At five in the afternoon on Sunday 25 July he had a visitor: Benito Mussolini. A small convoy drew up to the building. The three escort cars full of guards and adjutants drove back to the entrance to the park, leaving Mussolini and his secretary, Nicola De Cesare, who was carrying a large portfolio full of documents, to climb out of their sedan. The king was waiting at the entrance of the villa to welcome them, which he did with some warmth, greeting Mussolini as Duce, a term he had avoided during twenty years of Mussolini’s leadership. The door to the villa closed behind Mussolini and his secretary, and carabinieri (police officers) had their driver park the sedan in a quiet corner of the grounds. He might have noticed, as he drove, that hidden from sight beside the villa was an ambulance.
Mussolini looked tired that afternoon and according to one source his chin was covered with stubble because – uncharacteristically – he had forgotten to shave. Then he had had a long and trying night. He had presided over a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council, the first held for several years, which had lasted for ten hours and became increasingly rancorous as leading Fascist leaders blamed one another – and especially blamed Mussolini – for Italy’s disastrous conduct of the war. A few days afterwards a Swiss journalist, M. de Wyss, who lived in Rome throughout this time and left an account of all she witnessed, pieced together what happened from some of those who had been present:
Furious personal attacks and violent invectives poured forth. For instance, De Vecchi shouted at Frattari: ‘You are kept by this prostitute’ – for Frattari was backed by Mussolini’s notorious mistress, Petacci. Everybody screamed. Some pounded the tables with their fists. Some cried. The Minister Pareschi even fainted.1
The meeting finally ended at three in the morning when the council voted to strip Mussolini of his powers and to place the king in charge of Italy’s armed forces. Mussolini had been deposed. But, waking up the next morning, he decided to ignore the whole business. After all, the Grand Council only had a consultative role. He would carry on as usual, quietly arranging a little revenge on his treacherous colleagues. He arrived at his office in Palazzo Venezia at nine, just as usual, and in the early afternoon he went home to the Villa Torlonia in the north-east of the city. Here he learned that the king had summoned him to the Villa Ada Savoia. A little oddly, Mussolini was instructed not to come in the military uniform he habitually wore, but to wear civilian clothes. His wife, Rachele, was suspicious and told him not to go, but Mussolini ignored her and, in a blue suit and black hat, he set out through the heavy summer heat.
M. de Wyss wrote an account of Mussolini’s meeting with the king, which she described as a bitter one, in which each furiously denounced the other. Her contacts, though, seem to have exaggerated and reports gathered months later from those who had been present offer a less dramatic picture. The king told Mussolini that he knew what had taken place at the Grand Council meeting. Mussolini, who had anticipated that this subject would be raised, hurriedly leafed through the portfolio of documents his secretary had brought, looking for one to show that the Grand Council’s role was purely advisory. The king insisted the vote showed that confidence in Mussolini’s leadership had collapsed, and then announced that he had decided to appoint a new political leader: Marshal Badoglio. Fearing that Mussolini might become violent, he had an adjutant concealed in the next-door room, ready with a loaded pistol, but the precaution was not needed. Mussolini seemed to crumple.
The interview over, the king conducted Mussolini and his secretary to the villa entrance, calling out, ‘Where’s the Duce’s car?’ Instead of their sedan, though, it was the ambulance that had been hidden behind the palace that appeared. As the king disappeared into the villa Mussolini found his path blocked by a carabiniere officer, Captain Vigneri, who told him that, for his own protection, he must go with him. At this moment the rear doors of the ambulance opened to reveal a squad of well-armed carabinieri. Mussolini took a step away, murmuring that he did not need any protection, but Vigneri took him firmly by the arm and led him towards the ambulance. By one account, as Mussolini climbed inside he pissed himself.
