As dusk fell on the evening of October 12, Silone, accompanied by Darina and flying with the old Socialist deputy Giuseppe Emanuele Modigliani and his wife, Vera, on an American military plane, landed at the Capodichino airport in Naples. In an interesting twist of historical fate, the pilot was Serafino Romualdi, a longtime labor organizer in the United States, now proudly wearing the uniform of his adopted country. Romualdi, born near Perugia the same year as Silone, was compelled to abandon Italy for America in 1923 because of his opposition to fascism. In July 1941, Romualdi had visited Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, where as a representative of the Free Italy Committee he directed a campaign to enlist the Italian population in those countries to the side of the Allies. He also worked closely with the Committee for the Political Defense of the Continent, whose main objective was to counteract the activities of Nazi and Fascist agents.
Romualdi had joined the Office of Strategic Services in May 1944 and was handpicked by Allen Dulles to pilot the plane. We don’t have a record of Silone’s conversation with Romualdi (probably difficult over the roar of the plane’s engines), but Silone and Darina did witness a poignant scene at the airport: Modigliani, with his imposing beard evoking an Old Testament prophet, tired from the long trip that had begun early in the morning at Annecy, was sitting on the sidewalk waiting for the military car that was to pick up the small group. A woman spotted him, clearly an exile but so full of human dignity that she practically knelt in front of him. This scene “gave us the impression,” Silone later wrote, “that we had not fully understood the significance of what was happening. In that old man with the great beard, she had seen Padreterno [God] defeated, humiliated, a power dispossessed.”
Although he didn’t learn of it until much later, a few days after their return to Italy a peasant revolt broke out near Pescina in Ortucchio. On October 16, peasants armed with nothing more than farm tools demonstrated for the distribution of the fertile land of the Fucino plain. The carabinieri shot into the crowd, killing one Domenico Spera (ironically, spera signifies “he who hopes”) and wounding eight others. On May Day six years later, another peasant revolt near Pescina, this one in Celano, was put down with violence. Prince Torlonia had at his disposal not only the carabinieri but also the local police, communal guards, and die-hard Fascists. The demonstrators threw stones; the authorities responded with bullets. Three peasants were killed. The violence led to a debate of the land question in parliament where, on February 7, 1951, a decree was passed effectively dismantling the Torlonia estate and distributing the land to local peasants. Less than twenty years after the publication of Fontamara, the peasants’ millennial cry of “land to those who work it” had become a reality.
Other endeavors were not as successful. Silone’s first order of business in Rome was a meeting with the leader of the PSI, Pietro Nenni. In his diary, Nenni recounted the meeting as being very warm and affectionate with a clearly emotional Silone. Nenni claimed that Silone wished to make it clear that he considered Nenni the leader of the PSI, he agreed with the task of unifying the PSI and the PCI, and he placed himself at the services of the party. If the PSI could find no place for Silone, he agreed he would go back to writing. Nenni made note of three points: Silone reminded him that his brother Romolo had died in a Fascist prison as a Communist; that Angelo Tasca’s descent into collaboration with the Vichy regime convinced Silone to rein in his anticommunism; and that a policy and politics of fusion between socialism and communism was the only way to avert a third world war.
In truth, either Nenni misunderstood or Silone was insincere. While the fusionist program seemed imminent—on November 7, 1944, the party daily newspapers Avanti! for the Socialists and Unità for the Communists published a single, combined issue commemorating the twenty-seventh anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution—Silone, Modigliani, and Giuseppe Saragat continued to work against a fusion of the PSI and the PCI.
Both Socialists and Communists saw Silone as critical to their cause. For their part, the Communists decided to hold their fire. Togliatti declared that “it depends entirely on him. We will attack him if he attacks us.” When Silone returned to the Abruzzo for the first time since his exile, the PCI of Avezzano organized a reception in his honor with the Communist cell of Pescina given a place of honor at the ceremonies. In the strategy of the PCI, peace with Silone was necessary to forge an alliance with the Socialists. Besides, the official line went, Silone was no longer really a Marxist; he had degenerated into Christian spiritualism and mysticism but was to be respected as an elderly relative with dementia is to be respected at family gatherings. When Ruggero Grieco offered an olive branch in the form of an invitation to join an “Alliance of Democratic Writers,” Silone refused, thereby earning the wrath of PCI intellectuals. Writing in early 1945 to the still-exiled Gaetano Salvemini, who was then teaching at Harvard University, Ernesto Rossi concluded that if Silone and Modigliani had not arrived in Rome when they did, the Socialists would have fallen into the Communist “embrace.”
