Florence

by Christopher Hibbert

  Many of their former colleagues and acquaintances had by now decided to give the new regime the benefit of any doubts. Indeed, while Florentines in general might joke openly about the Duce, ‘whose brain was said to be addled by over-indulgence in women’, there were thousands who revered him. According to the respected journalist, Luigi Barzini, he was the most popular man in Italy. Among those who attended the parties given by the smart and salacious American-born Marchesa Lulie Torrigiani, whose conversation was so coarse that Max Beerbohm was once sick into a majolica basin at her dinner table, there were those, as Harold Acton said, who ‘adored the dictator as a superman’.

  Many foreign residents, too, admired the Duce and were prepared to be indulgent towards Fascism. Amongst the members of the British Institute of Florence, which had been founded in 1917 by, amongst others, A. F. Spender and Janet Ross's niece, Lina Waterfield, Mussolini had his ardent supporters.1 Harold Goad, who had been the honorary director of the Institute since 1922 and lived in the Villa Mirabello, beneath Fiesole, was known to approve of Fascism, while Francis Toye, Goad's successor, who was to spend the coming war in Brazil, seemed to pride himself on his resemblance to Mussolini and used to do a fair imitation of him raising his jaw and rolling his eyes in the accepted manner.

  The number of foreign residents had been greatly reduced since 1910, when the British consul in Florence had estimated that there were no fewer than 35,000 people of his nationality living in the region. Since then the rising cost of living in Tuscany had sent thousands of these home; but thousands more remained and many were still coming out. One of those was the Nottinghamshire miner's son, the novelist D. H. Lawrence, who

  crowd estimated at over 100,000 listen to Mussolini speaking in the Piazza della Signoria in 1930.

  Mussolini, flanked by army officers and Fascist gerarchi, addressing the crowd.

  in the 1920s was living at the Villa Mirenda, where he wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover, which was first published in Florence in 1928.2 During his sojourn in Florence, Lawrence compared socialism and Fascism, expressing opinions which were not uncommon at the time:

  By 1920 prices had gone up three times, and socialism was rampant. Now we began to be bullied in every way. Servants were rude, cabmen insulted one and demanded treble fare, railway porters demanded large sums for carrying a bag from the train to the street, and threatened to attack one if the money were not paid. The train would suddenly come to a standstill in the heat of the open country: the drivers had gone on strike for a couple of hours… This was socialism.

  Such socialism made itself enemies. In an old civilized country like Italy, it was bound to cave in.

  In the summer of 1920 I went north, and Florence was in a state of continual socialistic riot: sudden shots, sudden stones smashing into restaurants where one was drinking coffee, all the shops suddenly barred and closed. When I came back there was a great procession of Fascisti and banners.

  This was the beginning of Fascism. It was an anti-socialist movement started by the returned soldiers in the name of Law and Order. And suddenly, it gained possession of Italy. Now the cabs had a fixed charge, a fixed charge for railway porters was placarded in the railway stations and trains began to run punctually.

  Two years before making this comparison, D. H. Lawrence wrote Aaron's Rod, which is partly set in Florence; in this book he introduced several characters who are clearly based on foreigners living in or near the city at that time. There is Walter Rosen, based on the art critic Bernhard Berenson, who lived at the villa known as I Tatti.3 There is James Argyle, based on Norman Douglas, that entertaining and unashamedly pagan writer of eclectic sexual tastes, who moved from room to room in Florence as his finances or peccadilloes dictated, settling for a time in an apartment found for him by his friend – and D. H. Lawrence's publisher – G. F. ‘Pino’ Orioli, before getting into trouble over a young girl and having to leave Florence in a hurry. There is Algie Constable, based on Reginald Turner, an only too justly neglected novelist and extraordinarily gifted mimic who had been a faithful friend of Oscar Wilde and who, so Max Beerbohm said, ‘would be eloquent even were he dumb’.

