Florence

by Christopher Hibbert

  From the Pensione White, Bennett went on long walks through the city. He did not so much relish such familiar landmarks as the Pitti Palace, which looked like ‘a rather expensive barracks’, or ‘the Uffizi, which gave a general impression of carelessness and poverty in the housing of collections’, or the Medici Chapel, where ‘a man stood flicking a portable electric light around all the time’, or the Accademia, where the guides ‘with their broken English and broken French were distressing and a lot of the pictures were in the dark’ and ‘crowds of people, chiefly young girls' blocked the view and a man ‘planted his easel right bang in front of the Primavera’, but he delighted in the out-of-the-way pleasures and curiosities of the city's life, the excellent second-hand bookshops, the postmen on the lungarni ringing doorbells and calling ‘La posta! La posta!’ louder and louder as they looked impatiently up at the windows, the crowded buildings in the Borgo Santa Croce, many of them inhabited by a dozen families or more living ‘like birds in the side of a precipice’, the constant ‘movement of bicycles and untidy work-girls on foot’ and the never-ending crying of wares. One man he came across was selling combs and ‘pretending to bend them with all the force of his muscles. He contorted himself with a whole series of Michel Angelo attitudes, and yet he was a little shapeless man in a shapeless suit. He was also a tremendous orator, with a perfectly smooth flow of impassioned words. Such a man in England would have filled the square and got himself mobbed.’

  Bennett was intrigued by the ‘shapeless carts’ trundling over the Ponte Vecchio, the horses in shafts, ‘covered with a red cloth and a pony at either

  A photograph by Howard Coster of Arnold Bennett, whose Florentine Journal provides a vivid picture of the city before the First World War.

  A sketch by Arnold Bennett of the facade of Santa Croce, which was finished to designs by Niccolò Matas in 1863.

  side’, the animals munching as they trotted along, eating out of ‘openwork wickerish bags with an ornamentation of bright coloured stuff on the front’. He was fascinated, too, by the astonishingly crowded horse-drawn trams rattling along on both banks of the Arno, and by the little omnibuses going out to villages ‘exactly as they must have done for ages’, tiny, cream-coloured vehicles with six seats and delicate fringes hanging over the sides of the roof, drawn by ‘poor feeble horses’, their drivers sitting under large yellow umbrellas.

  He was intrigued, too, by housewives letting down baskets by ropes from fourth-floor windows to hawkers in the streets below, by the men working twelve hours a day on the dredging machines in the river wearing ‘nothing but a shirt with a scalloped edge that comes down a few inches below the middle’, by the ‘vast amount of picture-framing and cabinet-work activity (you see it everywhere)’, and by the number of ‘flittings to be seen every day. Typically there would be a large handcart drawn by one man, with a chain across the shaft chaining him and pressing against the middle of his thighs; pushed behind by one or two others. And perhaps a woman walking alongside with a small chequered bundle, giving a poke now and then to the insecurely balanced goods to keep them safe.’

  There was ‘no order whatever in the streets. Pavements are quite inadequate and wayfarers sprawl all over the roadway, so that there is a tremendous confusion, and some danger, and a lot of noise. Very different from Milan, where the difficult crossroads are controlled in an English manner by the most aristocratic-looking policemen to be seen anywhere.’ Yet there was ‘no hurry and very little ambition in Florence and certainly a great deal more happiness than in England’.

  One day he ‘couldn't find anything to sketch from any spot which was free from wind and dust [this was in April] until I got to the Piazza Santo Spirito, which is very nice with its fountains and infants and idle gendarmes’. Another day he found himself in the Piazza Peruzzi, which he was told was ‘le quartier des filles’. They appeared to him ‘a sinister-looking lot but they suited the architecture’.

  Avoiding the ‘damned English tea houses’, he spent pleasant hours at tables outside cafés ‘with a drink and a strange newspaper just out, as fresh as fruit' – preferably the Nazione, not as good as the Corriere della Sera or the Secolo but still ‘not at all a bad paper for a continental provincial town’ – raising his eyes from time to time to ‘glance at women most assuredly got up purposely to be looked at – this experience wants a lot of beating’.

