A Bold and Dangerous Family

by Caroline Moorehead

  Like the Pincherles, the Nathans were also patriots for whom la patria mattered more than religious observance. They felt grateful to the Risorgimento which had brought them freedom both from the Austrians and from the papal authorities. In the 1830s in London, both the Rossellis and the Nathans had met Giuseppe Mazzini, the Genoan visionary journalist and pamphleteer who, along with Cavour and Garibaldi, would be one of the founders of the united kingdom of Italy. A good-looking man, with soft feline grace and a long, mournful, oval face, Mazzini had an uncompromising, even religious sense of patriotism. He had spent his life organising one insurrection after another, calling for a new Rome for all the Italian people, based on morality and duty. He believed that if only countries were given the frontiers that God had intended for them, then peace and goodwill would surely follow, and that the unification of Italy would be just one step towards the unification of all Europe. He thought of himself as a ‘missionary of a religion of progress and fraternity’. Others saw him either as the principal theorist of patriotic movements in nineteenth-century Europe, or as a dangerous radical.

  At the age of twenty-six, having narrowly escaped execution, he went into exile, to spend most of the remaining years of his life abroad, dedicating himself to the cause of political and social revolution. He reached London after expulsion by the Swiss. He lived and dressed plainly and was appalled by the cost of everything, though he had a taste for scent and expensive writing paper. He thought the English unusually prone to drunkenness and complained about the bed bugs in his cheap lodgings, but he enjoyed pale ale, saying that it was far healthier than the London water, which was full of worms and bugs. Mazzini loved music. He had not been in London long when he met Sarina Nathan, and together they played in ensembles of chamber music. Money was always short, but the Nathans were happy to provide it. In the evenings, in Sarina’s house, there was much talk of suffrage, education, poverty, and how Karl Marx and communism would not work in a liberal, united Italy. Mazzini had great charm but paid little attention when urged to shave off his moustache, which friends said gave him the look of a wild revolutionary. Sarina and her husband Mayer Moses, whose father was rumoured to be a Rothschild, helped Mazzini send coded messages into Italy in the form of trading exchanges: Purchase ‘50 sacchi della solita merce’ – 50 sacks of the usual goods – meant buy guns.

  To win Rome and make it Italy’s capital had always been Mazzini’s great ambition. In the summer of 1868, he slipped back into Switzerland and crossed secretly into Italy. It was too soon. Arrested and imprisoned in Naples, he was in jail while the military conquest of Rome took place. When freed, he returned to exile in London, spending a few days on the way with the Rosselli brothers in Livorno, then a further two months on Lake Lugano, where Sarina, by now a rich widow, had a house. All twelve of her children had turned out satisfactorily Mazziniani. Three years later Mazzini himself was back, having crossed the St Gotthard pass in a horse-drawn sledge, once again staying with Sarina as he launched the last of his twenty newspapers, La Roma del Popolo; he sent her son Ernesto to Rome to run it. February 1872 found him in Pisa, calling himself Dr Brown and staying with Sarina’s daughter Gianetta, wife of Pellegrino Rosselli, who nursed him through asthma and bronchitis. A month later, shortly before his sixty-seventh birthday, he died. When he was buried in Genoa, the ships at anchor in the bay lowered their flags.

  Mazzini’s story, his patriotism, his hatred of xenophobia and imperialism, his honesty and moral clarity, were all crucial to the Rossellis’ view of themselves and the world they lived in – all things greatly pleasing to Amelia and her family, whose attachment to the recent heroes of the Risorgimento was no less fervent than the Nathans’, and for whom Mazzini had long been their champion.

  In 1891, Amelia Pincherle and Joe Rosselli became engaged. When he was away in Florence or Livorno they exchanged letters every day, later pasting them into an album decorated with flowers. Their tone evokes their courtship: urgent, unexpectedly amorous, even sensual, sometimes apologetic on his side; reassuring, almost maternal, on hers. He called her ‘Miliettina cara’; she called him ‘Mio adorato Joe’ and occasionally ‘Joino’. ‘We will always love each other as we do now,’ she wrote towards the end of April. ‘And, like now, I will feel the need to kiss you and sense your dear lips on mine.’ And, three days later, ‘Happy, happy in a superhuman way. I feel within myself this great fire, and I ask myself: who can say if Joe feels this way too? who can say . . . I feel that my heart, my soul, everything in me is absorbed in you, I am yours in the most complete meaning of the word.’

