by Gay Talese
After Murat’s execution, the grateful King Ferdinand ordered that a monument be erected along the shoreline where the last French king of Italy had properly perished. The monarch ordered that the monument be inscribed to read: “Heaven has reserved for the inhabitants of Pizzo the glory of saving our fatherland and Italy from fresh revolutionary calamities.” King Ferdinand also decreed that the royal treasury would pay for the restoration of the Pizzo church that Murat’s administrators had never gotten around to doing, and he further stated that all the citizens who had resided in Pizzo at the time of Murat’s capture would be perpetually exempted from royal taxes, and that they could in the future expect other privileges and special treatment from the Bourbon crown.
Suddenly this small seaside village was the envy of the entire realm; and whenever a resident of Pizzo traveled elsewhere in the kingdom and made known his place of origin, that acknowledgment usually elicited a favorable comment or a reaction that made him feel heroic and blessed. Even Vincenzo, who during the time of Murat’s capture had done nothing except to remain steadfastly uninvolved, was now regarded as an influential figure by most people whom he knew in neighboring villages—including his cousin in Vibo Valentia, Luigi Gagliardi. One evening Luigi paid Vincenzo a visit and asked if Vincenzo might intercede in his behalf with the Bourbon authorities should Luigi’s past dealings with the French ever be raised as an issue. Vincenzo quietly said that he would do whatever he could if the problem arose—and to his relief, it never did.
Vincenzo and Maria’s son—who would become Ippolita’s father—was at this time an ambitious young man in his early twenties who had already begun to benefit from the favored treatment extended by King Ferdinand to the residents of Pizzo. Even before this turn of events, Giuseppe Gagliardi had been prepared to take advantage of it; his early education, provided by visiting tutors in the Gagliardi manor in Vibo Valentia, had given him a foundation in learning superior to what had been available to the young people of Pizzo, where the Church-run school offered a most rudimentary curriculum and stressed mainly religious obedience. And with the revitalization of Pizzo’s economy due to the king’s munificence—the tax concessions, the royal subsidy to new businesses, the king’s designation of Pizzo as a port through which the realm funneled part of its olive oil and silk trade with England—Giuseppe had many opportunities for employment that were varied and remunerative.
Tall and slender, amiable and well-spoken (even in French, although it was now impolitic to speak it), Giuseppe followed his interest in mathematics by working first in an accounting office. A year later he moved on to the weights and measures section of the seaport terminal building, where his father was the director of cargo inspection. Two years later, Giuseppe took a job as a clerk to the director of loans at the Pizzo bank, an enterprise recently enriched by the substantial deposits made by the region’s land barons who sought to be associated with the king’s favorite city.
After nearly three years at the bank, Giuseppe gained a transfer to Naples, where he received wider experience at the main office of the Banco di Napoli. There he lived in a one-room flat overlooking the bay, in view of Mount Vesuvius. On Sundays he often strolled down to the pier to watch the arrivals and departures of large sailing vessels. He became acquainted with ship owners and captains, and befriended the minister of navigation for the Bourbon crown. One day Giuseppe suggested to the minister that the new twice-weekly mail steamer between Naples and Palermo, which sailed along the western coast of the peninsula, should stop at Pizzo. The minister considered it a worthy request, and with little delay it was arranged.
In 1831, at the age of thirty-five, Giuseppe left Naples to accept a higher position closer to home. He was named a subdirector of banking for the kingdom’s southern region, headquartered in Catanzaro, a city of more than twenty thousand residents that was about forty miles northeast of Pizzo via a bumpy and circuitous route that cut through the valley of Maida. In 1832, Giuseppe took that route to return to Pizzo for his father’s funeral. Vincenzo Gagliardi had died of heart failure at seventy-two. Giuseppe convinced his mother after the funeral to return with him to Catanzaro. Maria shared his small house there for three years, but she was never happy in Catanzaro. During the summer of 1835, Giuseppe took her back to Pizzo for a visit. A week after their arrival, Maria asked her son to escort her up to Vibo Valentia so that she might see Luigi. Wizened but not feeble at ninety-one, Luigi rose from his tree-shaded chair in the garden as their carriage approached. He greeted Maria and Giuseppe with a vigorous embrace, and he seemed almost as pleased to see their carriage after Maria had reminded him that, forty years before, he had given it to her as a wedding present.