King Vittorio Emanuele was an unlikely figure to have deposed the country’s dictator in a coup. Known for his tininess – Queen Victoria, herself no giant, remarked of him, ‘he is dreadful short’2 – he had never wanted to be king and in his youth he tried to persuade his father to nominate his dashing cousin the duke of Aosta in his place. When his father was assassinated in 1900, Vittorio Emanuele accepted his role without enthusiasm. He was far happier breeding horses, hunting and finding new items for his large coin collection – or, during the First World War, spending time with Italian troops at the front – than performing public duties. Frugal, even stingy, he used the Quirinal Palace only for state events, preferring to live in the far smaller Villa Ada Savoia. When Mussolini seized power in 1922 Vittorio Emanuele was grateful to him for, as he believed, having saved both Italy and the monarchy from Bolshevism. For the next two decades he left decision-making to Mussolini and kept a low profile.
The backseat monarch was transformed into a man of action by the disastrous war Mussolini had brought upon their country. By 1943 it was clear that it would be lost, and as early as January the king’s advisors urged him to depose Mussolini and sue for peace with the Allies. The king, who was by nature cautious and fatalistic, prevaricated. Then, on 19 July 1943 Rome was bombed for the first time. A huge day raid that involved more than 600 US aircraft showed up Italy’s lack of preparedness with painful clarity. The king, watching from Villa Ada Savoia, saw that there was not a single Italian fighter in the skies, while the city’s anti-aircraft guns lacked the range to reach the American planes. Unopposed, the bombers approached in perfect formation. As the dust cleared from the destruction more scandalous failings emerged. Shelters had been inadequate and no teams were ready to begin digging out survivors. In the San Lorenzo district, where most bombs fell, some 1,500 Romans died.
The attack also revealed what Romans thought of their monarchy. When the pope, Pius XII, visited San Lorenzo after the attack and distributed money he was met with cheering and tears of gratitude. When Vittorio Emanuele and his wife Elena appeared a little later, they were hissed. Vittorio Emanuele was called a cuckold and Queen Elena a whore. One woman tried to spit on her. When the king offered people money they tore it up and threw it back.
Six days later the king had Mussolini arrested and appointed the career soldier Marshal Badoglio in his place. When they heard the news of Mussolini’s fall late that evening the Romans burst into the hot summer streets to celebrate, some of them still in their pyjamas. Pictures of Mussolini were thrown from shops and offices, firemen brought down Fascist insignia, the Fascist Party headquarters was attacked, the offices of the city’s main Fascist newspaper Il Tevere was set alight and prisoners were freed from Regina Coeli prison. Police looked on, grinning. A few Fascists caught on the street were beaten up and one or two killed – the local party boss in Trastevere was said to have been chopped into small pieces in a butcher’s shop – but, as de Wyss observed, ‘taking it all in one cannot imagine a quieter and smoother overthrow of a dictatorial rule after twenty-two years of its abuses’.3
Badoglio, in his first broadcast as leader, insisted the war alongside Germany would go on, but few took him seriously and Romans were hopeful they would soon have peace. Sadly, it would not be so easy as that.
Badoglio was a great survivor. As one of the Italian army’s commanders he had endured the First World War, despite being blamed for Italy’s greatest defeat of the conflict, at Caporetto. Next he had made it through Mussolini’s rise to power, despite having urged that Fascism should be resisted. Mussolini, who rather liked to have something damning hanging over the heads of his close colleagues in case he chose to be rid of them, entrusted him with Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia. Now, as Fascism fell apart, Badoglio had survived once again, jumping from the sinking ship just in time: he had taken a leading role in the king’s coup d’état. But he was more t
han seventy years old and as cautious as his king. Though from the first he intended to switch sides, instead of doing so swiftly he delayed, negotiating with the Allies.
All the while Hitler, who never for a moment believed Badoglio’s assurances of loyalty, poured troops into Italy. After 45 days Italy announced an armistice with the Allies. Within hours German troops began to advance on Rome.
II
As to what Rome awaited them, to see it in anything like a state of normality we should step back a few years, to before the war began. If a Roman from the 1840s had been transported almost a century into the future, to the late 1930s, the first thing that would have struck him or her was how huge the city had become. In 1939 there were almost one and a half million Romans. The population had increased tenfold since we last saw it and, finally, there were more Romans than there had been in classical times.
