A Bold and Dangerous Family

by Caroline Moorehead

  Lussu, still coughing blood, had taken a room in a house in Lipari largely destroyed in a recent earthquake, its floors perilously sloping; but it had a large terrace surrounding the whole building. He had been invited to join the republican canteen – his political allegiances lay with the republicans – but in the winter of 1927 his health remained precarious and he was seldom well enough to leave the house.

  Three days after his arrival, Carlo was taken to meet Lussu. He found the Sardinian creeping around his semi-derelict room, coughing. They had barely exchanged a few polite sentences about the Risorgimento when Lussu told him that he dreamed of saving himself from the ‘poisonous, lethargic influence of this isolated, unfree existence’. He longed only to escape and spoke with what Carlo would later describe as ‘frenzy . . . [escape] at all times and in all tenses, past, present, future and conditional. Escape by boat, motorcraft, steamer, airplane, air balloon. Escape, escape, escape.’

  But no one had ever escaped from Lipari. Or, indeed, from any of the penal islands. They were too remote, too well guarded, and censorship was absolute.

  Just the same, the two new friends agreed to become what they laughingly referred to as a Club della Fuga. Lussu and Carlo were founder members, along with Nitti. A fourth was Gioacchino Dolci, a thin, short, very dark young Roman of twenty-three, with a laughing, guileless manner. Dolci had spent much of his childhood in an orphanage in Trastevere, before becoming the secretary of the youth wing of the Republican Party. Forced to flee to Paris, where he had survived by washing dishes, he had foolishly returned to Italy in pursuit of a girl, been arrested, sent first to Ustica, where Gramsci befriended him, and then to Lipari. Dolci was hungry for learning, interested in everything that came his way. In the Club della Fuga he found not just friends but mentors. ‘Dolci does gymnastics with ideas,’ noted Carlo.

  Mussolini’s Special Tribunal was hard at work, sentencing dissidents and despatching them to the penal islands. Lipari was filling up. By the spring of 1928, the number of confinati had reached 900 – both political and criminal – guarded by 400 militia Blackshirts and a contingent of policemen. While the islanders were prepare to tolerate the police, many of whom were local men, they were wary of the militia, arrogant young men from other parts of Italy who strutted about, refused to pay their bills, and preyed on the young girls. The Liparesi continued to look on the political confinati with a certain respect and admiration, called them ‘galantuomini’ and gazed at the soberly dressed ‘onorevoli’– the honourables – as they took their afternoon stroll up and down the port or sat in the Eolo drinking coffee, deep in conversation.

  Not long before Carlo’s arrival, the boats from Milazzo in Sicily had brought some fifty of the Aventine secessionists – arrested and sent before the Special Tribunal the moment they lost their parliamentary immunity. With them came Luigi Basso, secretary of Turati’s party, a small, chubby man with curling whiskers who sauntered along impeccably turned out in a dark suit, a bow tie and starched collar, accompanied by his formidable wife in a lace stomacher. Domizio Torrigiani, Grand Master of the Freemasons, had also arrived, a man considered so dangerous that he was always accompanied on his walks by two guards carrying guns. Since he had been described by the local priest as ‘the brother of the devil’, a little girl, watching him alight from the boat, marvelled that he was only a man. Torrigiani was famously mean, but cultured and shrewd. His health was poor and every evening, as he walked the 500 metres one way and 500 metres the other, conversing with all around him, he coughed and coughed. The confinati called him the ‘king of the road’; the locals thought he was a magician.

  Among the newcomers were many communists and anarchists – who between them made up the great majority of the confinati – but also men and women arrested for ‘equivocal behaviour’, or for smuggling, or for supplying birth-control devices. They came from every corner of Italy, from the Veneto down to the toe of Sicily, lawyers and journalists, teachers and farmers, metalworkers and fishermen, woodworkers, carpenters and bricklayers, drivers, barbers, coachmen. For many of them, confino would become their education, their university, the place where they learnt subjects they had never before heard of, and where their political understanding was sharpened. It was in the scuola dei confinati, they would later say, that they learnt to think.

