In the wake of the Dopolavoro came the Opera Balilla – the name taken from a young Genoese boy killed in 1746 during the revolt against the Habsburgs. It catered for boys – very young children were made the sons and daughters of the lupa, the Roman she-wolf – aged between eight and fourteen, who wore uniforms modelled on the militia – black shirts, grey-green shorts, a fez – and presented arms with little wooden rifles. They took an oath to ‘carry out the Duce’s orders’ and were organised into legions and cohorts. Discipline, said Mussolini, was ‘the sun of armies’ and Italy was to be served with ‘work and with blood’. He was a man ever alert to the magic of words. He sent a mission to England to study Baden Powell’s boy scouts and made the king’s cousin, the martial Duke d’Aosta, the Opera Balilla’s president.
Small boys marching in their Balilla uniforms
The ‘new man’ was to be a synthesis of thought and action; the ‘new woman’, considered incapable of creativity or leadership, was instructed to stay at home and have children. Eager to increase Italy’s population, the fascists banned abortion, sex education and all forms of contraception. ‘He who is not a father’, said Mussolini, introducing a punitive tax on male celibacy, ‘is not a man.’ In Florence, vice squads carried out a ‘pogrom’ of prostitutes, roaming the streets with ‘the strategy of sportsmen lying in wait for larks in the shrubbery’. Fascist propaganda had two images: the ‘donna crisi’ – cosmopolitan, urbane, skinny, hysterical, decadent and sterile – and the ‘donna madre’ – rural, devout, tranquil and fertile. In healthy, hardy, fascist Italy, women would never be serious players. They were urged to swim, run, play tennis, hockey, handball and volleyball, but not on any account to throw a discus or lift weights.
To help put across this myriad of often confusing instructions, the fascist propaganda machine took to the airwaves. Radio came relatively late to Italy, but by 1927 streams of romanità, bulletins and directives crackled out across the country, along with martial music, many renderings of ‘Giovinezza’ and bracing talks by the Duce. Newsletters, magazines, posters all reinforced the message, along with ceremonies, hymns, special dress, punchy slogans, aphorisms, lapidary phrases. If totalitarianism was anathema to Carlo and Nello, this spectacle of unthinking, subservient woman repelled Amelia.
Mussolini inspects a group of young fascist girls
For over a million Italians, fascism and its coercions had already proved too much. They had fled Italy and were living in exile in France, Switzerland, Belgium and South America. Though Mussolini would never be the equal to Hitler or Stalin in brutality and bloodiness, and Italy under fascist rule would never be like Russia or Germany, and though he liked to pretend that he was genial and forgiving, Mussolini was calculating, cruel and vindictive. Two of his mistresses, Margherita Sarfatti and Angelica Balabanoff, later said that he reminded them of a teppista, a brawler or hooligan. His own brother, Arnaldo, said that he was very nearly a criminal.
By 1927 – the year in which Churchill, who like much of Europe admired Mussolini’s firm hand, announced that ‘his only thought is the enduring welfare of his people’ – Italy had become a one-party police state. Mussolini was not only prime minister and head of state, but minister of foreign affairs, of the interior, of war, of the navy and airforce and of corporations. Elections had been abolished, the rule of law subverted, teachers regimented, textbooks rewritten, journalists sacked ‘for having manifested aversion to the regime’ or forced to join a National Syndicate. There were to be no stories of epidemics, national disasters or even bad weather. Content, declared Mussolini, ‘is as unstable as the sand formations on the edge of the sea’. Only mass organisation, a nation forced into a fascist political culture, would be able to drag the country out of its regional quarrels and economic divisions.*
With the laws of so-called public security, no one was secure any longer: letters were intercepted, phones tapped, houses searched, suspects followed. Spies multiplied, because they were paid well, and because the profession of informer conferred status. Since there were spies everywhere, it had become safer to trust no one. In his drawer, Mussolini kept secret files on his enemies, on the quarrelsome ras, constantly jostling for power, on his colleagues and subordinates.
