A Bold and Dangerous Family

by Caroline Moorehead

  Some of Amelia’s acquaintances were shocked by her treatment of Aldo, but she had no regrets. To reinforce her message, she told the boys that the will was like a piece of steel, which, unless constantly burnished, grew rusty. She drew a picture of three steel bars with their names underneath and hung it over their beds. When one of the boys demonstrated what she considered lack of will power, she drew fuzzy lines to suggest a patch of rust. At the end of the month, the child with the least rust was declared the winner. It was a true Mazzini gesture.

  Both Topinino books sold well; Amelia’s moral overtones suited the mood of social-minded Florence, and she was an accomplished story-teller. Laura was also writing children’s books, and making a name for herself on Il Marzocco, where she wrote a fashion piece under the pseudonym Mrs El.

  Slowly, Amelia was making her way in Florence’s literary world. She was finding friends, writing short stories for magazines, and planning new plays. In her memoirs she recalls first falling in love with the theatre when, as a small child in Venice, she had listened to her sister Anna’s stories and seen herself as a spy, overhearing the conversation of people who did not know that she was there. Never had the city seemed so lively; people talked about a new Renaissance. Amelia delighted, both for herself and for the boys, in its openness to newcomers, and the way it seemed so alive to influences from all over Europe. The theatres and concert halls played to large audiences. Amelia’s friends, like herself, read widely in different languages and met to discuss the issues of the day. Though she doubted that her young sons were old enough to take in much of it, she felt that they were absorbing the atmosphere, acquiring, as she wrote, a very ‘elevated impression of life’, just as she felt satisfied that she was providing the boys with the model of a mother who worked hard, staying at her desk all the time that they were at school.

  When Amelia visited Rome, she stayed with her uncle Ernesto who, despite being half-English, Jewish, a Mazziniano, a Freemason and an anti-papist, had been elected mayor. Much as she enjoyed these trips, she was pleased that she had exchanged luxury in Rome for her modest but intellectual Florentine life. Amelia and the boys had moved to Via Gianbologna, to a larger flat in another solid eighteenth-century house, with gardens where the boys could play under the oak trees. The wider family remained very important to them all, and both Gabriele, now at work on revising Italy’s legal code, and her much-loved sister Anna came to stay. Gabriele, more father to her than brother, would ask her whether she was still reading Dante, which made her think of a doctor, taking her intellectual pulse.

  The three boys were turning out very different from each other. Aldo was dark, and like Joe in looks; Carlo and Nello had fair hair. In character, Aldo was reserved, almost secretive; it was clear that he felt deeply about things but did not choose to show it. In appearance, Carlo looked strong and sturdy, but he had a tendency to plumpness, and fell ill easily; when he cut or scratched himself, the wound quickly went septic. He ate too fast and too much, and was fidgety and impatient when he had to wait for the others. Of the three, he was the most openly affectionate and high-spirited. Nello, who Amelia sometimes called ‘Ninnolino’ or Pinguino – Penguin – on account of his roundness, was quieter and more steady, and looked the most like her. Both the younger boys shared a certain stubbornness, a refusal to accept defeat, but while Carlo reacted by taking action, fighting back, trying to think up ways to make things work his way, Nello withdrew into himself and reflected. For all her severity, Amelia was the most affectionate and devoted of mothers. When she was away, the boys wrote her urgent, loving letters, all on the same page, with Assunta, the housekeeper, adding a note along the edge. Aldo took his duties as eldest child seriously: ‘Nello stayed up until 11 last night. Is it true that he shouldn’t always do this?’

  Carlo, as a boy in Florence

  Amelia had never shied away from bold subjects, and nor was she about to. In L’idea Fissa, ‘The Fixed Idea’, written in 1906, a doctor’s advice to his neurotic, possibly psychotic, patient that he should do his best to get over his obsessions, made it clear that she was reading Freud, and that the inner conflicts of men and women, tortured and remorseless, trying to come to terms with a fast-changing world, were what interested her the most. She had long championed writers who used local dialects as the best way to express their feelings, and now, thinking to refute her critics and that she might sound less stilted if she returned to the language of her childhood, she embarked on two plays in Venetian dialect. Once again, they touch on the clash between men and women, courage and cowardice, the domestic, cautious, safe life versus the new spirit of revolt and independence, personified by donne emancipate, women braving the new world. She was fortunate that Carlo Goldoni had paved the way by writing in Venetian, and that a company of celebrated Venetian actors, the Compagnia Italo-Veneziana, was in its golden age. El rèfolo – ‘The Whim’ – and El socio del papá – ‘The Father’s Associate’ – were both accepted and staged.

