At the local school, administered by the church and staffed by priests, the children were instructed that private property was a divinely sanctioned institution. Yet even the youngest children were keenly aware of the history of the distribution of the land around the Fucino plain: how the land had been expropriated by the new nation-state in 1871, distributed among the few politically connected families in the region while the valley of the drained Fucino was granted—seemingly in perpetuity—to the aristocratic Torlonia family by royal decree. In fact, during the years before the Great War, the delicate economic balance between agriculture and artisan sectors was thrown into crisis, not by Socialist revolution but by the development of industrial capitalism with its cheaper products. It was neither paradoxical nor surprising that private property was being destroyed not by socialism but by capitalism itself.
In September 1911, the government of Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti cynically manufactured a “crisis” with the Ottoman Empire as a pretext for war and the annexation of Libya, events that would eventually have a direct impact on Silone’s life. The Italian Socialist Party (PSI) was riven by internal debates: Should the party support or denounce the imperialist war? When the reformist and moderate Socialists voted to support the war effort, revolutionary Socialists, led by Benito Mussolini, formally expelled them and seized control of the party. The PSI, born in 1892, would one day regret the opportunity it had created for a brash and impatient Mussolini.
Four years later, war came to Italy in May 1915, almost a full year after it had broken out in much of Europe. Italy, formally linked with Germany and Austria-Hungary in the Triple Alliance, argued for a creative reading of the treaty binding the three countries together: Italy was to come to the defense of its allies only if they were attacked. Since Germany and the Austrian-Hungarian Empire were actually the aggressors, Italy proclaimed neutrality. In fact, neutrality was an overwhelmingly popular stance in Italy. Few could imagine Italy joining military ranks with Germany and even less with the traditional enemy, Austria. Although the neutrality position resonated with the population, Italian politicians immediately entered into secret talks with Britain and France, seeking the best possible terms for Italy’s participation in the war. At the same time, a small but vocal and persistent minority in Italy was calling for an immediate entry into the war. Mussolini, from his post as editor of the Socialist Party newspaper, Avanti! first argued for neutrality, then intervention. The PSI, the only European Socialist Party maintaining international solidarity by voting against the war, expelled him. Thus began Mussolini’s political pilgrimage from left to right that eventually culminated in his assumption of the prime minister’s office in October 1922. Nationalists and Futurists both perceived the war as a necessary endeavor, but for different reasons. Nationalists felt Italy had been unjustly deprived of its place in the sun and longed for colonial possessions. An 1896 expedition in Africa had ended in ignominy while the brief war with the Ottoman Empire had brought only Libya as an Italian colony. Nationalists were hungry for more. Some of the more idealistic felt that participation of the masses in the war would function as the final act in the drama of national unification begun in the nineteenth century. The Futurists welcomed war as “the world’s best hygiene” and an occasion to revel in the glories of speed, technology, flight, and violence. In Pescina, though, the war was received as one of the natural calamities that periodically befall the poor. Most realized that Italy’s entry into the war was not for idealistic or noble purposes but rather for the immediate and short-term gains afforded a small and corrupt band of inept and shortsighted politicians and their avaricious supporters. In Pescina, the war was viewed through the prism of an eternal fatalism. “The women went to church to pray for peace,” remarked Silone a half century later, “but the men knew that impatience with fate never did any good.”
At age sixteen, Silone was still too young for the call to arms, yet he was elected to be secretary of the Abruzzese Peasants’ Youth Federation. He accepted the post in part because the federation adhered to a current of socialism proclaimed at Zimmerwald in Switzerland in September 1915, where Italian Socialists had reiterated their stand against the war. The year 1917 was one of revolts and revolution for Europe and Silone. He formally joined the Unione Socialista Romana, but his first brush with the law occurred during a public demonstration protesting the transfer of the bishop’s office from Pescina—where it had been for centuries and lent the town its only measure of importance—to the nearby town of Avezzano. The transfer signaled the bishop’s and the church’s desire to be nearer an administrative center than to the poor peasants, a point not lost on the citizens of Pescina. A second revolt broke out in protest over the blatantly corrupt distribution of the wartime bread ration in Pescina. But it was the third revolt that carried the most serious consequences for Silone.
