Salvemini, Carlo Levi, and Carlo at the Fabian summer school
Levi and Salvemini stayed on too. One night, Salvemini came to a fancy-dress ball as Janus, with two faces, two stomachs and two pairs of spectacles. Carlo put on a voluminous gown and passed himself off as a ‘formidable but courteous English lady’. He told Amelia that the three Italian friends had ‘made these grave English people laugh’.
And then he left for Birmingham and the Midlands, to see what he called ‘the real England, smoky, dirty, industrial, ugly, productive’, as compared to the ‘dead England’ of the Home Counties, where the countryside, with the sunshine gone, seemed to him grey and sad and featureless. The only blight on the excellence of his Fabian weeks, he wrote to his mother, was the food. ‘Here’, he said, ‘is the bad part . . . I loathe English cooking, a mixture of spices, sauces, little sauces, big sauces, marmalade jams, fats, minced meat, barley, horrific combinations of still more horrific ingredients’; how people could survive on them for long he could not imagine. Only the brioches at tea were bearable. Salvemini felt the same way. ‘If you but knew’, he wrote to a friend, ‘what an infernal thing is this English cooking!’ But, as he wrote to Rossi, the three weeks had been ‘magical’, and Carlo ‘had stirred up a storm among the ladies’. There had even been a comic occasion when he and Carlo, both taken by a Junoesque Irish lady, had gone walking in the woods, Carlo throwing himself into seduction ‘with youthful high spirits, me limping along behind’. To both men’s astonishment, the Irish lady chose Salvemini. Carlo left. ‘What happened then,’ wrote Salvemini, ‘under the light of the moon, I cannot tell you: because nothing happened. English women are like Italy: nothing ever happens and nothing lasts.’
Before leaving England, Carlo paid a short visit to Oxford, where he fell in love with the colleges and their soft green velvet lawns. He was taken to the National Liberal Club in London, where the WC was so big, he wrote, that the Circolo di Cultura could easily have fitted into it. On reaching London, he had learnt of the assassination of General Tellini – sent to Corfu to arbitrate over a boundary dispute between Greece and Albania – and of Mussolini’s decision to bomb the island, claiming insufficient apologies and indemnity. After terms exceedingly generous to Italy were negotiated, Mussolini agreed to withdraw his troops, but not before Harold Nicolson remarked dryly that he had not only succeeded in muzzling the League of Nations but also extracting money from Greece ‘without evidence of guilt’. The weeks of innocent fun were sharply brought to an end. The Italian newspapers came out loudly in praise of Mussolini’s firm stand. ‘Do they not realise’, Carlo asked his mother, ‘into what a terrible, infernal volcano we are plunging our hands?’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Moral Choices
Carlo arrived home towards the end of October to find little had changed. The squadristi rampages had been somewhat curbed, but their violence was being more strategically directed at specific targets, those identified as opponents of Mussolini. Francesco Saverio Nitti, the former prime minister, had his house in Rome invaded, and his clothes, linen, silver and even his shoes and typewriter looted. Amendola, the principled former minister of culture who had become one of Mussolini’s most persistent critics – though he insisted that he was not an ‘enemy’ but an ‘adversary’ – was being dealt a series of ‘lessons’ in the form of attacks in the street or when he went out in his car. When Salvemini got back to Florence after his lectures in London, he found posters all over the city with the words: ‘The ape of Molfetta should not re-enter Italy’. Molfetta was Salvemini’s home town. The stairs and corridors of the university were full of threatening young fascists; but his students, who loved and admired him, turned out in large numbers to protect him.
Nello had become the delighted owner of a motorcycle, and he was constantly setting out on excursions around the city. Despite the almost total absence of vehicles on the streets of Florence in the early 1920s, the day came when he managed to collide with a car and was knocked unconscious. The hospital discovered that he had broken his left femur and put him in plaster. Since he remained in considerable pain Amelia had him transferred to a specialist in Bologna, where the cast was removed and his leg put in traction. Unlike Carlo, Nello was a worrier. He lay in his hospital bed fretting that he would end up with one leg shorter than the other. The weeks of enforced idleness fed his constant sense of self-doubt; he brooded and grew depressed. Carlo was not unsympathetic; but his tone tended to be brisk.
