huge feet and powerful knees, shoulders and hands. In spite of age and comfortable family circumstances, they continued to do the hard labor themselves; they drove the wagons, they guided the plows and supervised the threshing. The need to work seemed a physical necessity for them.” The family enjoyed a standard of living considerably more fortunate than the overwhelming mass of peasants in the town. As Silone himself admitted, his orientation toward progressive ideas and toward the poor developed in direct contradiction to the dominant psychology of his origins. The phylloxera epidemic of 1908, which wiped out the family vineyard, along with the mysterious deaths of a few head of cattle, spelled economic ruin. Economic considerations, along with his innate nonconformism and status as the youngest of seven brothers, goaded Paolo Tranquilli to emigrate. Unlike most of the Abruzzesi, he decided to try his fortune in Brazil. But when Paolo Tranquilli stepped off the boat in Rio de Janeiro, he was confronted with the spectacle of striking workers being beaten by police. The police, in addition to assaulting the workers, appealed to the newly arrived Italians to accept jobs at lower wages. Disgusted, Paolo Tranquilli took the next boat back to Italy. He died in 1911, three years after his return. Silone was eleven.
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