One of Amelia’s first thoughts on hearing of his arrest was relief. After the deaths of Matteotti, Gobetti and Amendola what she feared most was that her two remaining sons might be assassinated by the fascists. She requested and was given permission to visit Carlo. A note from the prefect of Florence testified that Amelia was of ‘good moral conduct’ and took no interest in politics, though she was ‘opposed to the current regime’. When the train on which she was travelling north stopped in Milan she saw a group of expensively dressed people gathered just outside her carriage. They turned out to be seeing off Mussolini’s mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, her childhood friend from Venice. Amelia observed the crowd’s obsequious behaviour, and remembered all the times that Margherita had come to visit her in Florence before the war. Now Amelia was the mother of a disgraced political prisoner, and Margherita the mistress of the most powerful man in Italy. There came a moment when someone, clearly recognising Amelia, whispered into Margherita’s ear. She looked up, their eyes met, but neither made any sign of recognition.
Amelia had feared that she would find Carlo in some way altered. Apart from being pale, he was resolute and full of plans. He asked her to contact his socialist friend Gonzales and see whether he would act as his defence lawyer; he was sure that he would be only too pleased to defend the cause for which they were all fighting. However, Gonzales, when Amelia went to his offices in Milan, was clearly embarrassed; soon after came elaborate excuses. Accommodations with the fascists had become contagious. Amelia expected Carlo to be angry, but when she told him, he merely said briskly, in his good-humoured way: ‘He refused. That’s all that matters.’
Carlo’s next choice was Francesco Erizzo, a lawyer from Genoa. He was a small man with a little white pointed beard; everything about him was sharp, enquiring, beady. Treating Amelia with old-fashioned courtesy, he assured her that he would be delighted to do battle on Carlo’s behalf. The trial, as he saw it, would essentially take the form of an attack on the fascist state. It was more than likely, he said to Amelia, that this would be the end of him personally as a lawyer. But then he was old, and he had always been a fighter. Marion, who had taken a house at Varazze in order to be close by, said that she felt optimistic about its outcome. ‘Is it a given’, she asked Carlo, ‘that things always have to go badly?’
Nello in Venice with his new bride Maria
On 22 December 1926, Nello and Maria had gone ahead and married, according to Jewish rites, in the house of her grandparents in Florence. He was twenty-six; she twenty-one. From their honeymoon in Rapallo, Nello wrote to Amelia to say what he minded most was not being able to do anything for Carlo. For himself, ‘our happiness is such that no blows or knocks can harm it. Every day that passes the sense of my own happiness grows inside me. I feel happy because every morning, when I wake up, I feel pleased at the thought of our long day ahead . . . Every evening I smile when I think of our shared nights. This is happiness, no?’
For Nello, his marriage to Maria was quite different from that of Carlo to Marion. He was no less committed to the cause of anti-fascism, but the natures of the two brothers became more clearly defined with their choice of wives. If for Carlo marriage was a partnership, for Nello it meant escape into loving domesticity with a girl entirely untouched by politics and who expected to spend her future in family intimacy. ‘This point is crucial,’ Nello wrote. ‘How far can a man, a husband, sacrifice his family for an ideal?’ In Maria he had found a sense of security and purpose; he did not intend to throw it away. He told his friend Leo Ferrero that until then he had never known a ‘true and complete friendship’ as he had never dared to expose his hopes, the ‘fragmentary’ nature of his interests, to anyone, preferring only to present all that was ‘best or at least most lively’ in himself. With Maria it was different. He had found a new closeness, a new adventure in intimacy ‘which fills me every day with serenity and delight’. It was a ‘double event’ in the Rosselli stable: matrimony and friendship.
Nello was still on his honeymoon when he learnt that his work on Mazzini had won a competition for the best thesis in modern history at the Scuola di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, one of the few remaining relatively liberal institutions. He had not expected it, and appeared more surprised than pleased. He returned to Florence to learn that the award included a scholarship with the Scuola, which was run by Gioacchino Volpe, a distinguished modern historian who was managing to navigate the uneasy waters of fascist academia. The position brought with it a salary and considerable prestige. Volpe steered him towards research into the diplomatic relations between Piedmont and England in the early nineteenth century.
