A Bold and Dangerous Family

by Caroline Moorehead

  With Carlo in the army and Nello soon to depart, Amelia decided that she could not bear to stay on in Via Gianbologna, where she had once waited so desperately for news of Aldo, to find herself waiting once more for word of her two younger sons. ‘I am still stunned by grief,’ she told her mother. ‘I can’t think of the words to describe my state of mind.’ She had discovered an empty flat in a beautiful if dark fifteenth-century palazzo, Stiozzi Ridolfi, on the other side of the Arno, in Via San Niccolò, a busy road that snaked its way in a long S parallel to the river. It had high ceilings and views across the countryside to San Miniato. Here she recreated ‘Aldo’s room’, ‘to keep him near and close to me’. From the open windows, she could hear the birds singing. She made herself a study and filled it with the furniture she loved: an eighteenth-century table, a silk screen, a bookcase. Here she sat in a striped blue blouse with a high white collar, writing at her desk in her tidy, legible hand.

  In November, Nello – who had enrolled in the law faculty at Pisa university – volunteered but was told that the infantry was not taking recruits for the moment. While waiting, he decided to switch to a literature degree at the Istituto di Studi Superiori in Florence. The winter passed, slow and grim; Amelia was lonely and fretted ceaselessly about Carlo, who had been moved to various different barracks in the north. Postal services between serving men and their families had been greatly improved and the two of them exchanged letters almost daily, in which they discussed books, philosophy, religion, the inner life. They talked about Freemasonry, Carlo expressing interest and sympathy, Amelia saying that the Masons were an anachronism, and the Masonic ritual of stroking palms as a sign of recognition seemed to her ‘like monkeys scratching their stomachs’. They agreed that Britain represented the ‘greatest liberty and the greatest discipline’.

  In April 1918, Nello was sent first to Vigevano, in Lombardy, for training, from where he reported that there were more pretty girls than flies, then to a military academy in Turin. Occasionally, when she heard nothing for more than two days, Amelia was reproachful: ‘I am so alone; you have to know that I live for your letters.’ Once they lost the habit of communicating every aspect of life, she warned her sons, they would never get it back. From a punishment cell in his military academy – to which he had been confined for ten days for talking during a period of compulsory silence – Nello sent a humorous note, including a drawing of a cell, barred windows and bread and water. He added ‘very loving kisses’ and signed himself ‘terribilmente gelato’, terribly frozen.

  In mid-June 1918 the Austrians, this time not backed by the Germans, launched a major offensive against the Italians on the Piave, east of Venice. Supported by the Allies, the Italians held firm and then gradually pushed back, capturing Trieste and Trento. But then came the Spanish flu. In Bologna, Nello was put to work transporting the dead and the dying, and briefly became ill himself. Amelia now never left her flat in San Niccolò without meeting three or four funerals, and hardly a day passed without her having to write a letter of condolence.

  She was staying with Zia Gì at Frassine when, on 4 November, the news came that the Austrians had surrendered. She stood outside, listening as the bells rang out from churches all round the Florentine hills. Though Carlo had been very slightly injured by a splinter of shrapnel, and though one of her nieces was very ill, her sense of relief was overwhelming. She felt light, weightless. Carlo and Nello had survived. On his nineteenth birthday she wrote to Carlo: ‘This is the last of your birthdays we will ever spend apart.’ She was planning to give him a raincoat she knew he coveted and she was thinking of him entering Trieste with his men: ‘It’s a solemn and great moment for an Italian, to see the frontiers of our country pushed back.’ She had decided to set up a library in the elementary school in Timau, at the foot of Pal Piccolo, ‘where my Aldo died fighting’.

  Italy, however, was in disarray. The victory itself was ambiguous, with unclear gains and many losses. Five million Italian men had gone to war: 500,000 had been killed and perhaps double that number wounded. The soldiers who now came home were exhausted, disillusioned. Their complaints that they had been ill-led and ill looked after were only increased by the currents of political tension swirling around the country. After Caporetto, in order to keep enough soldiers at the front, the government had made extravagant promises about land reform. Those who returned to Florence found no signs that these promises would be kept, and a city whose economy had been devastated by four years without tourists. There was talk of ‘internal enemies’ and a ‘moral disintegration of the political system’. Finding no work, these men vented their anger on those who had spent the war in factories, thereby avoiding the draft.

