By 1930, most of the Italian anti-fascists in exile who were not communists were envisaging a constitutional democracy once fascism fell but, believing that socialism would ultimately prevail, they preferred to analyse, rail and dream rather than to act. The communists, for their part, remained faithful to Marxism and a totalitarian ideology. Carlo, Lussu and Nitti still did not agree with what they saw as the Concentrazione Antifascista’s culpable passivity. Since Mussolini’s ‘ruthless fanaticism’ used violent methods, the only way to oppose it, they maintained, was through violence; since all legal means were closed, only illegal ones were left; since the old left-wing parties were mired in a failed past, and in any case political parties were too ponderous to respond dynamically, then what was needed was a wide-based, united fighting force.
Socialismo Liberale, Carlo’s one major theoretical work, its themes endlessly refined on Lipari and further hashed out in Paris with Tarchiani and Salvemini, was published in French in December 1930. It advocated the two Mazzinian ideals of republican liberty and social justice; a separation between Marxism and socialism on account of the deterministic nature of Marxism, and an overhaul of socialism to make it less sclerotic. Italy should pursue a mixed economy, agrarian reform, and an end to the complacent monarchy and the complicit paternalism of the Vatican. Local committees could lay down the basis of a new state, to be completed once the fascists fell by a constituent assembly, elected by universal suffrage. But first, a militant vanguard, ‘small nuclei’ of active fighters, would prepare the path towards the liberation of Italy, after which freedom for all citizens would follow.
There was more. It was not merely a question, said Carlo, of overthrowing a bad regime, but of putting in its place a ‘civilisation’. Like Gobetti, he believed that ethics, politics and culture should go hand in hand; like Amelia, that people should be responsible for their own actions. The difference between the fascists and the anti-fascists, he argued, lay not in matters of class but in moral sensibility: his ‘creative revolution’ envisaged spiritual redemption as a precursor to the renewal of the nation and its culture. In this, intellectuals had an important role to play in re-educating a people ‘suborned by an ignorant and brutal dictatorship’. Italians had been made ‘morally lazy’ by fascism.
It would be a mistake to try to pin down too neatly Carlo’s proposed new state. His ideas were not without flaws and even Salvemini found some of them a bit of an enigma. But what inspired him chiefly was the desire to destroy Mussolini as soon as possible. In any case, he regarded this concept of freedom not as static but as something fluid, constantly renewed in debate and argument, a set of rules for civil society rather than a collection of principles cast in stone. Carlo had sent his first draft to Nello, who commented: ‘You really are a star.’
He had expected criticism from others. But he was not prepared for the tidal wave of indignation and opprobrium which followed the publication of his book. The anarchists declared that he was far too respectful of government and state. The communists said that he was too privileged. His much-loved friend Turati called him a ‘presumptuous little bourgeois’, a ‘reactionary dilettante’, and said that by contrast Gobetti had been a serious scholar. Other communists called him a ‘socialfascista’. Claudio Treves announced that Carlo was in truth neither a liberal nor a socialist. Croce, who joined in the attacks from Italy, said that his ideas were like the mythical hircocervus, half-stag, half-goat, ‘an absurd and aesthetically unpleasant combination that purported to attach the rough, rude and shaggy body of socialist to the long and agile legs of liberalism’. The pages of the opposition papers in exile were filled with similar attacks, many of them vituperative and extremely hurtful, particularly when written by people he considered close friends. While the backbiting rumbled on, Carlo turned resolutely to what he really believed in: action.
The few young anti-fascists still at liberty in Italy had meanwhile formed themselves precariously into the very kind of networks Carlo was looking for. There was a small, mainly republican group in Rome; some followers of Gobetti in Turin; the railway-worker and Non Mollare distributor Traquandi in Florence; Lussu’s friends in Sardinia; more republicans in Trieste. In Milan, there were Carlo’s three close friends: Riccardo Bauer, austere, well-educated editor, recently released from Lipari; Ferruccio Parri, who had just benefited from an amnesty; and the lively, bold, brilliant, mocking Ernesto Rossi, Salvemini’s third spiritual son, considered by some to be a complete ‘madman’. A chemist, Umberto Ceva, who had helped with the escape from Lipari, provided invisible ink for their communications.
