A Bold and Dangerous Family

by Caroline Moorehead

  Identified by the fascists as the leading and most outspoken ‘man of the Aventino’, and loathed by Mussolini for his publication of the Rossi memorandum, Amendola too was in considerable peril. The once staunch monarchist and parliamentarian had become Mussolini’s loudest critic. He had already received four ‘lessons’ – beatings and arbitrary arrest – when, towards evening on 20 July, he left a spa at Montecatini to drive to Pistoia. Conscious of the probability of further attacks, he had requested protection from the local prefect. A lorry full of carabinieri turned up to escort him. But they did nothing when a crowd of fascist thugs, summoned from all round the countryside, blocked the road with a large rock, dragged him out of his car, set about him with their cudgels and broke his sternum. He was taken to hospital and underwent several operations. ‘This time,’ he told a friend, ‘they mean to make an end of me.’

  Giovanni Amendola, another thorn in Mussolini’s side

  Non Mollare was still going. Working ever more frantically now that Salvemini and Rossi had gone, and conscious that the paper’s days were numbered, Carlo continued to put out bulletins on fascist brutality. Tamburini and his men, unable to track down the authors, decided that the Freemasons were behind it, not least because 20 September, the day on which Non Mollare published yet more evidence tying Mussolini to the Matteotti murder, was also an important day in the Masonic calendar. And the Freemasons, who had initially supported Mussolini, had indeed recently withdrawn their approval. Battaglie Fasciste now published a manifesto, calling on fascists throughout Tuscany to ‘strike at the Freemasons in their persons, their property and their interests’. Over the next few days, Freemasons in Florence were duly hunted down and beaten up. While this was going on, Mussolini was in Vercelli, addressing a group of Blackshirts: ‘If necessary, we shall use the cudgel, and also steel. A rising faith has to be intolerant.’ Lest the message had not been fully understood, on 3 October Battaglie Fasciste repeated the point. ‘Freemasonry’, it declared, ‘must be destroyed and to this end all means are good: from the cudgel to the revolver, from the smashing of windows to cleansing fire.’ And, as it turned out, to murder.

  That afternoon, in Florence, a squad of fascists under the leadership of a small-time local boss, Giovanni Luporini, went to the house of a Freemason called Napoleone Bandinelli. They would not have found him at home, for he had taken his wife and child to the cinema, except that he had come back to collect a coat for his child. A neighbour, a train-driver and head of one of Non Mollare’s sections, Giovanni Becciolini, came to his help, drew out his own revolver, and in the confusion, with everyone firing, Luporini was shot dead. Who precisely fired the bullet that killed him was never established. But Bandinelli was chased across the rooftops and gunned down, after which his house was ransacked; the sound of his piano crashing from the window on to the cobbles below resounded down the street. Becciolini was battered, taken to fascist headquarters nearby, brought home half dead, stabbed again, then had his head held under the water in a nearby fountain. He died in hospital soon after.

  Giovanni Becciolini, courageous supporter of Non Mollare

  From his headquarters, Tamburini sent out a call for fascist volunteers. Handing them lists of names and addresses, he told them to ‘take the initiative of serious reprisals for Luporini’s death’. Luporini had been, he said, ‘one of the most brilliant figures of Tuscan fascism’, lured to his murder in an ambush. Vengeance must follow. In what became known throughout Italy as the Night of St Bartholomew – after the 1572 massacre of the Huguenots in France’s wars of religion – thirteen lawyers’ offices, a dress shop in Via Tornabuoni, and seven other shops were ransacked. Papers, dresses, typewriters, files, shoes, bags, tables and chairs were flung into the street and set on fire. These bonfires had become standard squadrista practice.

  Nello had just returned from Germany, and he and Carlo learnt that their names were on the list of wanted men. Persuaded with great difficulty by Amelia to leave the city, they were driven by Zia Gí to collect Nello’s car, then set off for a friend’s house outside Cortona. Amelia, wanting to remain close by, left Il Frassine and went to stay in a pensione in San Domenico. That night, a fellow guest called her to look at the strange rosy light in which Florence seemed to be bathed. The two women stood at the window looking out over the city below and asked each other whether some kind of fireworks celebration was taking place. It was at almost exactly this moment that squadristi reached the Rosselli house in Via Giusti. Failing to get an answer to their repeated banging, they fired a fusillade of bullets into the heavy doors. Ada and Mariapò kept the lights off and lay low.