The mansion she had lived in as a new bride had been sold by Luigi; he had moved into an even grander palazzo that stood behind him now, a fifty-room edifice with windows filled with figures and faces of people old and young, most of whom Maria did not recognize. Luigi’s wife, Beatrice, and his stepmother, Baroness Fortunata, were now dead. So were five of his eleven children, and twelve of his thirty-one grandchildren. Maria Gagliardi was of course not a blood relative, being related to the family through her late husband; but even before she entered the house to begin the greetings and introductions, she felt more than reunited with the Gagliardis when the old patriarch informed her that a suite in the palazzo would always be available whenever she wished to move in.
With her warm reception in Vibo Valentia she felt less isolated and lonely than she had after Vincenzo’s death; and when she told Giuseppe that she preferred not to return with him to Catanzaro, he deferred to her wishes without much discussion. She was clearly happier away from Catanzaro. And in Catanzaro he would not be entirely alone. Giuseppe would continue to see, and now less furtively, the woman his mother had not approved of—his part-time housekeeper and mistress, a widow of almost forty whose husband had died with Murat’s army in Russia.
Giuseppe had first hired her four years earlier, shortly after his appointment to the Catanzaro bank, and before his father’s death had brought his mother into his home. The housekeeper was a handsome olive-skinned woman who wore white blouses and colorful skirts, suggesting that her mourning days were behind her. There was never any question of marriage—to her, or to anyone else. Cautious in all things, Giuseppe was particularly cautious regarding women. Most young marriageable females in the provinces of southern Italy were ever under the watch of protective male relatives and aspiring suitors, and the back roads of the kingdom were lined with white crosses under which were buried the bodies of unwary men who had looked twice at the wrong woman. Giuseppe was also fortunate in not having in his veins the hot blood of a daring Lothario; he was, except for his occasional dalliances with his housekeeper, as cool and correct in his private as he was in his professional life. He determinedly saw himself as a bachelor for life. Having felt claustrophobic as a child within the lower level of the Gagliardi hierarchy in Vibo Valentia, and as the overly protected single offspring in his parents’ house in Pizzo, Giuseppe wished to remain free of additional binding, clinging relationships.
This continued to be his attitude even as he approached his fiftieth birthday and was beginning to find his business routine tedious, and his personal life empty, as there had gradually disappeared from his life every individual who had played any part in it. First, his housekeeper abandoned him one day with the announcement that she had fallen in love with a man whom she refused to name but was leaving to marry. A month later his mother died in her sleep at her home in Pizzo, willing to him her diary and the gems the duchess had given her. Before Giuseppe had returned to Catanzaro from his mother’s funeral he learned of the death of Luigi Gagliardi at ninety-seven. Giuseppe went to Vibo Valentia to attend the Requiem Mass and walk in the funeral cortege. More social than solemn, and joined by nearly every nobleman and politician in the deep south, the long procession to the cemetery afforded Giuseppe an opportunity to eavesdrop on the men’s unflattering comments about the king and their comp
laints about the worsening conditions in the provinces. The local economy was depressed, this Giuseppe knew for sure, but the extent of the people’s rancor against the present occupant of the throne of Naples was deeper and more emotional than what he had been hearing in Catanzaro. Giuseppe got the feeling that the area of his birth was now almost ripe for insurrection.