  And among the political prisoners there were women too, but never very many of them. The archives in Rome hold files on every individual sent to the confino. Some are fat, with dozens of documents containing details of arrests, sentences, supposed crimes, changes of address. Others contain just a single page. The women’s files are very thin. On Lipari, when Carlo arrived, there was Florinda Salvatelli, a thirty-seven-year-old peasant woman from Monterotondo, arrested for singing a rude song about Mussolini and described as an ‘ignorant, foul-mouthed . . . disgusting subversive’.Vera Santoni, twenty-six, was a Florentine dressmaker brought up by anarchist parents. She was arrested when she went to lay flowers – together with seventeen other people – on the grave of a communist killed by squadristi. She was described as pretty, intelligent and ‘eloquent’, but active in the ‘Bolshevist campaign.’ At forty-two, Agata Bertollini was one of the older women, of ‘staunchly republican’ views, accused of receiving packets of anti-fascist literature from her brother in New York. Agata was the mother of five young children, and her husband was struggling to keep their farm going without her. In a letter to Mussolini, she begged him to pardon her, ‘with my hands joined in prayer and on my knees’. There is nothing in the archives to indicate that he did.

  And, as the months passed, the boats brought a growing number of wives and children of the confinati, many deeply relieved, despite their small, cramped, dark lodgings, that here at least they were safe after months of constant fear of physical attack by the Blackshirts. ‘This new life’, wrote a woman called Giaele Angeloni, who arrived on Lipari with her new husband Mario, ‘felt like liberation.’ A school was set up for the children, though Bocchini sent word that it be taught by ‘persons of certain fascist faith’.

  Because many of these political prisoners were intelligent, energetic and very bored, they set about devising ways to pass the time. A man called Paolo Fabbri opened a laundry, using the water in the cistern on his terrace and sending his fifteen-year-old son Pietro round the houses to collect the confinati’s dirty clothes. His wife worked in one of the communal kitchens and she and some of their friends also did the ironing. (When Pietro took Carlo’s laundry back to him on Wednesday mornings, he always found a biscuit waiting for him.) Ernesto Sagno from Salerno made doughnuts, which he sold from a basket along the Corso. Filippich, from Trieste, mended bicycles; Ceruti, from Como, opened a carpenter’s shop; Guatelli from Parma arranged for deliveries of Parmesan; Tagli, who had been a famous maître d’hôtel, took charge of the republican canteen. Professor Lazzarini, an expert on Dante, gave talks on The Divine Comedy. Mario Magri, D’Annunzio’s adjutant, organised swimming races, ball games in the water, and boxing matches, which were invariably won by one of the two anarchists from Civitavecchia. The director of the penal colony, Cannata, was a civilised and fairly liberal man and he looked approvingly on all these activities, but some of the militia were already beginning to complain that it was all too lax, and that drunken confinati could be found wandering around at night.

  Every Thursday afternoon, at 4 o’clock, a small group met at Carlo’s house for French conversation under the orange trees. One of the circle was Ettore Albini, theatre critic of Avanti!, arrested for his role in Turati’s escape. They drank glasses of Malvasia, bought by Carlo from the local priest. He had already acquired a reputation for tactful generosity, and the penurious among his students would be given food and a little money to take away. Another couple known for their generosity were Pasquale Binazzi and his wife Zelmira, joint former editors of an anarchist magazine. Binazzi was a small, ruddy-faced man, with his hair en brosse and a piercing stare; Zelmira was tall, slim and elegant and kept everyone’s spi
rits up by singing old ballads in the sweet, pure voice of a young girl. The Binazzis were known as the ‘true apostles of anarchy’.

  It was an odd existence, free but not free; and no one would ever forget these strange yearning years on Italy’s most southern islands.

  On 18 January 1928, Marion arrived on Lipari with Mirtillino. He was seven months old, a happy baby who seldom cried. Carlo had never yet spent a night in the same house as his son. He was much taken by his small boy, ‘so sweet, so lively, so calm, so amusing – enough to gladden the heart of a father theoretically immune to the charm of babies’. The boy’s smiles, he said, made him realise how much Mirtillino would mean to them all. ‘I believe that he has a special feeling for me: he must have understood, at last, that I am, and will be, set in stone, someone in his life.’ But he was not without apprehension: could anyone as involved as he was in ‘humanity’ really be a good father? Carlo had asked Dolci, who was always short of money, to whitewash the house and paint a coloured frieze along the walls of Mirtillino’s bedroom. He was to share it with a Tuscan nanny, Maria Porcellotti, whose fiancé was a confinato anarchist from Pistoia and who had herself been declared ‘exuberant and troublesome’ by the fascists.