Once Nello had recovered, Amelia, who had involved herself in every step of his treatment, was now able to turn her attentions to helping her nephew Alberto Moravia, whose tuberculosis in the bones of his legs was beginning to cause unmanageable discomfort. She happened to be visiting her brother Carlo in Rome when a doctor decided to put Alberto in a cast, but this proved extremely painful. In her researches for treatment for Nello’s broken femur, Amelia had heard that there was a new cure for TB of the bones being tried out in a clinic in Cortina d’Ampezzo. Alberto’s father was sceptical. While Amelia was trying to persuade him, the fifteen-year-old boy went to stay with the Rossellis in Via Giusti in Florence, where he was much impressed by the writers and professors who came to the house, some of whom, now very elderly, were able to tell him their memories of the exciting days of the Risorgimento. One afternoon, Alberto went to Via Tornabuoni and bought himself a copy of the newly published Ulysses. Carlo and Nello found their cousin unnervingly precocious and well read, but thought that he exuded loneliness. Amelia had become attached to this bookish nephew, with whom she had long conversations about writing. Once he left, she sent him subscriptions to magazines and membership of a lending library. Moravia would later say that while his aunt’s house had a very particular ‘liberal, socialist, Jewish’ style, his own was like a windy port, into which ‘swept everything, even fascism’.
Slowly, very slowly, Amelia was coming back to life, though every anniversary of Aldo’s birth or death brought fresh pangs of sadness. She had not been able to find a theatre to take Emma Liona, her play about Lady Hamilton, and was planning to publish it in book form. She had also gone back on to the council of the Lyceum, and was made president of the prize-giving committee of the Almanacco della Donna Italiana.
Mussolini, at this stage, remained somewhat ambivalent about women’s rights. In 1919 he had favoured extending the vote to women, but then in 1922 he told a reporter that ‘I am a supporter of universal suffrage, but not female suffrage, especially since women always vote with their men.’ In 1923, a bill to give women the right to vote in local elections got through parliament. But this was also the year in which fascism went on the attack against feminism. The fascist-run Consiglio Nazionale delle Donne, which had its offices in Florence in the Lyceum’s building, scolded women for losing their way during the heady campaign for emancipation. They needed, the organisation claimed, to be ‘moralised’ and to rediscover themselves and their values in the ‘real female job’ of keeping house. The good fascist woman was one who accepted collective goals.
The Lyceum had asked Amelia to preside over their third International Congress, which took place in Florence in 1922. But by 1923 the uncertainties affecting Italian women generally had infected the members of the Florentine chapter. No one has ever been able to discover why Amelia and another vice president suddenly gave in their resignations, to be followed immediately by those of Zia Gì and Laura Orvieto. A ‘heated’ debate ensued, and the whole council resigned; but peace was brokered by the president and all returned to their posts. One possibility is anti-semitism. Both Amelia and the other vice president were Jewish, and there is a suggestion that a cabal formed against them. For those who chose to see it that way, a small drop of poison had been spilt, and over the next few years, one by one, Jewish members began to fall away.
For all their intense interest in politics, neither Carlo nor Nello had yet joined a party. They were watching, waiting. In any case, both were extremely busy. When Nello’s leg healed, he went to
work for the publishing house started by La Voce, in order to help produce what they called ‘debates’, short books on different aspects of current political and cultural life, rather on the model of the discussions conducted on Saturday evenings in the Circolo di Cultura. For this, he set aside four hours every afternoon. He was also working on an article about Mazzini, Bakunin and the Paris Commune for the respected academic journal Nuova Rivista Storica, and told Amelia that he was happily ‘swallowing’ books in the archives. Mazzini’s ‘admirable intransigence’ fascinated him. Both he and Carlo loved what they called the ‘defeated’ intellectuals of history.