  Whether Joe felt as strongly, whether, indeed, he was capable of such intensity, is not clear. He wrote to her about his new piano, about how when they were married she would sit on his knee while he worked, and they would kiss, not once, not twice, but a hundred times; he told her of his difficulties composing music; he warned her about his bad moods, his doubts, his days of sadness. She told him that she did not mind. ‘Come here, my poor little boy, come here to me and I will cover you with kisses, and hug you very tightly, tell you such loving things that it will cure your sadness.’ Even so, her letters could be firm: she intended to be taken seriously. ‘I want you to get used to the idea of a woman capable of understanding you, comforting you, and raising you up, earnestly and serenely.’

  Amelia and her husband Joe Rosselli

  When he sent her rare flowers, or those out of season, she scolded him for his extravagance. Just very occasionally, in one of their many letters, they seemed to be moving tentatively towards the idea that they were perhaps not really made for each other, that the whole edifice of their love was without solid foundation, that his easy-going, conciliatory, light-heartedness was not altogether suited to her strong will and moral clarity. But then they shied away. The fulsome, adoring messages resumed. On 3 April 1892, in a synagogue in Rome, they were married. The night before, Joe wrote to Amelia to record that this was his last letter ‘before I am happy’.

  Letter-writing was in Amelia’s blood. Their honeymoon took them to Naples, Nice, Monte Carlo, Spain, Portugal, North Africa, France and England. From all these places letters and postcards showered down on Via Nazionale in Rome, where Emilia said they kept her company. Amelia wrote in a neat, flowing hand; Joe scrawled messages along the side of the page. In London they visited Madame Tussaud’s with Joe’s cousins and Amelia marvelled at the elegance of the Londoners. In Bordeaux they stood on the riverside and watched the boats bound for the United States and the East Indies. They went to the races in Seville and visited Fez and Tétouan. Sometimes there was so much to say that Amelia wrote first one way and then another, so that the letter looked more like tapestry than writing. Emilia wrote no less often. On 15 May, when Joe and Amelia reached Madrid, they found fourteen letters waiting for them. The honeymoon lasted nearly three months.

  Vienna 1892

  By the late 1870s, Vienna had been the musical capital of the western world for over a hundred years. Even if the musical world was riven with a deep and acrimonious gulf between Wagnerians and Brahmians, the first loving and the second despising emotional depths, there was music everywhere, all the time, in the magnificent new Opera House, in concert halls, in private houses and even in the parks. When Joe proposed to Amelia that they settle in Vienna, in order for him to pursue his musical career, she was pleased. For Amelia it meant theatre – in which she was growing more interested – art, culture, an escape from the formality of Italian domestic life.

  They arrived in August 1892 and took a flat at 3 Amalienstrasse; Joe enrolled at the Conservatoire to take lessons from Mahler’s teacher, Robert Fuchs. Vienna was an agreeable city, surrounded by vineyards, meadows and the beech woods made famous by the waltzes of Johann Strauss, with the river Wien curving away across the plain towards Hungary. Emperor Franz Joseph was living in Olympian isolation from his people, complaining that Mozart’s ‘Seraglio’ had too many notes, and presiding over an aristocracy of sixty-five archdukes and -duchesses. Sisi, t
he frantically dieting empress, who lived on bouillons of venison and eggs whipped up in port, spent much time travelling abroad and was not popular. But a new constitution had brought civil rights to the emperor’s subjects, and prosperity had caused an unrivalled flowering not only of music but of all the arts and sciences.

  Led by Klimt, Carl Moll and Otto Wagner, the future young secessionist artists were beginning to replace the carved and inlaid furniture, the fringed tablecloths and heavy dark hangings, the bric-a-brac and peacock feathers, with a sparer, more austere look. The Impressionist painters were arriving; the heavy, declamatory style of theatre was evolving into a swifter, lighter form; trotting races had never been more popular, and before Lent each year, Vienna saw fifty balls held on a single night.