  During the war years, there had been no one dominant leader, but rather power had been shared between successive politicians, military commanders, industrialists, Freemasons and landowners. A monarchy ruled by a timid, irresolute king, the country was awash with the conflicting dreams of Nationalists, republicans, Futurists, liberals, socialists and Catholics, each competing for influence in a society still marked by profound social divisions, and all wrangling about the war, and what it meant for the future.

  It would be early 1920 when Carlo and Nello finally arrived home. Neither had yet reached the age of twenty-one. Both boys had filled out, become self-contained, self-reliant, organised; they were sturdy, robust. Carlo was the more dominating, with a lively, argumentative manner and slightly myopic eyes which shone with an ironical and questioning gaze. He was, as Zia Gì said, ‘a saucepan always on the boil’. Nello was quieter, more studious, with innocent, almost child-like, blue eyes. He had inherited Amelia’s sweet smile and his look was ‘luminoso’. The brothers remained inseparable.

  Both envisaged some kind of academic future, though Nello, with his mind set firmly on history and literature, was the more decided. Carlo, still drifting between the social sciences, politics and the law, and needing extra qualifications to make up for what he had lacked at his technical college, enrolled to study economics at the Cesare Alfieri Institute in Florence. He told his mother that she had been wrong to relegate him to a second-class education, and called it a ‘refuge for donkeys’. Both brothers spoke of having been profoundly changed by the war. They had met and become friends, for the first time, with men ‘of the people’, and said that it had given them a shared dream of a socialist world, and of forging bonds between the classes. ‘I left as a boy,’ Carlo would later say; ‘I came back a man.’ He told Zio Giù that a thousand ideas were racing through his head. ‘I want to study in depth a great many things and I want to read and learn about everything.’ His mind, he wrote, was alive with the ‘tumultuosa rapidità’, the tumultuous speed, of the world awaiting him. Amelia told him: ‘I see the sail of your boat not black . . . but beautifully white, open to a wind which will carry it far, very far . . .’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Dark Seraphim

  Aldo and his friend Giacomo were just two of the 47,000 Tuscan soldiers – one for every six men sent to the war – who did not come home. Many who did were wounded. The trains from the north arriving at the station of Santa Maria Novella no longer brought refugees but angry, exhausted men who found little to please them in post-war Italy. As Salvemini would say, at the war’s end the capitalists got the ‘substance’ and the soldiers the ‘shadows’.

  The Versailles Conference opened in January 1919 to set the peace terms for the defeated powers. The Italian delegation arrived full of expectations. Along with the other promises made to them at the Treaty of London in 1915 – the acquisition of parts of Dalmatia, territory from the Ottoman Empire and islands along the Adriatic – they hoped for Fiume and South Tyrol, which they called Alto Adige. But the United States was seeking self-determination for nations and few of the Allies had much liking for the Italians, whom they accused of not fighting hard enough in the war; they were quick to dismiss Vittorio Orlando, Italy’s premier, as untrustworthy, and Italy as a land of ‘sturdy beggars’ who alterna
ted whining with truculence. The young diplomat Harold Nicolson noted that Orlando was a ‘white, weak, flabby man’, while Curzon referred to the Italians as ‘mere bagmen, who would sell either party’. No one paid much heed when Orlando warned that if the earlier promises were not honoured, there would be civil war.

  By the time a crushed Orlando arrived home to be ousted from office and replaced by a professor of economics, Francesco Saverio Nitti, most concessions to Italy had been abandoned. Italy came away with almost nothing except for a permanent seat at the League of Nations, a share in German reparations and two small areas of Istria and South Tyrol. Not surprising, then, that Gabriele D’Annunzio, who despite his age had waged a heroic war, referred to the treaty as a ‘mutilated peace’, a phrase quickly repeated around Italy, and sometimes altered to ‘mutilated victory’. The fact that Italy’s old enemy, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, was dismantled did little to assuage a widespread feeling among the Italians of being ill-used.

