Death In Florence

by Marco Vichi

  The mortal remains of Livio Panerai have been transferred to the chapel of the hospital of …

  Acknowledgements

  Leonardo Gori: without the material on the flood that he was kind enough to let me borrow, and without his generous and decisive help on a few crucial points in the plot, this novel would have had more than a little trouble emerging from its cocoon, and might never have been written. I even used the encounter between Arcieri and Bordelli from his novel L’angelo del fango (Rizzoli, 2005), in a sort of reverse-angle shot that respected the dialogue without changing so much as a comma.

  Enneli Haukilahti: by now she has become one of my most precious consultants.

  Laura Bosio: a highly gifted line editor at Guanda publishers, possessed of infinite patience.

  Adolfo Mattirolo: a comrade of my father’s in the San Marco batallion, he has told me many stories about the war.

  Alessandro Coppola: a police officer in the DIA (Direzione Investigativa Antimafia), his technical observations on the police procedures of the 1960s have been invaluable to me.

  Alberto Severi: for having put me in touch with Angela Motta.

  Angela Motta: the kind director of the Teche Rai of Florence, she provided me with material on the flood surpassing all expectations.

  Bruno Casini: for his critical reading.

  Carlo Zucconi: for having directed me to useful witnesses to the events of Cintoia and for his critical reading.

  Curzio Malaparte: for Mamma marcia (Vallecchi, 1959).

  Daniele Cambiaso: for his historical review and other useful pointers.

  Dante Falleri: for the story of Giuggiolo, heart-rending and true.

  Divier Nelli: for his reading and observations.

  Domenico Antonioli: for translating into Massese dialect the dialogues between Bordelli and the former partisan fighter Nobody – that is, Riccà, who was his father.

  Don Gamucci: for accounts of the flood.

  Emiliano Gucci: for his uncompromising critical reading.

  Enzo Fileno Carabba: for his help on mushrooms.

  Francesco Leonardi: a Florentine policeman in service in 1966, he told me many stories about the flood.

  Grazia Collini: for putting me in touch with Alessandro and Raffaele Coppola.

  Laura del Lama: for her critical reading.

  Luca Scarlini: for information and a variety of pointers.

  Mariangela Zucconi: for her critical reading.

  Max Aub: for the story of the mouse (in his version it was a crow).

  Paolo Ciampi: for the extremely useful book he got for me.

  Piernicola Silvis: for putting me in touch with Dante Falleri.

  Raffaele Coppola: for his stories about the flood.

  Stefano Miniati: for his critical reading and more.

  Valerio Valoriani: for his critical reading.

  Principal Sources:

  La Nazione – Various editions from November 1966.

  Teche Rai – Television and radio documentation.

  DOC, the review – Year 5, number 20 (Arno ’66 – Fango e ideali).

  L’alluvione di Piero Bargellini, Bernardina Bargellini Nardi, Polistampa (2006).

  L’inondazione di Firenze del 4 novembre 1966, Ilario Principe – Paolo Sica, Istituto Geografico Militare, Florence (1967).

  NOTES

  by Stephen Sartarelli

  1.– Ça va sans dire: It goes without saying.

  2.– Calimero is a cartoon character created by Italian television advertisers, a little black chick who first appeared during the nightly Carosello adverts programme. Once a normal chick, he falls into a mud puddle and turns black, after which his mother no longer recognises him. His black colour leads him into a number of misadventures before he is washed in the detergent Ava, the sponsor of the spot, which turns him white again and puts an end to his troubles.

  3.– The road linking Florence and Siena and passing through the Chianti wine region.

  4.– Potente was the nom de guerre of Aligi Barducci (1913–1944) a Florentine who joined the partisan resistance after the Armistice of 8 September 1943 and became a leader and hero of the struggle against the Nazi occupation around Florence and in Tuscany generally. He was killed by an enemy grenade just as the Germans were being routed from the city.

  5.– Se vai a funghi, a parlar non ti dilunghi (Tuscan saying).

  6.– A cartoon kitten. Briciola means ‘crumb’.

  7.– A famously sonorous line, redolent of troubadour verse, from the famous Paolo and Francesca episode of the Inferno (Dante, Inf., Canto V, l. 103). Tantalisingly ambiguous in meaning, it is usually rendered in English, in accordance with the traditional Italian interpretation, as roughly ‘Love, which absolves no beloved from loving’.

