The trial of the three lawyers was set for 2 June. Two of them were released for lack of proof, and the last eventually sentenced to 19 months and 7 days in prison. But while giving evidence, Pinzi had also given names. He did not have those of Carlo and Nello, about whom he knew nothing, but he did give those of Salvemini and Rossi. Hearing that he had been denounced as a spy, Rossi was persuaded to escape to France. Salvemini, insisting that he had nothing to fear, decided to continue with his normal life. He went off to Rome, where he was sitting on a jury at the university. At 3 p.m. on 8 June, while he was at the Ministry of National Economy, police appeared, arrested him and took him in handcuffs to the prison of Regina Coeli. Salvemini had long been an irritant, and on more than one occasion fascists had tried to break down the door to his classes, and he had been saved by his students. ‘It is time’, announced Battaglie Fasciste, a party paper, ‘that this corrupter of minds’ be silenced.
Nello was away from Florence for much of the spring. Months earler, urged by Salvemini, who was constantly worried about the brothers’ safety, he had gone to pursue his research on Pisacane, Bakunin and Mazzini in Berlin, in the archives of the German Social Democratic Party. Stopping briefly in Munich, Nello’s first impressions were of architectural grandeur, disgusting food covered in sauces, and ‘catastrophic’ hotel beds. It was snowing. But he was working hard at his German, and he liked what he saw as far less class consciousness than in Italy, and the fact that the German girls seemed so free and independent.
In Berlin, Nello went to many operas and concerts, wrote long letters to Maria in Florence and kept a diary, covering the time between the death of Friedrich Ebert, the Social Democratic first president, and the election of Paul von Hindenburg, whose speeches he was taken to hear by the correspondent for La Stampa. Von Hindenburg, he wrote, had hair the colour of the froth on top of a glass of beer, a double chin, two pendulous cheeks, little damp eyes, and a ‘modest paunch, soft hands, characterless’. Guided by Salvemini, he enrolled himself in a course given by Friedrich Meinecke, the nationalist historian, observing that Meinecke’s reflections on the conflict between power and ethics had a horrible echo in Italy. Away from the day-to-day agitations in Florence, his sense of anger and indignation against the fascists had turned, he said, into one of profound sadness.
One day, walking down the street, he observed a Jewish man trying to stand up to a hostile, jeering crowd. In his diary, he wrote: ‘I heard, in that crowd, a wave of hatred.’ To be a Jew in Germany now, he wrote to his mother, meant having to pretend not to be one: otherwise he would not be able to do all the things he planned to do. It made him feel ‘more Jewish’. He had felt very uncomfortable on the night of the elections, when he kept hearing, in mocking tones, the word ‘Jüden’. Asking his landlady whether she would like to see the Jews expelled from Germany, he was appalled to hear her say that she felt ‘a sense of physical repugnance whenever she happened to find herself near to one’.
Whenever he was alone, all Nello’s sense of worthlessness returned to haunt him. ‘I spend my time tormenting myself over everything I haven’t done,’ he wrote to Amelia, ‘over who I am and who I hoped to be.’ Another day he wrote: ‘This morning life seems to me a beautiful thing, yes, but something that passes us by (or passes me by?) without our ever being able to seize it . . . It seems to me always that everything escapes me . . . that everything I have not done and don’t do is beautiful, while all that I have done and do is mediocre.’ Was this normal? he asked her. Was it his age? Was he really a mediocrity? He doubted now that he had the talent to become a university professor, or, indeed, a writer. ‘A dilettante? the very thought humiliates me.’ The endlessly troubled Nello never shared Carlo’s mostly robust sense of himself, though others admired his candour and honesty and loved his affectionate and generous nature. As Calamandrei would later write: ‘It was enough to look him in the face to have faith in the future.’
Nello was still in Berlin when news reached him of Salvemini’s arrest. The abyss which now divided them, a small band of antifascists, from the mass of Italians, was, he wrote to his mother, growing rapidly deeper. For the first time, codes, which would soon become a standard part of all their letters, made their appearance. Salvemini had become ‘the child’; prison, ‘a clinic’.
