The Pursuit of Italy

by David Gilmour

  More crass and vindictive was the regime’s policy towards the country’s ethnic minorities on the frontiers. Slovene was banned although half the people in and around Trieste were Slovenes. Italian was the obligatory language in the Alto Adige, where 90 per cent of the population spoke German as a first language. No suggestion of autonomy was permitted in the province. The teaching of German was forbidden even in private, newspapers in German were suppressed (except one produced by the government), and Italian immigration was actively encouraged. As a way of emphasizing the status of the ex-Austrians as a conquered people, Mussolini erected an enormous victory monument, its giant pillars sculpted in the form of the Roman fasces, in Bolzano, their provincial capital. Some of the inhabitants, who continued – and continue – to consider themselves Tyrolean, later hoped that nazi Germany would come to their rescue. But Hitler had no intention of rescuing these quarter of a million members of the Volk. He had 9 million Germans from Austria and Czechoslovakia whom he planned to gather to his reich, and he needed Italian friendship for his schemes. After the Anschluss in March 1938 he guaranteed Italy’s frontier with Austria near the Brenner Pass and forced Tyroleans to choose between emigrating to Germany or staying in the Alto Adige and renouncing their cultural and linguistic rights.

  A minority that was not oppressed during the first sixteen years of fascism was Italy’s Jewish community. Consisting of only 48,000 people, it was considered neither a ‘problem’ nor a threat by even the most extreme nationalists. One Italian diplomat recalled in a memoir published in 1938 that Jews were not regarded as aliens but as ‘patriotic and useful members of the community’ who were ‘not conspicuous enough to figure as scapegoats in times of depression’.12 Jews were welcomed into the Fascist Party, some took part in the ‘March on Rome’, and a few became ministers; Italo Balbo acknowledged that the three ‘best friends’ of his life had been Jewish.13 Within the Jewish community there was little discontent or anxiety, and only a handful of its members chose to become zionists and go off to colonize Palestine. Giorgio Bassani, the Jewish novelist whose books include The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, wrote mainly about the Jews of Ferrara, his home town (and Balbo’s), and admitted he could not remember anyone in the community who had not been a fascist.14

  Mussolini himself was not innately anti-Semitic, though later he pretended to be in order to refute accusations that in 1938 he was simply imitating Hitler’s policies. His favourite mistress in the 1920s was Jewish, and he chose a Jewish architect to do the work on the Ara Pacis and its surroundings. Although he hoped to ‘give Italians a feeling of race so that they [wouldn’t] create half-castes’,15 and though he encouraged them to treat Arabs and Africans and later Slavs as inferior peoples, he did not share the racial doctrines of the nazis and he was understandably uncomfortable with theories that exalted fair-haired, blue-eyed northerners above all other races. Yet in 1938, plainly influenced by Germany, he declared racialism to be an essential fascist dogma and said that the purity of the Italian race could only be preserved by the expulsion of the Jews. As Governor of Libya, Balbo protected the colony’s Jewish inhabitants but in 1942, after his early death, Mussolini persecuted them with new edicts; fortunately General Montgomery and his Eighth Army soon arrived and made the new policy redundant. In the autumn of the following year 183 members of Ferrara’s Jewish community were deported to nazi concentration camps. Only one returned.

  Visitors to Italy after the Second World War received the impression that most of its people had been anti-fascists. It was simply not true. The dictatorship could not have lasted for twenty years if Mussolini had been despised and fascism had been detested. In recent years there has been much debate about how popular Mussolini really was, how much consenso – a word somewhere between acceptance and approval – he enjoyed among the Italian people. For a decade after his victory in the last real elections in 1924, consenso seems to have been fairly general. The diplomat Daniele Varè expressed the view of many when he claimed that fascism ‘embodied an ideal of Order, Discipline, Authority, wedded to the Italian temperament’.16 This was what most people wanted, especially the middle classes and above all the members of the petty bourgeoisie. Mussolini himself had charisma – to men and to women – and also a certain charm, difficult though this may now be to discern. It is revealing to look at a newsreel of him making a speech in the late 1930s in Padua’s Prato della Valle, one of the largest squares in Europe. The piazza contains nearly the entire population of the city, tens of thousands of people cheering every sentence and throwing their hats in the air or twirling them deliriously at the end of their sticks. The event was, of course, orchestrated, but the enthusiasm was genuine. Those who failed to attend such spectacles were not arrested and put in prison.