  Coffee houses were central to the intellectual life of the city. Open all day and for most of the night, they came in all sizes and forms, and provided food, beer, newspapers and billiard tables. Chess-players met in the Café Central; the Café Griendsteidl was home to musicians and writers. Many of these cafés had been decorated to look like richly gilded drawing rooms, with oil paintings, carpets, stuccoed vaulting, chandeliers and swirls of marble, malachite and alabaster. The best were positioned on street corners, with bay windows on both sides, allowing people to see and to be seen. For the gregarious Joe, who loved to talk, these cafés were extremely alluring. They had little to offer Amelia, for women were not made welcome, and went instead to Demerol’s, the imperial confectioner, where they drank hot chocolate and ate creamy cakes. With time on her hands, Amelia went to the many packed theatres, to light comedies and verse plays, and to Schnitzler’s sketches about modishly melancholic Austrian youth. She was a good linguist, and in any case Vienna was multilingual, from the days when the Austro-Hungarian empire stretched across swathes of Europe. Joe kept the household accounts meticulously, noting down expenditure on wood, concert tickets, ties, blankets, newspapers and tips to porters. He also recorded his gambling wins and his debts, which grew steadily.

  Behind all the exuberance and magnificence, however, was a vague sense of impending collapse. Anti-semitism was stirring, fed by disparaging references to the gôut Juif – the modernity many disliked – and to the haute Juiverie, the prominent Jewish bankers and industrialists.

  But there was something else happening in Vienna, and it became of great interest to Amelia. Not wanted in the cafés, banned from the faculties of medicine and philosophy at the university, Austrian women were turning to politics. Adelheid Popp, the first woman public speaker for the Social Democratic Workers Party, was writing and campaigning for the rights of the many badly paid and overworked women in industry. All over Vienna, feminist movements were taking shape. They found an echo in The Doll’s House, Ibsen’s play about a woman who leaves her husband and children. Its theme, that women were living in a world made and ruled by men, intrigued Amelia, as did Freud’s work on the unconscious, which she had recently discovered. She turned her thoughts to a play of her own, working quickly, as if, she said later, by instinct, seeing the scenes appear before her, hearing the voices and conversations of her characters in her head. In three months the play was written.

  Even in iconoclastic and experimental Vienna, Anima – Soul – was a bold play. Amelia’s heroine Olga is an artist, a free, independent woman from a good Italian family, who is known to paint nudes and receive gentlemen in her studio. One day she falls in love with the respectable and conventional Silvio. Just before they marry, she tells him that when she was fifteen she was raped. Silvio breaks off their engagement and marries a pure, dull woman, with whom he has nothing in common. Amelia’s verdict is harsh. Olga finds, marries and is happy with another man. Silvio shoots himself. Implicit is the idea that men lack moral understanding, that they cannot distinguish between the ‘virginity of the body’ and the ‘virginity of the mind’, and that in any case their only concern is a trivial one, that of the chasteness of women.

  For the time being, Amelia did nothing with her three-act play. Her first son, Aldo, known to the family as ‘Topinino’, was born on 21 July 1895. But unlike her heroine Olga, Amelia was far from happy. Joe’s eye was wandering. His small talent had not flourished in Vienna’s exuberant but hard-working musical world, and there was too much else to distract him. In the summer of 1896, having been away four years, they returned to Rome, to a flat in the Palazzo Marignoli, not far from Piazza San Silvestro.

  Rome 1896

  In the years that Amelia and Joe had been away, the rulers of the new united Italy had been floundering. Public debt, corruption and bribery were rampant. Francesco Crispi, a self-important former Garibaldino who had been prime minister on and off for the past decade, presided over a parliament in which votes were bartered for favours, and the word ‘trasformismo’ had been coined to denote the hanging on to parliamentary majority through alliances with often incompatible partners. Unification had happened too fast, seven states moulded into one in under two years; there seemed to have been no time to think through a credible modern democracy.

  On top of this, Crispi dreamt of military conquest. He longed for Italian men to become martial, and for Italy to acquire colonies. Smarting from a humiliating defeat by Ethiopian troops at Dogali in 1887, Crispi had despatched a force to overthrow the Emperor Menelik. Shortly before Amelia, Joe and Aldo returned to Rome, these soldiers too had been humiliatingly defeated at Adowa, with the loss of more than 6,000 lives and many men taken prisoner. With the Treaty of Addis Ababa, Italy was obliged to recognise Ethiopia as an independent state. Only Eritrea and Somaliland, seized in a punitive raid unleashed against what Crispi called the ‘barbarians’, remained Italian. Crispi, now in his seventies, was forced to retire. As prime minister he had been quarrelsome and embarrassing; and he had won few friends by declaring that Italians had been injected ‘with the morphine of cowardice’.