Three soldiers on leave had confronted the local carabinieri who, in the eyes of the soldiers, were paying too much attention to the wives and girlfriends of the local soldiers away at the front. (In their resplendent uniforms, the carabinieri may indeed have caught the eye of the lonely local women.) The accused carabinieri turned to their commanding officer, who had the soldiers arrested and decreed that they should be sent back to the front immediately. The mother of one of the three soldiers made a desperate appeal to Silone in his capacity as a member of the Unione Socialista Romana, and he, in turn, presented the appeal to the parish priest, the local judge, and the mayor, all to no avail. The arrogant sentence of the commanding officer, coupled with the impotence or indifference of the local authorities, sparked outrage among the townspeople. And so, with their innate sense of justice offended, the peasants were transformed into what Eric Hobsbawn has defined as “primitive rebels” initiating periodic, millennial, and rarely successful revolts against the autocratic powers that controlled their lives.
The three soldiers were detained in the local barracks, awaiting the next train back to the front. In the late afternoon, a crowd collected before the police and soon transformed itself into a mob, moving from simple shouts to throwing stones while the police responded by firing shots into the air. After several hours, the police fled to the nearby fields, the mob broke open the windows and doors of the barracks, and the three soldiers—“whom everyone had by now forgotten”—went home unobserved. Silone and the “revolutionaries” were left in control.
“What do we do now?” the other boys wanted to know from me. (My authority derived, more than anything else, from the fact that I knew Latin.)
“Tomorrow morning,” I said, “the town will certainly be occupied by hundreds and hundreds of soldiers, carabinieri, and police who will arrive from Avezzano, from Sulmona, from L’Aquila, maybe even from Rome.”
“But before they get here, what will we do tonight?” the other boys wanted to know.
“A single night evidently is not enough,” I said, having guessed what they wanted, “to create a true new order.”
“Couldn’t we take advantage of the fact that the whole town is sleeping to make socialism?” some of the others proposed. They had heard the word only recently, without grasping its meaning; and perhaps they thought that now everything was possible.
“I don’t think,” I had to answer, “I really don’t think that a single night is enough to establish socialism, even if the whole town is asleep.”
“One single night could be enough to sleep in our own bed before going to jail,” one of those present finally suggested.
And since we were tired, that advice was both timely and wise.
The spectacle cost Silone a trial and a fine of one thousand lire (several thousand dollars in contemporary numbers). One friend, less fortunate, was sent back to the front and later killed in action. Many years later, he looked back at the unfolding of events that led to the catastrophe and saw a world already in crisis. “The Great War,” he wrote in 1954, “simply revealed the fragility of the myths about progress on which capitalistic society was based.”
Silone and his cohort were born in times of momentous change. At the turn of the last century, “Italy” itself was a mere four decades old, having been unified in 1861, with Rome added to the new country only in 1871. Civil unrest coupled with (or caused by) desperate poverty, especially in the south, created a constant state of tension. Economic historians agree that conditions in the Mezzogiorno deteriorated after unification in the nineteenth century. In the year of Silone’s birth, King Umberto I was assassinated by the anarchist Gaetano Pesci. (Pesci had traveled from Paterson, New Jersey, a hotbed of Italian anarchism, to kill the king in retaliation for the massacre of striking workers by the armed forces.)