Soon after returning from England, Carlo went to Milan to take up his post at Bocconi University, where he was put to hearing the oral examinations for his students’ theses. He was impressed by the generous funding given to the Bocconi, which lent it, he said, ‘una larga signorilità’, a feeling of space and refinement, but he did not immediately take to the much-respected economist Luigi Einaudi – whom he described to his mother as ‘taciturn, small-minded, boring etc etc’ – or to Milan itself. The city, he complained, was obsessed with money: ‘Intellectually it is a real disaster.’ In his letters home he sounded cheerful and overworked, spending long days at the university, long evenings with friends or at the opera, and seldom getting enough sleep. He worried that he was getting fat, and kept planning strict diets, ‘niente vino, niente dolci’, and was annoyed when his new shirts did not fit, sending them back to Florence to have their collars and sleeves altered. He was not without a certain endearing vanity. Later, Anna Kuliscioff would say that Carlo ‘was like a spring wind, youthful, sane and intelligent, full of promise, his intellect robust and impressive’.
With time, Carlo, who was unsure of himself as a speaker and could not quite take himself seriously as a professor, began to feel more ‘à mon aise’, particularly as his classes were packed. A colleague teased him that he looked little older than his students and described him as ‘a chubby, blond, myopic youth’. He was asked to give a series of ten lectures at the Università Proletaria on protectionism and free trade, and was reviewing Keynes’s ‘A Tract on Monetary Reform’. Then, early in 1924, his lectureship at the Bocconi University was confirmed for the following year. Things were going well. He was starting to make plans for the moment when the ‘Fascist pressure has fallen’ and the ‘socialist movement rises again in full strength’. Salvemini kept urging him to stay away from active politics.
Fascist pressure, however, was not falling but rising. The subservient parliament had granted Mussolini a year with full emergency powers, and the Fiume crisis was satisfactorily concluded with a deal in which Yugoslavia recognised Italy’s sovereignty over both the city and the port. Mussolini was also encouraged by the tacit support of the European powers: the London Times spoke admiringly of his firm hand and the way in which ‘Fascismo has abolished the game of parliamentary chess’. Within Italy, left-wing newspapers were cowed, devastated by frequent visits from squadristi, while money was being poured into their right-wing rivals. Turati was fast losing hope that the combined forces of Giolitti and the communists might yet prevent the slide towards dictatorship: ‘A train travelling at full speed’, he wrote to a friend, ‘is crushing us while we are tied to the rails.’
Mussolini addresses his supporters from a balcony in Rome
Even so, parliament remained a problem for Mussolini: he was still the leader of only thirty-five fascist deputies in the Chamber. What he needed was a far broader base. Giacomo Acerbo, his deputy minister in the prime-ministerial office, was instructed to revise the electoral laws. The new law he came up with proposed that any party obtaining at least a quarter of the total number of votes would automatically be assigned two-thirds of the seats in the Chamber, the remaining third to be distributed proportionally. In November 1923, the Acerbo Law was voted in by the supine, quiescent deputies. Though it was blatantly framed to ensure total control by the fascists, it was welcomed by the king, the Vatican and even by a number of liberals, who maintained that it would introduce a measure of stability. Parliament was dissolved and new elections called for 6 April 1924. The fascist ticket, appropriately enough, was called il listone, ‘the big list’. Fascists all over Italy were urged to unite and become ‘genuinely Mussoliniani’.
For all his calls for an orderly and peaceful election, Mussolini intended to use the militia and the ras to intimidate the opposition. In Genoa, Milan, Turin, Udine, Savona, Urbino and Rome, dissidents were attacked, along with prominent liberal-Catholic supporters. One socialist candidate was murdered. Early in 1924, Mussolini declared that governments in a state of transition needed ‘certain illiberal branches to take care of their adversaries’. He summoned to Rome two notorious veterans of the punitive raids, Albino Volpi and Amerigo Dumini, and put them in charge of a band of fedelissimi, the most faithful, to menace the deputies. Dumini looked more school-masterly than martial, but was in fact vicious and quick-tempered and was known to have shot dead the mother and brother of a girl spotted wearing a red carnation – symbol of the socialists. Cesare Rossi, head of Mussolini’s press and propaganda office, had been entrusted with overseeing Dumini and his fedelissimi; and Dumini had been promised by General Emilio de Bono, veteran of the March on Rome and now chief of police, protection from the legal consequences of any crimes committed.