  Amelia’s brother Gabriele had become a professor in jurisprudence and was engaged on redrafting the constitution; her second brother, Carlo, was working as an architect and engineer. Important in all their lives was the presence in Rome of her uncle by marriage Ernesto Nathan, the man sent by Mazzini to Rome to run his newspaper, and who had recently become Grand Master of the Roman Masonic lodge. Ernesto, who still spoke Italian with an English accent from his childhood in London, had a formidably austere and intransigent wife, Virginia Mieli, as republican in her views as her husband: in Roman circles they were considered the perfect Mazzini couple.

  Joe now sought out the Roman musical world, in which Verdi, ‘il maestro della rivoluzione italiana’, had replaced Donizetti as the most popular composer. Amelia turned back to her play. Conscious that Anima’s story of rape and disregard for social conventions was little suited to Catholic, family-minded Italy, she entered it with no expectations for a national theatre competition in Turin. Others – Verga – had written on such topics, but they were men. Anima reached the final shortlist of three, the winner to be selected after a performance by the prestigious Teatro dell’Arte. And there, on 29 October 1898, it was declared the unanimous favourite. Amelia gave 500 of the 2,000 lira prize to the association of Italian playwrights.

  Anima was taken up and produced in other cities, and she was soon being referred to as the ‘foremost woman playwright of Italy’. Many years later, looking back over her life, she would write in her memoirs: ‘Perhaps the day on which I was first recognised as a playwright was also – unbeknownst to me – the day on which my happiness as a woman ended.’

  She now sat down to write a novella, Felicità Perduta, ‘Lost Happiness’, once again a desolate tale of the fissures between men and women, passion and love, work and domesticity. For Amelia, happiness could come only from equality and truthfulness. When Luisa, the young wife in her story, asks her husband Giulio, who has reluctantly admitted to an earlier affair, what would happen if a wife set out to inspire passion rather than conjugal love in her husband, Giulio replies: ‘Any woman who felt this way . . . would not be an honest wom
an, nor a desirable wife.’ For Luisa, consumed with jealousy, the marriage has died.

  Amelia and Joe’s second son, Carlo, was born on 16 November 1899; Sabatino, their third boy, always known as Nello, followed a year later on 29 November 1900. Shortly before Nello’s birth, Joe’s father died, leaving him a substantial fortune. But Joe, always somewhat reckless, entrusted it all to an unscrupulous lawyer, who invested it unwisely. Within two years, the money was gone; Joe, ever gambling, ever losing, was forced to sell everything to pay his debts.

  These financial calamities shook Amelia. But she was far more shaken when she learnt that Joe had formed an attachment to an opera singer he had met in the casino at Monte Carlo. The moral code in which she so passionately believed had been breached and, like Luisa in Felicità Perduta, she was not forgiving. Joe had dug an ‘abyss’ between them with ‘his own two hands’, and there was no going back. It was not that she had ceased to love him; on the contrary, she ‘loved him beyond everything’. But they would have to part.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Donne Emancipate

  The Florentines loved their city. They loved the way that every street and every house gave a sense of past harmony and measure. For them, its magic lay not in the greatness of its artists but in the fact that, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it had been a city of bankers and merchants, modest and parsimonious men who spent their fortunes on architecture and paintings and built palaces filled with frescoes and books, surrounding them with cypress trees. They liked the way that artists called their studios botteghe, shops, and thought of themselves as artisans. It was in Florence, they said, that perspective was invented, along with clocks that rang the hour, and art in which reason dominated over fantasy. There was a word – fiorentinità – for what the citizens felt about themselves. It meant not just intense pleasure in their surroundings – in the scent of the orange blossom, the lilac and wisteria, and the light, yellow by day, violet at dusk – but a certain dry wit, discretion, irreverence and an instinct for non-conformity. And also a kind of heaviness, an ever-present consciousness of passing time, so that in some houses they built a small door, the size of a coffin, called ‘la porta della morte’.