A Bold and Dangerous Family

by Caroline Moorehead

  Both her uncle, Ernesto Nathan, and Salvemini, despite their ages, had volunteered, but while seventy-year-old Ernesto was able to join the elite Alpini corps as a junior lieutenant with the job of looking after foreign visitors, the doctors sent Salvemini home to Florence after discovering that he had traces of TB. Even now, seven years after the earthquake that had destroyed his family, he continued to hope for news of his small son Ughetto, and waited each day until after the second post before paying his calls, in case it brought him a letter.

  Then the day came when Aldo appeared in Amelia’s room and told her that he had decided to join up. Her immediate instinct was to try to dissuade him. But Aldo took her hand and asked her how, having demonstrated through the streets of Florence in support of the war, he could now sit by while his friends left for the front. ‘Would it’, he asked her, ‘be fair?’ Aloud, Amelia said: ‘Yes, yes, I understand.’ But inside, as she wrote later, she could only think: ‘I can’t bear it. I can’t stand to see you leave. I love you so much, I don’t want you to be hurt. I don’t want to be fair . . . no, no, I don’t want this.’

  Two months later, Aldo left for officer training at the military college in Modena, and after this was posted as second lieutenant to the 145th Infantry Regiment at Carnia, where most of his men were Sicilians. Before leaving, he went to the Orvietos’ villa to say goodbye, and while he was there carved his initials in the trunk of a lime tree in the courtyard where he and his younger brothers had so often played. Amelia noted with pleasure that Aldo had become ‘very straight and idealistic’. His great friend Giacomo Morpurgo, the son of the director of Florence’s national library, left for the army with him. When Amelia went to visit Aldo soon after, Carlo wrote to her: ‘I am certain that Aldo will be so happy to see you so proud of him.’

  Amelia and Aldo, in military uniform

  In November, when the men on the front line were sleeping on wet straw or in the mud, and their uniforms had been turned to parchment by sweat, dust and rain, Aldo came down with pleurisy and was sent home for a month to convalesce. Not long after he returned to his base at Tolmezzo, he wrote to Amelia to tell her that he longed to see action and so had asked to be transferred to an alpine regiment at the front. He was now with the Alpini on the Pal Grande, conveying weapons up from the plains by mule, under enemy fire. His letters were cheerful and uncomplaining; he told her that his trench was so close to the enemy that he could hear the Austrian soldiers speak, and that he was happy. Two weeks later he was granted a short leave and Amelia and Carlo travelled up to Udine to meet him. They found him ruddy from the mountain air. They climbed to the keep of a castle and Aldo pointed out the front lines at Carnia, Pal Grande and Pal Piccolo. In the distance they could hear the thud of shells.

  Back at the hotel, they found a telegram recalling Aldo to duty. Before he left, Amelia sat on his bed and stroked his dark hair. She was touched when Carlo told her that Aldo had resisted buying a special officer’s beret that he badly wanted, remembering her feelings about extravagance. On their way home to Florence, Amelia and Carlo stopped in Verona, where Zio Giù, with the rank of colonel, was training young officers. Verona had become a garrison town, and sacking covered the ancient monuments. When they reached Florence, they found a long line of women outside the Palazzo Vecchio, waiting for news of their men. One evening, over dinner with a cousin, Amelia said: ‘If I were told that Aldo would not come back, I don’t think that the sun would ever shine for me again.’

  As deep winter settled over the Dolomites, orders went out to keep up the skirmishes and tie down the enemy, but not to tire the troops. The men dug trenches under the snow and tied canvas across the openings to caves, inside which they crouched in their sodden greatcoats, trying not to freeze to death. Aldo wrote to say that the snow was piling up all around them and that the strong winds blowing from the north were arctic, but that he was content with his companions. He wrote to Amelia almost every day, and she wrote back, anxious, loving. On 26 December, he reported: ‘Yesterday was the saddest of Christmases: rain and fog all day.’ But he had been given leave to descend the mountain and eat in a hotel, where he had had an excellent meal, and had laughed and joked with his fellow officers.

  Early in January, Aldo went briefly on leave to Udine, where, observing officers wearing greatcoats lined with fur, he bought one for himself. ‘È molto bellino’, he wrote, but he worried that it might be a bit short in the sleeves. Away from the front line, shelters had been set up with stoves, food and water; the larger ones had baths and ovens. Even so, a senior medical officer sent early in January 1916 to report on conditions, described clothing torn and encrusted with mud, frostbitten feet and ‘psychological disturbances’. Lives were being lost, he noted, because the men had not been given elementary training in how to keep warm, and were so careless about latrines that the surroundings had become ‘literally a field of filth’. There was typhoid and cholera.

