A Bold and Dangerous Family

by Caroline Moorehead

  The night of 10 October was particularly stormy. The wind howled. There was a rumour that a ‘foreign’ ship had been seen and the dormitories were full of excited chatter. Buemi and Memmi decided that the moment had come to act. Police and militiamen were despatched to search the rooms. Men, protesting, were led out and made to stand in the storm. Women were threatened with guns. Children cried. Next morning, thirty-nine of the supposed ringleaders were manacled, chained and rowed out to where the water boat, full of carabinieri, was waiting to take them back to Palermo. Because of the heavy seas, the little boats pitched and banged into each other until the captain called out that he would not transport anyone unless the chains were removed.

  Cleverly, Buemi had selected the intellectual ‘elite’, and now accused them of plotting to overcome the guards and escape to the mainland on the ‘foreign boat’; for good measure he added that he knew of a plot to poison his coffee and that of his men. One of those singled out was Amadeo Bordiga, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party. There were fears that Nello might be included after he was accused of making a ‘very violent speech’ and inciting a group of communists, anarchists and Freemasons to rise up and kill Mussolini, but in the event he was spared. Next day, 272 other people, named as accomplices, were transferred to the island of Ponza; 17 more were sent to join their friends in the Ucciardone prison in Palermo.

  The upshot of this turbulent night was surprisingly fair. Though it took some months, an honest and impartial magistrate declared that the whole incident had been ‘absurd’, dreamt up in the fevered minds of ‘ill-intentioned informers’. The ‘foreign’ boat was found to have been a French vessel, the Orléans, which had been in too great a difficulty in the rough seas to answer the semaphore requesting information. The unfortunate and wrongly accused men were allowed to complete their sentences without further punishment. But Ustica itself had changed. All classes were now closely supervised, and every restriction was enforced; it had become a wary, tightly controlled place.

  On 8 January 1928 Amelia left the island; she was worried about Marion, alone with Mirtillino in Rome. ‘But what is to be done?’ she asked. ‘It’s impossible to divide myself in two.’ Maria and Nello stood on the new dock, recently completed by the prisoners, and watched the boat draw away. ‘The intimacy of these last two months’, Nello wrote to Zio Giù, ‘has been so close and so warm that it doesn’t seem possible that it has come to an end.’ His grief at her going was made worse, as he wrote to her, by the fact that ‘I feel a huge sense of pity for your sad life of sacrifice.’ Maria’s mother Luisa had arrived to take Amelia’s place and Maria was now safely well beyond the third month of her pregnancy. ‘We are beginning to breathe a little,’ Nello wrote. ‘We NEED at least this to go well.’

  As it happened, luck from an unexpected source was about to befall them. Before coming to Ustica, Amelia had been to Rome to see Gioacchino Volpe, the director of the Scuola di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea. She knew that Volpe admired his young protégé, and that Nello was attached to him. But Volpe, once a man of pronounced liberal views, had opted to serve the fascist state and was acutely conscious that his every move was closely watched; one mistake would cost him dear. He received Amelia at home. Volpe’s manner, she wrote later, perfectly reflected the uncomfortable position in which he found himself: it was clear that he wanted to help, but equally that he feared that any word of sympathy might be used and distorted. His facial expression was ‘that of the liberal’ and at one point she even saw a glimmer of tears in his eyes; but his words, ‘composed and measured, belonged to the fascist’. Tentatively, Volpe proposed that Nello should write a letter explaining that he was just a historian, with no political interests . . . Amelia stopped him. Nello, she told Volpe, would never apologise or beg. It was not in his nature. However, she added somewhat sternly, it was in Volpe’s power to see that justice was done. Leaving his house, she concluded that no more would be heard.

  To his uncle Gabriele, who had intervened on his behalf, Nello wrote that he considered his university career over. ‘It’s a miracle that it lasted so long!’ A long letter of comfort arrived from Carlo. ‘I want you to feel me close by, by your side, solidly with you . . . on this perilous, the most perilous, road that you have chosen.’ He told his younger brother that he fully agreed with his decision not to ask for clemency: ‘To be at peace with oneself is the premise for happiness.’

