1964–1965
NOTES
CHAPTER 1
president of the chamber, Leone: Giovanni Leone (1908–2001) was a prominent politician in the Christian Democratic Party.
Italy’s Kiev: The Emilia-Romagna region, in the 1950s widely devoted to agriculture, was one of Italy’s Reddest. It was one of the places where the cooperative movement, nascent socialism in Ferranini’s eyes, flourished.
legge-truffa: The “scam law,” as the left-wing opposition called it, was a new electoral law of 1953 assigning the winning party a large bonus of seats in parliament.
Palmiro Togliatti: Togliatti (1893–1964) was the general secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from 1927 to 1964.
Il Migliore: “The Best,” as Togliatti was known.
between March and May 1915: The months just before Italy entered World War I.
ras Italo Balbo: The term ras (from the Amarico, meaning an Ethiopian nobleman) made its way into Italian during the colonial period to describe an Italian political boss, thus the Fascist Italo Balbo. The attempt on his life referred to here appears to be a novelistic invention.
Turati: Filippo Turati (1857–1932), the leader of Italy’s Socialist Party, which was founded in 1892. The party split in 1921 when the Communists broke off. The Communists considered Turati’s followers mere reformists.
Anna Kuliscioff: Kuliscioff (1857–1925), who was born in Russia, was Turati’s partner and one of the leaders of the Italian Socialist Party.
Abyssinia awaited, and perhaps Spain: In 1935–1936 Italy fought a brutal war in Ethiopia before annexing the territory to its East Africa Colony. Some 50,000 Italian “volunteers” were sent by Mussolini to fight with Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Other Italians went of their own accord to back the Republicans.
Bosciàn: It’s unclear if the name refers to any historical figure. During the 1930s and ’40s, the preeminent Soviet agronomist was the regime-backed anti-Mendelian Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976).
Oparin: Alexander Oparin (1894–1980) was a Soviet biochemist who formulated a pioneering theory of how life originates from carbon-based molecules in a primordial soup.
Lepeshinskaya: The biologist Olga Lepeshinskaya (1871–1963) maintained that life could come forth from inanimate matter via spontaneous generation.
Qualunquista!: Politically apathetic, someone who “doesn’t give a damn” about ideological consistency.
CHAPTER 2
Cope, de Vries, Mark Baldwin: The American paleontologist and anatomist Edward Cope (1840–1897); Hugo de Vries (1848–1935), a Dutch biologist who expounded the anti-Darwinist theory of mutationism; and James Mark Baldwin (1861–1934), an American psychologist who proposed that learned behavior influences reproductive success and thus guides natural selection.
Camden, New Jersey: Morselli identifies the city as Camden, Pennsylvania, when from the context it is clear he is writing about Camden, New Jersey.
Marcinelle, to the mines in Belgium: In 1956, 262 miners, the majority of them Italian immigrants, died in a coal-mine fire near this Belgian city.
CHAPTER 3
porca vita, porca matina: “Swine of a life,” “swine of a morning,” minced oaths with a strong edge of blasphemy.
Camillo Prampolini: Prampolini (1859–1930), born in Reggio Emilia, was an early socialist.
People’s Train: A special weekend train (treno popolare) created by the Fascists for popular tourism and leisure.
CHAPTER 4
anti-blasphemy laws: Morselli writes of an apocryphal “Blasphemy Act, a federal law.”
Academy of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux: The name Morselli gives the school translates as Garden of Lisieux, a slightly improbable name for an American Catholic school.
“Americanism”: The term Morselli uses, in English in the original, is “Americanhood.”
National Review: In fact, the magazine was not founded until 1955.
CHAPTER 5
American army rifle company: Morselli refers to a nonexistent American “27th Rifles.”
CGIL: Italian General Confederation of Labor, the largest Italian labor union association; the majority of its membership was traditionally Communist.
Nenni: Pietro Nenni (1891–1980) was a longtime leader of the Italian Socialist Party.
Luigi Longo: Longo (1900–1980) was the deputy secretary of the PCI under Togliatti, and later became the general secretary. In early editions of the novel he is identified by a pseudonym, Mauro, but real names were reinstated for both Togliatti (pseudonym, Maccagni) and Longo in the collected Romanzi (Adelphi, 2002), following corrections to the manuscript added in 1966 and 1967 when the novel was edited by Rizzoli (but never published). For unspecified reasons Longo is called Giuseppe Longo in the 2002 edition.
if there’s a second attack let’s hope they shoot at me: In 1948 Togliatti was shot and gravely wounded, but he recovered.
