Another was a blacksmith’s son from the Apennine foothills of Emilia-Romagna, a pallid, thick-set young socialist, anti-clerical teacher and journalist called Benito Mussolini. Although, like Amendola, still in his twenties, Mussolini was already a man much drawn to power, uncouth and rough in manner, writing fiery articles and prone to outbursts of fury and glaring looks. He was about to become editor of the socialist Avanti!, in whose pages he waged virulent warfare against his opponents, whether on the left or the right, displaying all the volatility and inconsistency that made his own politics so hard to pin down. But he was all in favour of La Voce’s crusading message. As he wrote to Prezzolini in the autumn of 1909: ‘To create the “Italian” soul is a superb mission.’
Mussolini was living with, but not yet married to, Rachele, born in the same village of Predappio in Romagna as himself, a small and buxom girl he described as ‘an attractive wench, coarse-mannered but inviting’. Their first child, Edda, was born in 1910, but this did not prevent him from carrying on with any number of women, to whom he could be brutal. One of these was Amelia’s childhood friend Margherita Grassini, now married to a lawyer called Sarfatti, who had just inherited a fortune. Margherita was beautiful, fascinated by politics and deeply ambitious, and she tried to teach the dishevelled and belligerent Mussolini how to dress and behave.
Nineteenth-century Italy had not held women in high regard. Two doctors in Lombardy, investigating the high rate of women with pellagra, a disease of hunger, described how local farming families, having only a single cow, gave the milk to the men, or made butter which the men ate or sold. The men also ate all the eggs. The doctors concluded that these women were simply perceived to have minori bisogni, ‘lesser needs’.
But as the century approached its end there had been a sudden rise in interest in the bettering of women’s lives, and in its wake came a flowering of feminist groups. People began to talk about the elevazione della donna. Some concerned themselves with suffrage, others with factory conditions and infant mortality. In Florence, in 1897, a Lega Femminile had met to discuss ways in which to confer rights on school teachers and the new telephonists. Not long after Ernesto Nathan became mayor of Rome, the first National Congress of Italian Women was held in the capital, organised by feminists from the left. Though ruthlessly appropriated by the right, and some of the more ambitious goals deleted from the agenda, its message about improving the lives of ordinary women did not go unheard. Amelia, already active in a number of Florentine associations, went as a delegate. Mindful that the new social-welfare laws making their way through parliament had omitted to mention domestic servants, she was at work drawing up proposals for sick pay and pensions, outlining her ideas in a long article for Il Marzocco. With her customary lack of sentimentality, she praised the ‘common sense’ of Italian women who, she said, were quick to ridicule the more theatrical aspects of feminism.
Florence, with its many clubs and associations, was a natural home for these women campaigners. In 1904, a talented young British feminist called Constance Smedley, a novelist, playwright and creator of pageants, had founded the first Lyceum Club, in London, with the aim of getting women out of their domestic settings and into public life. Branches had since opened in Paris and Berlin, and in 1908 Amelia became a founder member of the Florentine chapter. Exclusively for women – men could be guests but had no voting rights – the Lyceum started ambitious classes in languages, journalism and international affairs. Amelia immediately proposed lower dues for the ‘less fortunate sisters’, women just as refined, well-educated and upper class as the founders, but obliged through straitened circumstances to earn their own living. Though this went through, there were already tensions among the more patrician Florentine ladies, who spoke of the need for exclusivity, and they blocked her second suggestion, the setting up of rural libraries. On the surface, the debates remained exquisitely courteous. After a performance of Amelia’s El rèfolo, the ladies offered a tea in her honour.
Around this time Amelia made another important friend. In Turin for an early performance of Anima, Amelia had been introduced to Guglielmo Ferrero, a distinguished historian of Roman antiquity, and his wife Gina Lombroso. Gina was a successful writer on the psychology of women and professed herself interested in the ‘essence’ of men and women. The Ferreros had a son, Leo, a little younger than Nello, on whom Gina doted. She devoted a special book to his deeds, saying that he had ‘moral sensibilities’, a great feeling for justice and that he possessed a ‘refined aesthetic’ sense. Leo was indeed a little prodigy, and also a budding poet. When the Ferreros moved to Florence in 1910, to a house near the Boboli Gardens, Amelia introduced Gina into the Lyceum Club. Though distinctly eccentric in her dress, with a penchant for long Grecian tunics, Gina was soon befriended by Laura Orvieto and Zia Gì. These four women – all Jewish, all very well educated, all determined to make other women understand that work and a degree of independence led to greater happiness – became a formidable quartet.
