Observing the mixture of youthful idealism and intellectual uncertainty in which her sons and their friends seemed to spend their days, Amelia turned her hand to another of her highly autobiographical novellas, this time on the theme of boys who had lost an older brother in the war and felt guilty at not having suffered enough. Many of the scenes in Fratelli Minori, ‘Younger Brothers’, come straight out of her own life; in places they read like a diary. There is a mother, distraught at the loss of her eldest son, and reduced ‘in her pain to wordlessness’, who had once witnessed her three boys laughing with happiness as they hung a flag from the window of their apartment to celebrate Italy’s entry into the war. ‘Upright, rigid, the mother stared with an unseeing eye . . . But the mother thought: “It is right, oh Lord, to suffer for Italy.”’ The boys in the story are ‘like children, despite having so much bitter knowledge’. Fratelli Minori’s style is staccato, haiku-like. ‘Rancour. Unsaid. Unsayable. Against everyone and no one.’ It carried a prescient warning. These young men, she concluded, were getting far too immersed in politics. Once ‘too cerebral and obsessed with literature’, they were now too cerebral and obsessed with politics. It was a form of sickness: ‘pericoloso’, dangerous.
In the immediate aftermath of the war it had seemed as if Italian women might be about to get the vote. A debate in parliament in the early twenties ended with 292 deputies in favour and 42 against. But over the next few days the deputies wavered and prevaricated until, having one by one changed their minds, they decided that it was far too soon, and that more time was needed in order to prepare the ‘Italian female world spiritually for electoral battle’* Amelia was surprisingly unconcerned. For all her championing of the rights of women workers, she remained ambivalent, writing in Fratelli Minori that ‘women create men but not ideas’. She tended to agree with her more emotional friend Laura Orvieto that women’s existence was ultimately best defined by domesticity and maternity, though both of them insisted that marriage should no longer be regarded as an ‘absolute monarchy’, but rather as a ‘republic’, lived with ‘perfect equality’. Radical feminism sometimes seemed hysterical and absurd to Amelia, especially when indulged in by women of means. Gina Lombroso took a tougher line: giving the vote to women, she said, would only alienate them from family life and it was in the nature of women, ‘powerless to attain happiness by their own means’, to make ‘others the centre of their desires’. When the three friends met, they pored over these matters. What had changed, they conceded, was that now, in the wake of the war, ‘women were more exposed to the knocks of life, to its temptations, its dangers’.
No less than her sons, and soon to be fifty, Amelia was having trouble deciding what to do. She was still beautiful and elegant, with her thin, neat features, her thick hair piled up. But Aldo’s death had caused a fracture in her own sense of herself and her future, and it seemed to her highly unlikely that she would ever write a play again. Amelia was translating Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird for a children’s publisher, and now she agreed to become a judge in a competition for the best short story written by a woman and to edit a series of books ‘aimed to widen the horizons of young girls – of all classes’.
Moving slowly back into her position with the Lyceum, she joined the National Union of Italian Women, which shared the Lyceum’s offices in Via Ricasoli. One day its president, the Contessa Luisa Capponi, rang her to say that Florence’s prefect had ordered her members on no account to fly the Italian flag from their windows on the anniversary of the Armistice. In the few months since the men had come home, the war had become so deeply unpopular that soldiers in uniform risked being spat on in the streets. But the Florentine ladies were not easily cowed. ‘I believe I don’t have to tell you, Signora Rosselli,’ said the Countess, ‘that it is our duty to disobey this shameful request.’ Next day, Amelia’s flag, along with those of the other Union women, fluttered in the sunshine. It took rather more courage when, having decided to fly a second flag from Aldo’s Casina, Amelia not only had to brave a disapproving shopkeeper when she went to buy it, but run a gauntlet of jeers when she drove up the hill towards Bagno a Ripoli with it flapping merrily from her car window.