For a while there had also been Sandro Pertini, the young man who had escaped to France with Turati. He had proposed getting hold of bombs and clock parts and setting them off under the Palazzo Venezia, a plan that had to be abandoned when it was discovered that Bocchini, ever haunted about Mussolini’s safety, had not only had steel bars welded over all the basement entrances, but formed a ‘squadra di sottosuolo’ to patrol the sewers. In any case Pertini, who had slipped back into Italy, had been recognised by a childhood friend since turned fascist, subsequently picked up by the police, and was now serving a 10 year, 9 month sentence in solitary confinement in prison in the port of Santo Stefano, where ‘exemplary punishments’ with the manganello were often meted out by the guards. Pertini’s friends, following his fate, knew precisely what they risked.
Bauer and Parri had immediately joined forces with various friends in Milan who had been working under the name of Italia Libera to help prisoners’ families, arrange clandestine crossings to France and Switzerland, and send information on the fascists to those in exile in Paris. After his abrupt departure with Salvemini from Florence in 1925, Rossi, like Pertini, had infiltrated himself back into Italy – Rossi was a common Italian name – and managed to get a job teaching law and economics in a technical institute in Bergamo, avoiding Florence, where his mother Elide and sister Serenella lived. Elide was a woman in Amelia’s mould: brave, dignified, uncomplaining, as close to Ernesto as Amelia was to her two sons.
Travelling around Italy with two large suitcases full of clandestine material, his black eyes shining with honesty and passion, Rossi had managed to cross the border into France undetected on six separate occasions. He told Salvemini that he was not so much a man of politics as a sceptic, and that what really mattered to him was sympathy and instinct. He had recently become involved with Ada, a teacher of mathematics from the University of Pavia whose surname also happened to be Rossi. A fervent Garibaldian, she, like him, was leading a double life. The police were not fooled. A report by the head of the carabinieri in Bergamo described her as a ‘profound hater of fascism’ and said that she needed close watching. Few of the leading anti-fascists were women, but occasionally one would carry material in false-bottomed suitcases over the border, and these women were known as fenicotteri, flamingoes.
Bauer and Rossi, using invisible ink and writing between the lines of a French textbook, had sent Carlo, Nitti and Lussu warm congratulations on their escape and an outline of plans for actions to be carried out inside Italy. Rossi’s risky crossings had been replaced with a more secure route via socialist friends in Ticino and Lugano, where a young Greek scholar called Pietro Zani collected messages and propaganda material, hid them behind the panels in his car, and delivered them to couriers in Milan. Bauer’s diminutive and combative housekeeper, Rina dei Cas, kept their most precious notes on her at all times.
What the Milanese group proposed, in a manifesto called Consigli sulla Tattica, ‘Advice on Tactics’, was a two-tier approach: the education of the masses and the setting up of small cadres of active fighters to carry out very noisy, very public, very embarrassing attacks ‘with courage and sacrifice’. ‘We gathered around us’, wrote Bauer later, ‘the best, the dispersed, the believers, the young. We danced for liberty, for the republic, for social justice.’
This was precisely what Carlo had in mind: insurrection, through ‘squadre d’azione’, taking the grea
test care to avoid harming innocent bystanders. Indiscriminate killing, Carlo and Salvemini agreed, was a ‘terrorist act’, and therefore illegitimate; ‘assassination’ and ‘tyrannicide’ were legitimate responses to state violence. Lussu, the self-styled Jacobin, regarded by the others as a brilliant logician, was put in charge of devising spectacular actions. Leaflets and pamphlets, written by members of Giustizia e Libertà – now known as giellisti – began to arrive over the border.
In Rome, Bocchini and Nudi were chafing over their continuing failure to produce culprits for the Milan bombing; the documents on the case filled fifty-five fat volumes. It was a clever young colleague of Bocchini’s, Guido Leto, who now proposed putting the blame on the giellisti, about whom they kept hearing rumours. Word had reached Rome that the printing of their material was being done in Milan and not in Paris, and that the conspirators met in the Café Tantal in Via Silvio Pellico. Two suspects were immediately arrested. Although Polpol and OVRA were never vicious in the way of the Gestapo, they were not altogether averse to using torture to get people to confess. One night, the two suspects were taken to the mortuary, shown the bloody remains of the victims of the bombing, and had their feet burned and their testicles squashed before being held for many hours in agonising positions.