  Also living in Florence then was Turner's rival, Reginald Temple, a dainty little former actor. He, too, had known Oscar Wilde and he delighted in telling gruesome stories over the tea table, seeming to live, as Harold Acton put it, ‘on buttered toast and nightmares’. There was also Edward Hutton, a prolific writer on Italian subjects, grandly described by himself in Who's Who as a ‘Man of Letters’, who imparted his wide knowledge of matters Italian at Casa Boccaccio, Poggio Gherardo.4 Occasionally to be seen were Somerset Maugham, who played game after game of bridge while his raffish companion, Gerald Haxton, chose more self-indulgent pursuits; and Aldous Huxley, whose Time Must Have a Stop is set in Florence, as is A Room with a View, an earlier novel by a fleeting visitor, E. M. Forster, who seems to have based the Pension Bertolini upon either the Simi or the Hotel Jennings-Riccioli.5 Rebecca West came to stay and so did Hugh Walpole. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, translator of Proust, and Richard Aldington, novelist and biographer, both lived here for a time. Osbert Sitwell came down from the castle his father had bought in his name at Montegufoni,6 while Osbert Sitwell's mother, Lady Ida, was a frequent visitor when her eccentric husband was away on his travels. The novelist, Ada Leverson, friend of Oscar Wilde, who called her ‘the Sphinx’, appeared from time to time and always found it hard to leave.

  The most celebrated hostess in these years was the charming, discreet, vivacious and Junoesque Hon. Mrs George Keppel, King Edward VII's former mistress, who bought the Villa dell'Ombrellino at Bellosguardo in 1925.7 Sir Harold Acton, who still lives at La Pietra,8 well remembers her charm and her amusing talk, free of malice, and the soldier-like appearance of her husband, once a commanding officer of a battalion of the Highland Light Infantry, who ‘looked every inch a colonel, with the hearty laugh that denotes a lack of humour’. ‘I remember how shocked he was to find my mother reading a book about Oscar Wilde,’ Sir Harold wrote in his More Memoirs of an Aesthete. ‘ “A frightful bounder. It made me puke to look at him,” he muttered. To a certain extent the colonel shared his wife's aura. A guide once pointed him out to a group of inquisitive tourists as “l'ultimo amante della regina Victoria”.’

  Sir Harold also remembers how at the time of Italy's invasion of Abyssinia – when Anthony Eden, British minister for League of Nations affairs, had successfully rallied support for a policy of sanctions, thus providing Mussolini with an opportunity of uniting his country against the actions and slanders of a hostile world – ‘the walls of houses were scrawled all over with slogans which were meant to persuade one that “La guerra è bella”… My former friends were embittered by the constant reminder that they were among the have-nots – they who possessed Italy, her great culture and her climate – and their appetites were whetted for conquest.’

  There was a campaign to expunge foreign words from the Italian language, to rename hotels with English names, the Eden Parks, the Albions, Bristols and Britannias, to purge ‘English Tea Rooms’ and shops called ‘Old England’. ‘The world of the Pension Bertolini with its framed portraits of the late Queen and its notice of the English church services, so deftly evoked by E. M. Forster… had been attacked in its foundations.’

  In the spring of 1938, Mussolini came to Florence with Hitler, his partner in what was to become known as the Rome–Berlin Axis. The Duce had already paraded through Rome with the Führer; and great efforts had been made in Florence to give the city as welcoming an appearance as Rome's had been.

  The planning for Hitler's visit had begun six months before. Count Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law and foreign minister, anxious that nothing should be done in a ‘commonplace, countrified sort of way’, had paid particular attention to the decoration of the streets; and, while many shopkeepers refused to display portraits of Hitler in their windows, they had been made to look splendidly festive. The Duce had spent hours supervising the arrangements for
the military parades, checking the details of every march-past.

  The long route of the parade through Florence was lined with soldiers, with bersaglieri, carabinieri, militiamen and uniformed members of the Fascist Youth, both boys and girls. German and Italian flags flew side by side from the rooftops, specially embroidered swastikas hung from windows next to banners emblazoned with the Florentine lily and the symbol of the Fascist regime, the axe and the lictor's rods of ancient Rome.

  The Duce and the Führer were driven along the route in an open car, acknowledging the cheers with their characteristic salutes. They were taken to Santa Croce to pay their respects at the shrine dedicated to the Fascist dead. They were entertained in the Boboli Gardens with a series of tableaux celebrating the glories of Florence's medieval past. They were conducted round the galleries of the Pitti Palace, Hitler appearing to be much more interested in the works of art than the Duce, who looked bored and later complained that looking at pictures tired him. They attended a performance of Verdi's opera Simon Boccanegra; they went to the Palazzo della Signoria, where Mussolini wrote gratefully and proudly in the visitors' book, ‘Firenze fascistissima’; and they appeared together on the palace balcony to a tumultuous roar of welcome from the people crowded together in the piazza below.