  In the evenings there was ‘a great deal going on in a cheap, unorganized way’, as was indicated by the ubiquitous posters stuck on every wall. There were, for instance, numerous cinemas from whose interiors came the sound of enticing music and outside which bells were rung to inform customers that the performance was about to begin. There were also several large theatres in addition to the famous Pergola where Bennett saw a performance of Il Re Lear which his companion pronounced the ‘finest Lear [he] had ever seen’. He also went to an opera at the Teatro Verdi where, having paid 2 lire for his seat and counted 120 people in the chorus on the vast stage, he reflected that the performers could not earn very much. The costumes were rich and the scenery elaborate; but ‘you could see the theatre had come down in the world’; in the same row as himself he noticed a man ‘surreptitiously smoking a cigarette’.

  The music-halls were not to be recommended: the Alhambra was ‘appallingly tedious’, the Apollo only ‘slightly better; if there had been a few women in the audience it would have been passable’. Nor did he much enjoy a concert in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Palazzo della Signoria, where cheap chairs of all colours and designs were arranged in rows on a ‘dirty tiled floor’. There was, however, no cause for complaint in most of the restaurants. He was particularly taken by Lapi's, which was in a cellar in the Via Tornabuoni:

  Here the cooking is done in full view of the audience. Each dish prepared specially for each client. All by one man. About 35, dark, personable, extra-ordinarily quick and graceful. If he left his recess for a moment to go upstairs he would slide down the rail to come back again. Charcoal stove. He blew it up constantly with a fan. Sparks fly. He put on charcoal with his hand. Everything goes through that hand. He would fan with one hand and stir with another. He made an omelette in a moment… Orders called out in a loud voice by the landlord or the boy waiter… Things not in stock, such as ham, sent for and brought down in a paper. When a dish is ready the chef would plant it down on a ledge and whistle, or call out its name… The boy waiter took a pair of loose cuffs from a hat hook and slipped them on, at once giving him an air of grande toilette. Later the landlord, evidently bethinking himself, did the same, from another hook. About 15 customers, and all cooked for by this one man. Arched roof all papered with coloured posters of all sorts. Graceful leave-takings from all personnel as we left. Bill and tip 8½ lire for 3 people.

  In these years Florence seemed little disturbed by the imminence of war. Doney's was still crowded with customers chattering over their Gâteau Elena and their marrons glacés; the Giacosa tearooms opposite were just as popular. There were fancy-dress parties, and tango teas, and balls given by the witty Contessa Rucellai, the tall, orange-haired daughter of a Cossack general. At the Comtesse d'Orsay's, Gabriele D‘Annunzio enthralled his hostess and her guests with the flow of his seductive talk. Ronald Firbank could occasionally be seen drifting dandiacally through the streets, his body writhing as he clutched at his hair; and Gordon Craig, having parted from Isadora Duncan and opened a theatre workshop in Via de' Serragli, was a common sight ‘with his flowing hair’, as Harold Acton, then a schoolboy, described him, ‘driving his school, a bevy of Kate Greenaway girls, round the city in a Dickensian stage-coach’.

  Italy entered the war on 24 May 1915; but, as Acton recalled, ‘the city of Dante remained placid… a city of ivory towers, where art historians could pursue their investigations without disturbance’. Refugees sought shelter here: Prince Alexis Karageorgevitch and his Serbian entourage settled in one of the Acton family villas; in others ‘British convalescent officers flirted and danced with those Flor
entine girls who were not too closely chaperoned.’

  In the early months of the war, confirmed Lina Waterfield, who was then living with her aunt, Janet Ross, at Poggio Gherardo, ‘life went on as usual for those who had no relations at the front’. Yet by 1917 the mood was one of ‘gloom, anxiety and finally of tragedy’. As she wrote to her son in England in January that year, ‘It is bitterly cold in Florence, with snow on the ground for several days. The intense cold comes hard on the poor people as fuel is all strictly rationed. People are only allowed enough to cook with day by day, and have to shiver in cold houses. It does not matter how rich you are; money cannot procure for you fuel, petrol, sugar or butter.’