  Just after midnight, the squadristi, having commandeered two buses and moving from house to house, ransacking as they went, reached the home of Gustavo Consolo, one of the lawyers arrested previously for having copies of Non Mollare in his office. The family was woken by shots against the shutters. Consolo rang the police, who did nothing, and then hid under the maid’s bed. The fascists broke down the door and herded Signora Consolo, her two children and her niece on to the terrace, while she pleaded on her knees for her husband’s life. The squadristi then searched the house, discovered Consolo under the bed and shot him dead.

  A second squadra had gone in search of Gaetano Pilati, the audacious, much-loved builder who had distributed so many copies of Non Mollare. Two men put a ladder up the side of the house and climbed into the bedroom in which Pilati and his wife were sleeping. They fired two shots at him. Using his one good arm to try to protect the room in which his son was sleeping, he was shot again, after which the fascists left, one man saying: ‘Let’s go and get a drink. I have silenced him.’ An ambulance was called. In the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, Pilati was found to have been wounded in his face, his leg and one shoulder, and his intestine had been perforated in five separate places. Before dying three days later, he said to his wife: ‘The Austrians disabled me, and the Italians have killed me.’ Later, Rossi would describe Pilati as a man of ‘luminous humanity’. Both Consolo and Pilati had made themselves much hated for refusing to be bribed or blackmailed.

  The attacks went on. More fascists, summoned from the surrounding countryside, arrived in Florence and gave themselves up to an orgy of looting. By the time the violence was spent, eight people had been murdered, the villa belonging to Domizio Torrigiani, the Grand Master of the Freemasons, had been sacked and set on fire and forty businesses and houses belonging to Freemasons and lawyers who had been brave enough to act on behalf of some of the fascists’ victims had been reduced to rubble. In the streets, anyone remonstrating against the violence was forced to kneel before a portrait of Luporini.

  A campaign of whispers, lies and rumours was spreading around the city, terrifying people into telling on their friends. Old scores were paid off. As Nello’s friend Leo Ferrero wrote: ‘Every ring on the bell can signal the arrival of the police to arrest us, or that of friends come to warn us that the concierge, the cook, the concierge’s daughter, the concierge’s daughter’s friend, the maid’s friend . . .’ had denounced them. He kept a diary, in which he described his father Guglielmo, a distinguished historian now in his fifties, as having no mental skills with which to deal with the ‘pazzi’, the lunatics who patrolled the streets, or with the harassment and surveillance. ‘All his wisdom’, wrote Leo, ‘is like an instrument that no longer works, a key when the lock has been changed.’

  When Amelia returned to Via Giusti, she found the streets of central Florence littered with broken glass and crockery. Over the city hung a pall of acrid yellow smoke. Had they been there, she knew, Carlo and Nello would certainly have been murdered. People were speaking to each other in whispers and looking over their shoulders. Florence, she observed, lay ‘under a monstrous incubus’. When she went to the local police station to ask for armed guards to protect the house, she was told that there were very few available, so many having already been called to protect others.

  As the extent of the damage and the violence emerged, S
t Bartholomew’s Night sparked widespread shock and indignation. Florence swarmed with foreign visitors who had been manhandled, seen their favourite restaurants and theatres closed and witnessed the looting and burning. There were protests, complaints, unfavourable articles in the newspapers. One of the lawyers whose premises had been destroyed was the legal adviser to the British colony. The Italian Financial Commission was due to leave for the United States to negotiate new terms for war debts. The anarchical rampages in Florence could not be seen to go unpunished, and the Fascist Grand Council decided that the time had come to curb the violence.

