A Bold and Dangerous Family

by Caroline Moorehead

  Some time in 1912, Amelia started work on a new play. Once again it was a portrait of a society in the throes of change, and written in Venetian. But this time, urged on by the Orvietos, she decided to set it in her own family past, during Venice’s heroic resistance to the Austrians in 1848. San Marco, told through a series of domestic scenes, charts the rift between two generations. The play was to have its premier in Venice, but Amelia soon fell out with the director, saying that he was too parsimonious with his crowd scenes, and that the power of the crowd was what San Marco was all about.

  Even so, it might still have come on, but for its timing. Italy was filled with anti-Austrian feelings and there were fears of riots. The government ruled that unless she toned down the fierce attacks on Austria in the play, it would be banned in Venice. She refused, but since there had been protests and much publicity, San Marco was picked up by the Manzoni theatre in Milan. There, to Amelia’s dismay, the influential critic of the Corriere della Sera dismissed it as a ‘play of little value and somewhat insipid’. Though restaged in Rome to better reviews – Roman critics tended to praise what Milan had slammed – Amelia was downcast. ‘Alas,’ she wrote, ‘it’s so very difficult and rare to pull off perfect harmony between heart and pen.’

  When in Rome, where Ernesto Nathan was busy modernising the city, she always stayed with Gabriele, on whom, since Joe’s death, she had become very dependent. She was ill-at-ease with their brother Carlo, who used the name ‘Moravia’, and whose son, Alberto, was suffering from TB of the bones and had to spend months in bed.

  The years 1911 and 1912 marked something of a watershed for Giolitti’s liberal Italy. Although extreme poverty continued to drive desperate southerners to emigrate – just under 1 million people in 1912 – even the socialist Turati was forced to agree that the country had seen considerable progress. But as a nation Italy remained profoundly divided, full of unruly dissident political forces, none willing to make compromises. The hope of melding the socialists of different persuasions, the Nationalists, the Futurists, the liberals, Catholics, republicans, syndicalists and anarchists into a united country without resorting to violence or dictatorship seemed more distant than ever.

  The elections of 1913, the first to see universal male suffrage, brought large gains for the socialists. In Florence, 52.3 per cent of the vote went to socialists, and it was quickly dubbed ‘the reddest city in Italy’. But many Catholics had abstained from voting altogether, the liberals were bitterly divided, and all over Italy there was beginning to be a longing for a leader to cut through the confusion and the rampant corruption.

  Then, on 7 June 1914, police fired on and killed three demonstrators at a socialist rally in Ancona, and wounded thirty-one others. In what became known as ‘Red Week’, churches were attacked, red flags hoisted over town halls and the villas of rich landowners looted. There was talk of civil war. Florence and Rome were the cities most affected. At a Futurist grande serata Fiorentina in the Piazza Santa Croce, pandemonium broke out. Barricades were set up and defended by strikers throwing stones and bottles. After a carabinieri officer was beaten up, police on horseback charged the demonstrators. There were many casualties. All over Italy, telegraph lines were cut, trains halted and fires lit. Salvemini, who had stood for parliament for Apulia, was shot at by an opponent, but not injured.

  The strutting and boastful Mussolini was one of the principal instigators of Red Week. As editor of the socialist Avanti! he had quadrupled its readers and won admiration for his forceful rhetoric and irrepressible ambition. At the Socialist Party Congress, held in Ancona that April, he had secured his dominance over the revolutionary wing of the party. In many ways, Red Week had been a successful tactic, effectively proving that it was possible to paralyse the country; but it had also shown that, without the backing of the police and the army, it was impossible to confront guns with stones.

  When the schools closed for the summer, Amelia decided on the advice of doctors to send Carlo to Viareggio, where the sea air would do him good, and where a tutor could be found to coach him. Carlo was now fourteen, a somewhat overweight boy apparently not greatly interested in the world around him and showing disturbing signs, she thought, of ‘superficiality’ and ‘impulsiveness’, though always loving and exuberantly affectionate. In one of their many letters, when Amelia had been absent from Florence, Carlo wrote: ‘Last night I kissed your portrait, I thought about you and tears came to my eyes.’ Sometimes, now, he signed himself ‘Charley’.

  Having seen Carlo off for Viareggio in the company of a spinster cousin, Amelia took Aldo and Nello to the alpine resort of Macugnaga, near Monte Rosa. To her considerable surprise, the letters that arrived from Viareggio were anything but childish; over many pages, they raised urgent questions about the Balkans, and about the worsening international situation. Pleased as she was to receive them, she scolded him for sending them by expensive express post: ‘You know perfectly well that when I tell you not to do something, I mean it.’ From friends in Viareggio, Amelia heard that at dinner in his pensione, Carlo impressed the other guests with his adult conversation and the maturity of his views. The only sour note came from the spinster cousin, who reported that Carlo always insisted on doing things his own way.