Bocchini, meanwhile, had reorganised the central office of the state police into seven separate divisions, two of which dealt explicitly with politics: Polpol (Divisione Polizia Politica) and DAGR (Divisione Affari Generali e Riservati). Polpol collected and processed information on anti-fascist movements; DAGR coordinated repression through the regional prefects and police commissioners. But in 1927, Bocchini began to put in place a secret political force, OVRA, an acronym deliberately kept mysterious for some years to make people feel anxious and constantly watched. Accountable only to Bocchini and Mussolini, OVRA inspectors had the power to intervene and investigate wherever they saw fit. The first office was set up in Milan, behind the facade of a wine dealer. Its head, Francesco Nudi, was a methodical, painstaking, portly, stubborn man with white whiskers. He was given twenty agents and a generous budget. Files on ‘subversives’ were opened and constantly updated, and before long there were 100,000 dossiers, arranged according to region, degree of threat, type of opposition, and as much material on character, habits, family, attitudes and sexual orientation as could be gathered. If Polpol was the brain, the central memory in the fight against the anti-fascists, OVRA was its operating branch, entrusted with infiltrating and ultimately crushing, if need be by assassination, Mussolini’s enemies.
On 26 May 1927, the Duce told the Chamber of Deputies that public security in Italy was ‘quasi perfetta’. All opposition, he said, had been dealt with; dissidents were ‘dispersed, finished, reduced to dust’. There is no place for opposition, he added, ‘in a totalitarian regime such as Fascism’.
None of this boded well for Carlo and Parri, awaiting trial for the Turati escape, nor for Nello, facing five years of internal exile, his brief academic career in ruins. Of Mussolini’s many enemies it was the intellectuals whom he most feared. With Matteotti, Amendola and Gobetti dead, and Salvemini, Turati, Nenni and many others in exile, only a few prominent ones now remained in Italy. The most admired, Benedetto Croce, had retired to his house in the south and no longer openly opposed the regime. The Rosselli brothers, however, refused to be silenced. Unlike the women, the farmers, the teachers, the factory- and farm-workers, the civil servants, all crushed and supervised, they remained not only alive and still inside Italy but also vocal and absolutely determined; and thus extremely dangerous.
What quickly became known as the ‘Trial of the Professors’ opened in Savona on 9 September 1927. For reasons of space it was moved from a small courtroom to a larger one. Eleven men were on trial: Parri, Carlo, Oxilia and the others who had helped with Turati’s escape, along with Turati himself and Pertini, these last two being tried in absentia. The public prosecutor was asking for five-year prison sentences for their ‘openly rebellious behaviour against the powers of the state’. We are, wrote Carlo, ‘clutching at straws and at the mercy of a cyclone’.
Carlo’s wife Marion and their first child Giovanni, known as Mirtillino
For several days beforehand, the cafés, streets and squares of Savona were full of groups of people, talking excitedly. Friends and supporters of the accused had arrived from all over Italy. Marion and Amelia were there, as well as Parri’s wife Esther and his father, and Alessandro Levi. As she walked into the public gallery, women gave Marion flowers and told her that if the verdict went against Carlo, they would storm the prison.
A few days earlier, Carlo had met his small son for the first time. He told Marion that Mirtillino looked very sweet, but that he probably liked babies when they were a little older. Mirtillino, as it happened, was teething and not at his sweetest, having been kept waiting for several hours to see his father. Marion wrote to Amelia that their meeting had been ‘a bit sad’. Carlo was well, a little thinner, ‘serene and tranquil and calm’, but he had the look of a ‘
more serious man’. ‘I ask myself if they are going to throw away the whole of our youth.’ He was reading Dostoevsky and Victor Hugo and remarked to Marion that they had now spent almost more time apart than together since their marriage. Amelia told Nello that Marion herself was behaving with ‘admirable dignity and courage’, though her health was not good and she had had to find a wet nurse for Mirtillino. The two women had grown closer.
From Paris, Turati had sent a long letter to the president of the court. Touching only lightly on his escape, he wrote about the ‘insupportable’ conditions imposed by the fascists on any Italian who had a ‘backbone’. His native land had, he wrote, been turned into one vast prison, in which it had become a crime both ‘to remain in dignity or to leave in freedom’. His words on the immorality of the fascists quickly became the theme of the very public trial.