  Roberto Farinacci was despatched from Rome to clear up the mess, but his lightning inquiry concluded that the troubles had all been caused by anti-fascists. Since this verdict satisfied no one, the buccaneering ras of Ferrara, Italo Balbo, arrived in Florence to conduct a more thorough investigation. He needed scapegoats. The city’s prefect was forced to retire, the questore was transferred elsewhere, Tamburini was sent to the Italian colony in Tripolitania and it was not long before the hot-tempered and brutal Farinacci himself, whose whitewash report had done nothing to restore Italy’s reputation, lost his position as secretary general of the Fascist Party. At the end of October, fifty-three prominent Florentine fascists were expelled from the party. Writing in the monthly Gerarchia, Mussolini announced: ‘Violence is moral, provided it is timely and surgical and chivalrous . . . private and individual ungoverned violence is anti-fascist.’

  What few people seemed to grasp was that all this left fascist powers fundamentally undiminished. A series of trials of squadristi accused of the worst excesses followed, but each was more absurd and corrupt than the last; the few that ended in convictions saw them rapidly overturned. Signora Pilati was threatened, offered bribes, told that if she identified her husband’s killers her son Bruno, too, would die. The family business was bankrupted. But she was a brave woman. Insisting on appearing in court, she pointed to the principal killer and declared, her voice barely audible for the jeers, that her husband had ‘made of Italy something great. You have dragged it into the mud.’ The five men accused of the murder were all absolved, and a banquet was held by local fascists in their honour. Signora Pilati and her son emigrated to South America.

  Peace, of a kind, returned to Tuscany. Florence, noted Amelia, ‘began to breathe again’. Marion Cave, writing to Salvemini in Paris in her perfect Italian, said that the city was indeed calm, but that legal oppression was beginning to take the place of squadrista violence. The killing of Pilati and Consolo had effectively dealt a death blow to the city’s socialists. ‘All but the arch intransigents like us’, she wrote, were either withdrawing from public life or tacitly joining the fascists. Their letters, now, were full of oblique references to things going well or badly and friends were spoken about only by their code names. Rossi had become ‘il burattino’, the puppet.

  Marion’s rheumatic illness had returned and she had begun to suffer from heart troubles; she had been put on valerian and digitalis and forbidden tea, coffee and cigarettes. In the preceding months, she and Carlo had become very close, and there were thoughts of an engagement. Amelia, however, was not in favour. There was something about this spirited, bold, emancipated young Englishwoman that made her uneasy and she begged Carlo not to meet Marion while he reflected on his future. Amelia, herself so determined and independent, remained curiously old-fashioned about women who chose to pursue careers, suspecting that it was self-indulgence; her instinct was that wives should keep house and support their husbands in their work. She could not quite see Marion Cave doing either.

  In any case, it was no longer safe for Carlo or Nello to remain in Florence. Nello wrote to Maria that he felt ‘humiliated, humiliated because we are Italian, and in spite of this, we are hunted down by Italians as if we were game’. Carlo was reluctantly persuaded to close down Non Mollare. His jobs in Genoa and Milan required him to spend his weeks between the two cities and Amelia and Nello decided to join him for the next few months. By coincidence, Marion was on the train that took them north; she was much hurt when Nello pretended not to see her. She was sure, she wrote sadly to Salvemini, that he and Amelia, so apprehensive after the loss of one son, would keep a close watch on Carlo all winter. What she feared, in her revolutionary heart, was that they would entice him back into their comfortable world, and that then he would never achieve anything politically. Because, as she put it, ‘that world is like a heavy eiderdown which suffocates every generous impulse, and in which a man of character or an act of daring cannot exist’.

  The Rossellis were all in Genoa when Anna Kuliscioff died soon after Christmas 1925. The funeral took place on a very foggy New Year’s Eve in Milan. Flowers and wreaths poured in from all over Europe, and Turati laid a cushion of violets on the coffin. Thousands of people came to pay their respects to this remarkable woman, calling out ‘Viva Turati! Viva il maestro!’ as the coffin was carried past. But among the crowds were many fascists. Setting about the mourners with their cudgels, they ripped the ribbons from the wreaths and tried to break through the cordon of friends guarding the coffin, which was almost tipped over in the scrum. Turati had to be helped to escape by climbing over the cemetery wall. He and Kuliscioff had been together for almost forty years; he despaired of a life without her.

