A Bold and Dangerous Family

by Caroline Moorehead

  Two years later, after the death of Matteotti’s mother Isabella, Carlo tried again. By now it was known that Velia was living in miserable conditions, forbidden to wear black as no mourning for Matteotti was tolerated, followed whenever she left the house, and kept almost totally isolated, since very few visitors were brave enough to call. The eldest boy was allowed to attend school, but only in the company of a policeman; the two younger children were forced to stay at home. But Velia had a doctor friend, Giuseppe Germani, who was determined to spirit the family out of Italy, and while passing through Paris he met Carlo and agreed to take back to Rome some invisible ink so that they could be in touch and make a plan. A spy overheard the conversation. On his return to Italy, Germani was arrested and sent to the penal islands.

  Carlo, with Salvemini’s help, turned to Sylvia Pankhurst, who mobilised her international circle of feminists, among them Dora Russell and Ethel Mannin. They formed a committee, launched an appeal and began gathering signatures for a petition asking the British government to protest. One of the people approached was Bernard Shaw, noticeably unreliable on the subject of fascism. Shaw refused, saying that Pankhurst was an ‘incorrigibly pugnacious woman’ and that she suffered from the vice of lecturing other nations on their moral inferiority. ‘No,’ he wrote, ‘you can’t bully me, and you can’t bully Mussolini. If you want to help Mrs Matteotti, and not merely sandbag him with her, you must be scrupulously polite.’ Their correspondence quickly degenerated into a squabble over the fascist corporate state.

  The British government, appalled by these proceedings, refused to accept a delegation to Downing Street, a member of the Foreign Office noting: ‘Better leave, well or ill, alone.’ Briefly, Pankhurst considered leading a delegation herself to Rome, but that too had to be abandoned. The Matteotti family remained under virtual house-arrest. When news reached Carlo and Salvemini that Velia had agreed to be taken under the wing of the Catholic Church, Salvemini observed sourly: ‘We must be indulgent towards that unhappy and lonely woman. But it is so disgusting.’

  Very little of the fanfare, ritual, regulations and strictures of fascist daily life touched the Rosselli family in Florence; they had enveloped themselves in a cocoon apart. Between April and October they lived at their villa, L’Apparita, a place remembered later by the children with great happiness, with its barn for grain, its chickens and rabbits, its storerooms full of jam and apples, and its farm, tended by a peasant family who also made oil and wine. They had a goat. When the weather was bad they played in the loggia on the top floor; when it was good they roamed about the gardens or on the terrace looking out over Florence. Visitors who came to L’Apparita were collected from the tram terminus at Bagno a Ripoli by donkey and cart. Silvia had been given the donkey, a small Sardinian animal with its distinctive dark stripe across its back, for her sixth birthday. Nello, who loved surprises, had presented it to her very early one morning, still in his dressing gown. There were excursions to Zia Gì and Zio Giù nearby at Il Frassine, and to visit Maria’s family, not far away at Borgo San Lorenzo, where the children watched the maids do the laundry with ashes, played under an enormous old chestnut tree and ate the thick yellow honey for which the farm was famous. On hot days, they followed the dirt track down to the river, dragging their toes through the dust, to the acacia trees from which the bees fed. Their grandmother Luisa was a warm, homely woman, small and cosy, physically as unlike the tall, elegant Amelia as it was possible to be. She suffered from terrible migraines, and would lie on her bed with a cloth soaked in vinegar over her eyes. Silvia and Paola watched her at her devotions, reading softly to herself from a book of Hebrew prayers.

  Zio ‘Giù’ Zabban at Il Frassine near Florence

  Marion, Zia Gì and Mirtillino

  Winters were spent in Via Giusti, where an inside staircase had been built so that Amelia, in her rooms on the ground floor, should not feel isolated from Nello and his family above. Here, too, the family lived as apart from fascist Florence as they could, and here, too, it felt like countryside, with its large garden behind the house, and hills in all directions beyond. Whether at L’Apparita or Via Giusti, the girls were taught at home. A plan to let them do gymnastics at the Istituto Pastorini was abandoned when Silvia won a gala and was told to stand to attention on a dais and raise her arm in the fascist salute. In the afternoons, she and Paola would clamber up onto the step by the high windows giving on to the street and watch the children coming out of the school opposite, and envy the little girls in their Giovani Italiane uniforms. They saw no newspapers, listened to no radio, and no adult who visited the house ever mentioned upsetting facts in their presence. The son of a family friend recounted to them one day the grisly details of a body found drowned in the Arno. It was some time before he was invited to play again.