In the voting on June 2, 1946, to create a Constituent Assembly and decide on a republic, Silone was elected a representative of the Abruzzo on the PSIUP list, receiving 929 votes in Pescina. He spent much of his time fending off innumerable requests for the notorious “letter of recommendation” that would magically open doors to the coveted posto, or fixed employment for life. One 1946 document reveals that there were, though, more humble requests. A schoolteacher from Pescina wrote to Silone describing the plight of her students, most of whom had no shoes for the winter. After a shipment of shoes arrived, her poignant letter, with the signatures of her students and their mothers and their profuse thanks, found its way to Silone’s office in Rome.
To the Honorable Ignazio Silone,
The distribution of the shoes has been carried out. You cannot imagine the joy of the parents for such a blessing received for their children. With a soul profoundly moved and grateful, we send blessings and thanks to you and your dear spouse. Sending their affectionate greetings, in testimony of your kindness, through their individual signatures,
[Here followed the humble signatures of thirty women from Pescina.]
It was one of the few pieces of correspondence from his political career that he kept in his archive. But the pettiness, venality, and corruption of the postwar period sent him into a serious despondency and he refused to stand for the pivotal election of April 18, 1948, which ushered in decades of Christian Democratic rule. He did return once more halfheartedly to the electoral fray as a candidate for the PSDI (Italian Social Democratic Party) in June 1953 and was resoundingly defeated.
Meanwhile, “post-Fascist” Italy stumbled early and badly. When King Vittorio Emanuele’s choice to replace Mussolini, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, resigned in June 1944, the veteran moderate Socialist Ivanoe Bonomi took his place. Bonomi would last one year, his fall engineered by both Socialists and Communists two days after the liberation of Italy from Nazi occupation (April 25). In June 1945, Ferruccio Parri of the Action Party attempted to pull Italy out of its Fascist past. A compromise candidate, Parri had fought valiantly in the underground Resistance. When Pietro Nenni was proposed as prime minister, the Christian Democrats vetoed the idea, so Nenni and the liberal Manlio Brossi became vice prime ministers; Palmiro Togliatti of the PCI was named minister of justice; and Alcide De Gasperi, who sought refuge from the war in a Vatican library and was now head of the Christian Democrats, was given the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But before the end of the year, sabotaged by the conservative Christian Democrats, Parri fell from power.
Silone, though, was already thinking and writing about the problems of postfascism. In July 1944, a legislative decree created the High Commission for Sanctions Against Fascism. Directed by the veteran liberal diplomat Carlo Sforza, the commission was actually composed of four separate entities: one was charged with the administration of property confiscated from the Fascists; another was to sequester profits from Fascists; a third to prosecute prominent Fascist party o
fficials; and the fourth, under the Communist Mauro Scoccimarro, to purge Fascists from the government. A week before the liberation of northern Italy, Silone, by ministerial decree, was nominated to the central committee for the purge of Fascist journalists. Torn by a desire to sweep Italy clean of its Fascist past but wary of a commission that was in danger of fomenting its own inquisition (or perhaps mindful of his own murky past with Bellone), Silone wavered for two weeks. With the memory of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s still fresh in his mind, on his forty-fifth birthday, May 1, 1945, Silone resigned from the commission. But nearly a year later, he cryptically wrote in the PSI newspaper that “we should not pretend that the work of the purge has left everyone disappointed.”