With the journalists silenced, the opposition cowed, the ballot boxes a farce of irregularity and militiamen prowling the corridors of parliament, the election results were a foregone conclusion. Just the same, they represented a triumph for Mussolini. The listone took over half the seats in the north, 76 per cent in central Italy and 81.5 per cent in the south; the left, too divided to form an alliance, saw their vote cut to just 14.6 per cent. In the new Chamber, 374 of the 535 deputies owed their allegiance to Mussolini. It was the most resounding victory since 1861 and there had been no need for the Acerbo Law. The ‘new politics’, declared Mussolini, would give the Italian people ‘five years of peace and fruitful work’. His spirits were high: he had proved himself a canny administrator, an able political force, and he had publicly distanced himself from the worst of the violence. Better than anyone, he had shown that he understood Italy’s love of strong rhetoric.
Salvemini, who had refused to vote, was visited by five fascist thugs and threatened. Afterwards, he went with Carlo, Nello and Ernesto Rossi up to Fiesole, where they lay bleakly on the grass in the sunshine.
The last photograph taken of Giacomo Matteotti, shortly before his murder
Of all the many thorns in Mussolini’s side, Matteotti was the most irksome. However often he was attacked – and he dealt with each attack with dignity and courage – he refused any notion of compromise. For the left, for Carlo and Nello, Salvemini, Gobetti and Rossi, Matteotti represented a symbol that democracy and honour had not quite died in Italy. Carlo called him a ‘prosaic hero’, admiring his gravitas and the way that he considered standing up to Mussolini a moral imperative. And he shared Matteotti’s intolerance towards all ideological extremism, whether from the right or the left, and his fears that some of the socialists were drifting towards communism and the Bolsheviks.
In the late spring of 1924, Matteotti slipped secretly out of Italy and went to London, where he hoped to convince the Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, of Mussolini’s violence and the dire state of the Italian economy. Just before he returned home he was asked by a reporter whether he was not afraid to go back to Rome. ‘My life is always in danger,’ he replied. ‘That is what I want you to understand.’
Then came the day when he stood up in parliament and called for the recent elections to be declared invalid; and soon after his kidnapping, murder and the discovery of his mutilated body in a shallow ditch on Via Flaminia. When his corpse was transported to his home at Fratta Polesine in the Veneto, the route was lined with people. At the moment the coffin appeared, someone shouted out ‘Tutti in ginocchio’ and they all knelt. His mother, Isabella, howled ‘like a wolf who
se cubs had been killed’. She was dragged away, her cries resounding across the countryside. Squadristi were overheard to say: ‘This is the first. There will be others.’ Velia Matteotti was warned not to visit her husband’s grave, ‘for this could cost her her life’.
Whether this act might have provided the spark for radical action no one can say. The opposition leaders hesitated. Mussolini kept the Chamber closed and ordered the fascists to lie low. Turati, still trying desperately to instil fire into the socialists, proposed a common front against the regime but it was blocked by the Vatican. In due course, Amendola’s liberal conservatives, with some socialists, communists and a few Catholic deputies – some hundred men in all – walked out of parliament and formed the ‘Aventine Secession’, taking their name from the moment in 494 BC when the Roman people withdrew to the Aventine Hill in protest against the patriciate.
The Lancia car in which Matteotti was kidnapped
But even the Aventine Secession was little more than a show of principles. Within their ranks there was no unity and none could envisage a solution other than within strict parliamentary legality, preferring to pursue a ‘moral campaign’ rather than set up an anti-parliament. As one critic phrased it: ‘The Aventino lost the battle on which not only Italy’s future, but possibly that of the world, depended.’ When it refused to endorse the communists’ proposal for a general strike, the communists withdrew and declared that the socialists and democrats ‘had neither the strength nor the will to win’. As Gobetti put it, the Aventino ‘spun a myth, the myth of caution’. The days passed and nothing happened. Turati wrote to Kuliscioff: ‘Time is working for the enemy.’ In Turin, lorries of fascists drove through the streets singing: ‘Matteotti, Matteotti, ne farem dei salsicciotti’ (‘we’ll make sausages of him’). A few days later Turati wrote again: ‘The enemy has caught its breath’; Matteotti’s death ‘has perhaps yielded all that it has to give.’
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