The city was vastly busier and noisier. In place of a few sleepy cabs and carriages it now had buses, electric trams and no fewer than 30,000 cars clogging its congested streets. The city had more bridges than ever before: ten (in classical times there had been eight). It had begun to extend beyond the old Aurelian Walls and, in another first since classical times, its empty areas, the disabitato, had largely disappeared. With it had gone most of Rome’s elegant Baroque parks and villas, though fortunately not all of them. The Villa Borghese had survived, as had the vast Villa Pamphili, where Garibaldi’s volunteers had fought the French in the spring of 1849, and also the Villa Ada, where, as we saw, King Vittorio Emanuele had his residence. The disabitato had succumbed to a construction boom of the 1870s and ’80s when Rome, as the new capital of Italy, became a vast building site. Plans of the city’s remaking were frequently ignored and numerous ancient relics were lost in the frenzy of development.
It could have been even worse. During this same era medieval Paris was largely razed to the ground by Prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann. In Rome some especially outrageous proposals were seen off, such as plans to demolish a section of the Aurelian Wall, to destroy a stretch of the older Servian Walls near Termini railway station, and to remake the Appia Antica as a tramway. And some good came out of the destruction. Under the guidance of the archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani the Colosseum was given a spring clean and the Pantheon – once again – was cleared of accretions, including two seventeenth-century bell towers that Romans referred to as ass’s ears. If much was lost to development, much was also found. By the late 1880s, 192 marble statues had been unearthed along with 266 busts and heads, a thousand inscriptions and more than 36,000 coins. Eventually, belatedly, the city’s antiquities became properly protected. Shortly before the First World War the city’s socialist mayor, Ernesto Nathan, ring-fenced the Theatre of Marcellus, the Baths of Diocletian and the Portico of Octavia from development and transformed the Forum, the Palatine and nearby areas into an archaeological park.
Along with the city’s vastness, a visitor from the 1840s would have been astonished by its political display. In the earlier nineteenth century Rome had been a city of the popes that was dominated by churches, Catholic institutions, papal insignia and street corner images of Mary and Jesus. In the late 1930s these still existed but alongside them was a new layer of symbols that celebrated everything the Church detested. The Liberal governments which ruled Rome after 1870 had made their new capital into a vast theatre of propaganda in their cold war with the papacy. Unified, royal Italy celebrated itself with new main streets that cut across the city: Via Nazionale, that led from the Piazza Venezia to Termini railway station; Via Settembre XX, that led to the Quirinal Palace from the spot where royal troops broke through the wall in 1870 (and was named after the day when they did so) and Corso Vittorio Emanuele II. This last, which sliced through the maze of lanes across the river from the Vatican, and had been the dream of past popes and of Rome’s Napoleonic conquerors, finally made the city traversable from the Tiber to the start of the Corso. Destructive though it was, it could have been worse, twisting and weaving so the finest buildings of the area were preserved.
To papal fury the city centre was now home to non-Catholic churches: Anglican All Saints’ Church on Via Babuino, American Episcopal St Paul’s within the walls on Via Nazionale, and, close to Piazza Venezia, a church belonging the Waldensians, whose members had once been burned as heretics. And there were the statues. These now crowded Rome as they had in classical days and hardly an enemy of the popes was absent. As well as Liberal politicians, in Trastevere there was now a statue to the early nineteenth-century Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, who had enjoyed taking a dig at priests. On the Capitoline Hill, ancient seat of civic resistance to papal rule, stood a statue of Cola di Rienzo, the unstable fourteenth-century would-be founder of the new Roman Republic, now reinvented as a national hero. In the Campo de’ Fiori towered a statue of Giordano Bruno, the philosopher and mathematician who in 1600 had been burned in that very spot by Pope Clement VIII, while panels on the statue’s plinth honoured celebrity rebels against the papacy, from John Wycliffe to Jan Hus.
The Gianicolo Hill, where Garibaldi and his volunteers fought, had become a vast open-air shrine to the battles of 1849. Streets around the hill were named after those involved: Via Emilio Dandolo, Via Emilio Morosini, Viale Aurelio Saffi, among many others. In pride of place, naturally, was Via Garibaldi, which snaked its way up the hill. Around Piazza Garibaldi on the hill’s summit were busts of dozens of those who had fought for Italy’s unification, and in the square stood a huge equestrian statue of Garibaldi himself, staring out over Rome in his trademark fez and poncho. A short distance away an ornamental lighthouse flashed out the green, white and red of Italy’s national flag, and every noon a gun was fired to wake up Romans to the need to defend their country. To the ire of the popes, Garibaldi and his horse’s backside were clearly visible from the windows of the Vatican Palace.