  But Volpe’s more generous instincts prevailed. He asked the university president, the distinguished and very elderly Senator Boselli, to petition Mussolini to free Nello to pursue his research; and he got in touch with Gabriele Pincherle to suggest that he, as a senator and Nello’s uncle, petition Mussolini for Nello to be sent somewhere he could continue his important studies. Boselli duly wrote to Mussolini, pointing out that Nello’s family were prominent people, that his eldest brother Aldo had been a decorated war hero and that his wife was pregnant. Mussolini, who underlined these last words, sent back word to say that Nello could indeed be freed – providing he wrote in person to ask for a pardon. Boselli informed Nello that he now needed to write a letter in which he promised henceforth to concentrate only on his research. It was to be a letter of submission, even if only implicit. At the same time, Volpe wrote to Nello that he needed to be tactical. Why not put aside his scruples, undertake to engage in ‘no practical activity’ of a ‘political nature’, or show any ‘open hostility’ to the regime?

  But Nello was not to be swayed.

  Much as Carlo’s speech at Savona would go down in antifascist history, so would Nello’s reply to Boselli. His words were brusque and clear. He would never, he told the president, ‘renounce the fundamental rights and duties of a citizen’, for to do so would be to ‘voluntarily paralyse my brain and my heart’. Furthermore, he was convinced that no real research was possible ‘if it is not conducted by a free spirit in a free atmoshphere’. A self-censoring historian was an absurdity. Boselli felt that he had no alternative but to forward this letter to Mussolini. All would now depend on the Duce’s mood.

  The reply came in the form of a letter from the under-secretary in the Ministry of the Interior, Giacomo Suardo. Its tone was sharp. Nello’s letter was full of ‘unacceptable views’ and falsehoods. Furthermore, it bore no trace of submission. However, he went on, Mussolini had made the ‘generous and high-minded’ decision to award him conditional liberty, in the hope that his spell in confino had taught him the ‘most elementary duties of a good citizen’. On 29 January 1928, Nello learnt that he was to be set free.

  ‘The autumn passed, the winter passed,’ Nello wrote later; ‘when the swallows returned I was freed.’ The day came when he and Maria, accompanied to the jetty by their friends, climbed on to the boat to take them back to the mainland. Both of them had tears in their eyes. Nello felt that in Ustica he had learnt a great deal, been ‘formed’ and made many ‘unforgettable’ friends. As the boat pulled away, they looked back at their companions, at the little white church, the low houses, the rocky coastline; then the whole island came into view, ‘like a black whale’. Against all the odds, they had been very happy there.

  A young militiaman, going on leave, sat down next to them and began to play his guitar and to sing. Maria, who suffered from seasickness went below. But Nello continued to sit on deck, in the cold wind, watching two seagulls dipping and flapping above him. Later, he wrote to a friend: ‘Balance: two months in prison, seven in confino, a child on the way, a vast and incomparable experience lived through, the relationship with my wife become intimate and profound. Future? Uncertain.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Island of Winds

  On a windy morning towards the end of December 1927, a young confinato lawyer called Francesco Fausto Nitti, nephew of the former prime minister, saw a man in the usual manacles and handcuffs step ashore in Lipari’s Marina Corta. He had ‘an open and pleasant face, he was gigantesco, and his blue eyes smiled from behind his glasses’.

  This w
as Carlo. ‘I arrived into a glory of light and sun,’ he wrote to Amelia the next day, ‘and was greeted extremely warmly.’ In a postcard to his uncle Gabriele, he wrote that ‘Lipari is very civilised and leaves nothing to be desired from a material point of view . . . The climate is spring-like . . . After a year of greyness, this return to life is delicious.’ The port of Lipari was both ‘affluent and clean’, there were four chemists’, several well-stocked groceries and butches, and a clockmaker, ‘all in all a veritable Eden’ compared to Ustica. He felt drunk, he said, on the sea, the sky, the light, the overwhelming joy in being able to move around freely again. Like Nello, he was determined to see only the best of things.