Carlo picked up these words when he spoke, early on, of Turati as a man of the highest moral clarity, ‘one of the noblest and most unselfish spirits’ Italy had ever produced, obliged to flee the ‘desolation’ into which the fascists had plunged Italy. It was only fitting, he said, that he, Carlo, the descendant of a Rosselli who had hidden Mazzini when he fled from his persecutors, should save another hero of similar moral stature from ‘fascist fury’. Fascism, he declared, ‘stands accused by the consciences of all free men’. Since all legal opposition had been suppressed by ‘blind violence’ and ‘unjust laws’, ‘it has confronted them with the tragic alternatives of either supine acquiescence or starvation or exile.’
He then described, calmly and in great detail, the attacks on himself and his family and the murders of Pilati and Consolo.
Parri, too, spoke eloquently about morality. The months in prison had made him very pale, and his white skin stood out against his very black moustache. As a teacher and a much-decorated war veteran, he told the court, he had never been an exponent of subversion. But his moral aversion to what the fascists were doing to Italy had left him with no choice but to act. The fascists could ‘persecute, disperse, strike down’ people like him, but his moral disgust would never go away.
Carlo’s lawyer, the wiry, white-haired Francesco Erizzo, made a brave, combative speech in which he argued that the laws under which the men were being tried were ‘absurd, unconstitutional and persecutory’. Parri’s lawyer, Vittorio Luzzatti, another small, modest, middle-aged man, who looked swamped by his huge robes, asked whether Rosselli and Parri might not be, as Mazzini had been, the true ‘precursors of a new age of liberty and justice’.
But it fell to Carlo to make the most moving speech, long remembered in the annals of anti-fascism. ‘I had a house,’ he said, speaking quietly to a totally silent courtroom; ‘they destroyed it. I had a magazine: they suppressed it. I had a university chair: I was forced to give it up. I had, as I have today, ideas, dignity, an ideal: for these I have been sent to prison. I had teachers, friends – Amendola, Matteotti, Gobetti – they killed them.’ Among the spectators – the shopkeepers, the fishermen, the office-workers who had come to listen to the trial – there were audible sounds of weeping.
On the third day, the prefect of Savona summoned to his office the many journalists present, among them Carlo’s English friend Barbara Carter, come to cover the trial for the Manchester Guardian and smuggled into court by Marion as her cousin. Under orders clearly issued from Rome, the prefect instructed them to keep their articles very brief, since the trial was ‘no longer very interesting’. One young reporter scribbled: ‘Hic jacet mortua justizia’, ‘Here, dead, lies justice’.
At 6 o’clock on the evening of 13 September, the three judges withdrew. In the dock, the defendants sat smiling and Marion and Esther went over to talk to their husbands. The corridors outside the courtroom were overflowing with people; in the square outside some 2,000 others had gathered and were waiting for the verdict. Seven o’clock came and went; then eight, then nine. No one went home. Shortly before 10 o’clock a bell rang. The door of the judges’ chamber opened and the three men filed solemnly back to their places. There was total silence. The president of the court, Pasquale Sarno, read out the verdict: ten months in prison.
There was a gasp, silence; then shouts and cheering, ‘Viva! Viva la giustizia! Viva l’Italia di Parri e Rosselli!’ which spread out from the courtroom, along the corridors and into the square. People cried, kissed each other.
The defendants had already been in jail for over eight months; this meant that Carlo had forty days left in prison in Savona. But this was not really the point: in essence, they had been absolved. In the five days of the trial, as Carlo said, ‘We really believed that something new had taken place.’ The judges had proved that justice was still alive in Italy, and that, as independent magistrates, they had refused to be coerced or bullied. Sarno would later say, with an understandable touch of pride, ‘We obeyed only the voice of our conscience.’ As one of the fascist lawyers sourly observed, ten trials like this one, ‘and the regime is done for’. It was, as Barbara Carter wrote for the Manchester Guardian, ‘as if a hole had been opened in a sultry sky’.
