A Bold and Dangerous Family

by Caroline Moorehead

  With the death of Matteotti, Amendola was emerging as one of the strongest remaining moral voices. But he was a monarchist and a parliamentarian and could see no change other than with the king and the electorate, though he was deeply gloomy. ‘Now’, he declared, ‘will come silence, inexorable, tenacious, invincible.’ Italy was turning into a country he no longer liked. The working-class movement had not recovered from the defeat and destruction of its organisations and cooperatives and its leaders were beaten or in exile. The Catholics were constrained by fears of any opening to the left, and by the fact that many among them welcomed Mussolini’s conciliatory tone towards the Vatican. Had others joined the secessionists, had Giolitti not declared that he intended to give Mussolini another chance, had the Aventine not been so craven, so lacking in imagination and so divided, had the king threatened to stand down, had the army and civil service come out in support – then Mussolini might have fallen. All during the summer and autumn of 1924, more and more embarrassing details emerged to haunt him. But he played them all with skill, courted the vacillating liberals and made promises to the restive and powerful ras. He then got the king to sign a second decree further curbing the powers of the press: when it went through, squadristi celebrated by burning newspapers in the public squares.

  Was Mussolini directly responsible for Matteotti’s murder? Some historians believe that he was, pointing to the fact that the existence of Dumini’s squad was known to several leading fascists, as were the arrangements for Matteotti’s abduction, and that the Lancia was traced to the editor of the Corriere Italiano, a known contact of Mussolini’s brother Arnaldo. But not everyone is so sure. Both the nature of the murder and the choice of burial place, where the body was sure to be found, seem too amateurish. Mussolini clung on, denied all knowledge of events, blamed rogue fascists, and declared that not only was such an act ‘anti-fascist’ but ‘anti-Mussolinian’. He told Sir Ronald Graham, the British ambassador, that he believed Matteotti’s murder had been a case of personal vendetta, a ‘bestial crime’ that had started out as a warning and a lesson, or perhaps a practical joke, and had clearly gone wrong when a coat was wrapped over Matteotti’s head and he suffocated. Matteotti, he said, ‘was a delicate man’.

  For Carlo, Nello and their friends, the murder of Matteotti, the man defined by Gobetti as the ‘most staunch and intelligent of them all, the youngest in years and in spirit’, was a defining moment. While the Aventine secessionists prevaricated, the young dissidents, most of them still in their early twenties, were shocked into political action. None would ever feel the same again. It was as if, across the whole of Italy, the political map had been abruptly altered. Gobetti immediately declared war on the apolitici, those who refused to sully their hands in the political arena. ‘It is no good sitting in the middle,’ he told his friends. ‘You have to become fighters.’ Carlo wrote to him: ‘The time has come for us all to assume our battle positions.’ It was their duty, wrote Rossi, ‘arduous but sacred’, to enter the battlefield. The time for compromise, for hesitation, was over.

  One of the Rosselli brothers’ first moves was to look for a political party to join: Nello was drawn to Amendola’s newly formed Unione Nazionale, a movement calling for a return to the ‘noblest traditions of the Risorgimento’ and sufficiently wide, he hoped, to form the basis of a future government. Carlo, along with Salvemini, looked to Turati’s United Socialist Party, of which Matteotti had been the general secretary. All shared what Gobetti called ‘revolutionary liberalism’; inspired by an ‘inexorable passion for liberty’, all hoped that it might now be possible to awaken such a wave of revulsion across Italy that it would bring Mussolini down. Fascism, said Gobetti, was a peculiarly Italian phenomenon embracing narrow-minded, dogmatic nationalism and had to be fought as such. He was more urgent than the two brothers, calling for a nationwide network of intellectuals, united by cultural affinities, but all three agreed that though they would not join the communists, fascism would only be defeated with the support of the working classes.

