A Bold and Dangerous Family

by Caroline Moorehead

  By dawn they had left Sicily’s western tip far behind them. Fearing pursuit, they took turns at scanning the horizon with binoculars. When they saw boats they picked up the weapons that Lussu had requested be put on board. At 3 o’clock that afternoon, the Dream V reached the coast of Tunisia. ‘Our hearts were bursting,’ wrote Carlo later. ‘We could not stop smiling. It was as if we had changed our skins . . . New interests, new hopes, urgency. In a flash, confino became a memory. We could think only of the future.’ They sent a telegram to Tarchiani, who had made it as far as Tunis and was in an agony of anxiety: ‘Baby born. Mother in excellent health.’ Tarchiani had been waiting for this moment for two years. He had never met Carlo, Lussu or Nitti, but as they walked towards him under the plane trees of L’Avenue de France in Tunis he felt that he had known them all his life. ‘All well’, he cabled his wife. ‘Very glad.’

  Francesco Fausto Nitti, Carlo and Emilio Lussu, on their way to freedom

  The men left behind them pandemonium. It was a Saturday night and many of the guards were not at their posts. Those who were ran around shouting orders. The officer on radio duty refused to send out the alarm without the signature of his superiors, who could not be found. Cannata dithered, and when at last he sent word to the naval base in Naples, it was hours before anyone acted; it was only late next morning that a flying boat was despatched to search for the fugitives. By the time the prefect of Messina contacted Rome, the Dream V had reached the shores of Tunisia. Mussolini, outraged, ordered that he should be constantly updated on progress. Everyone was extremely reluctant to tell him that there was none.

  Forty-eight hours later, a team of men from the Ministry of the Interior descended on Lipari. From their interrogations they learnt that the carabinieri had indeed heard the sound of a boat around 8.30 p.m., but concluded that it was the one belonging to Cannata; and that the head of the police, Tommaso da Ponte, grown bored and lazy, had never bothered to check that the lightbulbs around the cove were working, and had not even known of the existence of the flight of steps down to the rocks. A furious Bocchini accused Cannata of ‘indolence and an absolute lack of intuition and initiative’. Described as ‘opportunistic, corrupt, inefficient’, he was dismissed. (He had long wanted to leave Lipari: as a fervent Mason, he had hated being jailor to Torrigiani.)

  Fabbri and Parri were both arrested for complicity; Bongiorno was repeatedly questioned. Surveillance was tightened up and the whole area around the cove was sealed off. New prohibitions were introduced. The number of roll-calls, patrols and police boats were increased and the militia, who were busy taking out their rage and humiliation on the prisoners, were given more powers. A barbed-wire fence was put up to enclose the whole confino area and sentinels posted day and night. The daily sum given to the inmates for their food and lodging was reduced from 10 lire to 5. When, one evening, a goat sneezed on the mountainside the militia, jumpy and watchful, thought it was some kind of signal: in the ensuing chaos, 35 confinati and 16 islanders were injured.

  But nothing dented the immense excitement, admiration and pleasure felt by most of the prisoners, for whom the escape had been not just a triumph of ingenuity but an act of overwhelming public rebellion against the fascists. The Lipari ‘raid’, as Lussu later said, was like a stone thrown into a calm lake on a sunny day: ‘Around the spot on which it falls ripples form, multiply, fan out and ruffle the flat water, bringing sudden life to apparent death.’

  For Mussolini, it was a small calamity. Not only had three dangerous and articulate critics of the regime escaped an apparently impregnable penal settlement, but they were now free and outside Italy, where they would obviously lose no time in describing in detail a side of fascism that most of the world knew nothing about, or had chosen to ignore. He did not plan to let it go either quietly or unpunished.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  To Be an Exile

  On 29 July, Carlo, Lussu and Nitti woke to freedom. They bought suits, shirts and Basque berets, so as to pass unnoticed, though Carlo had some trouble finding anything in Tunis large enough to fit him. Back on the boat, they informed the authorities that they were bound for Sfax, along the coast towards Libya, then set out in the opposite direction towards Algeria, but were soon driven ashore by heavy seas. While the three fugitives hid, Oxilia reported, as instructed under Tunisian law, to the port authorities. At 4.30 the next morning, hugging the shore, they set out again. A party of mounted spahis kept them company for a stretch of the way, cantering along, their arms raised in salute. Forced into Bizerta by the continuing bad weather and too impatient to delay their arrival in France any longer, they boarded the night ferry for Marseilles. Before they left, Oxilia, who had volunteered to stay with the boat, took photographs. The four men stare out, smiling exultantly.

  During the night, when no one could sleep, Tarchiani filled them in on the world of the anti-fascists in exile, their feuds and penury and endless gossip. At Marseilles, a customs officer asked whether they had anything to declare. No, they replied, ‘we are the smuggled goods’. Carlo, normally the most exuberant member of the party, was quiet, worrying about possible reprisals against his family.

  Their train reached Paris at 11 o’clock on the evening of 1 August. Tarchiani had sent a telegram to Turati and Salvemini, asking them to meet him at a bistro by the Gare de Lyon, but not explaining why. When Carlo, Lussu and Nitti walked in, there was first silence, then cries of excitement. ‘It seemed’, noted Lussu later, ‘as if fascism itself had fallen.’