CHAPTER 6
Di Vittorio: Giuseppe Di Vittorio (1892–1957) was a legendary Italian trade unionist and anti-Fascist.
the big man Valletta: Vittorio Valletta (1883–1967) was the president of Fiat from 1946 to 1966. The Agnelli family owned the company.
Gramsci’s L’Ordine Nuovo, in which Tasca: The Communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) founded the socialist review L’Ordine Nuovo in 1919 along with Angelo Tasca (1892–1960). Gramsci and Tasca were also among the founders of the Italian Communist Party, which split from the Socialists in 1921. In 1929, Tasca was expelled from the PCI for anti-Stalinism.
CHAPTER 7
you’re not the most attractive bunch in the chamber: The handsome parliamentarians Nuccia cites are actual politicians—Giolitti, Alessandrini, Moro, Colombo—not fictional characters.
Huxley: Julian Huxley (1887–1975) was a British biologist and geneticist.
Marx praised Darwin: Morselli mistakenly attributes that praise to Hegel, who died almost thirty years before On the Origin of Species was published.
the famous balcony: Mussolini’s office was in Palazzo Venezia and he made his public orations from its balcony overlooking Piazza Venezia.
the 17th and a Friday to boot: Seventeen is an unlucky number in Italian folklore, and Friday the 17th is considered a most unlucky day.
Togliatti’s also out of line: The party secretary Togliatti, who was married, had a long-standing affair with a leading party official, Nilde Iotti (1920–1999).
Alexandra Kollontai: A Russian revolutionary, Kollontai (1872–1952) joined the Bolsheviks in 1915 and became commissar for social welfare in 1917. A proponent of free love, she was an early champion of Soviet women’s rights.
CHAPTER 8
the errors of a Blanqui: The French socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) held that a socialist revolution should be carried out by a small group of secret conspirators who take over the state, in contrast to Marx’s emphasis on the guiding role of the proletariat.
next number of Nuovi Argumenti: A left-leaning review of literature and politics, in fact founded in 1953 by Alberto Moravia (1907– 1990).
CHAPTER 9
Lunik: Unmanned Soviet spacecraft first sent to the moon in the late 1950s.
Father Gapon: Georgy Gapon (1870–1906), a Russian Orthodox priest and the leader of working-class protests during the 1905 revolution, was executed by the Socialist Revolutionary Party for being a police spy.
He turned toward the Forum: Morselli writes “Foro Italico,” a Fascist-era complex very far from via delle Botteghe Oscure, a street near the Roman Forum from where Ferranini is setting out on foot. Probably a mere error of Roman geography.
CHAPTER 10
apply Modugno’s blue: The reference is to Domenico Modugno’s 1958 hit love song “Nel blu dipinto di blu” (In the sky painted blue), better known as “Volare.”
Fascist of the first hour: As the earliest followers of Mussolini are known. Morselli uses the somewhat more recondite term Sansepolcristi after Mussolini’s founding rally in Milan’s Piaz
za San Sepolcro in 1919.
Dino Grandi: Dino Grandi (1895–1988) was one of the leading lights of Fascism in Emilia. As Morselli says here, a number of committed Fascists joined the PCI after 1945.
ARMIR: Some 235,000 Italian soldiers fought alongside Hitler in Russia and Ukraine in 1942 in the Armata Italiana in Russia, the Italian Eighth Army. After a notorious, crushing defeat by the Soviets in the winter of 1942–1943, ARMIR withdrew. Many Italians died.
Chebutykin’s History of Scientific Thought tucked under his arm: This invented text suggests a possible ironic reference to Dr. Ivan Chebutykin, an alcoholic doctor unashamed of his ignorance who is a celebrated character in Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.”
CHAPTER 13
Labriola: The philosopher Antonio Labriola (1843–1904) was an Italian expert on Marxism.
The ‘Curia’: The term comes from Catholicism, where the Curia is the church’s central administration that keeps the machine running (just as here it is the PCI equivalent). Italians often compare the PCI to the Italian church and its political sympathizers, the Christian Democrats, the two parties having been the main political-ideological structures of postwar Italy.
CHAPTER 14
Kravchenko: The Soviet diplomat Victor Kravchenko (1905–1966), a famous defector to the United States in 1944.
CHAPTER 15
where Kipling’s Captains Courageous takes place: Morselli’s geography is slightly off; he identifies the setting of the novel as Nantucket.
Peace Corps: Morselli is writing about 1959, but the organization was not created until 1961.
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