It is in Florence that the story of Amelia Rosselli and her three sons really begins.
They arrived in 1903, Amelia having decided to leave Joe and embark, as she put it, ‘on my life as a woman alone’. Joe, she would write, was an exceptionally intelligent man, possessed of great charm, but his intelligence was too eclectic and his will too weak. She was not, of course, a woman alone. She had Aldo, now aged eight, Carlo, four, and Nello, three, to whom she explained that their father had stayed behind in Rome to look after his affairs and would be joining them. She had been forced to leave behind Emmy, an English nanny the children loved and who had been with them since the birth of Aldo. In the boys’ heartbroken reaction to the loss of Emmy, Amelia thought she perceived her sons’ future characters: Aldo said nothing and disappeared; Carlo raged; Nello looked confused and miserable.
Of all the cities in Italy, Florence was the most sensible choice for Amelia. Joe’s uncle Pellegrino, a tall, magisterial figure with a full white flowing beard, lived in the city, and Amelia was much attached to his clever, feisty wife Gianetta, who was also a good pianist. Gianetta lamented the deaths of Mazzini and his heroic companions and bewailed the banality of her contemporaries, ‘small men . . . not worth frequenting’. Italy, she said, had become a duller and flatter country since they died, and Florence a less romantic city: in the last fifteen years alone, one of the most famous city centres in the world had been stripped down – 26 old streets destroyed, along with 40 piazzas – in the name of modernity and hygiene. Amelia took a flat in Via Cherubini, not far from the Duomo and the central station. It was in an imposing eighteenth-century villa and rather dark, and on the grey, rainy days of the Florentine winters, damp and cold seeped through the walls. But she was short of money.
There was another excellent reason for choosing Florence. Amelia’s success with Anima had brought her fame in literary circles, and Florence was Italy’s cultural heart. Here, she could earn a living, writing more plays and short stories, and here she would find friends. Very conscious of herself as a separated woman, in a country in which the Catholic Church frowned upon such things, and suffering from what she described as ‘esaurimento nervoso’, nervous exhaustion, she took stock, and thought long and hard about how she should raise her sons to understand about duty and generosity of spirit. She was not sorry that they had so little money: it would teach them that the real riches of life lay with the spirit.
Topinino, the title taken from her name for Aldo as a baby, was the first of her children’s books, read aloud to Aldo, chapter by chapter, when he went to bed. It says everything about her state of mind. Topinino is a small boy who has a grey cat, Baffino and a large white dog, Nadir. His mother – illustrated in the book by a slender, elegant woman, with the nipped-in waist and long dresses of the day – takes him shopping for a sailor suit, in which he preens himself as he walks along, complaining loudly that no one is admiring him. She reproves him: ‘what has he done to earn admiration?’ With the help of a family of flies, Topinino, defying his mother’s orders, sets out on a series of adventures. These involve ocean liners, the newly installed telegraph system and many other educational things besides. But the message in each chapter is clear: small children needed to be obedient, think of others, not steal and always help ‘the weak and the oppressed’. ‘What is the point’, observes the narrator, ‘in being sorry when it is too late?’ Amelia dedicated the book to her ‘little birds’.
From time to time, Joe came to Florence to see the boys. The visits were affectionate, but brief and uneasy, with Joe miserably saying that he was ‘not worthy’. In his absence – for the three boys were growing up to regard the writing of letters as a natural part of life – Aldo sent him reports. ‘Charley and Nino have grown very tall’, he told his father, ‘and Charley is very fat.’ The younger boys added their names in careful large letters. Amelia invented excuses for his few appearances. She spoke of him with respect to the children, and had resolved to say nothing of the true reason for their separation – or indeed that they had separated at all – until they were much older.