Milan was clearly crucial. But Bocchini realised that it was Paris where the true heart of the conspiracy lay. He recruited more spies and ordered them to France to gather information, contacts, addresses, means of communication. Then were posted to ports and put on merchant ships; others were placed on the railways to act as couriers. A Captain Rey, controller of the wagons-lits between Rome and Boulogne-sur-Mer, was noted as having a ‘zèle débordant’ for fascism; in the Paris secret-service notes, he was described with ‘very piercing eyes’, a small face and a little moustache en brosse. Another useful man was a sly and resourceful policeman called Guido Valiani, attached to the Italian embassy in Paris, who smoked little Tuscan cigars, spoke French with an execrable accent, but knew everyone. Yet another was Livio Bini, who passed himself off as a Florentine socialist in exile and was a very canny exploiter of weak or deluded refugees. Then there was a journalist called Aldo Borella, who wrote meticulous reports, excelled at combing hotel registers for hidden information, and was paired up with one of OVRA’s most formidable emissaries to Paris, Vincenzo Bellavia, known as ‘Acquarone’. Discreet and manipulative, Bellavia was said to have several French policemen in his pay. He was given the specific task of watching Carlo. There was also the former director of a cooperative in Ravenna, Antonio Bondi, who longed to recant and go home, but was persuaded first to worm his way into the Giustizia e Libertà offices. All these men were in a delicate position. They had to be plausible, able to explain away the fact that they had money to live on, and they had to produce and stick to believable stories about their pasts. If rumbled by the anti-fascist community, the spies ran the risk of summary justice or vengeance against their families still in Italy.
Soon, reports from these men were arriving in Rome, either by special letter-drops in hotels or private houses, or poste restante to the main post office in the Piazza San Silvestro. They would be collected, typed up in three copies for the various archives, and a summary sent every afternoon to Bocchini, who extracted the most important information and passed it on to Mussolini. In the Ministry of Information, 400 shorthand typists were kept busy transcribing intercepted letters and conversations picked up in phone taps or prison cells. One report spoke of Rosselli proposing a ‘series of attacks’, and of the absolute necessity of getting rid of the ‘capo’. Another named Lussu as the ‘supreme commander of all the armed forces of the anti-fascist revolution’. Several others mentioned that quantities of explosive material were being shipped around.
The fact that many of these reports were full of exaggeration, invention and mystification only played to Bocchini’s fears about Mussolini’s safety. There was one wild assertion that terror attacks were about to be launched from Corsica, another that squads of militiamen were being trained in Paris. One of the more fanciful had Marion falling in love with Bassanesi, being forbidden by a jealous Carlo to visit him in Brussels, and having a row with Signora Nitti because, ‘being a hysteric, she had apparently made suggestive proposals’ to her husband. Though often absurd, the result of these daily bulletins was a climate of growing determination in Rome to break this ‘odious and criminal anti-fascism’.
It would prove surprisingly easy to pull off a first victory. For the anti-fascists were turning out to be extraordinarily gullible and none more so than the easy-going and credulous Carlo, whose instinct was to trust everyone.
Bocchini made one further recruitment before setting his trap.
Carlo del Re was a twenty-nine-year old lawyer, a Freemason, a polyglot, an extrovert, always willing and very presentable. He came from Friuli and had a pale face, floppy black hair, and a scar along his right cheek from an accident in which he had also lost two fingers on his left hand. For a while, acting as a lawyer for receiverships, del Re had made a lot of money. But he was a gambler. The day came when he owed 124,000 lire in poker debts: he was ordered either to pay them or go to jail. But there was a third option, that of selling his friends in Milan to the fascists, and he took it. Through a distant friendship with Italo Balbo, the Minister of Aviation, he was introduced to Bocchini.
With friends among the former left-wing journalists in Milan, del Re was just the man Bocchini was looking for. They made a deal. Del Re would infiltrate the group of anti-fascists suspected to be working in Milan, and if possible trace the network back to Carlo in Paris. Then he was to pin the Milan bombing on to Giustizia e Libertà, and to rake as many people as he could into the conspiracy. In return, his debt would be paid off, he would be guaranteed total secrecy and, once the group was ‘liquidated’, a job. Bocchini forwarded the proposal to Mussolini, who simply wrote ‘Si’ on it.
