If brothels were permitted, little else was. Here was an aspect of Roman life that a visitor from the 1840s would have found very familiar. As it had been under the train-hating pope Gregory XVI, Rome in the 1930s was a city of moral policing. In the 1840s its streets had been patrolled by priests watching for sexual misbehaviour. In the 1930s they were patrolled by Fascist militiamen. As Maurice Lachin observed in 1935, Rome was no place for lovers: ‘True love and sentimental walks have become perilous … It is not wise to venture through the streets of Rome in the company of a woman as there are roundups, in which zealous agents often see wickedness where it does not exist.’8 Even holding a conversation with a woman could put one in trouble with the militiamen, who patrolled their localities from dusk to dawn. Women required a chaperone to visit the cinema or to go dancing and were excluded from bars. Visitors to dopolavoro clubhouses were almost wholly male. Embracing and kissing in public were strictly prohibited and any woman who seemed to be lingering alone in a public place was likely to be questioned and, even if her papers were in order, might find herself spending a night in jail. Unmarried or separated women about whom gossip circulated, which suggested they were sexually loose, could find themselves arrested and removed to one of the country’s prison islands.
As well as unromantic, 1930s Rome had next to no nightlife. When Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre visited the city in 1932 they found the night-time streets almost empty. Feeling rebellious they decided to provoke Fascism a little and to stay up till dawn. At midnight they sat chatting beside one of the fountains of a deserted Piazza Navona, till they were approached by two Blackshirts. As Simone de Beauvoir recounted, ‘That we were tourists won their indulgence but they told us firmly to go to bed.’ Undaunted, the couple moved to the Colosseum, where at three in the morning they were approached again: ‘A light shone on us. What were we doing? This time it seemed that our behaviour was indecent even for tourists. Sighing at the thought of a long, Madrid night, we ended up going back to the hotel.’9 It was as if Mussolini had transformed Rome into a vast version of the local town where he had grown up: sleepy, respectable, dull Predappio.
Yet if it was dull, Rome could also be dangerous. As a foreigner, Simone de Beauvoir knew she was unlikely to get into trouble, but Romans had no such confidence. In the 1930s many of them imagined they were being watched and often they were. Between 1926 and 1943 some 40,000 Italians were placed under surveillance, monitored by three separate spying agencies, which were also bitter rivals. Between them they ran hundreds of informers who operated networks of sub-informers. Post was opened, houses searched and 400 stenographers diligently typed out tapped telephone conversations. Hoteliers were required by law to report on guests, doctors had to report on patients who suffered from alcoholism or mental illness, and bar owners lost their licences if they refused to spy on their customers. Even architecture was put to use: the Case Popolari were given few entrances so it was easier for police to keep watch on their inhabitants.
Fascism’s surveillance was so successful that it almost put itself out of business. By the early 1930s its main targets, anti-Fascist groups, were largely broken. New targets were found in anyone the regime found un-Fascist or distasteful. Homosexuality was not illegal under Fascism, as the regime refused to admit it existed, but gay men were watched and arrested, along with the mentally ill, alcoholics, pimps, loan sharks, child abusers, drug dealers and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Rome of the 1930s was an anxious city where people were careful what they said in public. Though some were more anxious than others. As was usually the case with Fascism, life was much easier if one was respectably wealthy and had Fascist connections. In 1936 George Mosse, a Jew who had recently escaped from Germany to Italy, found himself on a train when, to his alarm, his well-dressed fellow passengers began telling Mussolini jokes, though a carabinieri officer was within easy earshot. As Mosse had feared, the officer walked over to them, only to begin telling Mussolini jokes of his own. The situation would probably have been very different if jokes had been told by someone who was poor or drunk, who had mental problems, or was known to be idle, a loudmouth, or an old leftist. In other words, someone with an anarchist streak like Mussolini’s father, or for that matter like Mussolini himself in his younger days.