  Fiume – the area of 28 kilometres which lay between the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Slovenia and which contained a large Italian population – now became a rallying cry among Italian nationalists. On 12 September 1919, the posturing, theatrical D’Annunzio, who had lost the sight in one eye as a result of his plane crashing in the war, led one thousand disbanded veterans into Fiume, forcing out the occupying Allied troops. Many of D’Annunzio’s followers were Arditi, the shock troops who had led the attacks against the Austrians. From the balcony of the governor’s palace, D’Annunzio proclaimed the annexation of Fiume; he called himself duce of the Regency of Carnaro, and his followers legionari. And there he remained, seducing visitors with his rituals and dramatic mises en scène until December 1920, when Giolitti, now nearly eighty and recently returned to power, ordered the Andrea Doria warship to bombard the governor’s palace, and D’Annunzio’s weird, flamboyant reign ended. His much-repeated promise – ‘Either Fiume or death’ – turned out to amount to very little. D’Annunzio opted for neither. He returned to Venice and eventually accepted the title of Principe di Montenevoso.

  Many Italians, from all sides of the political spectrum, considered D’Annunzio absurd; but not Mussolini. The editor and proprietor of Il Popolo d’Italia was now thirty-six, the father of three illegitimate children, and finally married to Rachele, although this had not prevented his incessant womanising. He had observed D’Annunzio’s antics with envy and admiration. But he had not been idle. Twisting and turning in the political chaos of the hour, ever ready to address a crowd, however small, he told the returning soldiers that they represented the ‘admirable, bellicose youth of Italy’ and that their daggers and grenades would ‘wreak havoc on all the wretches who desire to hinder the advance of Italy towards greatness . . . She is yours! You will defend her!’ The cry of the Arditi – ‘Me ne frego’, ‘I don’t give a damn’ – found ready listeners among the three million demobilised men who had become accustomed to obeying orders and were drawn to uniforms, parades and jackboots. The Belgian poet Léon Kochnitzky, who was an admirer of D’Annunzio, called the Arditi the ‘dark seraphim of another apocalypse’.

  By February 1919, there were some twenty ex-servicemen’s leagues, calling themselves Fasci di Combattimento, active everywhere from Messina to Venice. Though still not making it clear as to whether he favoured a monarchy or a republic, a clerical or lay state, Mussolini told them that the old political parties were ‘like corpses you keep as relics’. On 23 March, he invited the fasci to a meeting in Milan. Though the numbers were not particularly high, this meeting, in a building overlooking Piazza San Sepolcro, would later be seen as the founding moment of fascism; some of the men who attended – Roberto Farinacci and the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti – would soon be fascist leaders. The Arditi who showed up came in their black shirts. By the summer of 1919, the fasci had 1,000 members calling for a ‘patriotic revolution’. By then they had cut their teeth on attacking an anarchist rally in Milan, helped by 200 students from Bocconi University.

  The first Florentine fascio, which had grown out of a group of Futurists, students and war veterans, all passionate anti-communists, was bent on defeating those they considered ‘degenerates’. In the second week of October 1919, Mussolini – fresh from a flight to congratulate D’Annunzio on his seizure of Fiume, and dressed in a dirty flying suit and beret, goggles perched on the crown of his bald head – paid a visit to Florence. By now, Il Popolo d’Italia had dropped its claim to be socialist. It was aimed at ‘soldiers and producers’, at all the small shopkeepers, clerks and students who had come home to find no work and rising prices, and at the young who would rescue Italy from its decadent, fossilised leaders and make it virile once more. There was a large crowd to greet him in the Teatro Olimpia. Glaring at his audience with his near-set, intense dark eyes, he told them that he intended to make ‘a clean sweep of the past’ and that he needed followers ‘energetic and ruthless’ enough to help him to do so. Fascism, he declared, stood for the spirit of the trenches, for the wounded veterans who now paraded through the streets demanding their rights, and fascists were needed to act as a bulwark against Italy’s ‘internal enemies’, the Bolsheviks and socialist ‘eunuchs’. Leninism, he warned, entailed autocracy, bestiality, terror and chaos, and Bolsheviks were little better than murderers. Socialists, said Mussolini, were ‘un-Italian’. His skills as an orator – by turn sentimental, brutal, rabble-rousing, confessional, philosophical – were dazzling.