Del Re set about his task with a degree of pleasure because among his many accomplishments he liked to think of himself as an actor. He went to Paris, met Carlo and Salvemini, and urged them to think up some really big action, preferably with explosives. Because he was able to travel in and out of Italy with no trouble, he was soon their preferred courier to liaise with Bauer, Rossi and Parri in Milan. Professing to have Masonic connections, he made friends among Paris’s Italian Masons, also high on the list of Bocchini’s suspects. Soon, he had become indispensable to Carlo.
Since the possession of explosives was useful in establishing guilt, del Re persuaded the chemist Ceva in Milan to experiment in making phosphorous bombs in one of their bathrooms. As luck would have it, exposure to air caused the phosphorous to explode, del Re’s jacket caught fire and Rossi put out the flames with his hands, burning himself in the process. Del Re urged them to make more bombs, but Ceva, a mild, retiring man, never keen on violence, refused. They were surprised when del Re got angry and argumentative, and even more surprised when he followed and watched when they insisted on taking the ruined explosives and throwing them into the river Brembo.
Del Re made a second attempt to plant bombs when he tried to persuade Carlo, in his Paris flat, to fill the seasonal panettoni with dynamite and send them to fascist officials. Carlo, appalled, refused. He would not dream, he said, of killing children on Christmas Day. Next, del Re engineered a meeting in a cemetery in Milan, attended by Ceva and Rossi, so that plainclothed policemen could photograph them. By now, he had amassed an impressive list of names and addresses of giellisti suspects.
Despite Ceva’s misgivings, plans were progressing to let off explosives in front of seven tax offices in different parts of Italy simultaneously. Because there had been so many botched attempts at capturing the group red-handed, Bocchini decided he could wait no longer. In any case, Mussolini was expressing considerable irritation at the delay and calling for ‘arrests on a vast scale’. On 27 October, 1930, the day before the eighth anniversary of the March on Rome, he struck.
Bauer, Ceva and P
arri were picked up in Milan; Rossi was arrested from his institute in Bergamo; Traquandi was caught in Florence; several others in Rome. Bauer’s sister Adele, finding him gone from home, suggested to Ada Rossi that they ask del Re what was going on; the spy’s manner was so ‘urbane and strange’ that she hastened away to warn others. Del Re reported to Bocchini that Ada had told him that she had been able to destroy a lot of evidence. She was, he said, a ‘nihilist’ with ‘terrorist tendencies’ and extremely dangerous.
Ernesto Rossi and his mother Elide
That day, twenty-four people were caught. Most of them were professors, lawyers and journalists, described as ‘whisperers, sowers of alarm and discontent’. They were transferred to Rome, to be held in solitary confinement in the prison of Regina Coeli. Mussolini was reported to be calling for the death penalty for the ringleaders, accused of being terrorists, bomb-makers, insurrectionists and assassins, in league with plotters abroad. They were put into death cells.
Del Re still had hopes of luring Carlo and Tarchiani into a trap. He phoned them from Lugano, asking them to come south urgently to give him orders. They told him to come to Paris instead. Rumours had reached them of a man with two missing fingers being a spy, and del Re’s name had been mentioned. Del Re caught a train north and turned up in Carlo’s flat, where, clearly uneasy, he proceeded to tell a confused and tangled story. Carlo ordered him to produce his wallet: it was found to contain a small fortune in cash. Characteristically, Carlo let him go back to his hotel, having made him promise to return next day. After all, as he said later, he was not a killer. Del Re vanished.
Ernesto Rossi, meanwhile, had very nearly managed to escape. On the train taking him south to Rome late at night, he had made friends with his four guards, who had obligingly handcuffed him in front rather than behind. The carriage was extremely hot and stuffy. The guards dozed off. Rossi, helped by the sweat on his wrists, wriggled his way out of the cuffs. Because he had often made the journey, he knew that a moment would come when the train was forced to slow down. He eased the window up, and, before they could stop him, squeezed out. He fell hard, next to the rails, and briefly fainted. As he came to, he heard shouts and began to run; the guards had pulled the communication cord, but it was not working and the train carried on. It was now one in the morning. He came to a house, pushed his way in, and found a husband and wife in bed, ‘naked, enormous, fat, terrified’. He explained who he was. The man leapt out of bed, shouted at him, and drove him from the house. He ran on towards the pinewoods near Viareggio, and lay on the sand until a storm drove him to take shelter in a beach hut. He moved on again, met a man with a horse and cart who refused to help him, and finally reached a naval barracks.
A Bold and Dangerous Family Page 33