There was another Florence, one that Amelia observed but for the moment played little part in. Since the early nineteenth century, the city had been, as the Goncourt brothers noted, ‘une ville toute Anglaise’. Home to some 3,000 English residents – writers, retired diplomats, pensioned-off governesses and teachers, referred to by the diarist Lady Walburga Paget as ‘a galaxy of spirits on this small plot of land’ – it was also a stopping point for many others who came to look at the art and enjoy the pleasant life. Browning and Henry James both passed through, as did Edward Lear, who spoke of Florence as ‘plum pudding, treacle, wedding cake, sugar, barley sugar, sugar candy, raisins and peppermint drops all at once’. Marmalade, digestive biscuits and seed cake were to be found in Via Tornabuoni. There was an English chemist, Roberts & Co, an American doctor, Dr Lewis Jones, an Anglo-Italian boys’ school, an English-language bookshop and lending library, as well as a group of English nursing sisters on Via Ferrucci. In the tea rooms, couples tangoed. Steam-driven trams ran along the Lungarno, where the mosquitoes were said to be fearsome, and little horse-drawn omnibuses, with six people inside and two on top, toiled their way up to Fiesole, San Domenico or Settignano, where many of the foreigners had their villas.
What delighted the romantic novelist Ouida was that she could buy anenomes in March and lilies in April in the very places in which Ghirlandaio as a boy had played among those sculpted in gold by his father. Standing on their terraces above the city, visitors remarked on the last moment of light over Florence, spread out along the valley of the Arno below them, when every contour, every tree and leaf seemed to be picked out in sharp intensity. As Arnold Bennett noted, it was a city without hurry and with very little ambition but where ‘there is a great deal more happiness than in England’. For these foreigners, Florence was Arcadia, a dream landscape, in which the Italians were often little more than picturesque components. Of the remarkably rich Italian cultural world of music, literature, clubs, magazines and associations that was flourishing all about them, they knew very little. Just as they knew nothing of the political tensions which by now were simmering around the city. It was perhaps not surprising that it would be some time before Amelia made friends among them.
Not long after reaching Florence, Amelia renewed her friendship with Angiolo and Adolfo Orvieto, whom she had last seen in Venice when they were children and envied the warmth and humour of their lives. Both had become good-looking, well-educated men, Adolfo clean-shaven and bowler-hatted, a bibliophile and author of satirical verse, Angiolo a poet and journalist, thin and very dark, with black eyes and a thick black moustache which curled at the tips. In 1889, while still in their early twenties, the two brothers had founded a magazine, to which the already celebrated poet Gabriele D’Annunzio had contributed a number of provocative articles. Though it closed two years later, Angiolo and Adolfo had gone on to start a second magazine, intending to make it more analytical and irreverent. D’Annunzio proposed the title: Il Marzocco, from the Florentine lion immortalised by Donatello in the Piazza della Signoria. Contributors met in the Café Giacosa in Via Tornabuoni, or in the Cascine, the park on the right bank of the Arno where the fashionable Florentines walked under the trees, and where Angiolo rode his pure-blood Arab horse. Pirandello sent in articles; when funds ran low, the Orvietos put in more money.
Having travelled around the world for half a year, Angiolo, the elder and the more extrovert of the two Orvieto brothers, had married his third cousin, Laura Cantoni. She was a small, fair-haired woman with sapphire eyes who looked frail and diaphanous but was in fact both capricious and obstinate. As a student in London, Laura had met Dickens and dreamt of working in the slums. Though Angiolo and Laura had done up a house in the centre of Florence, their real home was a white mansion in the hills, surrounded by olive trees, the Villa del Poggiolino. The Orvietos had two young childen, Leonfrancesco and Annalia, much the same age as Carlo and
Nello, and the Rossellis were invited to their large family gatherings, with several generations sitting at one long table, the meals often followed by plays written by the visitors and performed in the limonaia, the lemon house. Laura took to Amelia immediately, noting that she was intelligent, understanding, fascinating, exceedingly elegant and that ‘even when suffering herself, is always ready to take pleasure in the happiness of others’. Not much, it seemed, had changed in Amelia since her guarded Venetian days. Whenever she was troubled, Laura went to see Amelia, whom she regarded as more reliable and grown-up than herself, and though firm, ‘never hard or combative’.
It was at Villa del Poggiolino that Angiolo and Laura dreamt up the idea of starting a new club, the Società Leonardo da Vinci, where scientists and men of letters could meet and devise ways of shaking up the staid and sleepy Florentines. It was to be elegant, but not ‘social’, a counterpoint to the Club dell’Unione, where the old Florentine aristocracy gathered, or the more raffish Casino Borghese, where the ‘ceto medio’, the middle classes, met. Foreigners and university professors went to Doney’s, painters and writers to the Café Michelangelo.