  Within days, Carlo had found one floor of a house to rent on the edge of town, a whitewashed villa with views over the mountains and the sea, surrounded by cypresses, palm trees, eucalyptus, medlars and lemons, and bushes of capers with purple leaves. It reminded him of Tuscany. It had a terrace with a flowering vine over the pergola, and a garden large enough to grow vegetables and flowers and to keep chickens – though it lacked a lavatory, and his landlord had not provided sheets, blankets or plates. From the terrace you could smell the orange blossom, and there was a tortoise creeping through the undergrowth. Writing to Parri, still in prison in the north, he said that he was revelling in this new form of detention with an ‘unprecedented intensity . . . everything pleases me.’ He had applied to have Marion and Mirtillino join him and was busy equipping the house for their arrival.

  Lipari was generally considered the best of the confino islands. Home in classical antiquity to Aeolus, King of the Winds, it is the largest of the Aeolian Islands, fifteen kilometres long and nine kilometres wide, ten times the size of Ustica, with two volcanic peaks and thermal baths said to be the oldest in Italy. In 1927, half of its population of 7,500 lived in the port of Lipari, which had two main streets and a castle, built on a rock above the water on Greek and Roman remains, a Norman cathedral, a bishop’s palace and four other churches. The rest were scattered in hamlets on the hillsides, or around a second port, Canneto, a few kilometres to the east, where they worked in the obsidian and pumice industries. Though in autumn and winter Aeolus’s winds could blast and howl, whirling up blinding clouds of dust, the climate was mild and the mountains very green. There were no cars and very little electricity. The Café Eolo showed silent movies.

  But Lipari, like Ustica, was a place of tensions. When, in the spring of 1926, medieval houses round the castle were demolished to make way for two vast dormitories for convicts, a cortege of angry women had marched up the steep flight of steps, occupied the new buildings and rung the cathedral bells. They wanted no more convicts on the island, and brought with them peasants armed with hoes and rakes.

  All through 1927, the locals watched Mussolini’s political enemies land at the Marina Corta twice a week from the Adele or the Etna, the richer among them, such as Carlo, to rent houses, the poorer sent to occupy the dormitories by the castle. Among them was a growing number of dissident fascists, punished for various misdeeds and soon ostracised by the anti-fascists as the ‘gruppo merda’, the shit group. When there was trouble, these men were locked behind bars in a prison block with four large cells, suffocatingly hot in summer, arctic in winter. But the islanders loved their distinguished and educated inmates, greeting the anarchists, socialists, communists and Freemasons with enthusiasm as they shuffled and rattled off the boats in their chains. Nervously expecting taunts of ‘traitor’ and ‘renegade’, the political prisoners were instead given fruit and glasses of the excellent local wine, made from Malvasia grapes which thrived on the volcanic soil.

  Just a few weeks before Carlo’s arrival, there had been an uproar when two confinati, hoping thereby to secure pardons, had informed the director of the penal colony of a plot. The authorities used the occasion to strip the very well-furnished library, run by a confinato tax inspector, of many of its books. Anything with the word ‘revolution’– including Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution – was taken away, along with everything Russian, and all works written by malpensante authors such as Voltaire, Mazzini, Upton Sinclair and Anatole France. Bernard Shaw was allowed to stay. Many of these books had originally been smuggled in by the families of the confinati, hidden in the bottom of their suitcases.

  Whether in their rented houses or in the castle dormitories, the confinati were allowed out at seven in the morning, attended a roll-call at eight, when their daily allowance of 10 lire a day would be handed out, and then allowed to roam ‘free’ – within a tightly circumscribed area, watched over by patrols, militia and policemen from forty-three watchtowers positioned at regular intervals. At dusk, two blasts of a trumpet sounded the curfew. Those living in rented houses were allowed to choose between having peepholes in their windows and doors, open at all times, or being subjected to two-hourly roll-calls all through the night, when militiamen would pound on their doors.

  When the boat from Milazzo arrived with new confinati and the mail, the port was briefly closed. Otherwise the prisoners strolled up and down the Corso Vittorio, went down to the port to look at the boats, attended classes started by confinati teachers and professors, and ate in each other’s canteens. On Lipari the most popular kitchen was that run by Matteotti’s former cook. In summer, swimming was allowed, the confinati from one beach, the convicts from another. Occasionally, the director gave permission for men to walk with their families up the donkey tracks into the hills. When the boat brought newspapers, their lucky recipients would be followed around by a line of hopeful readers, though there was little in the press that did not follow the Fascist Party line. The former mayor of Orvieto, a socialist, wrote a hymn about the confinati, describing them as the ‘cavalieri dell’umanità’, ‘knights of humanity’, deported for their ideals. Though forbidden, it was sung, loudly, on all possible occasions.