  Amelia was still at Macugnaga when news came on 28 June 1914 of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, followed within weeks by Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia. On 4 August part of Europe went to war. Carlo’s letters were now about the duties of Italy under various treaties, whether Italy should remain neutral or join the war, and in which case, on what side. He told his mother that when the newspapers arrived in the pensione, the guests fought over them ‘like wild animals’. Amelia was beginning to regret her former enthusiasm for war. ‘I have become convinced of something,’ she wrote, ‘and that is that I have a horror of fighting. The beautiful war predicted by the Nationalists does not exist: or rather, it exists only in a single situation, that of a true war of independence . . . I am ashamed at the levity with which I said that war was something necessary in people’s lives. It is a horrible lie.’

  Two months later, the family gathered together again at Il Frassine, the Zabbans’ house outside Florence. Amelia would never forget, she wrote later, the moment that Carlo first entered her room. She had seen off to the seaside a boy, pale, stout and unhealthy. The young man who walked in was taller and much thinner, with his face and broad shoulders brown from the sun and his eyes gleaming with good health. He was, she wrote, ‘bellissimo, with the beauty of a man’.

  Though Aldo, now eighteen and a medical student, continued to tease his younger brothers and call them ‘i bimbi’, the little boys, they admired his dashing clothes and hair worn fashionably long. Since his return from college, to Amelia’s immense relief and pleasure, Aldo had once again become extremely close to her. Carlo and Nello were inseparable and went to learn fencing together. The house rang to their shouts and laughter and was often filled with their friends. Carlo, the most adventurous and high-spirited of them all, was their ring-leader. When the moment came to pick the grapes, the boys went to work in the vineyard, and in their spare time gave lessons in reading and writing to local children. The household had never seemed happier or more secure.

  At the outbreak of war, Italy was caught between its membership, with Austria-Hungary and Germany, of the Triple Alliance, and its traditional friendship and ties to Britain and France which, with Russia, formed the Triple Entente. On 3 August 1914, it opted for neutrality. Though a clear majority of Italians wanted to remain neutral, there were strong forces ranged against them. War against Austria was tempting, as Austria-Hungary held the ‘terre irredente’, the ‘unredeemed’ Italian-speaking city of Trento and part-Italian city of Trieste. The ‘irredentisti’ claimed that the retaking of these places would finally fulfil the goals of the Risorgimento. And there were the ‘interventionists’, backed by a powerful assortment of intellectuals. Among them were Salvemini, the Orvietos, the Zabbans, the
Ferreros and the Rossellis, all harking back to Mazzini’s belief in a new Europe born of a revolution against the aristocracy, and regarding the war as a moral struggle between the reactionary forces of Austria-Hungary and Germany, and those of liberal, democratic France and Britain. For his part, Marinetti and his Futurists maintained that a ‘blood bath’ would serve to ‘purify’ the nation.

  As Venetians, the Pincherles had always been anti-Austrian, and they had Jewish relations in Trieste. Not even memories of her creative and happy years in Vienna in the 1890s, or her instinctive distaste for war, lessened Amelia’s conviction that Italy should join Britain and France and go to war. She hated the Austrians in her bones.

  In October 1914 a pro-interventionist demonstration took place in Piazza Vittorio in Florence. Aldo marched with fellow students. Six weeks later, a ‘Revolutionary Interventionist Florentine Fascio’ was formed to coordinate their various forces, taking the word fascio from the fasces, the bundle of sticks carried by lictors in Roman times; a series of inflammatory war poems became their anthem. Those socialists who remained opposed to the war were becoming increasingly gloomy and despairing.

  So quick to judge and to harbour grudges, Mussolini was usually slow to develop policies, preferring to react and respond to those of others. But now he moved quickly. Challenged to clarify his own socialist position, he abandoned his former neutrality, resigned from Avanti! and started his own daily paper, Il Popolo d’Italia – this with funds from the government, from industry, and from the British and French secret services – and announced that it would be far better for the future of Italian socialism if Italy fought. Attracting pro-war intellectuals to write for his paper, his own style was fierce and declamatory. Neutralists were castigated as cowards: neutrality implied passivity, while intervention spelt dynamism. Other zealous crusaders for the cause of intervention included a fanatically anti-clerical railway-worker called Roberto Farinacci, who excoriated the feeble socialists still clinging to neutrality. Observing the hesitations of the government, Mussolini advocated ‘the shooting, I say shooting, in the back of a dozen deputies . . .’ Parliament, he declared, was a ‘pestiferous pustule poisoning the blood of the nation’.

  On 26 April 1915, having haggled, toyed with and finally rejected offers from Austria and Germany in exchange for remaining neutral, the Italians signed the secret Treaty of London. In return for the promise of Trentino, Trieste, Istria, much of Dalmatia, the upper Adriatic and Valona in Albania, Italy committed its troops to the war, though for the moment only against Austria and not Germany. In what was named a ‘Radiant May’ of joyful preparations, many newspapers celebrated what they called a triumphant ‘resurrection against traitors to the patria’. In Florence, the bells in the Palazzo Vecchio rang out and ‘patriotic vigour . . . broke out in every heart like an aria from Verdi’. Little heed was paid to the new Pope, Benedict XV, who refused to sanction what he considered an unjust war, or to the misgivings of the unwarlike king, or to the fact that 60,000 Italian soldiers remained in as yet unpacified Libya, or indeed to the military unpreparedness of a country that remained in many areas remote, backward, unmodernised and profoundly illiterate.