  What Nello’s daughters would always remember was the warmth of their family life, the closeness of the three adults, and Amelia’s serene and loving presence. This intensity of emotion is borne out by the many letters that continued to flow between them all, affectionate, solicitous. In those written to and from Carlo and his family in Paris, or between Amelia, Maria and Nello when one or other was away – at the seaside, up in the mountains, visiting relations – they wrote about what they ate and how they slept, about schools and nannies and cooks, about visits to concerts and the opera, and about the children, their moods and state of health; and when they ran out of space on the page, they flowed over into the margins and up and down the sides. But what they did not write about was politics. The Rosselli dossiers in the police archives for these years are very thin. There was, or so it seemed, nothing to report.

  Which was not, of course, entirely accurate. Nello, to whom domestic life had brought great personal happiness, continued to fret about doing so little publicly for the anti-fascist cause. His hopes to start a European historical magazine, with an implied stand against dictatorships, had been slowly dashed as possible contributors and collaborators fell away, fearful of too close an association with a known opponent of the fascists. Nello complained bitterly about defeat at the hands of ‘these parrots, these eternal buffoons of the life of the mind’. Writing to Benedetto Croce, he remarked sadly that he and his close friends felt old and extremely out of fashion, detached from the present, without even the pride of the past. He had become a stranger in his own country, afraid, exhausted, bereft of ideas, ‘as if we were just so many larvae from which no chrysalis had ever freed itself’. He told his friend Leone Ginzburg that he found the collapse of his magazine all the more painful because it had represented a real effort to overcome his own sense of unsociability, inertia and isolation.

  Nello’s sense of public futility was made stronger when he heard that his childhood friend, the talented and remarkable Leo Ferrero, only son of Guglielmo and Gina, had been killed in a car crash in Santa Fe. Leo had managed to reach Paris and then become a scholar at Yale, where he continued to pour out a stream of plays, poetry and fiction, saying apologetically that he was one of the ‘privileged’, who had never physically suffered at Mussolini’s hands. The Ferreros had become the hub for scattered anti-fascists in exile. On hearing of Leo’s death, Amelia wrote a bleak letter to Gina; both these women now knew what it was to lose a son. When Leo’s uncle asked Nello to write an obituary, Nello hesitated, saying that he felt too sad. But then he sat down to write, and described Leo as a boy, forced to trot along by the side of his friends because he was so small, and the way that in class he sat swinging his legs because his feet did not reach the floor, and the fact that they all despaired of him ever being anything but a dilettante, because his talents were so many, and his interests so scattered between art, music, literature and endless talk. He finished the piece while on holiday in Forte dei Marmi, where he was staying with friends of Leo’s, and wrote, ‘His shadow is with us.’

  And there were more deaths. At the end of October 1933, after a short illness, and in the middle of a great storm of unusual ferocity which roared round the ho
use, Zio Giù died. He had been Amelia’s prop for nearly thirty years. Zia Gì was desperate, but, as Amelia wrote to Carlo, evidently thinking of Aldo, ‘one does not die of grief’. Zio Giù, whose terror had always been to be buried alive, had asked that his body be kept at home for thirty-six hours and a further fifty in the mortuary. For all those hours, Nello and other members of the family watched over him.

  Not long after, Amelia’s much-loved sister Anna died, and Carlo, fearing his mother’s descent into depression, urged her to distract herself, to get out more. Cut off from them all, unable to share their sadness, he wrote to Amelia that he felt so uprooted that he doubted, even once the horror of fascism was over, that he would ever be able to find his roots again. Keeping going, he said, had become a blind and dogged determination.

  In the autumn of 1934, Maria gave birth to a longed-for boy: they called him Aldo, after Carlo and Nello’s brother. It was, as Nello remarked, a much-needed bit of happiness.