Leo’s reputation as a child prodigy was much discussed in clever Florentine circles. Both Carlo and Nello somewhat dreaded meeting him, imagining a tall, imposing boy so clever that he would put them to shame. In the event, Leo turned out to be short, like a little shrimp, and rather silent. None of this, however, could disguise the fact that he excelled at school, while Aldo and Carlo were both struggling. With Aldo, Amelia decided, it was once again a question of behaviour, with Carlo a combination of laziness and lack of intelligence. She was not a woman to let things slip. The rather tubby Carlo had had a long bout of ill-health. First appendicitis then phlebitis had kept him in bed on and off for almost a year, and he had used his ailments as an excuse not to study but to play the piano instead. He was argumentative, and refused to learn from the tutors brought in to help him. Scolding made little difference. Amelia now took another step, as radical and unpopular with her friends as the sending of Aldo to a carpenter. Both Carlo and Nello were in Florence’s most prestigious private classical Gimnasio, the Michelangiolo, to which the brightest Florentine boys were sent. In the middle of the year, Amelia abruptly removed Carlo and sent him to the local technical school, widely considered inferior, where he continued with his maths but abandoned Greek and Latin. Humiliating as this was, he was given no chance to object.
For Amelia, her Jewishness as yet played very little part in her life. But a forceful new rabbi, Samuel Hirsch Margulies, had recently arrived in Florence, started an association called Pro Cultura, and begun to attract some of the younger Jews in the city, among whom were spreading ideas about Zionism and a rinascita idealista, a renewal of their Jewish faith. Somewhat to Amelia’s discomfort, Carlo suddenly asked to be taken to the synagogue, and she worried that she had made a mistake in imposing her lack of religion on her sons. For her there was no debate: the italianità of Italian Jews was something precious, to be jealously guarded. She had no time for Zionism, fearing that it might damage the position of assimilated Italian Jews. For her, Judaism was ‘a religion and not a race’. There was just one patria, Italy, and they were Italian first and Jews second. To her relief, Carlo rapidly lost interest. The visits to the synagogue were abandoned.
All three boys were turning out to be musical. Aldo and Carlo played the piano, Nello the cello: Amelia said that music was something that could take the place of religion in ‘elevating the soul’. Deaf to her appeals, Aldo continued to waste his time and neglect the Mazzini principles she had sought so hard to instil: absolute clarity between right and wrong, the necessity of personal sacrifice and the practice of virtue towards others. Finally, Amelia removed him from his day school in Florence and sent him as a boarder to the Catholic, semi-military Collegio Tolomei in Siena, where he rose at six, spent eight hours a day at his books and had his lights out by nine. Punishments consisted of long periods of total silence, sometimes lasting several days. There were hot baths only on Sundays.
When Amelia had news that Aldo’s marks were good, she wrote to him as ‘Aldolino’ an
d signed herself ‘Mammina’. When they were bad, or there were complaints about his manners, she was implacable. Could he come home for the four-day break over Carnevale? No, he could not. ‘When you understand, for once and for all, that by behaving badly you are harming yourself, then you will behave better.’ Aldo’s handwriting, she pointed out, had become very sloppy, and ‘character and handwriting go hand in hand’. Unless things changed, he would not be coming home for the Easter holidays either. For his part, Aldo was remarkably uncomplaining. His letters were full of references to his desire to earn her approval. ‘I must now do everything I can in order to merit being allowed to come home for ever.’ As one Christmas holiday approached, Amelia wrote: ‘If in the next 20 days your behaviour does not improve . . . then you can give up all hopes of coming home.’
Even with Carlo, as his letters show, Amelia could be brutal. ‘I promise to be better,’ he wrote to her one day. ‘You’ll see that I won’t make you cross again. I am older and I understand that it causes you much unhappiness.’ Yet Amelia loved her sons and thought about them constantly, even obsessively, and she missed Aldo painfully. It was as if she was terrified that Joe’s weak and vacillating nature might have been handed down to the boys, and that only by the most ferocious vigilance could she hope to turn them into the kind of Mazzini characters she longed for.