Such people could find themselves in deep trouble over the most trivial of matters. Late on a hot summer’s night in 1937 a middle-aged tinsmith and former anarchist named Ruggeri Leggi was enjoying rides with friends on a roundabout in Piazza dei Coronari in the centre of Rome. When a killjoy civil servant fetched a squad of militiamen to have the roundabout shut down for the night, Ruggeri, who had been drinking, grumbled to the militiamen that he would do whatever he wanted as he was free and couldn’t care less about the law. He was given three years of internal exile. In the north of Italy another known troublemaker was sentenced to a year’s internal exile because he placed his pet rabbit on a restaurant table and told it, ‘Move it, Mussolini.’
In October 1938 a whole new group of Romans found they were now viewed with suspicion by the state: the Jews. In previous years, the regime, though it contained several vehement anti-Semites, had been tolerant of its Jewish citizens. Then, Fascism had many Jewish supporters. Among Rome’s Jewish community was the city’s deputy police chief. Everything changed when Mussolini, eager to keep up with his ally Hitler, introduced the 1938 Racial Laws. For a brief time these were harsher even than those of Germany, and they became more restrictive the following year. Jews were banned from holding positions in the army, the police and from teaching in universities or schools. Jewish children were excluded from Italian state education, forcing Jewish Romans hurriedly to improvise a school of their own. Some restrictions were small-minded and mean, such as the ban on Jews from taking holidays by the sea or riding in trams. Others were grimly familiar. As they had been in previous centuries, Jews were prohibited from professions and from managing shops. They were allowed only to sell goods from small, portable stalls and eventually not even from these. But, as ever in a country where most arrangements were personal and complicated, there were exemptions, notably for Jews who had been wounded in the First World War. As Jewish Romans had felt strongly patriotic towards the state that had freed them, there were a good number of these.
Announcement in a Fascist magazine explaining the activities from which Jewish people are excluded, from La Difesa della Razza, 5 November 1938.
When it came to those who got on the wrong side of the government, Fascism liked to boast that, when compared to the Soviet Union, it was not a murderous regime, and in some ways this was true. The death penalty was used sparingly and between 1926 and 1943 only twenty-five people were executed in Italy for political crimes. Yet if Fascism did not take many Italian lives, it wrecked many. In this same period 10,000 Italians were sent into internal exile, the great majority of them male and breadwinners, whose absence left their dependent families in a desperate state. Numerous letters from internal exiles have survived – many addressed to Mussolini himself – praising the regime in lavish terms and with their writers begging to be released, or for their families to be given support.
Even lesser punishments could be devastating. Fascism grew out of violence – squads of ex-soldiers beating up their political enemies – and for all Mussolini’s attempts to make the movement respectable, violence was never far from its heart. In the late 1930s militiamen of the MSVN – an organization that evolved directly from the squads of the early days – routinely beat up people who failed to take off their hats when a Fascist procession went by. They raided districts – Rome’s working-class area of San Lorenzo was a favourite choice and, after 1938, the Ghetto – where they smashed up shops and bars. They took people back to their headquarters to beat them up again, or force-feed them castor oil or petrol. Some victims died or were left with permanent injuries, while in a land obsessed with status to soil oneself in public after a dose of castor oil was a kind of death – of reputation.
Fascism could
cause havoc to people’s lives simply by exclusion. People who offended the regime, by failing to enrol their children in the Fascist youth movement or by making a joke to the wrong person, could find that their party membership, their work permit or their Fascist Trades Union card was withdrawn, and that they had no job, no livelihood and no social benefits. Fascism extinguished people’s very joy of life. One of the regime’s most surprising achievements was that it made the Romans – a people who were famously loud – go quiet. The French writer Béraud lamented the silence of Rome, where even singing a song could be dangerous if, like one that had the refrain, ‘don’t get angry, life is short’, it was regarded as anti-Fascist. By the late 1930s spies employed to inform the government on the state of the nation complained that their work was becoming impossible as people refused to speak in public. On trains and trams if someone started badmouthing the regime – usually one who was drunk or had mental problems, as nobody else would be so rash – others would quickly shut them up, fearful that simply hearing this could put them in trouble.