  Mussolini survived so long partly because he incarnated certain strands of italianità; he embodied the hopes, fears and grievances of a generation that believed Italy had been cheated of its due, both by its liberal politicians and by the attitudes of its wartime allies, who had forced it to accept the ‘mutilated peace’. Until 1934, before he began to squander Italy’s wealth on invasions of Africa and Europe, he faced little opposition to his rule from his countrymen. Probably he made Italy feel more united than ever before – or indeed since. As the historian Alberto Mario Banti has suggested, the middle years of Mussolini’s dictatorship were ‘the apex of the process of nationalizing the masses’, the moment when ‘Italy’s national identity was at its strongest and most widespread’.17

  Anti-fascist views seldom reached the ears of the Italian populace, and organized opposition rarely consisted of much more than a few clandestine cells of the Communist Party. The regime’s few outspoken critics were mainly dead (Gobetti and Giolitti), imprisoned (Gramsci), in exile (Salvemini and the popolari leader, Don Sturzo) or murdered (Matteotti and Giovanni Amendola as well as later victims such as the Rosselli brothers, whose anti-fascist group Justice and Liberty tried to create a united opposition of politically disparate elements). Few Catholics followed Sturzo into opposition because Mussolini made intelligent concessions to the Church. He allowed Catholic Action (an organization of 2 million people in 1930) to continue to operate, and in 1929 he gave the Vatican the status of a sovereign and independent state. Also, in one of his many about-turns, he abandoned his early anti-clericalism and his enthusiasm for contraception. However much Catholics might dislike other aspects of fascism, many of them shared the regime’s view that women’s priorities should be maternity, domesticity and religious observance.

  Fascism’s appeal was blunted, however, by its failure to provide prosperity. Italians might be deceived into thinking they were well governed but they could not be deceived into thinking they were well off. They could see in American films that other people were much richer than they were, and they could observe this discrepancy in person when emigrants returned for spells in the homeland with plenty of dollars to spend. Mussolini himself was not an acquisitive person and he wanted Italians to care more about their country than about their wealth. His economic policies duly reflected this priority: it was for reasons of prestige rather than financial advantage that in 1926–7 he kept the lira overvalued against sterling. A more damaging result of his craving for prestige was his insistence that Italy became self-sufficient in wheat. The so-called Battle for Grain did indeed achieve this objective, but the consequent monoculture led to soil exhaustion, a decrease in animal farming and a decline in exports of more profitable crops, especially fruit; for a while, Italy even became an importer of olive oil. Italy also suffered from a lack of coal and other raw materials, which meant it could never hope to compete as an industrial power with Britain and Germany. Yet it could have become wealthier if its rulers had shown any zeal in looking for oil in Libya. Foreign oil companies offered to help in exploring the sands, but Mussolini rejected their approaches, once again for reasons of prestige. Proud of the technological inventiveness of his countrymen, he thought it would be humiliating to accept foreign assis
tance.

  Fascism was a phenomenon of the north. It was made in the Po Valley, and its leaders were northerners; Gentile was almost the only Sicilian who became an important figure in the regime. In the south, where the petty bourgeoisie – its natural recruiting-ground – scarcely existed, fascism was imposed and then accepted without enthusiasm. The Duce did not like the south, and he especially disliked Sicilians, who did not care very much for him. Many of the island’s noblemen viewed the regime with aristocratic disdain; on seeing Mussolini for the first time, the Prince of Butera observed, ‘Too many spats! Too many spats!’18 The fascist government did virtually nothing to develop the southern economy, though it created some employment by erecting prestigious buildings such as headquarters for the party and barracks for the carabinieri. Little was done to exploit Sicily’s gas, and nothing was done to reform the latifondi until the Second World War, when it was too late.