Carlo, also mindful of the danger he was in, had been dividing his life between Turin, Milan, Genoa and Florence. For Amelia’s birthday, he ordered carnations and violets to be sent to her from the Riviera. He told her that he was lecturing to 500 students, that he felt twenty years older when they called him ‘Professore’ and wondered whether they would take him more seriously if he wore glasses. He had been to see Turati, who had made him ‘come alive again’, and Anna Kuliscioff, ‘sempre deliziosa’, always charming. For Anna’s part, she noted that Carlo was ‘tall and big and very dear to us’, and that he would turn up at all hours, was never punctual, talked incessantly and was always laughing. A new note of restraint had crept into all their letters. ‘Of this’, he said repeatedly, ‘it will be better if we speak face to face.’ In the late spring, somewhat injudiciously, he wrote gloomily: ‘Things are going very badly indeed. We are becoming flabby. Within the next three months, either we organise ourselves for a wide-based social revolt, or we will be slaves for eternity.’ What he suspected, but did not know, was that his letters were already being intercepted by the fascist police.
Carlo was back in Florence when, on 9 June, a young member of Italia Libera called Carlo Campolini painted a portrait of Matteotti on to a sheet, while his mother kept guard at the window – their house had been repeatedly ransacked – and then handed it to a former telephone engineer, who rang the bell of a convent on the Lungarno, saying that he had to check the wires. This man climbed from the convent roof onto that of the Palazzo Frescobaldi next door and fixed the rolled-up sheet to a gutter, leaving a cord hanging discreetly down. That night, another young man rowed a boat across the Arno, pulled the cord and released the painting.
Next morning was the anniversary of Matteotti’s murder. Crowds gathered, and it took firemen, carabinieri and militiamen several hours to remove the effigy. That same day – saying that these stunts were essential to make those who still resisted fascism feel less isolated – Marion, Carlo, and Alessandro and Sarina Levi led a party to lay a wreath of carnations in memory of Matteotti at the feet of the monument to Garibaldi on the Lungarno Vespucci. They were quickly arrested and taken to police headquarters, where the five men were despatched to spend a few days in Florence’s Murate prison, while the three women were released, the police saying smugly: ‘We fascists are gentlemen.’ In Battaglie Fasciste appeared a chilling warning: ‘To such provocations we always respond, and with persuasive arguments.’
For the first few weeks after his arrest, Salvemini was kept in Rome, in the Regina Coeli prison, and then moved to the Murate in Florence, formerly a convent. From his cell window he could see the hills of Fiesole and watch the swifts as they dipped and circled in the evening light. Among his fellow prisoners were a number of burglars, and they gave him lessons on how to break into a safe; they also taught him to play cards. Not long before, Salvemini had married Fernande Luchaire, mother of Carlo and Nello’s friend Jean, the talented young journalist, and she was now in Paris with her children. Daily life in jail, Salvemini wrote to her, ‘is not at all painful’. He joked that, as a student and a scholar, he was accustomed to long stretches of time shut up in small rooms. His one regret was that he could not finish correcting the proofs for a new edition of his book on the French Revolution. His trial had been set for 13 July. It would be one of the last moments of legality in Italy’s slow descent into total dictatorship.
There was a great turnout of friends, students and supporters inside the courtroom, but also a number of fascist militia, strutting about clutching their cudgels. Alessandro Levi was there, along with Marion, several former Aventine members of parliament, and university colleagues. Salvemini was in a cage, big, hirsu
te, with his wild grey beard covering most of his face, pacing up and down, cheerful, chatting, reminding people of a bear on a chain. When he caught sight of Carlo, he was furious: ‘Go away!’ he called out. ‘Your presence here is absurd. Do you really want to put your head into this trap? Go away. I beg of you. I order you.’ Reluctantly, Carlo left.