  What they regretted was having wasted so much time on discussions. ‘The old parties, the old cliques literally prevented us from fighting,’ Carlo wrote later. ‘They took shelter behind impotent moralising, boycotted bold action and were themselves swept away. And we with them.’ The ideas that he had been turning over in his mind for the past few years were beginning to acquire shape and form. While Mussolini had been vigorous, the left had just wandered around feebly rather like bankrupts who keep living the luxurious life, instead of taking to the streets. Wanting ‘normalisation’, they had thought they would get it by granting Mussolini exceptional powers, and by the time he came to use them, they were without powers of their own. Post-war Italy had been betrayed by the ‘blind and tortuous dogmatism’ of its craven and ‘sclerotic’ socialist leaders, and had therefore been an easy prey for a ‘tribe of fast-thinking predators’, who, seeing no need for legality, had waged an energetic, youthful battle, leaving its opponents in possession only of the high ground. What was needed now was a new socialism, a bulwark against fascism, a transformation of the old liberal state into a new mass democracy built on trade unions and cooperatives, capable of confronting both fascists and Marxists.

  One thing, however, was blindingly obvious to all of them: Mussolini could never be defeated by legal means. They now had just two choices: servitude or confrontation; a calm life or one of infinite danger.

  The year before, in June 1923, a small group of young republicans calling themselves Italia Libera had heckled Mussolini in Piazza Venezia, shouting ‘Viva la libertà!’ and calling for free elections, an independent judiciary and the dissolution of the fascist militia. Mussolini quickly dismissed them as ‘melancholy imbeciles’. But not long after Matteotti’s death in 1924, a Florentine chapter of Italia Libera was formed, and Nello abandoned Amendola’s party to play a leading part in it. One of its driving forces was Dino Vannucci, a twenty-nine-year-old Alpini veteran who had come home from the war with a limp and missing a finger, and who was now studying anatomy at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. Vannucci was tall, with a long, horse-like face, smiled constantly and appeared to take nothing seriously. Another founder was a railway-worker called Nello Traquandi who took the pseudonym Satiro (satyr), and began to interview possible recruits, among them the romantic, revolutionary Englishwoman, Marion Cave. A third was an exceptionally brave young doctoral student from Savona called Sandro Pertini.

  Within weeks, fifty young Florentines were writing, printing and distributing flyers, and painting slogans on walls. They called themselves ‘combattenti’, ‘fighters’. ‘We do not wish to be thought of as a race of slaves,’ read one of their posters, ‘worthy only of being dominated and humiliated by violence and intimidation.’ Already it was clear that the fascists had them in their sights. One day a policeman arrived to search the Rosselli house in Via Giusti. Going through Nello’s desk, he seized on some notes on Carlo Pisacane and his revolutionary activities. When Nello returned, the policeman threatened to arrest him for his seditious writings, and Nello took great pleasure in explaining that the Neapolitan patriot had been dead for over half a century.

  When, not long afterwards, Italia Libera decided to hold a secret ‘general assembly’, they alerted supporters via passwords. Over a thousand people turned up, among them doctors, shopkeepers, postal-workers and students. Rossi and Traquandi were elected leaders. There were to be no names, no registers; a code was derived from the weekly lottery, and the city divided into four quarters, each under a different man. Police sensibly kept away when Salvemini led marchers through the streets one day shouting ‘Eviva Matteotti’, but they were watching, biding their time. Nello spent a great deal of time distributing manifestos, driving his new car, which had been nicknamed Bianchina. He plastered photographs of Matteotti on the city walls, pasting them over the large yellow posters put up by the fascists. His thoughts too were taking shape; he was becoming bolder, less tentative, but unlike his brother, he was i
n search of a more contemplative life. For him, entering politics was ‘like swallowing a toad’. As for Marion Cave, she had found her cause, and now took on the role of keeping the flyers and posters hidden in chosen spots around the city. The two brothers were in a fever of activity. A young supporter later wrote that, while he loved Nello like a dear friend, he felt for Carlo a ‘kind of veneration’.

  Early in September, Carlo returned to London to learn more about guild socialism, and to observe the first ever Labour government at work. He travelled to England via Belgium and Holland, where he and a friend hired bicycles. In Strasbourg he caught a cold and bought himself a woollen waistcoat.