  With Zio Giù and Anna gone, with Gobetti and Amendola dead of their injuries, Matteotti murdered, Bauer and Rossi in prison, Parri and countless others on the penal islands, and almost every other friend in exile, the Rossellis’ world had become very small. Even the news that Giulio Einaudi, son of Carlo’s mentor Luigi, and one of the few people still at liberty, was starting a new publishing house in Turin and wanted him to write a biography of Mazzini did not dispel Nello’s growing sense of isolation. It was made more acute by an unexpected but delightful event. He and Maria – as they wrote to a friend in code – were just back from a week on the Riviera, where they had spent ‘very very happy hours’ with ‘relatives’. What he was referring to was meeting Carlo, Marion and Mirtillino at Juan-les-Pins. Nello and Maria had taken Silvia with them. It was the first time the two small cousins had met and they eyed each other with curiosity. A photograph shows the two children sitting on the shoulders of their tall, stout fathers. Going back into Italy seemed to Nello like returning, yet again, to prison.

  It was fortunate that Nello’s life revolved around Florence. For though he remained closely in touch with his friends in the north, particularly with Leone Ginzburg, and knew precisely what they were doing, his part in their activities was small. With the Milan branch of Giustizia e Libertà destroyed, the baton had passed to Turin, where Ginzburg and two other close friends, Mario Levi and Sion Segre Amar, had taken over the job of receiving anti-fascist material from Paris and sending it around the country. They also contributed to Einaudi’s new magazine, La Cultura, in what Benedetto Croce called an ‘open conspiracy of culture’, using historical articles as barely veiled references to fascist immorality. Another friend, Barbara Allason, gave parties that provided a cover for anti-fascist meetings.

  Bocchini had recently scored notable successes in his war on the anti-fascists with the arrest of two apparently lone would-be assassins of Mussolini. One was an industrialist from Rivarola called Domenico Buvone, who had taken up with an Austrian ballerina of expensive tastes in Paris and who had agreed, at a price, to plan an attempt on the Duce’s life. A bomb he was carrying in a suitcase in Rome suddenly exploded, killing his mother and badly injuring his sister, and he was eventually caught after shooting dead a carabiniere. He was sentenced to death, not for the murder of the policeman, which was accepted as accidental, but for his planned assassination of Mussolini, and not before he had provided Bocchini with many interesting details of the world of the anti-fascists in Paris. Buvone was executed on the same day as another conspirator, Angelo Sbardelotto, a twenty-eight-year-old anarchist from Belluno, who had volunteered to kill Mussolini. Sbardelotto, a disorganised and vague man singularly unsuited to assassination, had been picked up wandering aimlessly round the Piazza Venezia, and had later confessed. Both these plots, particularly when ties binding the two men to Paris became known, fed Bocchini’s terrors for Mussolini’s safety.

  But he had just acquired a most useful spy. Dino Segre was a cousin of Sion Segre in Turin, and because of this the Jewish-Torinese anti-fascists took him to their heart. He was a successful journalist, the author of bestselling soft pornographic novels – cynical, amoral satires with titles such as The Chastity Belt and The Scent of the Female – and though he was not short of money, he loved intrigue and adventure. Bocchini offered him a generous salary, gave him the code name ‘Pitigrilli’ and the number 373, and sent him to Paris to spy on Carlo and his friends. Pitigrilli had a particular loathing for intellectuals, suspecting that they despised him, and he revelled in the pain he was able to cause. As Lussu would later say, ‘Pitigrilli did not become a spy, he was born one.’

  In Paris, he had no trouble worming his way into Carlo’s trust. He was a tall, elegant, well-dressed man in his late thirties, and with his easy, agreeable manner, he invited confidences. In his reports back to Bocchini, he spun webs of the relationships between the Rosselli brothers, Leone Ginzburg, Carlo Levi and many others, mixing the real with the invented, rumours with personal observations, using his novelistic skills to paint lively reports of them all, and describing them as perched in various ‘caravanserai’ around the capital. Carlo, he reported, took his breakfast in bed, served on a silver tray, while reading L’Humanité. ‘Rosselli’, he told Bocchini proudly, ‘admires me greatly. I have definitely become close to his heart.’ Soon, he was able to inform Rome that Sion Segre and Mario Levi would be driving back from France into Italy, their car boot full of anti-fascist literature. A police trap was set at Ponte Tresa on the western shore of Lake Lugano. In the confusion, Segre and Levi managed to escape by jumping into the water; Segre was caught and fished out, but Levi swam to the Swiss shore and made his way to Paris.