Some five years earlier, Gabriele D’Annunzio had rented a fifteenth-century villa in Settignano, where he lived ‘like a great Renaissance lord’ among his dogs and horses, enjoying an exquisitely aesthetic life, writing his cycle of poems, Laudi – ‘Praises’ – and very occasionally descending regally into Florence, where he would be recognised and admired. D’Annunzio, whose support of Il Marzocco ensured that it had a steady number of readers, was a man of exceptional vanity, who gloried in his beautiful neat ears and flat stomach, and loved to shock with tales of incest and satanism. Since 1895, he had been having an affair with the humourless but extremely successful actress Eleonora Duse, who had added his plays to her repertoire and reluctantly put up with his notorious promiscuity. With their shared, self-consciously precious, behaviour, each extracting all that was most beautiful from their surroundings, they seemed to make a perfect couple.
Eleonora Duse, a woman who alternated periods of great affection with silence and rejection, was a regular guest at the Villa del Poggiolino. Laura, herself restless and prone to intensity and melodrama, had become infatuated with the actress, to the point of neglecting Angiolo, her children and her friends. Amelia, emotionally very orderly herself, worried about Laura’s capacity for sowing disorder, and wrote to her friend, referring to Duse as ‘la grande Donna’, and saying that whatever she touched acquired a strange ‘vibration’. ‘When you receive a letter or a visit from the Duse, then you hate me. I didn’t at first understand why, but now I do: it’s because she is important while I am not. It’s a mistake to allow yourself to be totally consumed by another human being. It shows a lack of personality.’ It never occurred to Amelia to be any less honest with others than she was with herself. But Laura was not to be deflected. ‘I would have liked to have lived just for her’, she replied, ‘and to have been able to provide for all her dreams.’
The day came when Amelia and Eleonora Duse were at the Villa del Poggiolino at the same time. The actress was enduring a temporary estrangement from her compulsively unfaithful lover, who, she declared, had ‘squeezed me like a lemon and then thrown me away’. The two women should have liked one another: The Doll’s House was a regular part of Duse’s repertory and both belonged, after all, to the world of theatre. But their encounter was a painful affair. Politely, Amelia asked la grande Donna whether she preferred contemporary or earlier plays. Duse was snappy. ‘If you are going to set me an exam,’ she replied, ‘well then I shall leave!’ Since it was perfectly clear that Duse had no interest of any kind in Amelia herself, Amelia hazarded a second more general question. This time Duse did not even reply; she covered her eyes wearily with her hands. Amelia crept away, went upstairs and burst into tears.
For a while, Laura and Amelia’s close friendship suffered. But Angiolo grew angry and the strange passion for Duse faded; Amelia, Aldo, Carlo and Nello were again guests at the Villa del Poggiolino. Better still, Amelia had been introduced to Giulio Zabban, a man of wide interests and prodigious memory who would later become vice president of a large Florentine insurance company, and Giorgina, his well-dressed and no less intelligent translator wife, author of biographies of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Florence Nightingale. Amelia soon thought of Giorgina as her sister, saying that they agreed on almost every topic. Being childless, the Zabbans quickly took on the role of honorary uncle and aunt to the three boys, calling themselves Zio Giù and Zia Gì. Villa Il Frassine, their house at Rignano sull’Arno, surrounded by groves of olive trees and a walled kitchen garden, became the Rossellis’ second home. Zia Gì was famous for her tea parties and exquisite anchovy-butter sandwiches. The Zabbans, said Amelia, were an incomparable gift from Providence.
Il Marzocco was part of a wider, more ambitious cultural movement. By the turn of the twentieth century, Florence alone boasted eighty-three magazines, all aspiring, one way or another, to influence and shape post-Risorgimento Italy. It was here that the European avant-garde was taking root. Writers dreamt of breaking out of the isolation in which they considered themselves to be still living and of offering what they described as a spiritual alternative to the modernising forces of science, commerce and industry. In all of this, Il Marzocco, with its elegant typeface and its heraldic lion, saw itself as paving the way, defending art for art’s sake, harking back to the glories of the Renaissance, and attacking the ills of modern life, the smoking factories and the ugly mechanical innovations. In 1903 came a rival, the Leonardo, started by two journalists, Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, who professed themselves ‘intoxicated with idealism’, ready to lead the lost Italians out of the dark and towards a new ‘spiritual virility’. All these magazines were prone to schisms, defections and intense rivalry. But for Amelia they represented a source of work. On one occasion she asked the Orvietos if she might reply to a piece in Il Marzocco, in which the novelist Neera had argued that, since men and women were different physiologically, it must follow that their rights and duties were also different, and there was therefore no reason why women should be allowed to take men’s work. Amelia’s reply was crisp, forceful. Whether or not the future would prove Neera’s assumptions to be valid, she wrote, what was important now was to provide all women with autonomy and recognition. And as for those who chose to be mothers, that role too was vital in imparting the ideas of justice and morality to the young; it was a job like any other and needed to be recognised as such. As a polemicist, Amelia was turning out to have a fearless and distinctive voice.