  London was in the throes of the British Empire Exhibition, with crowds flocking to the Palaces of Industry, Engineering and Art, and he had trouble finding lodgings. There were now separate fasci in many of the larger British cities, and two were opening in Scotland, in Leith and central Edinburgh. All were busy wooing the Italian community with summer outings, after-school activities, receptions and balls, attended by the men in their black shirts. A ‘Gruppo Femminile’ had been set up in London.

  Matteotti’s death had initially been greeted in England with dismay. There was a demonstration in Trafalgar Square and two minutes of silence were observed. A ‘Friends of Italian Freedom’ league was formed and its manifesto signed by Rebecca West, C. P. Trevelyan and Bertrand Russell. The tone of the financially ailing paper Il Commento had become despairing. In one of its last articles, published on 10 September, in Italian, English and French, it lamented the murder of Matteotti: ‘Fascism’, it said, ‘is the triumph of mediocrity, violence and shamefulness.’ The former editor of The Times, Henry Wickham Steed, who knew Italy well and had met Mussolini, observed that he was a deeply sinister man who reminded him of the famous burglar and murderer Charles Peace, hanged not long before.

  But Mussolini had good English friends and allies, not least Sir Ronald Graham, who never ceased to file adulatory despatches from the embassy in Rome. Lord Rothermere, who was introduced to Mussolini for the first time in the summer of 1924, wrote that the Duce ‘is the greatest figure of our times, dominating the history of the twentieth century as Napoleon dominated that of the nineteenth’. Order had first to be reintroduced into Italy; then liberty would follow. As The Times neatly put it, in Italy ‘murder is more common than in most of the civilised nations’.

  Though Amelia grumbled that Carlo did not write to her often enough, a steady stream of letters made their way back from England to Florence. He had met Professor Tawney, he told her, attended a reception for the International Peace Congress, bought the Times Atlas on special offer in Selfridges, was reading Bertrand Russell on China and had been made a visiting member of the 1917 Labour Party Club, where he was able to sit and read during the day. The weather was so terrible, so ‘despairingly’ rainy, that he had to keep having his damp clothes ironed. The portions of food in restaurants struck him as minuscule. One night he went to see Sybil Thorndike in ‘la grande novità Shawiana’, St Joan, the beginning of which he loved but then grew bored. He was trying to get an introduction to Keynes.

  Closely following the news from Italy, he observed to Amelia that the Aventine Secession was continuing its path of ‘collective suicide’ and that the situation was ‘grey’. On 15 September he wrote that whatever happened, those who opposed Mussolini had no alternative but to battle on, even if the battle lasted a lifetime. ‘For me, at least, this is a moral imperative.’

  In October, Carlo decided that he would stay on in England for the elections – Ramsay MacDonald was hoping to increase his parliamentary majority. Would his mother be ‘molto cross?’His plan was to travel across the Midlands and Wales, to talk to people at a moment when, preparing to vote, ‘their souls are naked’, and to write articles for the Italian papers. He was short of money, but ‘since I am already at the ball, I might as well dance to the end’. He heard Asquith speak and thought that he was a ‘worthy heir to the great Liberal tradition’; but declared that Lloyd George, though an able orator, was a buffoon and a demagogue. Carlo was excited by his encounters with factory-workers, miners and political campaigners, but had decided that the life of the roaming journalist was not for him: he hated having to come up with instant opinions and write ‘sciocchezze’, inanities, on complex subjects. He wanted to be a player, not an observer. That he was already, at not quite twenty-five, being taken seriously was clear when the socialists invited him to contribute to their paper, La Giustizia.

  Carlo was back in Florence in time to take part in one of Italia Libera’s most audacious stunts. Early on the morning of 2 November, the Day of the Dead, just as the Cemetery delle Porte Sante opened, Rossi and Marion slipped in and placed a large picture of Matteotti inside the gates of the Vannucci family chapel, then secured them with a chain and padlock. Word went out for people to come with wreaths and flowers. Dozens arrived and knelt in prayer. The flowers were soon spilling out into the alleyways. A furious woman, supporter of the fascists, made a scene. Policemen and carabinieri arrived, followed by a local fascist chief, who broke the chain, ripped up the picture of Matteotti and ordered the carabinieri – it was telling that he had the power to do so – to prevent people from laying more flowers. But they kept coming. At the gates to the cemetery, police began to make arrests. One of those grabbed was Salvemini, who was taken off to a nearby police station, recognised as a professore, a man of standing, and released. He hastened back to the cemetery, where he was again arrested and returned to a now furious police inspector, who shouted at his subordinates: ‘Don’t you understand? He wants to be arrested!’ Salvemini treated all fascists he encountered with open contempt and he advised his friends to do the same.