Joe had never lost touch with Amelia and his sons, though his letters to them were often wistful. In April 1910, thanking the boys for their birthday wishes, he noted sorrowfully: ‘Your life interests me a great deal more than my own . . . which is fuller of pain than happiness.’ Nello, who, unlike his brothers, was a diligent student, wrote to tell his father that he had come first in his class of sixty-six pupils. ‘When’, he asked, ‘will you come to live with us properly?’
It might have happened. In the nine years they had been apart Amelia had formed no other attachments, while Joe seemed genuinely to have shed his irresponsible ways. There was talk of him moving to Florence. But early in 1911 he fell ill and when he failed to get better the doctors recommended a stay in a specialist nursing home at Capodimonte in Naples. Leaving the boys with Assunta and Zia Gì, Amelia went south to look after him. Nello wrote to her: ‘My longing to be with you is gigantic.’ On the same piece of paper, sending messages of love, Carlo signed his name with a great flourish: ‘Carlo Alberto Rosselli’. In another letter, Nello drew a picture of a tall, elegant woman in a long dress, a suitcase by her side, clasping two small boys tightly to her, while an older one in a large hat stands alongside. From his boarding school, Aldo wrote to suggest that his father might recover more quickly were he to come home to live with them. But Joe was past recovery. On 9 September he died. He was forty-four.
Amelia was devastated. It was as if, paralysed by her sense of moral rectitude and duty, she had been completely unable to accept or forget the past, and now that he was dead she felt bitterly all she had lost. She put on black, and it would be many months before her friends were able to persuade her to take it off.
Florence was gradually turning into a modern city. Trains now linked it to Rome, Arezzo, Faenza, Pistoia and Livorno. Typewriters and gramophones were to be found on sale in Via Tornabuoni, and in La Nazione a motorist wrote of his ‘most agreeable ride’ in a car with pneumatic tyres. The desire of the Florentine intellectuals to link their city to the currents of progress sweeping across Europe received a further boost when, in 1908, the Grenoble Centre for Italian Studies opened an annex in the city. Its first director, Julien Luchaire, spoke of Florence as ‘one of the most intellectual cities in the world’, an ‘Italian Athens’, and declared his intention of rivalling the strong German and British presence. This was particularly pleasing to those Florentines who considered Paris to be the heart of all that was most avant-garde.
On the surface, this cultural fervour was all about freeing the Italians from the leaden weight of what they called ‘passatismo’, a cult of the past, and getting them to embrace modernity. But it had a darker side, one which glorified war and was seduced by the idea of violence and conquest. The Futurist Movement was launched in Le Figaro in Paris in 1909 with an essay by the journalist and poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, an exhibitionist, flâneur and experimenter in literary forms, who had a moustache with pointed ends and loved to shock. Marinetti had spent the early years of the century moving between Rome, Turin and Milan preaching novelty and a hatred of historical nostalgia. In ‘A Manifesto of Futurism’, he spoke rapturously of the beauty of mechanical objects, and particularly of planes and cars, conjuring up an intoxicating vision of automobiles racing through a hail of bullets. It was important, he wrote, to liberate Italy from ‘its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, Ciceroni and antiquarians. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.’ And, he added, ‘we will glorify war . . . the world’s only hygiene’ and ‘scorn . . . women’. Language, sculpture, art, poetry, the theatre, all were ripe for Futurist reappraisal. At his Futurist evenings, the audience was encouraged to throw vegetables.
Closely linked to the Futurists by their taste for violence were the Italian Nationalists, who, in 1910, formed themselves into a party in Rome. Instead of looking forwards, the Nationalists looked back with longing on the days of Roman antiquity. Futurists and Nationalists now joined forces and called for the conquest of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, the Ottoman provinces in Libya, whose own territorial claims were guaranteed by the recent Hague Conventions, to which Italy was a signatory. They called these lands ‘Italy’s fourth shore’. Getting them back – for were they not once part of the Roman Empire? – would make Italy richer and more important in the world and compensate for its humiliating defeat by the Ethiopians in 1896. It would yield a fortune in minerals and the Turkish garrisons were known to be weak. The fact that such a war meant breaking a treaty made the whole thing more of an adventure.