  Standing in the wings for the first night of El rèfolo in Rome, Amelia feared that the critics’ verdict would be ‘inexorable and harsh’. She need not have worried. They loved it, praised her lively dialogue, the poetry of her language and her ‘astute’ understanding of psychology, remarking only that she seemed at her best as a playwright when her characters were gente oscura, humble people, and that it was when she made them upper class that her plays came across as somewhat lifeless. Amelia had proved, wrote a notably difficult theatre critic, that women were not, after all, incapable of writing ‘theatrical poetry’. El rèfolo was translated into French and put on at L’Odéon in Paris. When Amelia went off to attend first nights of her plays, the boys stayed behind in Florence with Assunta, watched over by Zio Giù and Zia Gì. Carlo wrote to his mother: ‘Who knows how much money you will earn! Plays are so beautiful!’ At the bottom of the letter, Assunta added: ‘Brava, brava, la mia signora.’

  For all her success, Amelia felt alone. On one of her trips away, she wrote to Aldo, in a surprisingly adult tone: ‘I am a little sad, because I still can’t get used to going about the world so alone.’ Her friend Laura remarked on it too. Though Amelia was now at the centre of a group of friends who loved and admired her, she gave off a feeling of being ever more solitary, ‘always taller and straighter, like a blade of steel in a velvet sheath’. A new friend made around this time, a novelist and children’s writer called Maria Bianca Viviani della Robbia, visited her and admired the way that her drawing room seemed more like a study, full of books and flowers and very stylish. She described Amelia as somewhat pale, with regular features and eyes the ‘indefinite colour of deep water’, and her manner as friendly and measured. But, she added, Amelia had a sad expression.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Defining la Patria

  That the Florentines were independent-minded, even combative, was a fact long known inside Italy. The city had been the site of the first general strike in the country’s short history when, in August 1902, twenty-two workmen were sacked from the Pignone metalworks, and railway-workers, train-drivers, dustmen and even tailors came out in sympathy. To the surprise and consternation of the middle classes and the employers, Florence stopped. There were lock-outs and military cordons and much talk about the need to ‘tame these wild animals’. La Nazione, Florence’s right-wing paper, referred to the strikers as the ‘new barbarians’.

  For all its art-loving foreign visitors and wealthy landowners, Florence was a city with many poor inhabitants, some of them forced from their homes during the building upheavals which accompanied its short spell as Italy’s capital. Some 59,000 families were officially registered as ‘miserabili’, extremely poor, and among these was to be found a considerable number of anarchists and revolutionary socialists, angry at the vast gaps in income and for the most part fiercely anti-clerical. The anarchists had a long history in Italian politics and it had been in Italy that early anarchist attempts at revolution had taken place. There were many to be found among the Florentin
e artisans, the majolica-, lace-, leather- and tapestry-workers, the carpenters, clockmakers and potters, and particularly among the straw-weavers, who made hats and containers for Chianti, Tuscany’s most important wine trade. Many of them were highly literate and united in small, tight-knit associations. Florence, it was said, had become the capital of Italy’s anarchist movement.

  Since the turn of the century, Florence had been ruled by liberal monarchists with strong ties to the Risorgimento, many of them belonging to the city’s 400 leading families. But Tuscany, where the trade-union movement was increasingly powerful, also had a long tradition of socialism and in 1907, after years of control by aristocratic families, a junta of socialists, radicals and republicans was elected to the city council. On the cover of the socialist L’Avanti! della Domenica was a bare-chested man with an anvil, and a woman with an olive branch.

  Most of Florence’s political turmoils were a mirror of what was happening in Rome, where a pragmatic liberal called Giovanni Giolitti, a man of sober manners and a flourishing moustache, had been in power on and off since 1892. Under Giolitti, who was more interested in economic reform than in political turbulence, national income had risen sharply, mortality rates had dropped, and in the north at least – the south remained backward and neglected – a steady process of industrialisation was under way.

  Since 1895, when the Italian Workers Party had renamed itself the Italian Socialist Party, socialism had spread rapidly among academics, students and the educated middle classes. Its leader, Filippo Turati, a genial lawyer with a round face, wispy beard and protruding eyes, had proved skilful at holding together a party often riven by ideological disputes. With his lover, Anna Kuliscioff, a Russian exile and one of the first women to graduate in medicine in Italy, Turati had started the most influential journal of the left, Critica Sociale. The two of them had done more than anyone to spread Marxist theory in Italy, and to transform Italian socialism from a small anarchical group to a broad socio-political movement. Their salon in a palazzo by the Duomo in Milan had become the epicentre of the intellectual left, and the blonde-haired, handsome Kuliscioff, smoking ceaselessly and invariably dressed in a long black skirt and white shirt, was a figure of fascination to young Italian politicians and journalists. Giolitti had made overtures to these socialists, improved conditions in the factories and reduced taxes on food, and the moderates among them were willing to cooperate.

  But Italy was awash with controversy, discontent, opposing ideas, dreamers and revolutionaries, reformers and reactionaries, and the schisms that would mark Italian politics for the next twenty years – and far beyond – were already at play. Every shade of political opinion, every nuance of left or right, found expression in a chaotic and shifting mix of parties and associations. Giolitti, for all the prosperity he had brought, was unpopular with the right for his desire to make Italy economically sound rather than great. As the poet Carducci put it, Giolitti’s Italy was a ‘busy little farce of ponderous clowns’. Nor was he liked by the left, some of whom aspired to nothing less than revolution, and who accused his government of opportunism, his ministers of incompetence and his elections of corruption. Giolitti, they said, was nothing but a dictator, the master of trasformismo, holding on to power through deals and bribery.