Salvemini, back at his old job teaching at Florence university, had got into the habit of inviting his favourite students to his apartment in Piazza Massimo d’Azeglio. He was now in his late forties, his manner as trenchant and blunt as ever, his mind bold and independent. As Anna Kuliscioff put it, Salvemini’s intelligence was ‘phosphorescent’ and his thought totally devoid of clichés. In his huge black cloak, the same as that worn by the Florentine horse-cab drivers, with the sugarloaf hat of Apulian peasants perched on his head, he had become a familiar figure around the city. Loud in his attacks on Mussolini and the fasci, outspoken against D’Annunzio, whose Fiume adventure he considered a ‘source of dishonour and ridicule’, he was already making dangerous enemies. In the streets there were now calls of ‘turncoat’ and ‘renegade’ as he strode by. Early in 1919 Salvemini began warning that Italy was suffering from ‘profound moral weakness’, and that the young Arditi were nothing but ‘scimmie urlatrici’, shrieking monkeys. Writing in L’Unità, he declared that a ‘programme, a party, a group . . . to stand up against disorder and arbitrariness’ was needed, and asked: ‘Are we too late?’ That same year he organised a conference at which a League for the Renewal of National Unity was born, and introduced what he called ‘problemismo’, the posing of political problems, to which concrete answers had to be sought.
Nello, still in uniform and still looking for a topic for his thesis, went to see Salvemini, and the older man was immediately struck by how young Nello looked, with ‘something adolescent about him, with his rosy cheeks and eyes as blue as the skies of Florence’. They talked at length; by the time he left Nello had found his subject. He would write about Mazzini, the revolutionary thinker who was so vital to the history of the Rossellis and the Pincherles, and his battles with the Russian anarchist Bakunin. A few days later he returned, bringing Carlo with him. Carlo was about to finish his degree in social sciences and was writing his thesis on contemporary socialism. Salvemini never forgot the occasion. ‘It was’, he wrote many years later, ‘one of those Florentine spring days when the air is as clear as crystal and when from Florence itself you can see every leaf on the olive trees on the slopes of Fiesole.’ For all of them, it was a decisive moment. Carlo, concluded Salvemini, was obviously a young man of ‘exuberant vitality’.
The visit was repeated. The brothers were now joined by a third young man, Ernesto Rossi, whose elder brother had also been killed with the Alpini, and who had himself been wounded in the stomach, and was partially deaf in one ear. Rossi was twenty, the same age as Nello, and a very clever, troubled boy whose father was notorious for once having shot his mother – but not killed her. He was thin and wiry, with neat features, heavy eyebrows, receding dark hair and a charming smile. Pragmatic and sceptical by nature, he was impatient when faced with stupidity. Immediately after the war, he had been drawn to Mussolini and had contributed articles to Il Popolo d’Italia, but one meeting with Salvemini had been enough to make him change his views. He was still in uniform when he happened to hear Salvemini lecture. ‘It was’, he wrote, ‘as if someone had taken a cloth and wiped clear a windowpane shrouded in steam . . . I learnt from him to beware of the lure of false ideas, to be rigorous, to love precise facts . . . and to be intransigent over matters of truth and conscience.’ About himself, Rossi would say that he had been born in the wrong century; he was in love with the British and French rationalists, and believed in a tiny luminous world created by rational men standing against the surrounding chaos.
Salvemini called his three young disciples ‘la mia nuova gioventù’; they made him feel young again.
After a while, they were joined by others, such as Piero Calamandrei, a somewhat older university professor and lawyer, but no less filled with a longing for change than the younger men; Carlo’s study in Via Giusti, a great jumbl
e of books and papers spilling over on to the floor, became a second meeting place. Salvemini saw himself as their Socrates, drawing out their thoughts. He would say that what he contributed was experience, but that these enthusiastic and naive young men brought ‘courage and faith in these hours of darkness’. When it was clear that the meetings had become important in all their lives, they decided to turn them into something more formal. One day, in the offices of a lawyer-friend, Alfredo Niccoli, they constituted themselves into a Circolo di Cultura, an ‘intellectual cooperative’. They agreed to meet every Saturday evening in one or other of their houses to discuss everything from the economy to European literature, without party political bias, but starting from two simple premises: that Italy had reached a moment of crisis, and that its existing parties were apparently unable to solve it. As Carlo saw it, there needed to be a revolt against this ‘old, bloated world’ among the new generation, who would introduce ‘light, light, fresh air, youth, youth’. ‘We must not be blinded’, he declared, by a ‘paura cretina’, a stupid fear, of Bolshevism.
