Of the three women, Marion found return to Italy the hardest. She was bewildered and appalled by the changes, saying that nothing in post-war Italy seemed to reflect the values that Carlo and Nello had fought for, nor the sacrifices they had made. Amelia and Maria set up house together in Via Giusti, and often went up to L’Apparita, where a kind neighbour had saved Nello’s library. Silvia and Paola got engaged to two brothers, Francesco and Marco Forti, the sons of Aldo Forti, who had accompanied Amelia on the terrible train journey to Paris in June 1937. Maria took the girls to Paris to visit the graves in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
Marion stayed on for a while in Florence, but she found the stairs in Via Giusti too hard, and felt excluded on the ground floor from the rest of the family above. Amelia’s devotion and closeness to Maria were sometimes difficult for Marion to bear. Soon, she drifted back to England, where Mirtillino was doing his military service after graduating from Swarthmore College in the US. He was always the child she loved the most – ‘il mio adorato Mirtillino’ – and with Melina, who was often moody and prone to depression, she continued to have a difficult time. Andrea had a solitary childhood.
On 13 October 1949, by now so breathless that she found it hard to walk, Marion died in a hospital in West Isleworth. She was fifty-two. ‘I loved her like, and perhaps more than a daughter,’ Amelia wrote to Mirtillino. ‘She represented for me the presence of your father, and all that life of excitement and passion of which I too was a part.’ Speaking at a memorial service, Salvemini, who was back in his old job at Florence university, said that Marion had never recovered from the loss of Carlo and that the rest of her short life had been marked by a lonely, remorseless decline. Not long before she died she had told him that there was no day on which she did not miss Carlo. The Rosselli heroes left sad family legacies of depression and troubled minds. Melina, in particular, suffered from her family history. She became a talented and successful poet, but would commit suicide by throwing herself out of her attic window near the Piazza Navona on 11 February 1996, the anniversary of the death of Sylvia Plath, whose work she had translated.
Every one of Mussolini’s boasts and slogans proved illusory. Fascism had brought not stability, prosperity and victory, but war, humiliation, penury and foreign occupation. The ‘Corporative State’ had been expensive, cumbersome and useless to the economy. Some 13,000 people, among them a generation of Italy’s cleverest and most promising men, had spent many years on the penal islands, where dozens had died and many more seen their health permanently destroyed by malnutrition, untreated diseases and lack of all proper sanitation. Bassanesi, the dreamer who had dropped leaflets from his plane over Turin and Milan, was in a lunatic asylum.
Bocchini was dead by 1940, after a Lucullan feast in a Roman restaurant (both Himmler and Heydrich had attended his funeral). The Futurist Marinetti had died fleeing the partisans at Salò. Both Farinacci, the brutal ras who had been responsible for so much violence, and Gentile, who had given fascism such legitimacy, were shot. Some 10,000–12,000 active fascists were pursued and killed by the partisans at the moment of liberation. In July 1944 a High Commission for Sanctions against Fascism was set up in Rome, in order to purge the administration of fascists, prosecute those guilty of crimes and to retrieve stolen property, but many were soon granted amnesty, for without them Italy would have had few civil servants, teachers or policemen. The commission found over 130,000 dossiers on fascist suspects in the archives. A list of 622 of the most egregious spies and informers was published, and they were generally ridiculed, but few suffered more than passing shame. There had of course been many more – the historian Mauro Canale puts the number at 815 Polpol men, but if you include all those who worked for them, and all OVRA’s operatives, the figure was probably close to 10,000. One way or another, most wriggled out of censure.
It became known that forty-two separate individuals, at one time or another, spied on Carlo.