Their passion paid off, and Italy resounded to martial speeches. Neither Giolitti nor Victor Emmanuel III wanted war, the former because he had not been fooled into believing that any real benefits would come from such an undertaking, the latter because he was such an irresolute man. Nor did the young Benito Mussolini. Though currently imprisoned for fomenting disorder, damaging railway and telegraph lines and resisting police orders, Mussolini called for a general strike against this ‘unjust, imperial, colonial war’ and an end to Giolitti’s chaotic government.
In September 1911, Giolitti succumbed to pressure and sent the navy to bomb Tripoli. In Florence, tricolour flags festooned the streets. The socialists protested and called on the Florentines to strike, but few people listened. In the days that followed passions for and against the war flared up into brawls. Though it took a year, the Ottoman Empire, needing its soldiers for wars in the Balkans, capitulated and signed an agreement in which Italy was recognised as the de facto ruler of Libya. The Florentines, stirred to heights of bellicose fervour, celebrated wildly.
But it was all somewhat misleading. Libya’s Arab population was not prepared to yield up their lands so readily to Italian colonists. For the next three years, skirmishes and attacks were followed by harsh reprisals, and the war simmered on until only a handful of towns along the coast remained in Italian hands. Since Giolitti could ill afford a costly military failure, the defeats were recast as victories, campaign medals were handed out and streets across Italy given new names of Libyan triumphs. Liberal Italy’s treatment of its conquered people was harsh: hundreds of Libyan families who had dared to protest against occupation were sent off to the Tremiti Islands, where children and the elderly quickly died of malnutrition, cholera and typhus.
The war in Libya served to harden political positions. Salvemini had from the start felt that the war was an insane waste of Italy’s few resources. Having got hold of documents purporting to be accounts of happy colonists on their new Libyan farms and shown them to be forgeries, he now founded a paper of his own, a weekly he called L’Unità, with the subtitle ‘Problems of Ita
lian Life’. Writing many of the articles himself under different names, he embarked on a crusade to educate the young, sort out trade barriers and improve conditions in the south. His tone was confrontational, a mixture of Mazzini militancy and ideas for a modern, western democratic future.
As a member of the Lyceum and a regular contributor to Il Marzocco, Amelia was much caught up with the political tensions swirling around Florence. Salvemini had now entered her life and was instantly drawn into the Rosselli family circle. The boys called him Father Bear.
Five of Amelia’s articles for Il Marzocco had been on the subject of education, and she and Laura Orvieto, who was writing history books for children, agreed that teaching was best done through enjoyment. Laura, who was a natural story-teller, had produced her own version of Topinino, with her own two children as the main characters. Leo and Lia has two Italian children asking their English governess a number of questions, to which she gives serious and proper answers. Both women were impatient with the hypocrisy, evasions and distortions which seemed to them to fill not only the texts but the illustrations of children’s books. Children, they agreed, had to live in the real world, ‘the world of today, its vastness and complexity’, and parents should be reading the new books on education, science and medicine. The fanciful Laura and the down-to-earth Amelia had become very attached to each other, Laura writing one day: ‘Dearest, don’t you think our friendship is wonderful? I am so fond of you. I was thinking about this just now, and I wanted to tell you.’
For Amelia, the liberation of children was closely bound up with that of women. She had become increasingly involved with the suffrage debates being pushed by reformers such as Salvemini and the socialist feminists, but insisted that suffrage itself was not enough: women had to be educated, to learn to express themselves, to demand not so much sexual equality as their rights, which themselves carried duties. ‘I deny women the right to isolate themselves’, she wrote sternly, ‘and not to participate in the life of the country.’ She had become president of the literature section of the Lyceum, which put her on its board, and organised, to the delight of Carlo and Nello, a talk by the popular writer of fairy stories, Térésah. At last, she was emerging from her cocoon of grief over Joe’s death. She stopped wearing black and began to invite friends and their children to the house. Salvemini was a frequent visitor, as were the Ferreros and their son Leo, ever cleverer and more precocious, and the Orvietos and their son Leonfrancesco. Always close to the Orvietos, Amelia became involved in their efforts to excavate and restore the old Roman theatre in Fiesole, where, with Eleonora Duse’s encouragement, some of the Greek tragedies were staged. She would look back on these years as ‘bathed by a marvellous light’, in which so much was happy, intimate and rich in friendship and affection.
A Bold and Dangerous Family Page 6