Reconstructing Silone’s early intellectual formation is no easy task. Educated in religious schools, it was the liturgy and theatricality of the church that left their mark on the young boy. “During my youth, the only music I knew was religious music; the only singing, Gregorian chant; the only spectacle was the liturgy.” But at a certain point, Silone simply stopped attending Mass. It wasn’t that church doctrines suddenly lost relevance but rather that the young boys of the town grew tired of those who were always in church. He recognized that his rebellion was similar to that of all youth against tradition and that it was rarely devoid of ambiguity (spoglia di ambiguità). Instead of priests and churchgoers, the young Silone was drawn more to the wretchedly poor peasants who often didn’t even enter the church but remained outside in the piazza. “The companions I preferred,” he wrote many years later, “were the sons of the poor peasants. My tendency not to mind my own business and my spontaneous friendships with the poorest of my contemporaries were to have disastrous consequences for me.” “That which defined our revolt,” he confessed, “was our choice of companions . . . It was not their psychology that attracted us, but their condition.” And even that choice was sometimes foreordained, because “before we choose, we are chosen, without our knowing it.”
The crisis of the war and the postwar period, combined with disgust at the events unfolding in his own town, were responsible for “a profound change” in his soul: “the conviction that in an old, exhausted and bored society,” the poor peasants “represented life’s last hope.”
In his formation as a writer, even technically, Silone insisted that most influential were his contacts and association with the peasants and workers, especially those in difficult circumstances. He confessed (or boasted) that books did not play an important role in his intellectual formation. No teacher left a lasting impression. When an adolescent, he often took a book with him while wandering the mountainside, but he rarely opened it; books were most often used to sit on the wet grass. “Even in the best books I found some things unacceptable on a first reading.” Years later, he returned to the Greek and Latin classics that he had failed to appreciate in school, while certain romantic novels that he had read surreptitiously, because they had been banned, later seemed unreadable. He developed an intellectual interest in the liberal and idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce (born in Abruzzo) as well as Sigmund Freud, and wrote, “Whatever I know of the functioning of capitalist society I learned from Karl Marx and the Italian [Marxist] Antonio Labriola.” In midlife, after the success of his first two novels, he openly confessed that he had no personal theory about art. With characteristic irony and a slight maliciousness he added, “But I admire all those who do and I find that they are all correct, even when they contradict each other.” Silone defended this apparent lack of theory by saying that if he had known he was to become a writer, surely he would have “fortified” himself with a personal theory of art. But he became a writer “by accident.” He once asserted that from the age of seventeen, immersed in political struggle, he read only works of science, economics, and history. It wasn’t until after the immense success of Fontamara in 1933 that he seriously began a study of literature. If he is to be believed, he had not even read the Sicilian realist writer Giovanni Verga.
If Silone’s political education began with his involvement in the Peasant League, it continued with his joining the Socialist Youth Movement. In Pescina, the Peasant League had met in an impressive palazzo that had been an old Franciscan convent close to the Tranquilli home until both were destroyed by the earthquake. Later, the league was reconstituted in a dilapidated hut in the poorest section of town, surrounded by pigsties and donkey stables. Rescued from the ruins of the former headquarters was a picture of Christ the Redeemer appropriately dressed in red overalls. A banner over the painting proclaimed, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” Under the painting hung the trumpet used to summon the peasants to meetings. The league attracted a few old peasants on Sunday nights. Other children were being called home by their mothers, but there was no one left to call Silone home so he often attended the meetings. “I felt strangely attracted to those poor people who, worn out by their day’s labors, came at the summons of the trumpet.” Although these were the same men one saw at church, in the fields, in the piazza, they were different here, “in the courtyard of an old Franciscan convent which in its day had been founded by another poor man, St. Francis of Assisi.” The meetings made a profound impression on the young man. There he encountered “paradoxical opinions” that became a “bitter pain and torment” for him. He joined the Unione Socialista Romana and made preparations to move to Rome. “I left at night like a thief,” he recalled many years later, “and I never dreamed that I would be away for so many years.” On his leaving Pescina, his grandmother was distraught. At whose hearth would he warm himself, she asked him plaintively. “Who will bake your bread?”
Silone described his move to Rome in late 1917 as “a sort of flight, an emergency exit from an insupportable solitude.” He likened it to a sailor who cries, “Land! Land!” upon sighting a new continent. For a lonely and melancholy youth, Rome must have seemed a frightening and overwhelming city. Silone did eventually find people with whom he could “bake bread” and share a hearth. His immersion into party politics and then the underground life would first sustain—then nearly destroy—the sorrowful young man.