  On a visit to a Sicilian town in 1924, Mussolini was upstaged by a local mafioso, who hogged the publicity and made him feel inferior. The episode goaded the Duce to fight and try to destroy the Sicilian clans, and before long the annoying mafioso found himself in prison. Fascists could not in any case have been expected to tolerate what they considered a state within a state. A year later, Mussolini appointed a Lombard policeman, Cesare Mori, as prefect of Palermo with wide-ranging powers for a campaign against the network of criminal gangs collectively known as the Mafia.

  Mori was a man with a sense of mission. He believed that the ‘great soul of Sicily’ could be recovered only by extinguishing the Mafia. The task of extinction was complicated, however, by the fascists’ failure to agree on who in fact belonged to the Mafia. Radicals among them identified it with the old ruling class, but conservative fascists found it among bourgeois arrivistes. Others seemed simply to equate mafiosi with their political opponents. Mori himself, who believed the Mafia was a ‘parasitic’ middle class, admitted that its members could not be empirically unmasked. ‘The figure of the mafioso,’ he declared, was ‘recognized above all through intuition: he is divined, sensed.’ In the event, Mori sometimes used his intuition to ensure the downfall of fascist rivals, revealing to Mussolini their alleged links with the Mafia. His campaign against the mafiosi consisted of sweeping police operations, thousands of arrests and massive trials. Many mafiosi were caught, many others escaped, and many innocent people suffered. Although the crime rate dropped, the fascists did not manage to destroy the Mafia, partly because they insisted on seeing it as a secret and sinister organization, when in fact it was more than that; it was also a way of living that could not be extinguished by mere repression.19

  The Duce’s insistence that the Mafia had been destroyed meant that the subject could not be mentioned by the press and, as a result, many murders and robberies went unreported. This was a typical Mussolinian situation. A decree of 1925 stated that the Duce had ‘meditated with passion and knowledge’ on ‘the Southern Question’ and had thereby cut ‘the gordian knot of its solution’.20 In consequence the issue was no longer an issue and could not be a subject for public discussion. When Luigi Barzini was sent by the Corriere della Sera to report on Sardinia in 1933, he was ordered not to mention poverty, malaria or banditry because officially these no longer existed. Soon after his arrival, a captain of the carabinieri invited him to watch a shoot-out with some bandits.21

  Visitors from the north could see very well that ‘the Southern Question’ had not been solved, and they were, like the meridionalisti before them, appalled by the poverty and the sight of people living in one-room hovels together with their animals. They met young men volunteering to fight in Africa and Spain not as enthusiasts for those wars but as people who knew they had no future in their villages. Many observers were struck by the sheer joylessness of rural life in the south, where nobody sang, not even at harvest-time. One witness was an anti-fascist intellectual from Turin, Carlo Levi, who in 1935 was sent to confino in a village in the hills of Basilicata, which was then known by its Roman name, Lucania. A doctor by training and a painter by profession, Levi managed to empathize with the poor of the rural south in a way that few northerners have been able to do. A decade later, he distilled his experiences in Christ Stopped at Eboli, a hauntingly evocative work, part memoir, part study and part fiction.

  Levi’s title came from a saying of the villagers of Aliano (a place he called Gagliano in the book), who felt they were outcasts treated by other people as if they were not Christians or civilized people or even normal human beings. They inhabited a world ‘hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from History and the State’, a ‘land without comfort or solace, where the peasant lived out his motionless civilization on barren ground in remote poverty, and in the presence of death’.22 The most vigorous villagers had emigrated to Argentina. Those who remained tramped for hours to distant fields, they suffered from malaria and other diseases, and they were still further oppressed by the regulations of the regime. The government had decided that crops should be protected by a national tax on goats, but in Aliano, where there were no crops for goats to eat, they survived on thorn and scrub. All the same, the Alianesi were as subject to the tax as anyone else and, since they could not afford to pay it, they were forced to slaughter their goats and thus deprive themselves of milk and cheese.