  For an all-too-brief but happy moment, the Rossellis stood apart from the turmoil. Amelia was filled with overwhelming relief that two of her sons had survived and she took slightly bitter pleasure in hearing that Aldo was to receive a silver medal for valour.

  Her long years of worrying about money were brought to a sudden end when the mercury mine in which she had inherited shares from Joe, the Siele on Monte Amiato, was taken over by the government as part of their new monopoly on coal, oil and mercury. They were now rich. Amelia decided to leave the small, dark apartment in Via San Niccolò and they returned to the residential streets near the Duomo, buying an imposing eighteenth-century house in Via Giusti, close to Piazza Massimo d’Azeglio, where magnificent vast sycamores cast a deep, dense shade. The house had a large garden, a trellis of wisteria, a music room with a grand piano, and another with a billiard table. Just as Amelia was moving, she witnessed one of the first Florentine street attacks, when a group of local women, infuriated by the steep rise in the price of bread, ransacked the bakery opposite and made off with sacks of flour and loaves of bread. It was perilous, now, to be a shopkeeper suspected of hoarding.

  Nello had settled on a future in the academic world, though he was still casting around for a subject for his thesis. Amelia was worried about Carlo, whose thoughts and interests seemed to her dangerously scattered and whose spirit appeared constantly ‘elsewhere’. She told him that he had to find and become passionate about just one thing, and then study it in depth, ‘looking only down that particular path’ and nowhere else. Convinced that he had no talent for languages, literature or the law, she dreamt that he might choose something practical such as chemistry, or join one of the new industrial concerns where he would be able to explore their ethical and social implications. But Carlo hesitated. He and Nello talked and talked, often far into the night, though Nello complained that his brother’s insistence on seeing every side to every problem could be wearying. ‘Basta!’ he would say. ‘I can’t stand any more. You have overstuffed my head.’ Even Carlo’s friends were drawn into his doubts and quests. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ wrote one. ‘Don’t fret about the blackness you say that you see ahead, because it’s rubbish. There is no future clearer or more rosy than yours . . . You are intelligent, cultured, extremely hard-working, willing, and passionate about politics.’

  Among the educated young officers returning from the front there was a hunger for knowledge, for poetry and literature, for spending time with friends and talking. Writers and artists had drifted back to their old h
aunts and cafés. Carlo and Nello were both on the editorial committee of Vita, a magazine that had been founded before the war by their friends Leo Ferrero and Jean Luchaire to debate politics. Leo, who was already producing his own plays and poetry, proposed starting a club for his friends to meet in cafés and discuss ideas. There was much talk about Henri Barbusse and Romain Rolland and their work for peace and solidarity among nations. In earnest articles, the young men expressed pious hopes that the war might at least have served to break down the barriers between social classes.

  One evening, as Amelia was going to bed, Carlo and Nello came to suggest to her that they give away the fortune coming to them from Siele, and move to a cheaper part of the city. They loved their new house, they said, but they felt that it was morally wrong to own it. Sensibly, she demurred. As she pointed out, neither of them was earning any money, and nor was she, but she conceded that they might put aside a little to support the causes they believed in. Nello opened a small children’s library in San Frediano, one of the poorer quarters, and asked various publishers and friends to donate books. He and Carlo took turns to run it. He was also planning to set up a summer colony for sick children in a house on the road to Vallombrosa. As Amelia said, Nello possessed a ‘large and marvellous generosity of spirit’. Their cousin Alessandro Levi, a distinguished lawyer and lecturer at the university, had recently come into their lives; considerably older and more like an uncle to the boys, Levi too was a devoted Mazzinian. He was also a member of the reformist wing of the Socialist Party.