The defence lawyers too, Erizzo and Luzzatti, had refused to be cowed or silenced. And the fight against fascism had been portrayed, unambiguously, as a matter of morality, honest men speaking out against a dishonest state. Though all too soon such trials would become nothing but rubber stamps for illegal fascist actions, though the Special Tribunal would soon be handing down, behind closed doors, one corrupt and unconstitutional sentence after another, the fact remained that on this one day justice had triumphed. ‘These were the last rays’, noted one of the men present, ‘of a light that was slowly going out.’
The news spread rapidly throughout Italy and abroad, to the exiled Italians all over the world. To his young friends Parri and Carlo, Turati wrote that Italy had been shown not yet to be a ‘country of the dead . . . You spoke for all those who still dream and breathe and sigh for liberty . . . In that moment, you proved that you were the true and real Italy, an oasis in the desert that the nation has become. You defied the barbarians occupying Italy.’
But Mussolini had no intention of letting the men go. Within hours a telegram from Rome reached Savona. Parri and Carlo would not be freed at the end of their sentence. They would be sent instead to spend five years each on one of the penal islands off Sicily. Carlo was surprisingly unfazed. He wrote to his mother that his path ahead was now absolutely clear. Wherever he was, in whatever circumstances he found himself, he would find satisfaction only in taking action, ‘which is, and will be, my kingdom’. The year 1927, he told her, would forever be their black year, ‘unremittingly dark, in which we all touched the very depths. Now we are rising.’ Meanwhile he was ‘living in books’, discovering new fields of interest and planning a programme of work for his years on the penal islands, and in ‘an almost idyllic frame of mind’. But to Turati, revealingly, he wrote something else: ‘I am making no plans for the future. However, I don’t believe I will stay longer than a year . . . Read, twice over, between the lines.’
Carlo was about to follow Nello to the islands. The trial, for him, had been more than just an extraordinary victory over the fascists. It had made him, at the age of twenty-eight, a very public figure, a name to be admired by every anti-fascist of every political persuasion; and one to be still more hated and feared by Mussolini. The accused had become the accusers.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Il Confino
To the Italians, there was nothing new or very surprising about il confino, sending troublesome and unwanted citizens to house-arrest in remote villages or on barren islands off Sicily. The Romans had used these islands as places of exile, as had the Bourbons, who confined their most threatening opponents to a deep, wet, black hole under a barracks on Ustica. The history of banishment in Italy runs up to and through the struggles for independence and beyond, with laws on internal exile for ‘enemies of the state’ passed, rescinded, reintroduced. Even the relatively liberal prime minister Crispi despatched unruly social
ists and anarchists to the island of Lipari at the end of the nineteenth century, until they smuggled out descriptions of appalling conditions and the scandal was such that they were brought back to the mainland.
In 1926, when Mussolini introduced his ‘exceptional laws’, il confino, law number 1848, was thus the perfect solution to his growing number of enemies. It would neutralise, silence, physically remove people without the nuisance of a proper trial. It mattered little whether they kept or changed their views: it was enough that they could do no further harm. ‘We will remove these individuals from circulation,’ Mussolini told the Chamber of Deputies, ‘in the same way that doctors isolate their contagious patients.’
Better still, no actual crime needed to have been committed. Simply ‘intending’ to commit a ‘conspiracy against the state’ was deemed subversive, of ‘estrema pericolosità’, ‘extreme peril’, to the safety of Italy. It was enough, after 1926, to mutter or sing offensive words about the Duce, or to whistle at a squadrista, to be hauled before the Special Tribunal, after which a sentence of up to five years in some distant outpost was an almost foregone conclusion. One of the first men to leave for the islands was a Roman workman, overheard in his factory saying that he was surprised that no one had yet murdered Mussolini. He was followed, not long afterwards, by thirty-eight Florentine carpenters, cobblers, barbers, typesetters and train-drivers, all men, except for one woman dressmaker, suspected of ‘favouring armed insurrection against the state’. All had been members of the Communist Party. After them went a knife-maker from Frosinone, who had inscribed ‘W Lenin’ on to the handles of four knives.
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