  In the Rosselli house, there was much rejoicing, and much excited talk of liberating Trieste and Trento. ‘What I do or don’t do now is of no importance,’ wrote Amelia. ‘The individual does not count . . . at a time of national crisis we must all rise to small personal contributions.’ Coming home one evening from a student rally, Aldo insisted that they hang a flag from the window. Watching her three sons, Carlo and Nello already in their pyjamas, scrambling over each other to secure the flag from a hook in the wall, Amelia remembered herself as a child watching her father hanging out his tattered, faded flag from their window on the Grand Canal to mark every anniversary of the Austrian defeat of 1849.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Becoming a Man

  On 23 May 1915, after thirty years as allies, Italy formally declared war on Austria-Hungary. Within a few days, soldiers began to leave for the front in the Dolomites. The chief of staff, General Cadorna, spoke of reaching Vienna by Christmas. But he was already in his mid-sixties, a stubborn man whose military ideas were formed in an earlier age. Furthermore, Italy’s army was the weakest of any of the great powers, top heavy with administration and red tape and weighed down by useless ancillary units. As many as half the soldiers were illiterate. Jumbled together in brigades, men from different regions shared no common language. The front to which these men were now despatched by their commanding officers was one of high mountains and tree-less plateaux, swept by gusting winds coming from the north-east, and with fissures of limestone so tough that trenches were little better than shallow scrapings or holes in the rocks. Even in August, the cold at night was ferocious. All the soldiers, in their letters home, spoke of the muraglie massicce, the massive walls of mountain, the incessant booming of enemy bombardments against the rocks, and above all of the rain, mud and water, in which they advanced, retreated, fought and slept. But when occasionally the sun shone, they discovered a vast panorama of peaks, in shades of grey and brown and purple, stretching around them in every direction, and air that was crisp and thin and very bright.

  For the first few days, the Italians advanced, encountering little opposition. But the Austrians had simply pulled back their men to better positions. On 23 June Cadorna ordered the first major offensive; despite the lessons of the Western Front, he had decided on frontal attacks by infantry along the Isonzo river, and a defensive line through the Trentino, paying little heed to the artillery which had proved so vital in northern France, or to the carnage caused there by barbed wire and machine guns. The Italian soldiers, ill-equipped and ill-led, often with no helmets or bayonets and in boots which had wooden soles and cardboard uppers, found themselves faced by serried rows of wire and guns. The cutters they had been issued with were little better than garden secateurs. Soon, the few metres they had taken and then lost again were covered in corpses. By 7 July, when orders came to cease the advance, the Italians had lost 15,000 men.

  In Florence, Amelia had just finished a new play about Lady Hamilton called Emma Liona. She put it to one side. She had briefly fallen out with some of the Lyceum’s ruling council when, shortly before the declaration of war, she had arranged for a talk by a writer from Trieste, Haydée – the pen name of the novelist and journalist Ida Finzi – and had been told that this might be offensive to Austria, as her irredentist views were well known. Amelia had threatened to resign, but the quarrel had blown over, and now that the Austrians had become the enemy, the talk was reinstated, though the council urged a ‘tacit reserve’ by members when it came to political matters. The next and final talk arranged by Amelia before cultural events were suspended and the society’s premises handed over to the Red Cross, was by Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini’s mistress and now a successful journalist.

  For his part, Angiolo Orvieto was anxious to turn the Leonardo da Vinci Society into a centre for ‘l’italianità fiorentina’, where Jews, always wary about their standing, could prove themselves ‘ardent and useful Italian citizens’. He had taken over rooms in the Palazzo Vecchio and had started an information service for the families of men at the front, with a section given over to weighing, packing and despatching woollen garments to the cold Dolomites. Fifteen-year-old Carlo, who came after school to help, was much fêted by the ladies. He told his mother that he thought he might eventually make an excellent businessman, which depressed her, though she admired what she saw as his ‘insatiable desire to do things’. Laura had set up a training scheme for volunteer nurses and her twelve-year-old daughter Annalia gathered together her school friends to knit for soldiers. Amelia herself was working in Angiolo’s information office. Sometimes, as they transcribed the lists, news would come of husbands, sons and brothers fallen in battle. Then the room would fill with terrible cries of anguish.

  Amelia had made one of the rooms in their flat into a studio for Aldo, where he could receive
his friends. He was now nineteen, dark, with even features; photographs show an elegant, even dapper, figure in a dark coat and hat, with a round face and ears that stick out a little. Like his father, Aldo had many talents and was undecided about which to pursue. He had enrolled at the university to study archaeology, but Amelia, fearing that he would squander his life on artistic pursuits, persuaded him to join the medical faculty, saying that it would instil ‘self-discipline’. Intrigued by the idea of anatomy and the drawings it would entail, Aldo willingly agreed, and his early studies went well. As a medical student and the eldest son of a widowed mother, he was not liable to the ordinary draft. ‘We mothers, what should we do with our sons?’ Amelia wrote to Laura. ‘Turn them into men of action or men of thought? . . . This is hell, of the most immediate kind.’