Neither Carlo nor Nello was yet quite ready to enter the political fray; but politics was moving inexorably towards them.
Mussolini and his supporters did very badly in the general elections of November 1919: they won no seat in parliament. Mussolini himself stood as a ‘soldier wounded in action’, portraying himself as dynamic and intent on modernising Italian political life, but it earned him few votes. The socialists, under Filippo Turati, became the biggest party. Giolitti’s liberals lost many seats. Amelia had a particular dislike of Giolitti, saying that he was nothing but ‘a sack of lies’. At this point, the socialists could have formed a government, either by entering into a coalition, or governing as a minority with outside support. Instead they bickered and splintered. ‘We are witnessing painful times,’ Amelia wrote to Carlo; ‘the best people are resigning and the liberals . . . can agree on nothing.’ The new government was just a ‘Russian salad . . . made of many different vegetables, all concealed by mayonnaise’. In Florence the weather was unnaturally cold; it snowed. ‘Even the seasons’, she wrote, ‘are in revolt.’ Zia Gì told Carlo that the fig trees at Il Frassine looked like candelabra, every leaf picked out in snow. Salvemini stood once again in Apulia and was elected. When he accused Mussolini of collecting money in the United States to help D’Annunzio, Mussolini challenged him to a duel; but as Salvemini’s seconds insisted on proof, Mussolini withdrew.
By now, it was becoming plain that Italy was sinking rapidly into precisely the kind of civil war that Orlando had warned the Allies about. And Italy was not alone: in Russia the Bolshevik revolution had turned into civil war; in Germany an attempted uprising of revolutionary socialists had been savagely put down. Borders were unstable. Lines were being drawn, of a confused and confusing kind. Throughout Italy, landowners and employers were fiercely resisting reform. The workers from factories, industry and agriculture, were demanding higher wages and better conditions, and were supported by the war veterans, who had come home hoping for change but found only old parties, old institutions, old injustices. ‘With all these heightened tensions,’ wrote Amelia, ‘something bad will happen. Where and how will it end?’ Her tone was increasingly despairing: ‘We need so badly to create something. To create it and then to believe in it.’ In September 1920, workers at the Alfa Romeo plant in Milan occupied their factory; engineering workers in Turin and Genoa came out in support. What became known as the ‘biennio rosso’, two ‘red’ years of occupation and strikes, had begun.
A post-war occupation of the factories in Piedmont
In Rome, the political leaders appeared to have sunk into what Salvemini called “Buddhist apathy” paralysed by competing threats. Into this vacuum came the ever more powerful fasci, intent on dealing with those they called ‘Bolsheviks’ and winning growing support from landowners and industrialists. In the background, D’Annunzio remained a keen promoter of disorder. As were the Futurists, mystical warriors and apostles for la patria, whose cult of death, taste for danger and exaltation of physical courage found perfect expression in the new violence. All over Italy, bands of war veterans, petty criminals, resentful soldiers, excitable students – most of them people accustomed to solving problems with violence – embarked on spedizioni punitive, punitive expeditions against left-wing rallies, institutions, newspapers, and factories they considered ‘nests of subversion’. They thought of themselves as hunting parties. The youngest members were no more than sixteen; these raids were exciting rites of passage. Some likened them to Siena’s Palio, or medieval jousts with trophies. Their weapons were pistols and revolvers left over from the war, knuckledusters, cudgels and the famous manganello, a strong knotted stave with a lead tip, sometimes covered with leather.
Though the epicentre for these squadristi was usually a city, punitive expeditions were often despatched into the countryside to track down, intimidate and punish agricultural workers and their cooperatives. The squadristi travelled by bicycle, train, car, lorry or on foot. The Fiat 18 BL, once used to transport troops, was their preferred vehicle. In order not to be identified, they operated outside their own areas, or covered their faces with masks. Wherever they encountered opposition, they set buildings on fire, lashed out with their manganelli, and forced those who refused to give in to drink castor oil.