  Not everyone agreed that the reception had been altogether favourable. Lady Una Troubridge, who was then living in Florence with the lesbian novelist, Radclyffe Hall, said that ‘such preparations [were] made for Mussolini's reception as the Florentines [were] never likely to forget. From house to house across the narrow streets and across the façades of the ancient palaces were hung great swathes of evergreens studded with brightly coloured fruits… Every house, including our own, was supplied with silken flags, hand-painted and fringed.’ Yet, according to Lady Una, the ‘angry Florentines refused to applaud Adolf Hitler, an unimpressive-looking little man with a nervous smile. He seemed sheepishly anxious to propitiate the Duce, who appeared to treat him rather cavalierly.’

  To most other observers, however, the visit appeared an undoubted success, satisfying the Florentines' well-developed taste for the flamboyant choreographic techniques and the medieval trappings of Fascism. Certainly by the Fascist hierarchy it was deemed a triumph. ‘The military parades were magnificent,’ Ciano recorded in his diary. ‘The Germans, who may have been a little sceptical on this point, will leave with a very different impression.’ At the railway station when Hitler said goodbye to Mussolini he was seen to stare at him with an almost dog-like devotion. ‘From now on,’ the Duce told him, ‘no force on earth will be able to separate us.’ The Führer's eyes, so Ciano noticed, filled with tears. He returned to Germany satisfied that the Duce would not interfere with his designs on Czechoslovakia. But there were those left behind in Florence who deeply regretted the enthusiasm displayed by so many people during Hitler's visit. The great anti-Fascist poet, Eugenio Montale, lamented, ‘No one is guiltless any more.’

  In their efforts to emphasize the benefits which the regime had bestowed upon Florence, Fascist sympathizers pointed to the exhibition centre at the Parterre to the north of Piazza della Libertà,9 the Biblioteca Nazionale at last completed in 1935,10 the Casa della Gioventù del Littorio (Fascist Youth) in Piazza Beccaria, the Ponte Sospeso, finished in 1932, Raffaello's Accademia Aeronautica at the Cascine, to the splendid Stadio Comunale at Campo di Marte designed by Pier Luigi Nervi and opened in 1932,11 and to the fine new railway station of 1935, the plans of which, after competing designs had been exhibited in the Palazzo della Signoria, were approved by Mussolini himself.12

  Presented though he was as a tireless worker who found time to interest himself in all aspects of his country's life and well-being, those who knew the Duce most intimately were well aware of the reality concealed behind the tireless propaganda. They knew that he had no patience with difficult work, a horror of decisions, that he was capable of writing ‘approved' on two conflicting memoranda emanating from two different ministries – and then going into another room where one of his mistresses lay waiting to satisfy the urgent demands of a sexual appetite that approached satyriasis. In wild arrogance and wilful misapprehension of Italy's fundamental needs, he had by 1940 made up his mind to go to war again at the side of Germany.

  26

  WAR AND PEACE 1940 – 66

  ‘An hour marked by destiny is striking in the sky of our country.’

  BENITO MUSSOLINI

  Looking up at the loudspeakers in the squares on 10 June 1940, the Florentine people waited expectantly for the Duce's voice. ‘An hour marked by destiny is striking in the sky of our country,’ they heard him say. ‘We are entering the lists against the plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the West… People of Italy, to arms!’

  Soon afterwards, while Hortense Acton was entertaining a few friends at her villa, La Pietra, a police official called on her and requested her to accompany him to the Questura. ‘He explained that it was only a matter of a trifling formality, something to do with her passport,’ her son, Sir Harold, has recorded, recounting experiences which other foreign residents in Florence shared.