  Aldo was keeping a diary, with entries on training, expenses and the different phases of the campaign. Twenty-four new Italian infantry regiments had been formed, plus thirty-one companies of Alpini, and conditions were said to be very slowly improving, with a delivery of hobnailed leather boots and iron helmets. Stints on the front line had been shortened. Amelia wrote to him: ‘Remember, do everything you have to do, but be prudent.’ On 20 February, Aldo spent the day doing a round of the trenches and took some photographs; he had a cough, but assured her that it was getting better. On the 23rd, a ‘furious tempest’ cut off his platoon and they received no letters or supplies; he put his men to clearing paths and in the evening gathered with his fellow officers. There were rockfalls, howling winds and hailstones the size of walnuts. On the night of the 26th, he was in the mess, writing in pencil by candlelight: he told Amelia that he had marched five kilometres through the snow. Then came news that the Alpini might be moved, and there was a chance he would be allowed to go on leave. On 5 March, he sent her a card: ‘Weather still appalling: snow and yet more snow!’ Orders came for further forays, to tie down the enemy, confuse them. There were avalanches almost every day and casualties were mounting. And still it kept snowing.

  At two in the morning on 26 March, the Austrians, taking advantage of the dark night and thick fog, attacked on Pal Grande. The Italian gunners responded strongly and the Austrians withdrew. A second Austrian assault was launched on Pal Piccolo, and the Italian commanding officers, fearing that the whole mountain might fall to the enemy, despatched more troops. Aldo and his friend Giacomo were among them. At 5.30 on the morning of the 27th, after a night of heavy shelling by the Austrians, the Alpini were sent to take the peak. The Austrians exploded bombs with poisonous gas. The Italians retook their lost positions. In just two days they had seen fourteen of their officers killed and nineteen wounded.

  In Florence, Amelia was working grimly in the Palazzo Vecchio. She had heard about the heavy fighting on the Pal Piccolo. On 29 March, she wrote to Aldo: ‘I am very worried about you. I have had no news since the 25th . . . I hope that tonight’s post will bring me something.’ Next day she wrote again: ‘Nothing today either. Why haven’t you thought to send me a telegram? You must always do this, send me a telegram when there is fighting in your area.’ On 31 March: ‘Yet another day without a line from you. How long can this go on? . . . I kiss you, my dearest, with all my love.’ On 2 April: ‘My Aldo, where are you? How can these days pass, one after the other, with no news of you? . . . I hug you very close to my heart.’

  On the tenth day of silence, Amelia went to a meeting in Angiolo’s information office; as she entered the room she saw two women exchange glances. Nothing was said. She got home to find a cousin, Mary Nathan, waiting for her. Very carefully, Mary told her that Aldo was missing.

  Amelia’s reaction was to embark on a ‘fever of activity’. She sent telegrams, contacted the Red Cross, got in touch with friends at the front. Ugo Ojetti, a family friend serving not far from Pal Piccolo, cabled back: ‘About Rosselli, remain calm. Tomo
rrow will have more precise news’. There was a rumour that Aldo had been wounded in the head. Amelia sent a telegram to her brother Gabriele, who had been instrumental in having Aldo moved to the Alpini: ‘First news reassuring’.

  Three days of silence followed. No news came. The house fell quiet. Carlo and Nello tiptoed around, whispering. Amelia kept thinking that she could keep Aldo alive, providing she willed it enough. She took to her bed and lay in the dark. If she let the light in everything would fall to pieces. She listened to her neighbour, who had recently lost her son, opening and shutting her door to let mourners in.

  Then came the morning that she woke to find Gabriele sitting at the end of her bed. Speaking calmly, he told her what she already knew: that Aldo was dead, killed on 27 March during the battle for Pal Piccolo. His friend Giacomo had died with him. Gabriele was firm: she had to accept it, if not for her sake, then for the sake of Carlo and Nello. She had no choice. And so, she wrote later, ‘A great black shadow descended’ but ‘I obeyed. And the house, as if waking from an appalling nightmare, began once again to move.’