Another postwar phenomenon he criticized was the ubiquitous presence of so-called anti-Fascists who, until July 1943, had supported Mussolini’s regime. As in France, where after the liberation, suddenly everyone claimed to have participated in the maquis, the ranks of the Italian Resistance suddenly seemed to be overflowing. Nor was Italy to be saved by Marshall Plan dollars. In a June 1945 speech broadcast over radio, Silone insisted that “the Truth could save us,” but his adamant and intransigent stance on many issues was seemingly naïve when the postwar period was to be shaped by questionable compromise and political intrigue.
Indeed, an article published in the Socialist daily Avanti! on October 27, 1945, caused an uproar in Italy. Titled “Superare l’antifascismo” (Overcoming [or, Going Beyond] Antifascism), Silone argued that it was necessary to detach Italian life from the negative attitude of antifascism and orient it toward solutions for a post-Fascist Italy. Two weeks later, in a speech in Salerno, he charged:
Many of us have remained prisoners of an anti-Fascist mentality and even a pre-Fascist mentality, but the very difficult problems that we must solve are those of postfascism. Most of us lack this post-Fascist mentality; what is missing, in fact, is the intellectual and moral foundation to overcome fascism and confront—with a unified agreement of will—the problems of welfare and liberty that are at the root of our current needs. If we are not cognizant of this, we will be ruined; not only the ruin of a personal anti-Fascist politics, but what is far more important, the ruin of the country.
A related problem was what to do with ex-Fascists. Almost alone on the left, Silone warned against pushing the ex-Fascists into the embrace of neofascism. Caught between two radically different currents—one that advocated a total purge of former supporters of Mussolini’s regime and one that advocated a quiet absorption of former Fascists into the body politic—Silone was left stranded. “Let us leave the dead to bury the dead,” he said, “and let us pose before public opinion in Italy the real problems of today and the future, inviting Italians to argue among ourselves about these problems.”
Three years later in an interview with Giovanna Santostefano published as “Umanesimo tragico di Silone,” he confessed that antifascism had always “gotten on my nerves” and that “there have been and there are still Italians who know only how to be anti-Fascists and Italians who know only how to be Fascists. Italy has no need for either the former or the latter.”
In January 1946, Silone and Pietro Nenni, who had spent most of the last decade battling each other over the fate of the PSI and whether or not it should fuse with the PCI, traveled together to London, guests of the British Labour Party, to informally discuss the peace treaty being drafted between Italy and Britain. Darina accompanied them as translator. Silone, who had immensely enjoyed the airplane flight from Switzerland to Naples in October 1944, was so terror-stricken by the mirror-smooth English Channel that he spent the short voyage in their cabin. Italy’s new ambassador to Britain, Count Nicolò Carandini, hosted a dinner for the Italians to introduce them to Prime Minister Clement Attlee and members of the British government. After the first course, Silone rose from the dinner table, bowed formally, and apologized: “Gentlemen, excuse me; I have an important engagement.” He left, to the surprise of all present. What could have been more important than the first, tentative exchanges after war? In truth, Silone and his English translator Eric Mosbacher slipped away to watch an Arsenal soccer match.
Silone’s behavior was quite different for another visitor. The Labour Party had reserved rooms for Silone and Nenni at a modest hotel, but Ambassador Carandini had reserved a room at the embassy for Nenni, and a room for the Silones at the Savoy Hotel. There, George Orwell paid them two visits and invited them to dinner. During the war, Orwell had worked on a BBC production of Fontamara. Later, he adapted Silone’s short story “The Fox” for radio as well. An Orwell biographer proposes that Silone’s story influenced the English writer’s conception of Animal Farm. To spare Silone embarrassment at his poor English, they spoke in French.
Silone was instrumental in the creation of yet another left-wing party, the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity (PSIUP). When Nenni’s candidacy as prime minister was rejected by the Christian Democrats, the Socialists were furious and moved closer to adopting Nenni’s fusionist proposal. Together with Giuseppe Saragat, Silone embraced the motto “Unità sì, fusione no.” With the fall of the Parri government in December 1945, Sandro Pertini resigned as head of the PSI, to be succeeded by Rodolfo Morandi. It was Morandi who, in order to be convinced to take on the lead role in the party, had insisted that Silone become editor of the party newspaper Avanti! Editorship of the paper at a time when fusionists and autonomists were at dagger points was a precarious intellectual and political balancing act. From Harvard University, Salvemini wrote to Ernesto Rossi encouraging the latter’s entry into the PSI to support Silone against Nenni. But Salvemini had enough wisdom to see that “Silone doesn’t have the qualities of a practical and cunning political man but he is a splendid moral and intellectual figure.”