The solitary life had never suited the gregarious Nello and he looked forward to meeting fellow scholars and historians. As he said of himself, he was by nature a family man, a patriarch, a historian in need of colleagues. It was decided that the young couple would convert the second floor of the house in Via Giusti, with its views over the gardens and the mountains beyond, into a separate apartment. While waiting for it to be done, Nello spent his days in the National Library in Florence, making occasional forays into the archives in Rome and Naples. To their delight, Maria was pregnant. ‘My duty is done,’ Amelia wrote to Gina Lombroso. Her two sons were married and from now on she ‘would live in their reflection, and their lives will illustrate mine’. She felt, she said, a great sense of peace: she had done her best, and all one could do was prepare one’s children ‘to know how to confront [life] with serenity and peace’. Like Carlo and Nello, Amelia talked constantly about serenity; what made their use of the word so absurd was that serenity was not something any Rosselli actually felt.
Nello was indeed happy, but he was never without his doubts: the main shadow that lay over his contentment was that Carlo remained in prison, and he might soon go before the Special Tribunal. Asking himself why he was not taking risks, as his brother had, he resolved to set an example of how it was possible, in fascist Italy, to remain a dedicated anti-fascist: never weakening, refusing all invitations that came from the state, declining to join the Fascist Party, ‘like a tower in the middle of the desert.’ It was to be his form of rebellion. But there were times when he envied Carlo’s bold clarity and purpose.
Meanwhile they waited. It was, for all of them, as if time had somehow stopped.
Carlo was still in prison in Como, just as robustly cheerful but less plump, having to his pleasure lost some weight, when he received a copy of Nello’s newly published book on Mazzini and Bakunin. Carlo was spending his time thinking through his political ideas and enjoyed reflecting that Mazzini too had languished in an Italian jail shaping his own thoughts. What mattered to him now, he concluded, was exactly what had mattered to Mazzini: to bring about a ‘popular revolution’. ‘All I ask is this,’ he wrote to Gina Lombroso. ‘That one day I may find myself in the middle of a small group of friends who escaped, with dignity, from the furies, to work together to break the vicious circle of our errors.’ He was now facing sentences of not less than three years in prison for each of two charges: helping first Ansaldo and Silvestro, and then Turati, to leave Italy.
But then, unexpectedly, Carlo was informed that he had been absolved of the two journalists’ failed escape – but not of Turati’s – and that he would be sent to one of Mussolini’s new penal islands off the coast of Sicily to await his trial. In a letter to Nenni, Nello reported that his brother was behaving as if he had just won the lottery. ‘The time may come,’ Carlo told Amelia, when he would regret his decision to help Turati escape. But the die was cast, and there was no point looking back. What was important now was that he had shown proof of ‘morality and absolute intransigence’, true Mazzini attributes. Knowing how hard she found his absence, he wrote consolingly to Marion: ‘For the hundredth time, I bless the hour that we met . . . For us too hours of calm will come, hours of peace, hours of happiness.’ When Carlo left San Donnino prison, the other inmates found it all very silent.
The train taking him south st
opped in Florence. Amelia, Maria, Nello, Zio Giù and Zia Gì were at the station to meet him, but not Marion, whose heart condition had been aggravated by her pregnancy. Carlo suggested to the two carabinieri escorting him that they go back to the house in Via Giusti for dinner; surprisingly, they agreed. It was ten at night and when they got there Carlo bounded up the stairs to find Marion, calling over his shoulder to the startled carabinieri officers ‘Don’t worry, I won’t escape.’ As usual, noted Amelia, he looked like a ‘king, surrounded by his subjects’, with his customary ironical smile. She offered the men dinner, and when they grew restless, went up to get Carlo. She found him looking at the crib, made ready for the coming baby, with tears in his eyes.
In Rome, where Carlo’s train paused, his uncle Gabriele came to see him. To Nello, Amelia wrote: ‘Ever since the moment I saw him leave, I hate Florence, the house, the people, everything.’