  25

  ‘FIRENZE FASCISTISSIMA’ 1919 – 40

  ‘The military parades were magnificent.

  The Germans, who may have been a little sceptical on this point, will leave with a very different impression.’

  COUNT GALEAZZO CIANO

  In the second week of October 1919 a large crowd gathered outside Florence railway station to welcome the arrival of the leader of a new political party, a party which had declared war on socialism and had called for supporters ‘ruthless and energetic enough to make a clean sweep with the past’. The man the crowd had been waiting for appeared in a dirty flying-suit, wearing also a beret and a pair of goggles pushed towards the crown of his balding head. Squat and strongly built, with intense, rather near-set dark eyes and a massive jaw, Benito Mussolini was then thirty-six years old. The son of a blacksmith and a former editor of a socialist newspaper, he had just returned from Dalmatia where he had flown to congratulate Gabriele D'Annunzio on his seizure, in the name of Italy, of the port of Fiume (now Rijeka) in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles.

  In 1919, the number of committed Fascists in Florence was small, and Fascism was not yet a movement to be reckoned with in the city; the first Fascio in Florence, formed in April that year, had attracted few members. Mussolini's speech in the Teatro Olimpia in October, interrupted by calls for the death of the Prime Minister, Francesco Saverio Nitti, was well received by his audience; but when he came out into the street his supporters were whistled and hooted at by the crowd.

  Yet, as time went by, more and more Florentines, despite the excesses of the black-shirted squadristi, came to regard Fascism as the only political organization capable of saving the country from its postwar chaos and from the evils of atheistic Bolshevism. Other Fasci were formed; and in June 1920 a former sergeant in the army, Amerigo Dumini, who had joined one of them, was given command of a group of squadristi which was to become a powerful and feared force in the city. The Fascists had their headquarters in Piazza Ottaviani, held meetings in the Teatro della Pergola, and – with the support of the Futurists and of Futurism's prophet, the novelist and dramatist Filippo Marinetti, who had welcomed the recent war as ‘the most beautiful poem’ – orchestrated parades and demonstrations. Fights frequently erupted between the movement's supporters and its enemies; and in the course of one particularly rowdy march in August 1920 a policeman and two workers were murdered. Another policeman was killed and about twenty people were injured when a bomb exploded in February the next year in the midst of a procession through Piazza Antinori; and in revenge for the subsequent death of a young Fascist student, gangs of squadristi marched about the city issuing threats, beating up passers-by who refused to give the Fascist salute, closing restaurants and cafés. One squad invaded the head office of the railway workers' union and shot its secretary dead. Immediately the union, followed by other unions, declared a strike, provoking further attacks on the Socialists and their supporters. There were even more violent affrays the next day when barricades were erected, a pitched battle was fought at Porta al Prato, and a young member of the Fascist Party, Giovan Francesco Berta, the son of a businessman, was attacked by strikers as he was cycling across the Ponte Sospeso, beaten to death and flung into the Arno. The army was called in to help the police, but still the violence continued. On several days that year shops and restaurants were closed, trams did not run and electricity and gas supplies were cut off.

  In August 1922, to the fury of an exasperated public, a general strike was called; and Mussolini seized his opportunity to take control of the state. By then the acknowledged leader of a party with several seats in the Chamber of Deputies, he declared that if the government did not prevent the strike, the Fascists would. Taking to the streets in the name of law and order, the squadristi renewed their attacks on Socialist buildings, Socialist newspapers and all those whom they took to be their enemies. In October, at a party congress held in Naples, Mussolini was so impressed by the obvious determination of 40,000 Fascists that he said more and threatened more than he had ever done before. ‘What we have in view,’ he declared, ‘is the introduction into the liberal state, which has fulfilled its functions… of all the forces of the new generation which has emerged from the war and the victory… Either the government will be given to us or we shall seize it by marching on Rome. It is a matter of days, of hours.’