  But Carlo was not like Nello. While Nello’s sunnier nature meant that he searched hard for ways to make the best of all misfortunes, Carlo railed. Within days of reaching Lipari, the delights of semi-freedom had given way to anger and grief. ‘Confino is a cell without walls,’ he wrote to Marion, ‘all sky and sea. The patrols of soldiers act as walls, walls of flesh and bone, not cement and stone. The desire to break out becomes an obsession . . . No, no, I was not born to be shut up in a chicken coop.’

  Carlo had few illusions about his own character. In one of his most candid and self-reflective letters, he wrote to a friend that he was ‘thirsty for action, concrete, realistic; my whole being is orientated towards it. My happiest days are those of frenetic activity . . . rooted in the overpowering certainty of facts.’ He would never be a historian like Nello, he added, but he hoped that some small act of his might one day make history. Had things turned out differently, he would have lived quietly and happily, teaching, writing, enjoying family life. ‘But at times like these, when the most fundamental principles of life are at stake, I am drawn towards all the beauty and importance of a life of battle.’ Three days later, exploring another aspect of himself, he wrote to Parri: ‘My inner life and my outward acts are very tightly linked to the surroundings in which I find myself . . . That’s to say that I am, I think, I act, I react in terms of the people around me . . . I am, to the very tips of my fingers, a political animal, for whom a life without politics would have neither sense nor light.’ Did this side of his character, he asked, show a ‘dangerous weakness’? All Lipari’s little freedoms served only to make his captivity more bitter.

  Carlo was, however, as gregarious as he was political, and he immediately set about making friends among the 500 or so men, and the few women, sent to Lipari as enemies of Mussolini, a task made easier by his genial manner and his obvious sympathy for those in difficulty. One of the first was Nitti, the young lawyer who had watched him arrive. Like Carlo, he was twenty-eight, a thin-faced, dark-haired man with round spectacles in heavy, dark frames. Having studied law in Rome, he had been involved with a group of anti-fascist students, and ma
de a pilgrimage to the ditch in which Matteotti’s body was found; he had subsequently befriended Matteotti’s widow, Velia, under whose windows fascist patrols sang ribald ditties. He had been working in a bank when he was arrested and charged with ‘subversive acts’ and had arrived on Lipari nine months earlier, after a long journey on trains shunted around Italy, locked up in the little steel boxes with no light or air in which prisoners were transported. In the state archives in Rome there is a copy of the prefect’s report on him. Nitti, it claimed, was ‘an individual as dangerous for his propaganda as for his actions’. He and Carlo soon became close.

  Another new friend was the former parliamentary deputy for Sardinia, lawyer and co-founder of the Partito Sardo d’Azione, which was calling for regional antonomy. Emilio Lussu was in his late thirties; with his receding brown hair, small moustache, pointed beard and stern stare, he had the look of a Russian revolutionary. He seldom smiled. Returning after the war to his home in Sardinia with four medals for valour, he had tried to tackle the high illiteracy, malaria and backwardness into which the war years had further plunged his already impoverished island, but in so doing had come up against the hostility of the fascists. There were mutterings that he should be lynched.

  On 31 October 1926, a mob of squadristi, carrying staves, ropes and chains, had followed him home. Lussu had managed to get inside and take refuge in his study on the first floor. But the fascists broke down the door and one climbed on to the balcony. Seeing the man’s shadow, Lussu fired his old hunting gun. The young assailant fell back and later died. Lussu was arrested and spent several months in prison in Cagliari, where he developed pleurisy, and then began to spit blood. Mussolini had pressed for a charge of manslaughter. But as with Carlo and Parri, Lussu had come before a rare, honest judge. He was found to have acted in self-defence and pronounced innocent. But not so innocent as to avoid a five-year sentence on the penal islands as an ‘incorrigible opponent of the regime’.