  Carlo, Nello, Marion and Rossi all escaped arrest. That evening, Rossi and Dino Vannucci went to the police station to negotiate the release of those held for ‘violazione di domicilio’, house breaking, having entered the Vannucci private chapel without permission. Dino explained that he had invited his friends in, but not the police or the local fascists, and would now like to bring a case against them for breaking the law. The inspector, seeing no way out, let his prisoners go. The newspapers that were still bold enough to speak out gave the event considerable coverage. With uncharacteristic and absurd optimism, Salvemini wrote to Lina Waterfield: ‘Mussolini is in his death throes.’

  It had indeed been an excellent, humorous stunt; but the fascists were not in a mood for stunts. Their leaders were calling for blood, specifically that of Amendola and Turati. There was talk of a ‘seconda ondata’, a second wave of punitive expeditions.

  Sometime that autumn Nello had been introduced to the nineteen-year-old daughter of a former colonel, Maria Todesco. Maria wore her fair hair down to her waist and was not allowed to leave the house without her governess. Her family were Sephardic Jews and she had been educated at home, in Florence’s Via Jacopo Nardi, near the city centre. The Todescos were well off, owning property in Tuscany, but Maria’s father suffered from manic depression, brought on, it was said, by having been forced to sit on a tribunal handing down death sentences to deserters in the First World War. The family had resolutely distanced itself from politics. Maria was quiet and affectionate, Nello loving and amiable. They fell in love.

  The 4th Jewish Youth Convention was held in Livorno early in November and Nello decided to attend. Many young Jews from all over Italy were already looking towards Palestine for a Jewish homeland, and speaker after speaker insisted that there could be no true Jew who did not imbue his life with the values, language and culture of Zionism. On the second day, Nello rose to speak. His words might have come straight from the mouth of Amelia, for whom ‘Jewish, yes, but Italian first’ was an often-repeated saying. In a long, eloquent and sometimes emotional speech, coming across to his listeners as youthful, energetic and full of charm, Nello laid down the parameters of his own beliefs. He was, he said, Italian, and he felt himself to be profoundly Italian, heir to the great traditions of the Risor
gimento. But ‘I call myself Jewish, I hold to my Jewishness . . . because I look with Jewish severity on the duties of our life on earth, and with Jewish serenity on the mystery of the after-life, because I love all men as in Israel we are commanded to love them . . . because I have the clearest sense of personal responsibility . . . because I have that religious commitment to family which all those who look at us from outside agree is a fundamental, adamantine characteristic of Jewish society. I am thus – I believe – a Jew.’ That he did not go to synagogue, spoke no Hebrew and that Judaism was not the driving force of his life, did not make him any less a Jew. Nor did the fact that, ‘in the citizenship of his thoughts’, he was not a Zionist. His Jewishness might appear feeble, but it made him happy, alive and strong.

  Nello’s speech was much remarked on. He was attacked by the Zionists but warmly congratulated by those who told him that he had spoken out for the ‘tormented’ and the uncertain. ‘But the Zionists are extremely impressive,’ he wrote to Zia Gì. ‘What awaits us? Where are we going?’ The fervour with which he had spoken was all the more surprising in that religion had played such a small part in his upbringing. It was a mark of how the young Italian dissidents now regarded morality – truth, integrity, honesty, as opposed to fascist venality and bullying – as lying at the heart of their anti-fascism. For both Nello and Carlo, it was also about personal responsibility, inculcated in them from their earliest childhood (one has to look no further than Amelia’s morality tales of the errant Topinino), which had become a faith in its own right, ‘a spiritual torment’, as Carlo would later put it, ‘which forbids all indulgence’.