  Pitigrilli was not the only informer to whom the trusting Carlo had become close. There was also an engineer called René Odin, ‘Togo’, number 570. He too moved between Turin and Paris, inviting confidences. He reported to Rome that Carlo Levi and Ginzburg seemed to feel an ‘almost religious admiration’ for Carlo. In his role as agent provocateur, Togo did his best to persuade Carlo to organise an attack on the Chamber of Deputies in Rome, and though that came to nothing, he continued to weave his fantasies, and Carlo continued to trust him.

  Then came the day when, in Turin, Bocchini’s men made sixty arrests, among them Nello’s friends Leone Ginzburg and Barbara Allason. Moravia, fearing that he might be picked up too, hastened to burn all his letters from the Rossellis. Virtually every one of those arrested was either an intellectual or a university professor. The women among them were held in solitary confinement, their belts, suspender belts, hair pins, cigarettes and books taken from them, and repeatedly interrogated until they were stunned and confused. Then, unexpectedly, they were released. Leone Ginzburg and Sion Segre were sentenced to long prison terms; others went off to the confino. In Segre’s car the police had found leaflets about a small Jewish study group in Turin, and now declared that they had stumbled on a Jewish conspiracy, and that from ‘Treves . . . to [Carlo] Rosselli, the organisers of subversive anti-fascism are members of the “chosen people”’.

  Nello’s good fortune was that his name was never mentioned, but having once again escaped the fate of his friends, he felt more than ever a ‘grey and mortifying isolation’. In fact, Bocchini’s men were well aware that when Nello travelled for his studies, he used the opportunity to make contact with other anti-fascists, but had decided that now was not the moment to arrest him. A spy reported, with the usual mixture of fantasy and exaggeration, that the Rossellis were rich Jews, that Amelia had a lover whom her sons condoned, and that the family lived in great luxury in an ‘unhealthy moral environment’. In the evenings, he said, the men dined in black tie and the women in décolleté, waited on by manservants. Nello was described as owning many properties, among them a ‘sumptuous country villa’.

  The sly Pitigrilli somehow managed to escape all suspicion. He had a two-hour meeting with Carlo, who was mourning the capture of his friends, and told him that from now on no women must be used in the anti-fascist fight
. Saying that he still did not understand what had happened, Carlo went on to tell Pitigrilli of future plans, talking of the need to get their material into factories, and saying sadly: ‘We have become like ants which immediately begin to rebuild their granaries when they have been destroyed by someone’s footstep.’ The credulous Carlo described where and how he communicated with Italy, and soon entrusted Pitigrilli with more missions back to Turin, where he was able to assemble a list of more names.

  On 8 August 1934, Pitigrilli sent Bocchini the recipe for the invisible ink Carlo used, with the formula for making it visible. He added that Carlo had told him that he had spent half a million lire on Turati’s and his own escape and that much of his inheritance had gone to the anti-fascist cause. In December, Pitigrilli complained that they all seemed to prefer domestic lives, and seldom went to cafés, which made it harder to spy on them. As often as he could, he found pretexts for visiting Carlo at home. Carlo remained astonishingly trusting. As Pitigrilli smugly observed, though ‘he sees spies everywhere’ he had still not rumbled him.

  Pitigrilli’s sleuthing paid off. By the spring of 1935, Bocchini had enough information to order the arrest of the remaining Turin network. Over the next year, dozens of people were sent for trial, among them Carlo Levi, who used his months in confino in a village in the south to write his famous book, Christ Stopped at Eboli. The harsh sentences were such as to send warnings to other anti-fascists, both in Italy and abroad. But Bocchino was not altogether reassured. He had been unable to touch Carlo, Lussu, Tarchiani, Cianca and the others in France. ‘Among all the movements conspiring against the regime,’ he wrote to the questore in Turin, ‘that of Giustizia e Libertà is without doubt the most dangerous,’ not only because they were convinced that fascism would end only when Mussolini was ‘suppressed’, but because they intended to do all they could to stir up the quiescent Italian people. Another spy had told him that one of the Turin group had said: ‘What counts for us is action, coups: words are pointless.’ As for Pitigrilli, he persuaded Bocchini to arrest him too, to deflect suspicion; but by the time he emerged from prison a short time later, even Carlo had finally begun to have serious doubts about him. Pitigrilli slipped into the shadows.