  This was only the first of several painful deaths. Amendola, unable to recover from his last attack, died of his repeated injuries in Cannes. He was just forty-three. Lina Waterfield, who visited him shortly before, wrote that he was calm and not at all bitter. Amendola had been, Carlo wrote to Gina Lombroso, a ‘second Matteotti . . . the best of men during the worst of times’.

  Next to die was Piero Gobetti, alone in a hospital in Paris. He had stayed on in Turin for the birth of his son Paolo, then left for exile in Paris, telling a friend that it was a sad thing to be ‘spaesato’, ejected from one’s country. Ada and Paolo were due to follow shortly. But Gobetti had been much weakened by his many beatings. On 11 February 1926, he came down with bronchitis and was unable to shake it off. Four days later, he was dead. He was twenty-five. In his short life, he had edited three periodicals, founded a publishing house and written several books of history and politics. At a memorial gathering in his book-lined study in Turin, a friend spoke of him as a captain, who had led his troops to their first victory, then vanished like one of the mythical heroes of antiquity. Gobetti’s mantle, he went on, should now pass to Carlo, who would inherit his ‘bloodstained legacy’.

  ‘When everything that crushes and humiliates us now is over,’ Salvemini wrote to Ada in one of the thousands of letters she received praising her young husband, ‘then he will be remembered as one of the noblest and most effective’ of all the thinkers who had begun the anti-fascist movement.

  ‘I weep for you, Signora mia,’ wrote Carlo. ‘I don’t know what else to do or say.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Breaking Free

  Amelia and Nello stayed on in Genoa, in a little pensione, until the end of January 1926. An uneasy sense of servitude had settled over Italy. In November a former deputy, Tito Zaniboni, had been caught with a rifle and a telescopic sight in a hotel room facing Mussolini’s offices in the Palazzo Chigi in Rome. Mussolini himself did not appear much concerned about the plot, but he cleverly used the occasion to convince Italians that it was right, since the opposition were now resorting to assassination, to curtail their freedoms a little more. The streets of the northern cities were calm, but there were few opposition papers still brave enough to publish attacks on fascism.

  While Nello worked in the archives turning his thesis on Mazzini into a book, Carlo travelled back and forth between Genoa and Milan, occasionally pausing in Milan to see Turati, who was inconsolable without Anna Kuliscioff. Carlo continued to love his teaching and his students, but hated the limits on what he could now say to them. All civil servants and government employees were being asked to sign an oath of allegiance to the regime, and before his classes Carlo would pace up and down, s
aying that he was finding it unbearable to be a salaried member of a government to which he was so vehemently opposed. In the evenings, he would return pleased and buoyed up, for his students clearly liked his relaxed manner and the way he roamed around, perching on their desks; but by next morning the doubts would have returned.

  Nello told Maria that he felt ‘sick at the thought of violence’ but that he was beginning to think that ‘there is nothing for it but to bow one’s head’. He and Carlo spent long hours discussing what they could do next to oppose the fascists. It was telling that when they heard of Zaniboni’s plot, Nello was critical, Carlo admiring. The two brothers also disagreed over Salvemini’s decision to remain in exile in Paris, from where he had sent his resignation to Florence university. Nello wrote to him to say that he should take great pride and consolation in what he had done for his small band of scholars, and the way in which he had taught them the value of sincerity and openness. Carlo, on the other hand, urged him to return, to come to Milan, put himself at the head of an ‘elite’ of the most combative young people, whom he would ‘educate, incite and organise’. ‘The only man is you. There is no one else in Italy.’ To stay abroad would be a ‘very grave error’. The fundamental work, ‘whether material or spiritual’, he kept saying, can only be done ‘inside Italy’.

  Salvemini himself was much saddened by exile, writing to the rector at Florence university that, since the fascists had done away with the ‘existence of freedom, without which there is no dignity left in the teaching of history as I understand it’, he would return only when Italy again had a ‘civilised government’. Telling his friend Calamandrei that he would continue to do the ‘fascists as much harm as I can’ from abroad, he added: ‘They would have done better to kill me when they could.’ He soon learnt that he was no longer an Italian citizen and that everything he owned, except for his books in safe keeping at I Tatti, had been confiscated. ‘My future’, he wrote to Ernesto Rossi, also still in exile, ‘is as dark as yours.’