One of Fascism’s many victims was Fascism itself. Beyond the law and beyond criticism, Fascists high and low quickly became corrupt. Militiamen engaged in theft, extortion, confidence tricks, violence and sometimes murder. Leading Fascists who had been born poor grew mysteriously wealthy. Local Fascist leaders were seen eating in the best restaurants – often without paying the bill – and went on lavish holidays. Their wives used official cars to go shopping for the latest fashions. People waiting in the interminably slow bureaucratic offices saw Fascists and their friends and relatives jump the queue. The lower a Fascist’s rank, the more pompous and bullying his or her (it was almost always his) behaviour. Fascism could also be used. People denounced their neighbours, sometimes to win favour with the regime, sometimes to settle old scores.
The pattern was set at the very top and part of the problem lay with Mussolini himself. He was not himself avaricious but he was willing to tolerate failings, including corruption, in his close colleagues if it gave him scandalous information on them that might prove useful. Fascists further sullied their reputation by hurling dirt at one another. When fighting local power battles they would publicly accuse one another of sexual transgression with prostitutes, mistresses, other Fascists’ wives, and occasionally with men. By the late 1930s even honest Fascists were widely assumed to be corrupt.
Some Romans saw that, for all its boasts, Fascism was also incompetent. Aside from the draining of the Pontine Marshes, most of its great campaigns were failures. The Battle of the Births had no discernible impact on the country’s declining birth rate. The Battle of the Grain increased wheat production but had a woeful effect on all other farming. The Battle of the Lira made exports and tourism less competitive, helping to push Italy into a deep economic crisis two years before the Wall Street Crash. Under the elected Liberal governments that Mussolini so despised, Italy had had one of Europe’s fastest-growing economies, ahead even of Germany’s. Under Fascism it was one of the slowest. By the end of the 1930s even the new African Empire was in trouble, as local guerrilla insurgencies began to turn Abyssinia into an Italian Vietnam.
Finally, Fascist propaganda was a failure. By the late ’30s few Italians believed it or took any notice. Despite a dozen years of state hectoring, in 1937 young Italian females had no wish to spend their lives siring eleven children: most felt one or two would be enough. Nor did they intend to stay at home cooking: most wanted to work, ideally in a good profession. In October 1938 when the state turned against its Jewish citizens, Romans remained thoroughly unconvinced. By 1939 spy reports to the Fascist leadership reluctantly admitted that Romans had been ‘conditioned by an unrelenting compassion for the Jews’,10 who they felt had done nothing wrong. Priests attacked the Racial Laws and Romans were overheard saying that the city’s Jews were better than many Christians, being often more able in business, more honest and more compassionate to the poor. Another report stated that ‘everyone said the government was wrong, everyone said that this nastiness will soon be over’.11 Even high Fascist officials insisted the Jews were no danger to the state and some gave shelter to Jews fleeing from other countries.
Yet, arguably Fascism’s greatest failure was in the very campaign that Mussolini had most set his heart on: to remould the Italians as a driven, aggressive nation. In the 1930s, in the hands of the pedantic Fascist Party Secretary Achille Starace, the project became not inspirational but irritating. Italians were told not to wear slippers, in an anti-bourgeois campaign to shake them from their complacency. State officials were forced to buy and wear Fascist uniforms that were expensive and itchy. Instead of shaking hands, which was denounced as unhygienic, Romans had to greet one another with the raised right arm of the Roman salute. And they were told to stop addressing one another with the traditional lei, instead using the plural voi, which was seen as tougher and more formal. Spy reports admitted that almost nobody used voi, while those who did often did so facetiously, with a smirk.
By the late 1930s it was evident that Fascism was in deep trouble. On paper it was more successful than ever. It faced no opposition and between 1931 and 1938 party membership had swelled from 800,000 to five million. Italians assembled in huge crowds for the ever-growing number of Fascist meetings and Fascist marches. Yet it was a hollow triumph. Spy reports to the regime’s leaders warned that enthusiasm for Fascism was largely dead. Rather than making Italians dynamic, Fascism’s control had made them apathetic. They joined the party and turned up for marches and meetings because they had no choice. At the entrances to Piazza Venezia, where Mussolini made his famous speeches from the balcony, Fascist militiamen set up tables to collect people’s party cards so they could see who had failed to appear. In October 1935, when demonstrations were organized to cheer his announcement of Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, arriving demonstrators panicked when they found the militiamen had not turned up.