Yet the Gianicolo was not Rome’s greatest tribute to the victory of Italy’s unifiers. Far more imposing was a monument Garibaldi and his horse peered out towards: the vast, glaringly white Vittoriano, or monument to Vittorio Emanuele II. Overlooking Piazza Venezia, it had swallowed up the whole northern slope of the Capitoline Hill. Loathed by many – Romans called it the wedding cake or typewriter, and one described it as a luxury pissoir – its making had involved extensive destruction, including the Tower of Paul III and the cloisters of the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli. Opened in 1911 after twenty-six years of planning and work it was 135 metres wide and 70 metres high. It supported sixteen vast statues that represented each of Italy’s provinces, and a gargantuan equestrian statue of King Vittorio Emanuele II, which was so huge that twenty-one of those involved in its making were famously photographed sitting at a table enjoying a drink of vermouth inside the horse. As intended, it offered a riposte to the equally vast bulk of St Peter’s across the river.
Other slights to the papacy were marked by what had vanished. A visitor from the 1840s would be surprised to find that the jumble of medieval housing, alleys and courts of the Ghetto had gone. With the exception of a small section that had been added only in the earlier nineteenth century, it had been demolished in the 1880s, replaced by high apartment blocks and a towering new synagogue. Most Jewish Romans had been happy enough to see it go, though many, by force of habit, continued to live there or close by. Most were strong supporters of the new national state that had freed them, and under which Italy’s small Jewish population, numbering only a few tens of thousands, had thrived, particularly in the professions from which they had previously been excluded: politics and the military. In 1910 Rome was governed by a Jewish mayor, Ernesto Nathan (whose family had helped Mazzini during his exile in London, and who moved to Italy in Ernesto’s youth). 1910 was also the year in which one Jewish prime minister of Italy, Sidney Sonnino, was succeeded by another, Luigi Luzzatti. Five years later, when Italy entered the First World War, there were three Jewish admirals and fifteen generals. Though, as we will see, by the late 1930s life for Jewish Rom
ans had greatly changed.
Another part of Rome that had vanished was its riverside. This transformation, for once, did not represent a slight towards the popes, but had been a practical measure to save Rome from further disastrous floods. The last of these struck on New Year’s Eve 1870, and was gleefully seized on by Pope Pius IX as divine judgement on the seizure of his kingdom. Garibaldi, as a member of the Italian Senate, became involved in the debate over what should be done, proposing that a Tiber canal should be built to divert floodwater, in a vast work project that would toughen up decadent Italians. He also urged that the Tiber be paved over to create a roadway where the New Italy could be celebrated with huge military parades. It is probably as well that he did not get his way on the last proposal, though the run-off canal might have served Rome well. Instead, following the example of London and Paris, high embankments were built on either side of the river. Rome was made safe from floods, but at a cost. Riverside sections of the Aurelian Walls disappeared along with three churches, a theatre and four palaces. The greatest casualty, though, was Rome’s dreamy riverfront, whose houses had reached to the water’s edge, hanging above the stream.
From destruction emerged a new Rome. Under four and a half decades of Liberal rule from 1870 to 1915, the city was remade as a European capital, with a monumental new law court, a national bank, a military academy and numerous ministries. Outside the old city walls Rome had a new power station on Via Ostiense and it was guarded by fifteen new forts and three gun batteries. It had new sports associations, a horse racing track and even a velodrome. Most of all, Rome was filled with new housing. Already by the late 1880s the city had more than 3,000 new apartment blocks, which formed a series of new districts whose squares were named – naturally – in honour of the new Italy: Piazza Cavour, Piazza Mazzini, and Piazza Risorgimento. Even street plans could be political. The new residential area of Prati was constructed directly beside the Vatican yet locals point out that the papal city can be very hard to see. They claim that ingenious developers ensured that most streets would point away from St Peter’s and the Vatican, so it was visible to few, except servants washing laundry on their masters’ and mistresses’ rooftops.
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