  Life quickly settled into a routine. They rose early, in time for Carlo to attend the 8 o’clock roll-call. He had managed to find a piano and both he and Marion were taking lessons, and he had also recruited a newly arrived political prisoner to teach him German. Marion agreed to give three English classes a week to Nitti and two other men; they found her very strict. Though the soil was sandy and somewhat poor, and when it rained the earth turned to mud, they planted a vegetable garden. Carlo was taking his turn in the kitchen, in the ‘cakes department.’ Spring came early, and in February Marion wrote to Zia Gì: ‘I have to tell you that Mirtillino is even more beautiful than he was!’ The snowdrops were out, a ‘demon’ wind had been blowing for fifteen days and the garden was full of weeds, but there were the first signs of beetroot, radishes, lettuce and celery. They had also put in pansies, sweet peas and lilies. Carlo, she said, was against bulbs, but she herself had ordered some from catalogues. She asked Amelia to send coffee and Quaker Oats from the Old England shop in Florence and a bucket and spade for Mirtillino. As the weather got warmer, she was given permission to walk up into the mountains, from where she watched Stromboli’s small volcanic eruptions. Amelia arrived on a short visit and met Nitti, Dolci and Lussu, who said that she was just like Cornelia Africana, the upright, virtuous widow of Tiberius Gracchus the Elder, whose two reforming sons had challenged the Roman senate in the second century BC. She and Marion paid a visit to the neighbouring island of Vulcano.

  Carlo was restless; whenever the boats bringing post failed to arrive, sometimes for days on end, he fretted. Letters were crucial to his life, as they were for all the family. They had long used affectionate nicknames for each other – Amelia was ‘Mietta’, ‘Mimmola’, ‘Lilla’, ‘Bobolink’, ‘Pippola’, ‘Tiullina’; Salvemini remained ‘Father Bear’, and ‘Marion ‘Biancofiore’. But now, to circumvent the censors, they used Tuscan expressions, words in English and French, private jokes, slang, rhymes, jumbles of words, terms of endearment, blending both intimacy and the need for secrecy. Sarina Nathan became ‘Don’t say’, for her fondness for English. ‘Negro’ was used to describe something dark, something to be avoided. What the censors and the police in Rome, who received, copied and filed many of their letters, made of them, no one knows.

  ‘For myself,’ Carlo wrote after Amelia left, ‘I can’t say that I am going through a very brilliant period . . . the tedium of this humiliating life oppresses me.’ The days passed, one just like another, broken only by ‘little crises of inner rebellion’. After a few days of ‘cerebral life’, he told Nello, ‘I feel a sense of nausea and revolt, a desire for action.’ He had been on Lipari just three months; four years and nine months remained of his sentence. He could never, he said, accept this life of ‘resignation and oblivion’, which others seemed to tolerate. His existence, he wrote to Gina Lombroso, had become ‘all form and no substance, like bread without yeast, a day without light’. It was telling that both Carlo and Nello kept in touch with some of Amelia’s friends, remarkable people with whom they had grown up and to whom they continued to feel close.

  In the evenings, as it grew warmer, the family sat out in their garden, Marion knitting, reading aloud to each other from Molière or the Greeks. She was trying to work out what Carlo would wear come the summer heat: linen trousers, an open-necked sports shirt, a light flannel blazer, possibly striped or blue, and she asked Amelia to find them in Florence. They should be, she wrote, ‘outsize!’ Though Carlo had lost some weight, he was still somewhat plump. Even as he rebelled against what he called the daily ‘contemplation of domestic harmony’, Carlo knew that he was lucky to have found Marion. She was a woman, he told his mother, who was prepared to follow him anywhere, stop doing what she was doing to attend to him, and yet someone who remained essentially independent. And this, he said, was exactly what he needed. ‘But who knows how long this wave under which we are submerged will last?’ How long would he have to live in this ‘strangely deformed’ existence? Without Marion and Mirtillino, he kept saying, his life on Lipari would be truly unbearable.