Ferdinand II, grandson and namesake of the revered old monarch who had rid the country of Murat, was now the king. Many of the concessions granted by his grandfather had become loosely administered or were ignored entirely by his ministers, including the annual supply of free salt to Pizzo citizens, which many complained they were no longer getting. Salt was much craved by people throughout the realm because the crown had always made it scarce by monopolizing its supply and distribution, thereby gaining large revenues in sales taxes. Citizens had been warned against collecting even small amounts of salt water, on the assumption that they would expose the water to the sun for the purpose of crystallization. Guarding against this, the Bourbon police and coastal patrol had been entrusted to maintain an alert watch along the beaches; and while they had rarely been vigilant in the past, they suddenly became so after the coronation of Ferdinand II. And lately their watch came to include even the beach of the once privileged town of Pizzo.
During the time Giuseppe Gagliardi spent in Pizzo and Vibo Valentia attending the funerals, he refrained from expressing any opinions about the king’s administration—not entirely because he was afraid of being overheard and reported, but also because as a banker Giuseppe was appreciative of the efforts the king was currently making to ameliorate the economy through a more aggressive approach in international trade. At the remodeled port of Naples there had been under Ferdinand II an impressive increase in the number of merchant ships afloat and the volume of business conducted—indeed, in the last year the king could boast that his ships had carried to foreign ports two-thirds of the realm’s domestic produce. At factories in and around Naples there was record production of such popular export items as gloves, soap, perfumes, coral ornaments, silks, earthenware, hats, and carriages. The king had made Naples the first city in Italy to have a railroad system. After opening the first line from Naples to Portici in 1839, Ferdinand would extend the tracks farther north to Caserta in 1843, and to Capua in 1845—and he hoped to reach Rome in his lifetime, although the Pope remained rigidly opposed to any trains entering the Eternal City or the Papal States. The Pope believed that a train’s noise, filth, and monstrous unsightliness would mar the lovely panorama of the countryside and disturb the contemplative mood of those kneeling in the pews of churches.
While Giuseppe had not yet seen a train—he had not been back to Naples since their introduction—he had quickly and unequivocally accepted the Pope’s lowly opinion of such conveyances, which was shared by everyone he knew; and he was therefore much surprised to hear a spirited advocacy of the rail system expressed one night by the guest of honor at a dinner party he attended in Catanzaro some time after returning from the funerals. The guest of honor was a petite young woman from Naples who wore a white lace dress and was named Teresa Mazzei.
Giuseppe had been invited to the dinner by a banking colleague in Catanzaro who was married to Teresa’s older sister, and it was this sister whom Teresa had come from Naples to visit. When Giuseppe had been introduced to her he was not immediately taken by her physical appeal or charm, although she seemed pretty enough and sufficiently sociable by any standard. It was rather her enthusiasm that appealed to him, her blithe spirit and outgoing manner that would have been considered risqué among country maidens in Italy; but she was clearly a citified woman beyond the measure of country convention, and she was also young enough for her exuberance to be accepted by her older dinner partners as a genuine part of her nature and not merely an attempt to command their attention.
And yet she did command their attention during dinner, and after it as well, by her humorous accounts of current social activities in Naples and by her optimistic assessment of the role the railroad would play in helping Naples to maintain its position as a leading world capital. She described the festive opening of the new terminal building, glowing with stanchioned gaslights that had only recently removed the city’s streets from centuries of dim dependence on candles, and she reveled in the fact that the terminal’s iron rafters had seemed to reverberate with the voices and instruments of the performers from the San Carlo opera house, assembled near a platform to serenade the passengers, who climbed aboard wearing long dresses and tailcoats. While she admitted that she would not go for a train ride wearing the white dress she had worn on this evening of her sister’s dinner, Teresa said that the black soot flying from the locomotive had not been as pervasive as she had expected, and that none of the frightening jolts and sudden turns along the tracks could diminish the thrill of the adventure.
Giuseppe left the dinner that night imagining he would never see Teresa Mazzei again; and had it been left to his personal initiative, he probably never would have. Much as she held his interest, he assumed that she would soon be returning to Naples and to suitors who were far closer to her age than the thirty years that separated the two of them. But a few weeks later her brother-in-law at the bank asked Giuseppe to join Teresa and her sister at a picnic lunch in the country one weekend, adding that they would come by for Giuseppe and would ride out together.