Ferruccio Parri, the man whom Carlo had loved as a brother, became the first post-war Italian prime minister, presiding over a radical democratic party, the Partito d’Azione, with the same political creed of justice, liberty, federalism and republicanism that had inspired Carlo’s Socialismo Liberale. Both Lussu and Rossi served in it; Tarchiani was made Italian ambassador to the US. But Italy was in a turbulent state and neither Parri’s uncompromising nature, nor the Partito d’Azione’s lofty ideals were a match for the canny new Christian Democrats under Alcide de Gasperi. They were out of power within a year. Piero Calamandrei, who became rector of Florence university and took on something of Carlo’s mantle in post-war Florence, later wrote that fascism had dealt such a devastating blow to Italy because it struck down ‘the best men, who had to be assassinated one by one, only to leave behind them desolation and a desert in our political life’. Mussolini had been shrewd in knowing whom to murder. Matteotti, Amendola, Gobetti, Gramsci, Carlo and Nello would all have made future leaders.
But, Calamandrei went on, the battle for the liberation of Italy had shown that there were still young men and women faithful to the spirit of the Rosselli brothers, conscious of duty and responsibility, ready to defend the ideals of Mazzini and the Risorgimento that they had held so dear. It was no accident that many had taken the name Rosselli for their partisan groups, for they, too, believed in liberty and justice. Carlo and Nello, his two smiling young friends, would live on, alive and very present, symbols of what it meant to non mollare. For himself, he wanted to remember them ‘when they were still men of this world’, standing side by side, as in a portrait, Carlo in front, Nello at his shoulder, a little in the background, but illuminating the ‘poetic secret of the whole picture’.
As for Amelia, she lived on, as upright and uncomplaining as she had always been, apparently serene, slightly remote, a little daunting in her elegant mauve and pale grey high-necked blouses, loving and watching over the children, worrying about Melina, sharing her life with Maria, who grew stronger and more decisive as the years passed. Amelia died the day after Christmas 1954, at the age of eighty-four, leaving life, as a friend said, on the tips of her toes, without fuss, giving no trouble, slipping very quietly away. ‘Addio for today,’ she had written a few days before to Mirtillino. ‘There is so much that I would like to write to you, but I am rather weary . . . I kiss you tenderly. Nonna.’
Postscript
In April 1951 Carlo and Nello’s bodies were exhumed from Père Lachaise in Paris and brought home to Florence by train in a special carriage. Here they lay in state in the vast panelled and frescoed Salone dei Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio under the banners of the city and the flags of the Rosselli partisan brigades. Trumpeters played. Maria laid a wreath of red flowers. Salvemini, now in his late seventies, had been asked to give the address, and there was some anxiety that he might go too far in criticising the recent not-guilty verdicts handed down to their killers. In the event, in the presence of Luigi Einaudi, President of the Republic and Carlo’s early mentor and supporter, and many of the men who had fought alongside them for a better Italy, Salvemini said only that it would be ‘infantile’ not to think that the order for ‘this monstrous crime’ had not come from Mussolini. Much of the rest of his ovation was devoted to Carlo’s dreams for a united Europe.
Maria and her four children, Silvia, Paola, Aldo and Alberto, were there, along with Carlo’s Mirtillino, Melina and Andrea, as were Ernesto Rossi, Nello Traquandi, Emilio Lussu, Ferruccio Parri and even Gioacchino Volpe, the historian who had walked a thin line with the fascists but done so much to help Nello. At 11.30 a.m., as the coffins were carried out of the Palazzo Vecchio by former partisans and the Florentine city police, to make their way first to the university for another ceremony, then up to the cemetery of Trespiano in the hills overlooking the city, an orchestra played Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The music flowed out into the Piazza della Signoria, where thousands of Florentines had gathered.
Mirtillino and Ferruccio Parri during the ceremony at the cemetery above Floren
ce
In Trespiano, Carlo and Nello were put to lie under a grey marble tombstone, in a secluded corner of the cemetery surrounded by cypresses, where Salvemini, Rossi and Traquandi would later join them. Thinking back to the long struggle, to the love that had bound them so close for so many years, Salvemini said: ‘These young men were my youth . . . they were my masters in life.’
‘Carlo and Nello Rosselli’, read the words engraved on the stone, ‘Giustizia e Libertà. For this they died. For this they live.’