The crisis came in April 1946 at the party congress in Florence, where Silone hardly spoke at all. That spring, Vittorio Emanuele III, in a desperate attempt to save the Savoy dynasty and the monarchy in Italy, abdicated in favor of his son, Umberto, who darkly hinted at a coup d’état. On June 2, Italians went to the polls to decide on a Constituent Assembly that was to remake the laws of Italy, draft a constitution, and determine the fate of the monarchy. The results were not promulgated until three days later. By a narrow margin, Italians had decided to reject the monarchy and become a republic (the vote in the south had a majority voting to keep the monarchy). Silone, elected to the Chamber of Deputies, wrote the lead editorial for a special edition of Avanti! that was on the newsstands one hour after the results were known. The vote to end the monarchy was
an act of life, an act of good health, an act of liberation, an act of creation, a new form for a new reality. It is a birth: a presence, a revelation, an apparition, something that has come from afar and will go far. But it is also, and above all, an act of modernity: Italian society has liberated itself from a parasitic superstructure of feudal origins and it has liberated itself primarily through the efforts of the working class, which are the principal motive forces of every true progress in our era; and for this reason we are little inclined to tolerate the rhetorical, classical, or Risorgimental reminiscences or we tolerate just that little bit that is permitted standing by the crib of a newborn, speaking of the dead . . . It is the happiest day in the long history of our country.
Of course, no event could live up to such fervent desires, and Silone soon came to realize that the republic, much as it may have wished to, could not so easily disentangle itself from more than two decades of fascism. Nor could Italy and the Italians so easily shed their culpability.
The hopes raised by the PSIUP were soon dashed. In an autobiographical essay he wrote of the “sad epilogue” of postwar Italian socialism. The PSIUP, in particular, was a disappointment. “Instead of the hoped-for free and ardent Socialist movement, open to all the new forces that sprang forth from the war and the Resistance, it was a chaotic amalgam, under the tutelage of the Communists,” paralyzed by the debate between “fusionists” and “auton
omists” and then torn to pieces by the “inevitable and disastrous schisms.” Once again, Italian socialism had lost a golden opportunity.
The Ghost of Francesco Zauri
It was May 1946 and Silone was busy working in the offices of Avanti! on via Gregoriana in Rome. The convention of the PSIUP had just been held a month earlier in Florence, and Silone was struggling to keep socialism free from a fusion with the PCI. A staffer approached and said a vagrant with a wild beard and long hair was in the reception area asking for the esteemed writer. Silone, wary, hesitated but finally agreed to meet the barbone. Standing before him was Francesco Zauri of Pescina, the man unjustly accused of murder nearly half a century before. On behalf of Zauri’s illiterate mother, Silone had penned her letters to the incarcerated son. The young Silone came to be convinced of the man’s innocence, even though the consensus of the town was unanimous: Zauri was indeed guilty and there was no more to be said about the affair. Unknown to anyone else, including his parents, Silone struggled to translate a mother’s concern and anguish into letters that could pass the prison censors.
Zauri had been condemned in 1898 and sentenced to ten years’ solitary confinement and life imprisonment. As his fictional counterpart, Luca Sabatini in The Secret of Luca, pointed out, the difference between life with the general prison population and “existence” in solitary confinement was greater than the difference between life in prison and freedom. It was only in 1908 that Zauri was permitted correspondence with his mother, who approached Silone with the customary deference of the illiterate poor when dealing with the town’s bourgeoisie. He read the prisoner’s letters out loud to Zauri’s mother and carefully penned her replies. Silone was overwhelmed with the burden, tormented by his responsibility, buoyed by a certainty of Zauri’s innocence, proud of his secret, and quietly thrilled to have been asked to assume such an important task.
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