  Help arrived, in the shape of Ferruccio Parri, his wife Esther and their two-year-old son Giorgio, known as Dodo. Having been refused permission to serve his sentence somewhere in the north, where he would be close to his family, Parri had found himself on Ustica, before persuading the authorities to let him move to Lipari, where the climate was said to be better for small children. During their long months in prison together, in Como and Savona, Carlo and Parri had grown very close. It was from Parri that Carlo had learned ‘the value of spiritual discipline, of rigorous moral habits, of stoical indifference (perhaps exaggerated) towards the practical and ordinary aspects of life’. Parri was a man who ‘gave, gave, always gave but never took’.

  Rooms had been found for the Parri family in the Villa Diana, a fine two-storey yellow-stucco house not far from the Rossellis, with electric light, ‘almost’ running water, ‘views and fresh air’ and the use of the garden and terrace. They were to share the house with the Grand Master of the Freemasons, Torrigiani, and other onorevoli. There was talk of Parri joining the Club della Fuga, but he said that he feared repercussions against his wife and elderly parents. Like many of the men arriving from long months of confinement, his health was poor: he had bad rheumatism and found walking hard.

  Politics was the daily bread of the confinati, for there was little else for them to do. The amorphous nature of fascism meant that everyone searched constantly for meaning. Even those who had arrived feeling tepid about politics were soon drawn in. Despite the ban on political conversations, the confinati were constantly talking, analysing, interpreting, rewriting the past, as they walked up and down the Corso in their neat dark suits or sat in the Café Eolo, their conversations fanned by rumours and information gleaned from new arrivals. Like the Rossellis, all had been quick to learn the art of metaphor and disguise. Some of their phrases were both obscure and absurd: an ‘oyster farm’ had come to mean the monarchy. The consensus among them was that fascism had been the inevitable result of the war, and of the fact that working-class Italians had been mobilised and manipulated by the privileged classes. Where they disagreed was on how to beat the regime.

  The communists were the most disciplined, and were already forming themselves into cells: four or five comrades under an ‘amico’, five amici under a parente, four parenti under a famiglia. They were also at work keeping up the morale of their members. Their view was that any future bourgeois democracy was to be rejected; they would endorse only a government of the working class. The anarchists scorned all forms of organised government. The socialists havered, some saying that what was needed was a return to a pre-fascist, but greatly improved, democracy.

  Carlo, who had for some time been plunged into what he descr
ibed as a ‘regime of utter laziness’, now felt ready to turn his mind to politics. The arrival of Parri had galvanised them all, and the two men, together with Lussu and Nitti, sat around the garden of the Rosselli house pondering the possible shape of a future Italy. ‘What we were looking for’, Parri would write, ‘was a new rallying cry, persuasive and powerful enough to bring about a new revolution, an anti-fascist revolution’. As Carlo saw it, if The Communist Manifesto of 1848 had been the ‘revolutionary Gospel’ for almost a century, what was needed after the bitter experience of fascism was a ‘new promise, more humane and more liberating than Marxist ideology’.

  Though these four left-leaning men differed in the details of their political beliefs, they shared a total refusal to accept the state into which Italy had sunk, an instinct to fight, and a negation of all that fascism stood for. Most importantly, they kept telling each other, they did not want to create a new party, but to transform socialism so that it reflected a fairer society. Drawing their thoughts from Gobetti, from the Aventine parliamentarians, from Matteotti, Turati and Salvemini, they kept coming back to the two same words: liberty and justice.

  Very quickly, Carlo emerged as the strongest voice. ‘I have never seen a man so eager to explore, to conquer, to grow,’ wrote Parri later. ‘He was like a volcano in continuous eruption, both physically and intellectually,’ And when the four men were not deep in discussion, Carlo sat down to formulate these new thoughts, to produce a programme, a modern manifesto. As he wrote, Marion hid the pages inside the piano.