  Time did move again. But Amelia was inconsolable. A death notice for Aldo appeared in the Giornale d’Italia, in the name of the family and of Zia Gì and Zio Giù, asking for no visits and no contact. For this profoundly literate woman, who had spent her whole life exploring language and meaning, trying to make sense of the world and the people in it through talk and books, words at this moment could do nothing. She wrote to Laura that she was suffering ‘indescribably’ and that the pain never let up. ‘I am living two parallel lives,’ she wrote, as so many others in her position have written. ‘I speak, I laugh, I move about, and behind that person is another . . . I live suspended between these two conflicting states, somewhere in the clouds.’ What she found so unbearable, she said, was not being able to tell Aldo how proud she felt of him, knowing how very pleased he would have been to hear her say so.

  She found no comfort in Carlo and Nello; indeed, their physical presence caused her more agony, with its constant reminder of what she had lost. She sat at meals in silence, counting: one, two, but never again three. What terrified her was the idea that the war would end, and everything would return to normal, ‘when nothing can ever be normal again’. She felt as if the madness of grief had ‘shattered the mechanism of my mind’. Many years later she would write that she had known how ‘shut away, savage, even cruel’ she had been to the two boys; and later, too, they would say that her rejection of them had been terrible to bear.

  What at last brought Amelia back to life was the idea of setting up, in Aldo’s name, a home for children of serving soldiers whose mothers were dead or unable to look after them. Every day, after school, desperate to do something to counter his mother’s grief, Carlo rode around the countryside on his bicycle looking for a suitable place. One day he came home to say that he had seen a one-storey building, attached to a farmhouse, on the road between Bagno a Ripoli and Grassina. Amelia rented it, called it La Casina di Aldo, and threw herself into finding furniture and books. Zia Gì provided linen; Laura sent a grandfather clock. Assunta, who had been looking after the boys for the past thirteen years, offered to run the home; she was firm, capable and loving. By the summer of 1916, the Casina had twelve children living there.

  Towards the end of the year, Nello wrote to his uncle Gabriele to tell him that he was thinking of starting a magazine, ‘not a trivial one, but a serious paper in which to discuss good ideas’. His co-editor would be Gualtiero Cividalli, a friend from the Liceo Michelangiolo, who came from an observant Florentine-Jewish family. The two boys, whose fervour and patriotism knew no bounds, decided to call it Noi Giovani – ‘We Young’; its motto alone was proof of its extreme highmindedness: ‘Purezza, Forza, Amore’, Purity, Strength, Love. Saying that they did not wish to ‘exalt themselves’, they wrote under pseudonyms. Nello became ‘Nero’ or ‘Juventus’, Gualtiero took ‘Il Direttore’, Carlo was ‘Civis’, and Leo Ferrero signed his poems with two asterisks. Jean Luchaire, the son of the director of the French Institute, joined them, as did Leonfrancesco Orvieto.

  The boys met in the Rosselli house for long, intense debates. Six numbers came out, full of exhortations to young Italians to remain ‘noble’ and ‘uncorrupted’, both physically and morally. Nello contributed patriotic short stories, in which a florist or a maid lost her young man in the war. Carlo tackled politics. In the issue of 4 April 1917, he wrote a paean of praise to the recent Russian Revolution: ‘It is as if we were waking from a deep sleep . . . What has happened is so beautiful, so magnificent, so extraordinary that it is still impossible to believe it.’ In June, Gualtiero was called up and the magazine closed. But in its few issues, Carlo and Nello had put down extremely clear markers. It was up to their generation, they wrote, to prepare for the future, with firmness and conviction and a ‘true concept of Good and Evil . . . an ideal of justice and liberty for all mankind’.

  The winter of 1916 was bitterly cold. In Florence it rained steadily for three months, then snowed. Fuel was rationed, and in their dark and draughty old houses, all in stone and terracotta, people froze. Sugar was so scarce that it was sold in tiny twists of paper. In a hall attached to the church of Orsanmichele, under the flags of the guilds of medieval Italy, lessons were laid on by Florentine ladies in how to cook stews and bean soups by putting a casserole over a flame for just a few minutes, then packing it tightly in straw where it would simmer gently on. To counter the growing hostility towards the Allies, and particularly the British, Angiolo proposed starting an Anglo-Italian library. A loggia off Via Tornabuoni was rented; its ground floor, which had fluted columns and a magnificent carved and curling ceiling, was turned into a reading room. The grander and more affluent members of the Anglo-Florentine community who had decided to sit out the war in Italy – Bernard Berenson, Harold Acton, Janet Ross – gave books. Salvemini came to lecture on history.