By the end of 1938 apathy turned to loathing, and largely because of coffee, or rather the lack of it. The government’s latest campaign, for national self-sufficiency or Autarky – a riposte to League of Nations’ sanctions against Italy for invading Abyssinia – had caused a grave economic crisis. Prices rose and the government, short of money, became grasping, increasing the costs of union dues. As exports struggled, imports became unaffordable and the country grew short of oil, sugar and, most of all, coffee. Romans found themselves taking their morning break in coffee-less bars or queuing for hours for their supply. As they queued they complained, if quietly. Until then senior figures in the regime such as Starace had been hated but Mussolini had remained largely above criticism, the Teflon dictator. In May 1939 government spies noted an alarming rise in Mussolini jokes, such as, What does M stand for? Misery.
Not that the regime was in danger. For all its unpopularity Fascism’s machinery of control remained intact and was staffed by people who had much to lose if the government fell. Left to itself, the dictatorship would probably have endured for many more years. To discover the reason why it did not one can go to a spot just to the south-east of Rome’s ancient Aurelian Walls. Here in the spring of 1938 a gleaming new railway station had just been built to impress a visitor to the city: Adolf Hitler. Having stopped at Florence to enjoy the art, he arrived in Rome on the evening of 3 May. He had quite a welcome. Thousands of citizens had been organized to cheer and wave along the railway route. Ostiense station, which was hung with vast eagles and swastikas, was decorated with two gigantic murals, one representing Mussolini and Fascism, the other Hitler and Nazism. Even street names offered a welcome. The short road from the station to Porta San Paolo was now Viale Adolf Hitler and the adjoining square, which contained his statue, was Piazza Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s motorcade took him along Mussolini’s new boulevards: past the Colosseum, across the fora to Piazza Venezia and then to the Quirinal Palace. During Hitler’s stay, which lasted several days, he and Mussolini visited the Foro Mussolini to watch young Fascists mass into a huge M and then a swast
ika.
The new alliance, though, was never popular in Italy. Germany, and especially Austria, were the country’s traditional enemies, against whom the struggle for national unification had been fought. To make matters worse, by 1938 it was clear that Mussolini was very much the junior member of the partnership. Hitler did as he liked – shortly before his visit to Rome he had, without a word of warning, annexed Mussolini’s client state of Austria – while Mussolini emulated and tried to impress, commanding Italians to goosestep, to do Roman salutes and to turn against their Jews.
Almost no Italians wanted war. They had enough trouble paying bills and finding coffee. But on 10 June 1940 – nine months after his ally Hitler – Mussolini went to war with France and Britain. His chief motive was fear. With France on the verge of capitulation he was worried he would lose his place at the peace conference and miss out on his share of the spoils. American Colonel J. Hanley watched the huge crowd summoned to Piazza Venezia to cheer Mussolini’s declaration of war and he observed that people seemed glum and subdued. Later he heard that Italian newsreels of the event had had to be dubbed with cheering from sports events. According to government surveillance reports some Italians accepted that one had to be on the winning side but many felt ashamed at stabbing their old ally France in the back. Only a few students and keen Fascists showed any enthusiasm for the conflict.
The instincts of the Piazza Venezia crowd were soon proved right. Romans blacked out their windows and Fascist militiamen yelled Luce if they saw a glimmer of light, but Mussolini never did take his place at the peace conference. Three years later Italy was still fighting, now against Free France, Brazil, Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States. Newspapers reported regular German and Italian victories in Russia and North Africa yet these victories crept obstinately closer to home. By early 1943 it was clear to all that the conflict would be lost. As to what had gone wrong, the subject of this book is Rome, not Italy in the Second World War, yet one myth is worth disposing of: that Italians were somehow incapable of fighting. They had fought bravely in the First World War and with some success, despite facing enemies who were wealthier and better equipped. Even during the Second World War one Italian unit, the Folgore Parachute Division, proved highly effective in the North African war against the British, who regarded it with great respect. But it had been trained by Germans.
Rome Page 33