  Some measure of stability might have been provided by the monarchy. But Victor Emmanuel III, who had become king after the assassination of his father Umberto in 1900, was a singularly retiring man, more interested in military history than affairs of state. He was exceptionally short – just over five feet tall – and looked even smaller when standing by his statuesque Montenegrin wife, Queen Elena, particularly when she wore the vast hats of the day. By nature weak and vacillating, the small king – nicknamed Sciaboletta, little sabre, by his people – had been struggling, but largely failing, to establish the monarchy as a strong symbol of the new nation. People who met him remarked on his watery blue eyes, which tended to flicker and dart about when he was nervous. His third cousin, Prince Amadeo, Duke d’Aosta, was by contrast exceptionally tall, a foot and a half taller than the king, and made a popular and martial figure on ceremonial occasions.

  Among Giolitti’s most outspoken critics was a man who was about to become inextricably bound up with the Rosselli family. His name was Gaetano Salvemini and he was a senator from the south and a historian. Giolittian politics, said Salvemini, were ‘dead, dull and morally reprehensible’.

  Born in Molfetta in Apulia, Salvemini was one of nine children; his grandfather was a fisherman. His mother Emanuela was ambitious for this clever son and much interested in politics. Having taught him to read and write and how to be a gentiluomo, she sent him to a seminary for eight years, then to the prestigious Institute for Higher Studies in Florence on a scholarship. After this, saying that he had been turned into a socialist by the disastrous Ethiopian wars, Salvemini embarked on a career as a historian and a teacher. He promised himself that his life’s work would be a search for the truth and that he would give his students ‘a key to open locks, a compass to direct them across a sea of facts, to guard them against improbable or false assertions, and to teach them to think for themselves’. Salvemini had no patience with rhetoric. He claimed that one reason for Italy’s backwardness lay in the fatal preference among Italians for discussing general theories rather than practical solutions.

  In 1897, Salvemini married a girl from Molfetta and became professor of history at Messina university; they had five children very quickly and moved into a house on the seafront. On the night of 28 December 1908, an earthquake struck the Straits of Messina; it was followed by a tidal wave. Salvemini was thrown from a window by the quake, but his fall was broken by an architrave. His wife, five children and sister were swallowed up. Salvemini groped in vain among the ruins. Eventually, he found all the bodies except for those of his wife Maria and his youngest son, Ughetto. Between a quarter and a third of the inhabitants of the coastal cities of Reggio Calabria and Messina, some 80–100,000 people died that night. What tormented Salvemini was the thought that Ughetto, too small to explain who he was, might have been saved and taken away on one of the rescue ships. For days and weeks he searched the makeshift orphanages. ‘I made a mistake’, he wrote later, ‘in not killing myself on the first day.’

  For the despairing Salvemini, the loss of his family served to give shape to what had until now been mostly a spiritual inclination. He was fired with the conviction that he had to devote his life to the problems of the undeveloped south – for southern Italy remained for most Italians an alien land, magnificently beautiful but lawless and extremely poor – and that he would henceforth no longer talk, reflect, analyse, but act. What brought him back from a profound wish to die was his determination to work for ‘these people, who must and can rise up again’.

  By the time he arrived in Florence in 1909, Salvemini was thirty-six, balding, with a large head, small, kindly and intelligent eyes, a snub nose, a ‘great fence of teeth’ and a pointed beard. He had a pleasant, wry manner, tended to be impetuous and usually wore a black hat. His tread was heavy and his friends spoke of him affectionately as a ‘man from the fields, not the literary salons’. He had been taken on to teach at the university and had already contributed articles to Turati’s Critica Sociale. He was soon drawn in as elder statesman to a new magazine started by Prezzolini and Papini to take over from the Leonardo. It was called La Voce and consisted of four folio pages of dense print, unrelieved by pictures. Maintaining that only a reinvigorated and educated public could hope to solve the current ills of illiteracy, divisive regional aspirations and lawlessness, it fed its readers an austere diet of articles on suffrage, European art and good governance.

  Salvemini’s involvement took La Voce into a closer interest in politics and particularly in class struggle, the south, and international justice. What he shared with his young colleagues was a loathing for Giolitti and a conviction that, if Italy were to become a truly united and great nation, the Italians themselves needed to
change their habits and their way of thinking. Never greatly concerned with his own reputation or place in Italian academia, Salvemini became a fervent critic of Italy’s most revered intellectual thinker, the idealistic Benedetto Croce, who had turned his pen to history, philosophy and ascetics and was having a considerable influence on his contemporaries, whether from the right or the left. Salvemini complained that Croce was merely misleading people with his rhetorical abstractions, and thus preventing them from addressing the burning question of how to make Italy a truly liberated and civilised country.

  One of La Voce’s contributors was Giovanni Amendola, a handsome, liberal-minded journalist with very black hair and a sombre look, widely regarded as a rising political star.