  Responding to the power of Mussolini's oratory, the assembled Fascists took up the cry, shouting in unison, ‘Roma! Roma! Roma!’

  Soon afterwards riots broke out in several Italian towns. In Florence, preparations for the coup d‘état were organized by Italo Balbo, a twenty-six-year-old former student of the university and an officer in the Alpine Corps during the war, and by Tullio Tamburini, also a former army officer, a cunning, daring and duplicitous man of humble origins who had assumed control of a highly active Fascio of some two thousand members. Streets were barricaded, buildings, including the post office, the railway station and the telephone exchange, were occupied, telephone wires cut, trains requisitioned, rifles and cars commandeered, legions of Fascists drawn up for the imminent and, in the event, disorderly March on Rome.

  The government proclaimed its intention to declare martial law, but the King, fearing that this would mean civil war, and already prepared to countenance a Fascist government, refused to sign the decree and so left the existing administration powerless. In any event, both the army and the police were prepared to stand aside and let the advance of Fascism take its course. In Florence the police retreated into the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, where several armoured cars were parked without crews in the courtyard.

  With Mussolini established as head of the new government in Rome, overt opposition to Fascism began to die down in Florence. In June 1924, however, the murder by Fascist extremists of the brave and respected Giacomo Matteotti, one of Mussolini's most outspoken critics, aroused widespread revulsion in the city. An effigy of the murdered man set up in a private chapel drew crowds of mourners. Tamburini retaliated by bringing out his squadristi to intimidate opponents of the regime, while another leading Fascist, Renato Ricci, organized a large and bombastic parade through the city from Piazza Santa Maria Novella to Piazza della Signoria. The offices of the newspaper, Nuovo Giornale, were all but destroyed; freemasons' lodges and the chambers of several well-known anti-Fascist lawyers were invaded; while blackshirts ransacked Il Circolo della Cultura, a club which numbered among its members several well-known anti-Fascist intellectuals, including the historians Gaetano Salvemini and Guglielmo Ferrero, and Piero Calamandrei, professor of law at Florence University.

  Soon after Matteotti's murder, another anti-Fascist, Giulio Becciolini, was killed, together with a prominent Florentine Fascist, in a rapid exchange of pistol shots; and on the night of their deaths two other opponents of the regime were murdered. By now the Fascist Grand Council was becoming alarmed by the violence in Florence; and Italo Balbo was sent back to bring the local party under control. Tullio Tamburini and some fifty other extremist Fascist leaders were dismissed; efforts were made to establish better relations between the party and conservative and liberal groups, and to gain support from the principal Florentine newspaper, La Nazione. The Marchese Luigi Ridolfi, a member of one of Florence's most distinguished families, who had taken part in the March on Rome, was appo
inted head of the provincial delegation of the Fascist Party; Antonio Garbasso, an outstanding physicist from Turin who had come to Florence in 1913 to work at the Istituto di Studi Superiori, was appointed mayor, or as his office was now to be known, podestà; and the highly intelligent Alessandro Pavolini, son of the professor of philology at the Istituto di Studi Superiori – whose days as a pugnacious member of a Florentine squadra were largely forgotten – became secretary of the Fascist Federation and founder of their influential journal, Il Bargello. Thereafter the membership of the Fascist Party in Florence increased year by year, while its opponents became ever less active and effective.

  In the immediate aftermath of Matteotti's murder, various members of the anti-Fascist Circolo della Cultura had founded the clandestine Associazione Italia Libera, which, urging the prosecution of political murderers, the restoration of the freedom of the press and the re-establishment of the Constitution, bravely carried out a number of public demonstrations and published Non Mollare (‘Don't Let Go’), an underground journal containing reports of Fascist abuses. Such political associations and publications were soon suppressed, however; and several leading opponents of the regime took refuge abroad, as did the brilliant Jew, Carlo Rosselli, a former professor at the Istituto di Studi Superiori, who fled to France, where, after founding the anti-Fascist movement Giustizia e Libertà, he was murdered by extreme right-wing Cagoulards at the instigation of Italian agents.