In January 1921, he would be a catalyst at the birth of the Italian Communist Party. Membership in the PCI was unlike membership in any other political party. As he and others have pointed out, it was a “conversion,” a manner of living completely differently from the vast majority. “Those were times when to call oneself a Socialist or Communist meant risking everything, breaking with one’s relatives and friends and not being able to find work. The material consequences were therefore serious, and the difficulties in readjusting one’s thinking were no less painful.” The world embodied by Pescina, from which Silone had derived his first primitive instinct of rebellion, was “shaken to its foundations, as if by an earthquake.” All established truths and eternal verities came into question. “Life, death, love, goodness, evil, truth all changed their meaning or lost meaning completely.” How could he describe the private despair of a provincial youth in a squalid bedroom in the city who has lost his belief in the immortality of the soul? Unable to speak to anyone outside the party, Silone kept his despair to himself. “And so, unknown to anyone, the world changed its whole appearance for me.” Rome beckoned with its siren song of liberation. There, in the Eternal City of the popes, was a possible politics of redemption.
Silone was not a stranger to Rome, having traveled to the city with Don Orione after the earthquake of January 1915. Then, he was under the tutelage of the kind and generous priest; now, he was a young man with no visible means of support, seeking relief from the cold in St. Peter’s Basilica, and often reduced to sleeping under the baroque bridges that crossed the Tiber or in a niche of the Coliseum.
Despite his personal despair, his ascent through the political ranks of the left was astonishing: In August 1919, at age nineteen, he was elected secretary of the Unione Giovanile Socialista in Rome (USR); two months later, he was elected to the Central Committee of the Gioventù Socialista Italiana; a few weeks after that, Silone was named
to the Communist Youth International; in January 1920, he assumed direction of the Socialist weekly newspaper L’Avanguardia; at the Socialist Party congress a year later, he represented the Socialist youth wing and brought it to the newly formed Communist Party of Italy and was named to the central committee; in June, he participated in the Third International. Almost as soon as he set foot in Rome, a police file had been opened in his name. In September 1919, he was already marked as “subversive” and “dangerous.”
But the young man from the provinces was haunted by nostalgia and homesickness in Rome. An episode on Christmas Day 1920 is emblematic: Near St. Peter’s Basilica, in Piazza Rusticucci, Silone comes across a modest inn, the Taverna del Trentuno. In spite of—or perhaps because of—the proximity to the basilica, he is in mangia-prete (priest-eater) territory. A popular refrain in the neighborhood was “Abbasso preti e frati / Viva Giordano Bruno” (Down with priests and monks / Long live Giordano Bruno). Standing outside the door hungrily looking over the menu and calculating his expenses, the young man figures that if he restrains himself, he can just afford a modest meal. Entering, he finds a zampognaro, one of the itinerant wandering bagpipe players from his native Abruzzo, and is overcome with nostalgia. In the bittersweet moment, Silone is carried away and soon he is adding his contributions to those of the other—less destitute—patrons for the wandering musician. When it comes time to pay the bill, Silone is short sixty centesimi. The owner (surely in a foul mood, having to work Christmas Day) threatens to call the police. Silone humbly proposes a deal: his hat and cape in exchange for the sixty cents until the debt can be paid. Walking out into the cold streets with neither hat nor cape, Silone is desperate. Then a moment of perhaps divine illumination: Not far off is the Church of Sant’Anna, which hosts priests from Don Orione’s Order of Divine Providence. The surly porter who answers Silone’s knock says brusquely that Don Orione is indeed present but cannot be disturbed. Defeated and discouraged, Silone turns to leave, only to be brought back by the voice of Don Orione himself. They embrace and the priest thanks Silone for so unexpected a Christmas visit, but Don Orione is shrewd and can read a human soul. Embracing the young man upon his departure, the old priest coolly slips a handful of lire into Silone’s jacket pocket.
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