A band of squadristi, off on a ‘punitive raid’
For the most part, they met with little resistance, particularly after the police and the army, who sided with the squadristi, began surreptitiously to supply them with grenades and machine guns, which they were able to mount on to their trucks, though many of the targeted socialists fought back bravely with pitchforks and their fists. Equally the magistrates, asked to uphold law and order, became deaf and dumb. Some of the squadristi referred to their raids as ‘propaganda’, occasions on which to instil their anti-Bolshevik message; others spoke of themselves as i puri, and claimed that they were engaged in acts of ‘national purification’. They gave their squadre the names of their ‘martyrs’, struck down in street-battles, and adopted popular slogans, such as that used by the Arditi, ‘Me ne frego’. By March 1921 there were reported to be some 150,000 squadristi across the country, grouped into about a thousand local sections. In a little under a year, they killed 172 people and wounded many hundreds more; their own losses amounted to four dead. ‘We want revenge,’ they shouted; ‘whoever is frightened, get out.’
In Rome, where successive governments formed and quickly fell, the mood was one of helplessness. In the absence of any concerted policy, plan or alternatives, landowners and industrialists continued to finance and arm the squadre. One of the clearest exponents of calm was the articulate young deputy, Giacomo Matteotti, whose speech to parliament on 31 January 1921 was a model of dignity. Do not react, he told the beleaguered socialists up and down the country; however angry, remain calm; even silence and inaction can be heroic. But the socialists were divided and on the run, and in the Chamber of Deputies their protests were weak and irresolute. Turati, the party leader, described what was happening as a revolution of blood against a revolution of words.
In Florence, the troubles began slowly but soon gathered pace: Tuscany, along with Emilia-Romagna, would before long become the scene of the fiercest fighting and the most violent punitive expeditions. At the time of the first fascist congress, held in Florence in October 1919, the local fascio had just sixty members. But Tuscany was a region of large agricultural estates and successful industrial concerns – marble, chemicals, textiles and steel – and now, terrified by demands for reform, property and factory owners turned backwards, to a time when they had been all-powerful.
Spedizioni punitive were launched against radicals, democrats, social reformers, striking factory workers, rebellious peasants, newspaper offices, town halls and the homes of trade-union officials across the whole of Tuscany. In Florence the squadristi were nurtured and fanned by the fascists, preaching the menace of Bolshevism. Their crusade was bolst
ered by the arrival on the scene of an Italian-American called Amerigo Dumini, who had fought in the war and been much decorated, then drifted to Florence and worked his way up through the squadrista underworld. Dumini was a bland-faced young man, with neatly parted dark hair and ears that stuck out. He had a small, tidy moustache, but no beard. He was soon powerful enough to have his own squadra, the Disperata. Dumini’s men were a mishmash of former soldiers and disaffected students, filled with pseudo-revolutionary ideas; recruits joined in such numbers that he was able to launch five raids each day. His enforcer was a cabinetmaker called Albino Volpi, renowned for his savagery. They had at their disposal one Fiat 18 BL, two slightly faster trucks and three sports cars. Dumini’s headquarters were in Piazza Ottaviani and he held his meetings in the Teatro della Pergola, where, with the help of Marinetti and his Futurists, he orchestrated flamboyant parades and demonstrations.
Throughout Tuscany, the summer of 1920 was marked by agricultural strikes and labour disputes. On 10 August, an army ammunition dump was blown up: the socialists were blamed. On 29 August, ‘tragic Sunday’, a police chief was shot while trying to quell rioting which had left three people dead. For the whole of September, red flags flew over the factories in Pignone and Sesto Fiorentino.
Carlo and Nello were in Florence, studying hard; they were watching events, but not taking part. As Carlo wrote to his uncle Gabriele, he was filled with a passion to learn, to ‘acquire culture’, and he was reading Italian political historians, the French classics, Dostoevsky and Carlyle. He told his mother that at heart he felt ‘very, but very different from all the other people of my age’. In their letters, Amelia and her sons say surprisingly little about the violent events unfolding around them. The brothers talked about their friends, about meals and the opera, about visits to their uncle Gabriele or to their young cousin Alberto Moravia. It is all like a last cocoon of childhood. Nello himself still had his ‘riso da bambolino’, his childish giggle, and his soft face looked cherubic and unformed.
A Bold and Dangerous Family Page 10