Acknowledgements
This is a book which could not have been written without the extremely kind support, encouragement and help of the Rosselli family, who put at my disposal letters, diaries, papers and photographs and who talked to me about the lives of their grandmother and fathers. I thank Silvia, Paola, Aldo, Andrea and David very much indeed, as I do their cousin, Elissa Benaim.
Several historians were also extremely helpful. I should like to thank in particular Mimmo Franzinelli, Mauro Canali, Luca Michelini, Simone Visciola, Zeffiro Ciuffoletti and Stanislao Pugliese. In Lipari, Nino Paino and Giuseppe la Greca provided me with much local background and history; in Ustica, Vito Ailara found me very useful material in the Centro Studi. I thank them both very much. My thanks are also due to Marina Calloni, Isabelle Richet, Marcello Sorgi, Anna Chimenti, Diego Gambetta, Monica Miniati, Lionella Viterbo and Sonia D’Ambra.
Most of the research for this book was done in libraries and archives. I would like to thank Anna Mereu and Daniela Italia of the Fondazione Rosselli in Turin; Valdo Spini and the Fondazione Circolo Fratelli Rosselli in Florence; Simone Neri Serneri and Marta Bonsanti of the Istituto della Resistenza in Toscana; Gian Luca Corradi and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze; Raffaella Barbacini and the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome; Caterina del Vivo and the staff of the Gabinetto, G. P. Vieusseux; the Biblioteca Marucelliana; the Archives Nationales in Paris; the London School of Economics; the University of Reading Library; the National Archives in London; and the British Library.
Finally my thanks go to my travelling companions, Patricia Williams and Kathy van Praag, and to Paul Corner and Anne Chisholm, who read the book in manuscript. As always, I am most grateful to my wonderful editors, Penny Hoare, Poppy Hampson, Jennifer Barth and Pamela Murray, to my copy-editor Eugenie Todd and my proof reader Sarah Barlow, and to my equally wonderful agent, Clare Alexander.
All the Italian translations are mine.
Sources and Select Bibliography
The Rossellis were a family of letter-writers. For the lives of Amelia, Carlo, Nello, Marion and Maria and their friends, the best sources are to be found in the many thousands of letters they wrote to each other all through their lives; these are currently held in the Fondazione Rosselli in Turin. Two selections of these letters have been edited by Professor Ciuffoletti (Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, Epistolario familiare and Nello Rosselli). A collection of letters written by Carlo Rosselli during his many periods abroad is to be found in Carlo Rosselli, Scritti dall’esilio. Amelia’s memoirs, published in 2001 (Memorie), are also essential reading, as are two volumes put out by the Direzione Generale per Gli Archivi: Lessico familiare and Un’altra Italia nell’Italia del fascismo. In the Archivio Nazionale dello Stato the following files are especially valuable: CPC.b.1205.fasc.Cave Marion; CPC.b.4421. fasc.Rosselli Carlo; CPC.b.4422.fasc.Rosselli Sabatino; PP.Personali.b.79/A. fasc.Rosselli Carlo; PP.Personali.b.78/A.fasc.Rosselli Carlo; PP.Personali.b.80/A.Rosselli Sabatino; Confinati,b.883.fasc.Rosselli Carlo.
There are a number of biographies of Carlo and Nello, most of them in Italian: the best are by Stanislao Pugliese (Carlo Rosselli), Giovanni Belardelli (Nello Rosselli), Giuseppe Fiori (Casa Rosselli) and Aldo Garosci (La vita di Carlo Rosselli).
There are many excellent biographers and historians of Mussolini and Fascist Italy. For this book, I drew extensively on the work of R. J. B Bosworth, Paul Corner, Franco Antonicelli, Charles F. Delzell, Denis Mack Smith, and Gaetano Salvemini (The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy; Under the Axe of Fascism).
Two Italian historians have explored in depth Mussolini’s secret services: Mauro Canali (Le spie del regime), and Mimmo Franzinelli (Delatori; I tentacoli dell’OVRA, and Squadristi). Their work is invaluable to anyone interested in this field.
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