The weather for the outing was bright and balmy, and during the short walk after lunch Giuseppe was able to speak more intimately with Teresa, although he still felt awkward with a woman so young, and his response to her lighthearted commentary and banter was expressed mainly with avuncular bemusement. When she casually mentioned that she was extending her stay in Catanzaro, Giuseppe still did not think it appropriate for him to propose that they meet again, but he was quite pleased when her brother-in-law proposed it for him.
Several subsequent dinners, all proposed by her brother-in-law, made it clear even to the reluctant suitor that he was being courted; and while he delicately expressed his concerns to Teresa’s brother-in-law, he remained receptive to her presence, even to the point months later of accepting her invitation to come to Naples to meet her parents. After Teresa had welcomed him at the gate of their large stone house on the outskirts of the city, and had escorted him through a corridor into her father’s library, Giuseppe saw before him a trim, gray-haired smiling man of exactly his own age whose dark eyes and general physiognomy bore a striking resemblance to his own.
Giuseppe and Teresa were married in 1846; and in the spring of the following year, in a newly acquired house a few miles downhill from Catanzaro in the direction of Maida, there was born a daughter, whom the couple named Ippolita. In the choice of the name Teresa deferred to her husband, who had been uncharacteristically decisive in proposing it, even though it had not been a name in either of their families. It was the name of a woman Giuseppe’s late mother had often referred to, who had given her a dowry of gems on her wedding day.
The child Ippolita grew up in a kingdom beset by political chaos and warfare, and in a home of personal tragedy and sadness. When Ippolita was two, in 1849, her mother nearly died of an infection contracted while bearing a stillborn son; and before her recovery Teresa learned that her father in Naples had been imprisoned for treason, and was marked for execution, because of his alleged membership in a Mazzinian underground society that had been plotting against King Ferdinand. Such cliques were now proliferating in the kingdom, encouraged by the fact that the followers of Mazzini and Garibaldi had just invaded and conquered Rome, and killed the papal prime minister and the Pope’s personal secretary, having already forced Pius IX to flee southward to the city of Gaeta, in the protective realm of the Spanish Bourbons.
The provincial capital of Catanzaro was disturbed almost daily by public demonstrations and violence, as the police and royalist crowds battled with antimonarchists who circulated leaflets attacking Ferdinand’s oppressive regime and advocating a coup d’état. Giuseppe arranged
a transfer out of Catanzaro for himself and his family in 1850; he became a director of four small banks along the western coast, one located in Pizzo, and acquired a secluded house with high walls near the sea that he hoped would provide a salubrious atmosphere for his wife’s recovery. But Teresa only descended further into despair on learning of her mother’s fatal heart attack after the execution of her father. This melancholia would remain with Teresa always, and young Ippolita would never know her mother as the carefree and cheerful woman who had attracted her father in their courting days.
Ippolita’s father sometimes took her to Vibo Valentia to visit his relatives in the Gagliardi family. The current patriarch was Luigi’s thirty-year-old grandson, Marquis Enrico, who controlled the local grain and fishing industries, served on the town council, and was running for mayor. Like the late Luigi, who had married his stepmother’s daughter, Enrico had not ventured far in finding a wife. He had married his niece.
When Ippolita was eight, in 1855, her father gladly accepted Enrico’s suggestion that she be tutored along with the other children who were assembled each day in a classroom in a wing of Palazzo Gagliardi, next to the family chapel; and for the next five years, until she was thirteen, she spent more time with the Gagliardis in Vibo Valentia than she did with her own parents in Pizzo. Her father was on the road most of the day, traveling by carriage to the banks under his supervision, and her mother, now a chronic depressive, was under the constant care of a nurse. Sometimes Teresa, still in her thirties, was lucid and even cheerful, but then her voice would trail off into a jumble of inaudible words, or she would remain silent for hours and even days.