  8.– An Italian breed of cattle.

  9.– That is, a supporter or functionary of the Republic of Salò, the puppet government set up by the occupying Nazis in 1943 with the recently deposed Mussolini as a figurehead, after the Germans sprang the disgraced dictator from an Italian prison in a spectacular raid. The government had its seat in the town of Salò in the Alpine lakes region of northern Italy.

  10.– Piazza Venezia is the square in Rome in which Mussolini used to address crowds from his famous balcony on the façade of Palazzo Venezia. Piazzale Loreto is the square in Milan in which the body of Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were hung on public display on 29 April 1945, after they’d been captured and shot by partisans in the countryside near Lake Como. Their corpses were put on public view in the same place where, one year before, Fascists had displayed the bodies of fifteen Milanese partisans whom they had executed for participating in the resistance.

  11.– September 8 1943 was the date of the official announcement of the so-called armistice – in actuality an unconditional surrender – whereby the nation of Italy would cease all hostilities against Allied forces. The Germans, however, already controlled the northern half of the peninsula and sprang Mussolini, who had been deposed and arrested some six weeks before, from his mountain prison just four days later, on 12 September, guaranteeing more than another year of Fascism and bloodshed for Italy.

  12.– See note, no. 4

  13.– The famous Fascist ‘battle cry’, invented during the First World War by the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, who claimed it was once the battle cry of the ancient Greeks. The latter part of the cry, alalà, derived from the Greek verb (alalázo), is found in Pindar and Euripides and appears in the work of nineteenth-century Italian poets Giovanni Pascoli and Giosuè Carducci as well. Mussolini later adopted the eja eja alalà! as the vocal equivalent of the Fascist salute, itself derived from the Roman era.

  14.– ‘Bighead’ (It. ‘il Testone’) was one of the nicknames by which Italians referred (at first affectionately, then disdainfully) to Benito Mussolini, who appeared to have an oversized head on his rather diminutive though stocky frame.

  15.– The 10th Assault Vehicle Flotilla (known in Italian as La Decima Flottiglia MAS, for Mezzi d’’Assalto, or simply as La Decima or Xª MAS) was an Italian commando frogman unit of the Italian Navy created during the Fascist regime, one of whose symbols was a death’s head with a rose between its teeth.

  16.– Literally, ‘I don’t give a damn.’ Another ‘rallying cry’ first used by d’Annunzio (see note, no. 13) in the First World War in one of the many pamphlets he wrote for aerial distribution, by Italian airborne squadrons, over certain cities under Austrian rule, usually those with a majority Italian-speaking population. It became a common slogan of Fascist Party stalwarts. The intended meaning, in a wartime setting, of this otherwise common expression is revealed in the poet’s account of how it first occurred to him. As the story goes, during a discussion between a certain Captain Zaninelli and a certain Major Freguglia on 15th June 1918, at Giavera del Montello, Freguglio ordered his subordinate to take his company and attack an Austrian stronghold at Casa Bianca, adding that it was a suicide mission, but that it had to be undertaken no matter the cost
. The captain supposedly looked at the major and replied, ‘Signor comandante, io me ne frego, si fa ciò che si ha da fare per il rè e per la patria’ (‘Commander, sir, I don’t give a damn, we do what we must for the king and the nation’). And he dressed in his finest parade uniform and went to his death.

  17.– Another Fascist motto, which means ‘Quitters are murderers!’, it was, paradoxically, first coined by Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca during the Neapolitan revolutionary uprising of 1799 known as the Parthenopean Republic and later revived by Milanese revolutionaries during the 1848 riots that echoed many of the other uprisings occurring across Europe that year.

  18.– Some of the lyrics to the famous song ‘Mamma’, originally written in 1940 by Bixio Cherubini (1899–1987), though popularised in the US by Connie Francis and later covered by such famous tenors as Luciano Pavarotti and Andrea Bocelli. The lyrics here quoted translate as: ‘… Mamma I’m so happy / because I’m coming home to you … My song tells you it’s my greatest dream … Mamma I’m so happy, why live far away?’

  19.– Orgosolo is in Sardinia, and Mesina is Graziano Mesina (born 1942), a former Sardinian bandit and proponent of Sardinian independence famous, among other things, for his many prison escapes.