  The case of Aliano illustrates a widespread phenomenon in the south, one that long predated fascism. It is the concept of people from fuori, people from outside, from ‘over there’, people from the state, officials who are automatically distrusted and from whom no good can be expected. Peasants felt no attachment to the state, whoever controlled it, because they had never been made to feel that they belonged to it. No peasants in Aliano were members of the Fascist Party because fascism meant power, and they had no power. For them the state was a distant and alien entity that taxed them, conscripted them and made them kill their goats. They had absolutely no reason to feel affection for those ‘guys in Rome’. In the peasants’ houses, which he frequented as a doctor, Levi never saw prints of the king or Mussolini or even Garibaldi; alone on the walls were images of President Roosevelt and the Madonna of Viggiano, who in their different ways represented hope. When Aliano’s mayor tried to enthuse the peasants with talk of empire and the conquest of Ethiopia, they remained silent and uninterested. Nearly all their families had lost sons in the Great War for a cause they had not understood, and they did not wish to support the even less comprehensible project of an empire in Africa. As they told Levi, if the ‘guys in Rome’ had enough money for a war, why did they not spend it on providing Aliano with a reservoir or repairing its bridge or even planting some saplings?

  Aliano no longer feels lost in time or ‘cut off from History’. Much of the landscape is still desolate, the jagged slopes of its eroded hills stretching away towards the mountains of Calabria. But between the hills there are new fields and young olive groves as well as scraggy clumps of incongruous eucalyptus. Money from the government, remittances from emigrants and pilgrimages from the writer’s admirers have erased the sense of poverty that so troubled Carlo Levi. There is now no misery or malaria in the village, but neither is there much sign of wealth creation. Aliano today is a silent place, populated mainly by the old, by women in black who chatter from windows to their neighbours across alleyways, by old men in berets hobbling about or sitting together on benches under the ilex trees. Most of the people they knew as children went to Buenos Aires or further south to Bahía Blanca; there are far more Alianesi living in Argentina than in the old village in Basilicata. Most of the young have also left, and the village football team has been reduced to playing five-a-side soccer. The dismal demographic statistics listed in the parish newsletter tell a story that is only too typical of the south. There are more deaths than births, more women than men, more emigrants than incomers, and, among those who remain, unemployment is high.23

  ITALIA IMPERIALE

  Mussolini’s first appearance on an international stage was at Lausanne at a confe
rence summoned in late 1922 to settle Turkey’s borders after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. His fellow delegates were not impressed by Italy’s new prime minister. The British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, found him ‘a very stagey sort of person’ who was always trying to create an effect, sometimes with a band playing ‘Giovinezza’ in attendance. On the opening day of the conference Mussolini contributed nothing to the discussions and spent his time strutting around with his blackshirts and making eleven statements to the press. Although he left Lausanne the following day, still without any achievement, Italian newspapers managed to describe his performance as their country’s first diplomatic success since 1860.24

  Mussolini’s directives to his delegation soon convinced Curzon that, apart from being ‘stagey’, the fascist leader was a ‘thoroughly unscrupulous and dangerous demagogue, plausible in manner, but without scruple in truth or conduct’. From Rome he threatened almost daily ruptures of the alliance with the Great War victors and warned he would withdraw from the conference unless he was promised a slice of the Middle East, a stance that suggested to Curzon ‘a combination of the sturdy beggar and the ferocious bandit’. Soon he went beyond threats and adopted a policy that the South African prime minister, Jan Smuts, described as ‘running about biting everybody’.25 When four Italians working for an international boundary commission were mysteriously killed on Greek soil, Mussolini delivered an impossible ultimatum to Athens and then bombarded and occupied the island of Corfu, killing a number of civilians. Although the Italians were eventually persuaded to evacuate, they did so only after the Greek government was made to pay a large indemnity for a crime it knew nothing about and which was probably committed by Albanians. The Duce was determined, like the Venetians of old, to control the Adriatic and demonstrate the fact.