It was late May and the wisteria that covered the house in Via Giusti was out; the garden, full of sweet-smelling plants and flowering shrubs, had never been more beautiful. Maria and Nello had moved into their apartment on the second floor and though Maria had just had a miscarriage, it had been early and she quickly recovered. Nello spent his mornings in the National Library, returning home every day for lunch. But on 1 June, he did not appear. Two o’clock, then three o’clock passed. Alessandro Levi, summoned by Amelia, went to find out what had happened. He returned to say that Nello had been arrested and was now in Murate prison.
For a while, it was thought that he had been picked up for an attack on fascism written by one of the handful of liberal senators who had dared to stand up to Mussolini, and who had inadvertently sent it to him in Florence, where it had been intercepted by the police. Another theory was that a spy in the bank, noting his regular withdrawals of money to pay the men working on the house, had assumed they were going to finance anti-fascists. A police report prepared for the prefect of Florence spelt out the real reason: Nello, it said, was of ‘normal character’, esteemed by his colleagues, and very hard-working. He was reported as tall, robust, with dark hair worn long, rather small, deep-set grey eyes, a somewhat big nose, a large round chin, large shoulders, long legs, big feet, medium-sized hands, and a good-tempered expression. He dressed with care. But his work was ‘inspired by his very great aversion to the current regime . . . He is exceptionally cunning at evading the vigilance of the authorities,’ and with Matteotti’s death he had become ‘a violent and dedicated opponent’. He was, in short, a danger to the state, and needed to be removed to where he could do no further harm.
Like Carlo, Nello treated his incarceration with light-hearted disdain. ‘For my part,’ he wrote to Amelia, ‘I feel full of energy and youthfulness. In fact, I am very pleased about this disagreeable experience. It will enable me to test my nerve and my character.’ The days were ‘flying by’. He felt, he told his mother, both totally innocent and ‘extraordinarily serene’ – again using the word so often repeated in the family. But one day, while Maria and Amelia were at the prison visiting him, Nello was handed a typed note. He went first red, then white. It said that he had been sentenced to five years’ confino, internal exile on a penal island. No reason was given; there was to be no hearing; and he was not told where he would be going.
Three weeks later, Nello followed Carlo south. Amelia and Maria’s father were allowed to see him off. Nello appeared on the platform, handcuffed, his head held high, smiling, supremely dignified. Amelia thought ‘his expression amazingly pure, his eyes clear, limpid, transparent like those of a child’. As the train pulled out, the guards removed his handcuffs and he waved from the window until they were out of sight, his smile leaving behind it a ‘luminous trail’. Gabriele was once again at Rome station to see this second nephew pass by.
Before crossing to the island of Ustica, one of the penal islands off Sicily, Nello spent several days in the Ucciardone prison in Palermo. Conditions – as described by Carlo during his own stay there – were appalling. Built for 1,000 inmates, it was housing 3,500 in ‘filth and confusion’. He was put in a cell, empty of even a bed, and given two blankets, a spoon, a straw mattress; his belt, shoelaces, cufflinks, braces and tie were taken away. Bugs of every kind – fleas, lice – were rife. He would not have eaten had another prisoner not shared his food with him. In the jail were entire families of fathers, sons and brothers, picked up by the fascists in their trawl for subversive families in southern Italy. Some had been inside for several years, without trial or contact with their wives and children. In the ever-optimistic style with which the Rosselli brothers seemed determined to handle their misfortunes, a tone so cheerful that it became almost a parody, Nello now wrote to Amelia and Maria: ‘I am extremely happy and very proud . . . this will enrich my humanity.’ He was making friends with the other prisoners and whistling Beethoven symphonies to himself.
Amelia herself was wretched, sleeping badly, worrying. Many of her Florentine acquaintances shunned her and she had resigned from all her positions. No less than her two sons, Amelia was now an outcast.