  20.– ‘Beautiful Sicilian’ in Sicilian dialect.

  21.– A Fascist song that imagines, in Marinettian-Futurist fashion, modern warfare as music. Translation: ‘… and the part of the violins / [will be played by ] magnetic mines and submarines, / and instead of horns, / bombs, bombs, bombs, bombs … / The tenor sax / will be the cruiser, / and instead of drums [we’ll have] / missiles, missiles, missiles galore … / missiles, missiles, missiles galore! / A great serenade, a great serenade / for perfidious Albion!’

  22.– Dante, Inf., Canto V, 121–3 (‘Nessun maggior dolore, / che ricordarsi del tempo felice, / ne la miseria … / e ciò sa’l tuo dottore’). The words of Francesca da Rimini to Dante during the Paolo and Francesca episode of the Inferno. The ‘teacher’ (dottore) here mentioned is Virgil, Dante’s guide.

  23.– That is, the infamous March on Rome on 8 October 1922, when about thirty thousand Fascist militants marched on the capital city, demanding that their party be handed the reins of power if the country wished to avoid a violent coup. While a rather messy, inglorious affair amid the rain and mud, the march succeeded, and power was handed over to Mussolini.

  24.– The term trinariciuto (‘three-nostrilled’) was coined by ultra-conservative author and satirist Giovannino Guareschi (1908–1969) to characterise the militants of the Italian Communist Party. (The third nostril served two functions: to drain brain matter, and to allow the party’s directives direct entry to the brain.) The application of the adjective to Jews here is not Guareschi’s, but Panerai’s. Though solidly reactionary, Guareschi, best known for creating the character of Don Camillo, was not a Fascist or an anti-Semite. Indeed, the fictional Don Camillo, based in part on a real priest, was a partisan in the Second World War and interned at Dachau and Mauthausen.

  25.– Totò has the same name (a diminutive of the names Salvatore and Antonio) as the much-loved Totò (born Antonio de Curtis, 1898–1967), perhaps the greatest Italian comic actor of the twentieth century.

  26.– A television variety show broadcast from 1961 to 1966 on the national television station of the RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana). The popular singer Mina was the show’s mistress of ceremonies in 1965/66.

  27.– Cigarettes are controlled by a state monopoly in Italy, giving rise to a thriving black market of smuggled and even counterfeit brand-name cigarettes. Neapolitan-made fake Marlboros, for example, were long legendary for their seeming authenticity, being nearly impossible to distinguish from real American Marlboros smuggled in, as both lacked the monital stamp found on all state-issued cigarettes.

  28.– Amedeo Nazzari (1907–1979) was an Italian actor of the screen and the stage, one of whose most famous roles was in La cena delle beffe (1941, directed by Alessandro Blasetti), a Renaissance-era costume drama derived from the stage play of the same name by Sem Benelli, in which Nazzari’s character’s famous line ‘Whoever won’t drink with me, a plague on him!’ (‘Chi non beve con me, peste lo colga!’) became a popular saying. Under the title of The Jests, Benelli’s play was a big success in New York in 1919, featuring Lionel and John Barrymore in the lead roles.

  29.– A Sicilian greeting of respect, meaning literally ‘I kiss your hands’.

  30.– All Souls’ Day in Italy is called Il giorno dei morti, the Day of the Dead.

  31.– As Italian morale sank during the First World War, the high command instituted a policy of literal decimation – that is, every tenth man of a recalcitrant unit was shot for refusing to jump out of the trenches to a certain death. See Mark Thompson, The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915–1919, Faber & Faber, 2009.

  32.– Bordello, casino and postribolo all mean ‘brothel’.

  33.– Man is the maker of his own luck.

  34.– Nationalist poet Gabriele d’Annunzio famously planned and participated in a daring flight over Vienna on 9 August 1918, to distribute flyers featuring a text written by the poet himself, in effect to taunt the Austrian enemy by showing that the Italian air force could fly unimpeded over their capital city. Some fifty thousand of these flyers were released into the air. What is less well known is that d’Annunzio’s text had been judged ineffective and untranslatable into German, and 350,000 copies of a second flyer with a less provocative and more conciliatory message, written by Ugo Ojetti, were also released on the same mission.