  In 1917, both Carlo and Nello left school; they had now reached military age. Carlo had wanted to volunteer earlier, but Amelia’s frantic anxiety persuaded him not to. She missed Aldo no less keenly, but all her former love for her younger sons had returned, and with it her customary scolding. They were too extravagant, she said, too soft on themselves, too heedless of others. Characteristically, on what would have been Aldo’s twenty-first birthday, she told them she would be sending to charity the money that she had set aside for the watch she had planned to give him; and she hoped that Carlo and Nello would make similar gestures, ‘so we can almost create the illusion that our dear Aldo is still with us’. She and Zia Gì had started a small organisation to send sick and poor children to the seaside in his name, and, together with her friend Gina Lombroso, Amelia was setting up an association to ‘encourage Italian women to take part in the scientific, social, political, philosophical development of the country’. Slowly, very slowly, her sense of duty was beginning to assert itself again.

  In June, Carlo received his call-up papers and was sent to an artillery regiment stationed at La Spezia; in October he was enrolled in an officer school in Caserta, from where he wrote to his uncle Gabriele, in his rather childish round hand, that he had spent seven lire on gloves and another seven on shoes. When he wrote to Zio Giù however, asking for his help in getting him posted to a front-line unit, the answer was adamant: ‘No, dear Carlo, I have already told you many times, and I will go on telling you . . . you must not apply to join the Bombardieri.’ There was no reason to put himself in any kind of danger, and it was morally wrong, ‘whether out of ambition, whim or impatience’, to cause his mother such pain.

  Carlo was still in Caserta when, on 24 October 1917, the Austrian and German forces broke through at Caporetto and invaded Friuli and the Veneto. Cadorna had proved a terrible general, committing his exhausted, demoralised, underpaid, ill-equipped troops to a 300-kilometre front, where they had fought eleven battles against Austria for the control of the Isonzo valley. In one alpine area, 750 men had been allowed to freeze to death. Often, the c
ourage of the soldiers had been heroic. The Italian defeat at Caporetto was overwhelming. Forty thousand men were killed or wounded; 280,000 taken prisoner; 150 kilometres of terrain lost. On 27 October Cadorna ordered a retreat. A river of men took to the road in a long trail of abandoned weapons, animals and cannons, burning villages as they went in order to leave nothing for the enemy but the mud and devastation of the land over which they had fought. ‘Fare Caporetto’ came to mean ‘run away quickly’.

  General Cadorna, who had reacted to earlier defeats by dismissing his officers for incompetence and by having his soldiers executed for cowardice, was finally replaced by a more humane and abler man, Armando Diaz, who had no taste for sending men towards machine guns to be mown down in waves. Hearing of the catastrophe of Caporetto, Carlo wrote to Amelia: ‘Italy’s honour must be saved . . . Today we retreat, but tomorrow . . . there will be a magnificent resistance. I am sure of this. We have to be morally strong to win.’

  Against a backdrop of recriminations and rancour, the right calling the soldiers imboscati – draft dodgers – and blaming them for ‘revolutionary defeatism’, Italian refugees from Austrian-occupied territory began to stream down through Italy. ‘They are arriving in thousands and thousands,’ Amelia wrote to her mother Emilia in Rome, saying that when she had been to meet the trains at the station she had almost been knocked over in the crush. ‘You can nearly touch with your hands the reality of the invasion.’ The destitute families, many of whom had brought nothing at all with them, were taken to a carabinieri barracks near the station or to the cloisters of Santa Maria Novella, where, until mattresses were found, they slept on the ground. The more fortunate, usually the better-off families who had thought to escape with their jewels and some money, wound up in hotels on the Lungarno. Amelia spent her days taking down names, reuniting families and caring for the children, four of whom she entrusted to Assunta in Aldo’s Casina. ‘The more the days pass,’ she wrote to Carlo, ‘the more I see the enormity of the disaster that has hit us.’ One day she bumped into Salvemini, wandering among the refugees; he was in tears. She wanted very much to visit Carlo, but the trains were too crowded. It was clear to her now, as it was to many who had so fervently supported the war, that many of the men sent to fight had not even known where they were going, or who their enemy was.