  He drove her to a prison, where in a flimsy summer dress without even a toothbrush she was immured among prostitutes and others of ill-repute for the next three days and nights. She refused to undress or lie down in that noisome hole, nor would she eat the slops that were handed to her in a tin container…

  No message reached her from outside except an insolent letter from a Fascist female, the wife of an art critic, telling her she had only got what she deserved, she might have been treated much worse, with the slogan ‘Il Duce ha sempre ragione’ (‘The Leader is always right’) appended to her florid signature. When my mother's maid telephoned a powerful friend for help, he snapped back at her: ‘Don't you realize that we are at war and that Mrs Acton is an enemy alien?’ This distinguished official had been a frequent guest in our house for a quarter of a century…

  My father had a similar experience, in his case aggravated by blackmail. He managed to bribe his way out. Corruption has its advantages and under Fascism it was rife.

  Mussolini's declaration of war had long been expected and plans had already been made for the protection of the city's monuments and works of art. Statues were covered and padded; sandbags and blocks of asbestos were piled up against doorways and in windows from which the glass had been removed; yard upon yard of blackout material was tacked to doorposts and shutters; and works of art were removed from walls and packed up for removal to places of safety, to houses and villas beyond the confines of the city, where it was hoped they would be safer in the event of aerial attack.

  Many of the principal treasures from the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace, together with pictures from other galleries and from several churches in Tuscany, were taken for safe keeping to the Castello Montegufoni, which in 1940 had been sequestrated by the Italian government. The eccentric antiquarian, Sir George Sitwell, who had gone to live there in 1925, had thereafter, usually unwillingly, entertained guests from Florence invited by his wife. She would, according to their elder son, Osbert, ‘forget to tell either my father or the butler or chef; indeed it would pass from her mind altogether. Suddenly, just as my father was having a quiet early luncheon, the guests would arrive, tired and hungry after their long mountain run.’

  Sir George had himself once decided to ask several guests. It was to be ‘an Artists' Party’, he had announced. ‘Who would you ask?’ Osbert had inquired cautiously. ‘I was startled,’ Osbert recorded in his memoirs, ‘when, as he reeled off for me the list, I comprehended both how thoroughly he had thought it out, and that all of his proposed guests, Whistler, Degas, Renoir, Rodin, Lalique, Sargent, at least possessed one thing in common: they were all dead!’

  For the protection of the works of Cimabue, Uccello, Botticelli, Ghir-landaio and other masters in the galleries of Florence, the Italian authorities had decided no better hiding-place could be found for them than the Castello Montegufoni. It was isolated in
a remote district and, as Sir Osbert Sitwell said,

  the doors and windows of the chief rooms were big enough to allow the largest pictures to be carried in and out without risk of damage. These treasures were consigned personally to the contadino in charge of the castle, Guido Masti, the representative of a family who had occupied the same position of trust under various owners for well over a century… Among the first arrivals were Uccello's Battle of San Romano, the Cimabue Virgin Enthroned, the great Madonna of Giotto, and Botticelli's Primavera. Even my father had never foreseen or thought of a house-party of this fantastic order.

  From the first, the war went badly for Italy; and on 25 July 1943 Mussolini was arrested after a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council on the orders of the King. The news was greeted in Florence, as it was elsewhere in Italy, with a kind of stunned relief. Some took to the streets to celebrate, to burn pictures of the Duce, to clamber up the walls of buildings in order to destroy or deface Fascist emblems. Tricolour flags were hung from windows and a bust of Mussolini was shattered in the courtyard of the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini. But the general mood was one less of excitement than of alarm, an alarm which deepened when Marshal Badoglio, the new head of the government, declared that the war against the Allies would continue.

  The anti-Fascists in the city – Socialists, Communists, members of the Popular Party, later the Christian Democrats, and of the recently founded Action Party – had been meeting secretly in the house of Gaetano Pieraccini, a distinguished doctor who was to become the first mayor of Florence after the liberation, and at the convent of San Marco in the room of Giorgio La Pira, a young professor of Roman law at Florence University, who was also to become mayor of Florence in the future. These enemies of the Fascist regime started to meet openly on learning of Mussolini's arrest; and, when Badoglio, in contradiction of his earlier announcement, proclaimed his government's intention of surrendering to the Allies, they began to make arrangements for replacing Fascist officials by men with democratic views and for freeing trade unions from Fascist control. Their plans were soon thwarted, however, as the Germans moved in quickly to take control of Italy, entering Florence on 11 September 1943, arresting Italian soldiers, taking over their barracks and deporting many of them to Germany.