  35.– The Balilla was a parascholastic and paramilitary Fascist Youth organisation founded by the party in 1926.

  36.– The Alto Adige is the Italian name for the South Tyrol, a majority German-speaking area north of the province of Trent. At various times since its annexation by Italy in 1919, there have been radical Tyrolean militants willing to use force to achieve independence from Italy. Tempers have cooled in more recent times, since the region has gained considerable autonomy from Italy.

  37.– Ciacco is a mythic character who appears in Dante’s Inferno (VI, 52–4) and Boccaccio’s Decameron (Novel VIII, Ninth Day) as a personification of gluttony.

  38.– Mattonella was a famous pastry chef from the town of Prato near Florence, noted among other things for his biscottini. These are what are now called biscottini di Prato, but originally they were called, as Rosa calls them, biscottini del Mattonella. Brutti ma boni (literally, ‘ugly but tasty’) is the name of a traditional Italian biscuit.

  39.– Dante, Inf., Canto XIV, 116. ‘Lor corso in questa valle si diroccia, fanno Acheronte, Stige e Flegetonta.’

  40.– The Porcellino (‘little pig’) is a bronze fountain statue of a boar in the Mercato Nuovo in Florence, whose snout one is supposed to rub for good luck. The current statue in the Mercato is actually a copy of the Baroque original by Pietro Tacca (1577–1640), itself a copy of an Italian marble copy of a Hellenistic marble original. Tacca’s original is now in the Museo Bardini.

  41.– Dante, Inf., Canto III, 109, ‘Caron dimonio, con occhi di bragia …’

  42.– A semi-legendary Roman youth of the sixth century BC who is said to have thrust his hand into a fire to prove his valour and bravery and willingness to die in battle.

  43.– A reference to to the famous ‘amnesty’ granted in June 1946 by popular communist leader and anti-Fascist Palmiro Togliatti (1893–1964) to those guilty of political and common crimes, including conspiracy to commit murder. Togliatti was Minister of ‘Grazia e Giustizia’ (‘Pardons and Justice’) in the post-war government.

  44.– Claretta was the name of Mussolini’s mistress, Claretta Petacci.

  45.– The SID (Servizio Informazioni Difesa) is a division of the military intelligence apparatus in Italy. Primo Carnera (1906–1967) was a famous Italian boxer who was world heavyweight champion in 1933/34 and known for his tremendous size.

  46.– The MSI is the Movimento Sociale Italiano, the neo-Fascis
t party founded in 1946 by diehard survivors of the puppet Republic of Salò regime and the original Fascist party itself.

  47.– The OVRA were the secret police apparatus of the Fascist regime from 1930 to 1943 and of the quisling Salò government from 1943 to 1945.

  48.– Also known as the Republican Alpine Redoubt (Ridotto alpino repubblicano), this was a fortified stronghold where the remaining Fascist diehards planned to stage their final defence of the Republic of Salò as the end drew near. A few thousand loyalist soldiers actually did begin to gather there in the winter and spring of 1945, but the whole plan came to naught after Mussolini was captured by partisans on 25 April 1945.

  49.– From September 1943 to August 1944, the Villa Triste (‘House of Sadness’) at 67 Via Bolognese in Florence lodged a unit of the German ‘political police’, the SD (Sicherheitsdienst), and a section of the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (the Voluntary Militia for National Security) of the Salò government. This ruthless Italian militia was commonly known as the Carità Gang, after its leader, Mario Carità. The Germans let the Italians use the lower floors of the building, where Carità created his ‘Special Services Unit’, made up in large part of criminals seeking amnesty for their crimes by serving the Nazi occupation government, and other mentally unbalanced individuals. The Villa Triste of Florence was one of several buildings so called in the Italy of the occupation, the others being in Rome, Milan, Trieste, Genoa and elsewhere.

  50.– The nuraghi are the archaic conical megaliths of central Sardinia.

  51.– Dante, Inf., Canto X, 102. Dante’s original says, ‘We see, like those who have imperfect sight, / the things,’ he said, ‘that distant are from us; / so bright still shines our Supreme Guide.’ In Dante, the word I have translated as ‘Guide’ (intended as God) is duce, thus allowing the exploitation and adaptation of the passage here to Fascist purposes. Indeed, the last line in the original tercet reads: ‘cotanto ancor ne splende il sommo duce’.