Before leaving Rome, Amelia had worked with the upright, implacably good Virginia Mieli for various philanthropic causes, and had helped put on an exhibition of women’s art and work. Its aim, to obtain social recognition and fair pay for women workers, had stayed with Amelia. She had been involved with the Industrie Femminili, an organisation promoting women at work, and they now asked her to become their Florence representative. Since the needle-workers were short of designs, she went to look for ideas in the city’s frescoes and paintings.
She was also finishing work on a collection of short stories, Gente Oscura, ‘Humble People’, taking her characters from among the working classes, the ‘vagabonds and the disinherited’. When it was published, the left-wing newspaper Avanti! praised her for being ‘without a doubt a socialist’. This she immediately refuted, announcing that it was more that she felt great sympathy for women who did not have the fortune to belong to ‘so-called good society’, and that she remained profoundly influenced by Mazzini’s democratic principles and by her conviction that society needed to help those who were less well off. A new play, Illusione, had been taken by the Carignano theatre in Turin, with one of Italy’s best-known actresses, Teresa Mariani, in the lead. Once more a tale of emotional inequality, turmoil and lack of forgiveness, it revolved around the story of a man who, betrayed by his young wife, nonetheless takes her back and says that he still loves
her. To start all over, however, could only be an illusion; once again it is Amelia’s female character, braver than her husband, who makes the decision herself to leave.
Critics compared Amelia to Ibsen, but also noted that the language was too literary, not dramatic enough. After the enormous success of Anima, the reaction by audiences to the new play was muted. Laura Orvieto observed that her friend’s writings never quite did her justice. They lacked her particular voice and style, one which was robust, full of sudden insights and eclectic memories, and at once humorous and profound. Clever, poignant, with characters easy to admire or pity, the plays were somehow too wordy.
At home, Amelia was having trouble with Aldo. Though he did well at school and showed signs of being artistic, he seemed to her to have become boastful and arrogant, and his manner towards the very people about whom Amelia wrote had become ‘distastefully superior’. The real Topinino had clearly not listened closely enough to her teachings and she feared his influence on her younger boys. With Laura protesting that she was sometimes too hard on her three children, and Amelia replying that she abhorred what she called ‘moral disorder’ and was determined that her three sons should acquire ‘strength of will’, Amelia took a most unusual step. She asked a local carpenter whether he would take Aldo as a perfectly ordinary apprentice, after school, making no allowances for him.
Thus, three afternoons a week, dressed in rough clothes and an overall, Aldo was to be found sweeping up, running errands, being bossed around by the genuine apprentices. Carlo and Nello enjoyed gazing through the shop window at their embarrassed elder brother, in his huge blue apron, his blond hair cut like that of a thirteenth-century pageboy. And Amelia, for whom writing, life, family and duty formed one continuous whole, sat down and wrote Topinino, Garzone di Bottega – ‘The Shop Boy’ – in which her hero, now a teenager, refuses to study and is boastful and proud, until his father takes him out of school and sends him to live and work with a local carpenter. Topinino’s hair is cropped short, he is scolded and made to work very hard, and he learns not just about poverty and hunger, but about humility. ‘I had always thought that the world I saw from my window was the real world,’ he remarks, ‘never realising that there was another one, once you chose to see it.’ His character reformed, Topinino resolves to become a doctor or a lawyer, in order to look after the poor. This time, Topinino’s adventures were read aloud to all three boys before they went to sleep. Amelia dedicated the book to the ever-supportive Zia Gì, and in due course Aldo, in words almost identical to those of his father to his own parents, wrote to Amelia: ‘I will be good so as to make you happy.’
A Bold and Dangerous Family Page 4