The judge, on learning that the prosecution witness Pinzi had not yet even been tried himself for distributing prohibited material, and finding the evidence before him so feeble, took the surprising decision to adjourn proceedings and free Salvemini. As Salvemini’s friends left the court, the enraged squadristi swarmed out of the side streets like angry bees. The friends scattered. Some took refuge in a pet shop nearby, others in a typists’ office. Police and carabinieri were shamed into trying to protect them while waiting for a lorry which had been summoned to get them away. But more fascists had been alerted and came running. They surrounded the lorry, forcing it to a halt. Then they burst into the pet shop and the office, ransacked the premises, hauled out Salvemini’s friends and set about them with their cudgels. The British writer Sylvia Sprigge, in Florence to cover the trial for the Manchester Guardian, received a blow to her head. Alessandro Levi spent eight days in hospital. Nino Levi, one of Salvemini’s defence lawyers who had come down for the trial from Milan, was left with one hand permanently disabled. An old friend of Salvemini’s, the distinguished archaeologist Umberto Zanotti Bianco, was chased to the pensione where he was thought to be staying. When it proved to be the wrong one, the fascists moved from pensione to pensione in search of him, severely beating any owner who refused to hand over their register. Zanotti Bianco got away, but worse was to come. Salvemini’s other lawyer, Ferruccio Marchetti, was attacked a few days later in Siena and died not long after of head injuries.
Salvemini himself would certainly have been lynched had a carabinieri officer not hidden him in the basement of the Palace of Justice. At midnight, he was driven home. Instead of dropping him by his front door, however, the police pushed him out at the far end of his street. Rightly sensing a trap, he made his way instead to the Rosselli house in nearby Via Giusti. Amelia was with Zia Gì at Il Frassine, Carlo had gone back to stay with friends near Arezzo, and Nello was still in Germany. But Ada the cook and Mariapò the maid were there. The women greeted Salvemini affectionately and gave him a bed. He left next morning before dawn to take refuge with a friend in Rome.
The following night, towards 10 o’clock, there was a banging on the gates of the Rosselli house. Ada and Mariapò temporised, but in the end were persuaded to allow the two men standing outside to come in to see for themselves that Carlo and Nello, ‘i due signorini’, were not at home. When the women opened the gates, they saw, hidden in the shadows, a dozen more men, who now forced their way in, and, brandishing revolvers and twirling their cudgels, rampaged their way through the house. As Ada and Mariapò begged and pleaded, they set about shattering a magnificent Sèvres vase, then a Venetian cupboard full of valuable objects. Having discovered Carlo’s study, they tore the lid off the grand piano, then pulled an immense bookcase on top of it, smashing both. Before leaving the house, they made a vast pile of the furniture, with Carlo’s desk upside down on the top, and crashed their way through the bedrooms.
Amelia’s old friend Angiolo Orvieto appeared at Il Frassine the next morning. She was still in bed. Bit by bit, trying not to frighten her unduly, he described what had taken place. As they drove down towards Florence, Amelia thought that the countryside had never looked more beautiful, the air sweet and soft in the early morning summer warmth. The hall of the house in Via Giusti had a carpet of shattered glass and porcelain. The two sitting rooms and Carlo’s study had ‘ceased to exist’. In her own study, Amelia found a police inspector going through her papers. When she remonstrated, he told her that he would arrest her unless she showed him proper respect. She remained composed and dignified. As he left, taking with him letters from her brother Gabriele, now a member of the Senate in Rome, he told her, slowly and deliberately, that what he had found was ‘very, very interesting’. Amelia felt a sense of profound menace closing in around them all.
Later, two squadristi were arrested for the destruction of the house, but when Amelia pressed charges she was given to understand that it was all a question of ‘national security’ and that no one was therefore to blame. The judge at the hearing was rude and hostile. Later, too, Amelia worked out that it was the gardener, Arturo – whose wife was a ‘fascista furiosa’ – who had informed the militia that Salvemini had taken shelter in the house. Arturo was, she wrote later, ‘a real spy, camouflaged as a rabbit’. Amelia stayed in the house, camping in the three rooms that had not been destroyed. Carlo, ever robust in the face of calamity and deeply relieved that his research notes had escaped unscathed, said jokingly that he had never much cared for his Steinway and would now be able to buy a Bechstein. ‘If i signori fascisti don’t have a better idea,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘then they might as well go to sleep. They will have to wait a very long time indeed before I give up the struggle.’ To Amelia, he said that it was vital that the family appear ‘almost hard, indifferent and not damaged’ by what had taken place. From Berlin, Nello wrote a calming letter to Maria. For the moment, he told her, he would extend his ‘forced holiday’ in Germany. ‘But I feel extremely serene, and will remain so, even if these troubles keep on coming. I am “decisissimo”, most decided a non mollare.’