With Carlo and Nello apparently on their way to indefinite detention on the penal islands, Amelia, Marion and Maria settled down in Via Giusti to await the birth of Marion’s baby. Giovanni (from Amendola’s Christian name) Andrea (from that of Andrea Costa, hero of the revolutionary left) arrived on 8 June. Amelia was pleased that the child was a boy and said that he looked ‘like a miniature Carlo’. His parents nicknamed him ‘Mirtillino’, ‘little blueberry’, from the day when, on holiday in the Alps and, having just learnt that Marion was pregnant, they were walking in a field of blueberry bushes and Carlo said: ‘You’ll see what a beautiful little blueberry we’ll make.’
‘I have always felt that Carlo’s character was that of a hero,’ Salvemini wrote to Marion after the birth. ‘He is worthy of you, and you are worthy of him. But I cannot bear to think of what is happening to you both . . . Kiss your baby for me.’ From Colle Isarco in the Trentino, where they had taken Mirtillino to escape the summer heat, Amelia wrote to Nello: ‘And I say that not all the sugar in the world would suffice to wipe out the bitterness I feel in my heart.’
By the summer of 1927, the myth that Italy had been on the brink of a Bolshevik takeover, saved by the bold and prescient fascists, had outlived its usefulness. But a new myth was needed, a positive one, and it took the shape of the ‘corporative’ state, the ‘totalitarian’ nation – the word originated in Italy – in which, as Mussolini put it, ‘everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state’, a phrase that would be repeated often in the years to come. The time for history was over; it was now a ‘time of myths. Everything is yet to be done.’ It is against the background of this new Italy – dictatorial, repressive, intolerant – that Carlo and Nello, with their defiance, obstinacy and refusal to conform, stand out.
During the first half-century of free government that followed the Risorgimento, Italy had been a country of clubs of every kind, cooperatives, societies for mutual aid, associations of landowners, of teachers, of civil servants and of students, meeting freely and under a range of political and religious banners. These now had vanished. In their place came thirteen national confederations, six for employers, six for employees, and one for the professional classes, men of letters and artists that was broken down into seventeen separate associations. The right to strike was abolished. In theory, freedom of association was not actually forbidden; in practice, it became almost impossible to function outside the fascist body. ‘Italianità’, ‘Romanità’, ‘fascistizzare’ became the words of the day, with Rome as the centre of the world, as it had been and would be again, once centuries of decadence were swept away and Italy returned to the age of Augustinian purity. ‘Lei’, the polite form of address, deemed incompatible with the new bold, unservile Italian, was replaced with ‘voi’. Foreign words acquired new variants: pied à terre became piede a terra, sandwich, tra le due. Fascism loved slogans, superlatives. ‘Mussolini is always righ
t’ was stencilled on to walls, carved in stones, chalked on to blackboards, along with portraits and photographs of Il Duce, his black eyes staring, his jaw jutting into the air.
In order for this model state to run properly, its citizens had to be educated not only to work in the national interest but to use their leisure time productively, not fritter it away as ‘loafers, dandies and drunkards’. Leisure, as the fascists saw it, was no longer an end in itself, but a means of improving mind and body, of acquiring self-discipline and self-control. On no account, said one keen fascist organiser, ‘was the worker to be left to his own devices in his free hours’. Under the Dopolavoro, a national agency set up to regulate the hours after work, Italians of all ages were corralled into playing team games, cycling, doing calisthenics, going on group outings, and singing ‘Giovinezza’ on all possible occasions. (Toscanini, who had originally supported the fascists, refused to play it, saying La Scala was not a beer garden.) Boxing, said Mussolini, was an ‘exquisitely fascist means of expression’. A new sport, volata, somewhere between football and handball, was introduced as a throwback to Roman times, and therefore truly indigenous and truly fascist. Magazine articles showed pictures of comely peasant women in national dress, and sturdy peasant men ‘mirthful’, yet ‘sober and thrifty in their habits’, enjoying ‘healthy’ and ‘praiseworthy’ pastimes. Private dance halls were closed ‘for reasons of morality’. People were urged to become lean, willowy, sinewy. ‘I have no pity’, declared Mussolini, ‘for the fat.’ The new Italian was to be ‘Herculean’, potent, granite-like, made of steel.
A Bold and Dangerous Family Page 21