Salvemini was very reluctant to leave Italy, but friends were trying hard to persuade him that it was now quite simply too dangerous for him to remain. The American art historian Bernard Berenson was living at I Tatti, a villa at Settignano in the hills above Florence, with his wife Mary. I Tatti had become a meeting place for art-lovers and intellectuals and Salvemini had been a frequent visitor. There was now a thought that Salvemini might use Berenson’s passport to travel abroad – the two men looked vaguely alike – but Berenson demurred, not least perhaps because it soon became known that the fascists, thinking that Salvemini might take shelter in I Tatti, had laid siege to the villa. Salvemini realised he had to flee. But he did not plan to leave empty-handed. Through good contacts in Rome, he managed to buy, from a corrupt official and for a substantial sum, 350 pages of incriminating documents against Mussolini, tying him still further to the Matteotti murder. Then Salvemini slipped quietly down to a friend’s house in Sorrento and, a few days later, across the border into France, taking with him only the documents and a change of clothes. Rossi was waiting for him in Paris. Exile, now, was becoming an option that increasing numbers of the dissidents were being forced to take. Foreseeing the likely seizure of all Salvemini’s possessions, Mary Berenson spirited twelve cases of his books out of his apartment and up to I Tatti. From Paris, he wrote to tell her that he was planning to spend some time in England, which he considered ‘the land of my heart, free among free people, a man among men’.
In the middle of the summer, Amelia, Carlo and Nello met up at Siusi, in the Alto Adige. There they were befriended by a group of sympathetic anti-fascists. Later, Amelia would write that these people had all taken to Carlo, saying that he was exceptionally eloquent, but all felt that he was behaving too rashly, and should learn to be less foolhardy. During the days they had together, Amelia and her two sons talked and talked. Reflecting on the lawlessness into which Florence had descended, she said that it felt like living at the time of Dante. Carlo had taken over the full editorship of Non Mollare and was continuing to put out damaging attacks on Mussolini, fed by the additional documents now sent by Salvemini from Paris. It was becoming insanely dangerous, not only to publish proscribed material, but even to read it. The fascists had got hold of the names of subscribers to all papers of a vaguely independent nature, and were now going after them. By the summer of 1925, Il Caffè, Bauer and Parri’s irreverent and accusatory magazine – one issue was wittily composed solely of quotations from the fifteenth-century visionary Savonarola, Garibaldi, the writer Manzoni and the philosopher
Cattaneo – had been raided so often that it was obliged to close down altogether. As the fascist paper L’Impero noted, the time had finally come to do away for ever with all these ‘pestilential sewers’.
But Non Mollare kept appearing.
The violence did not stop. In Critica Fascista in May, an article had appeared saying that the most ‘terrible and determined’ enemies of fascism were not the communists, but the intellectuals, whose habit of ‘verbosity, compromise and equivocation’ contrasted so glaringly with that of the ‘mature, virile, self-aware’ fascists. Of these intellectuals, Gobetti was one of the most hated. In March 1924, Mussolini had sent a telegram to the prefect of Turin asking him to be ‘vigilant in making life difficult for this stupid opponent of the Government and of Fascism’. The prefect did what he was told. Gobetti was followed, beaten up, his house repeatedly searched. Towards the end of the summer 1925 came a particularly brutal attack: as he was walking towards his parents’ house one day he was set upon by a dozen young men with cudgels. He haemorrhaged blood, but told his mother that it was nothing. Ada was pregnant, and Gobetti was beginning to think that they had little choice but to join the anti-fascists already in exile. Friends who saw him at this time found him frail, his smile gentle, his skin like ‘alabaster’.
A Bold and Dangerous Family Page 17