  ‘They have arrived!’ wrote Turati in La Libertà, the newspaper of the exiled Italians. ‘Fugitives? No, men who have returned to fight under the Italian flag. In a civil war, as in every war, it is the first duty of every prisoner to escape . . . humiliation, shackles, slow death.’ These ‘victors and vindicated’ were the first, but they would not be the last of those who escaped Mussolini’s clutches. The story was picked up by the French newspapers, then sped around the world. Paeans of lyrical praise descended on these courageous and ‘brilliant sons’ of Tuscany, Sardinia and southern Italy, finally at liberty to draw the world’s attention to the ‘agonies of an enslaved people’. Since Carlo spoke English and French, they made him their spokesman.

  What no one could have anticipated was the speed of Mussolini’s response. Even as Carlo’s train was making its way up through France to Paris, he ordered the prefect of Aosta to arrest Marion at the hotel in Courmayeur where she and Mirtillino were staying. The police took them off to Aosta prison and put them into a cell with prostitutes. It was dirty and full of fleas. Discovering, to their discomfiture, that Marion was six months pregnant and suffering from heart problems, the authorities moved her next day into a hotel in Aosta, under police guard. She was forbidden to speak to anyone or to write or receive letters. A young friend, hearing of her arrest, hurried to Aosta, but was only able to watch her pacing around the square, in between her guards. It was thought that the next step would be to send her as a confinata to the penal islands.

  Nello and Maria were on holiday in Fiuggi when they received news of the successful escape from Lipari. They sent Amelia a telegram: ‘Tutto bene’, all well. It was intercepted by the police, who assumed that Nello was in on the plot. There was no proof, but the prefect of Messina, in search of scapegoats, gave his name as one of the organisers. Nello was arrested and taken to the prison of Frosinone, where he was put into a small cell with twelve other men.

  But Mussolini had not reckoned with Carlo’s energy and determination, nor with the British spirt of fair play. Within hours, Carlo and Salvemini, who had excellent contacts in England, had launched a clamorous and indignant campaign to get Marion released. Favours were called in and letters from prominent British academics and politicians began to arrive on Mussolini’s desk. Marion’s English family issued protests. Much was made of her frail state of health and her pregnancy. The Times reported that Mussolini had taken Marion and Nello as ‘hostages’ and the Manchester Guardian warned that any country pretending
to great-power status would suffer ‘fatal discredit’ by such behaviour. The New York Daily News sent Mussolini a telegram asking for clarification. A headline in the Evening Standard spoke of a ‘pure vendetta’. The Daily Express mentioned ‘barbarians’. Newspapers throughout France, Germany and the United States devoted long, highly critical articles to fascist brutality.

  While in London organising Carlo’s escape, Marion had made friends among the circle of clever, strong, well-educated women who had worked in the suffrage movement and now found themselves marginalised from power but still influential. One of these was Sylvia Pankhurst, who had visited Italy in her art-school days, and met Gramsci and the Italian radicals. She sent a telegram expressing solidarity and congratulations to the Rossellis. But there were also Bertha Pritchard, secretary of the Italian Refugees’ Relief Committee, and Barbara Carter, who had covered the Savona trial for the Manchester Guardian and was putting together a series of pamphlets highly critical of the fascists. They and their friends, highly competent and articulate feminists, began feeding stories to the British papers about Marion, ‘cast into a cell’, and used her story to throw more light on fascist Italy.

  Amelia, meanwhile, had arrived in Aosta and been allowed to visit her daughter-in-law and grandson. In public, she was able to remain ‘brave and cool’, but inside she was crushed. ‘This blow’, she told Nello, ‘is really too much for me.’ She felt old, used up, pointless, ‘arcistufa’, totally fed up with ‘this old carcass of mine’. Her sons had already had all that was ‘best and truest’ in her and she had little left in reserve. ‘I send you much love, my dearest, with all my despairing tenderness.’ Amelia was also worrying about Marion, who had fallen ill and seemed fretful and depressed, and she was cross with Carlo for embarking on such a dramatic step with no thought of what it might do to his wife.

  For his part, Carlo was mortified. ‘Here I am,’ he wrote abjectly in a joint letter to his mother and wife from Paris, ‘having obtained my own personal freedom, even if only temporarily, at the expense of yours.’ Were he not absolutely certain that he would become a ‘great force in the struggle for the freedom’ of his country, then he would find what was happening truly unbearable. He battled on with his newspaper crusade, seeming never to sleep, reassuring his family that he would not be deported, since he had committed no crime. ‘Courage, my dear Marionellina,’ he wrote. ‘Have faith, don’t lose your nerve.’ There was no proof against her, ‘none, none, none. They will be forced to give in.’

  Two weeks passed; the campaign in the newspapers continued. Finally the Italian ambassador to London was instructed to put out a statement: ‘Signora Rosselli has not been arrested or molested in any way . . . She is entirely free and nothing whatsoever has been done to curtail her full liberty.’ An official told the Daily News that his ‘countrymen were as tender in their dealings with women and children as anyone else’ and that the Italian people would be deeply wounded to be thought capable of imprisoning ‘a young, expectant, mother’. By now, Carlo had given long interviews to dozens of newspapers, most of which included the word ‘hostage’. Marion and Mirtillino were released.

  To Carlo’s great chagrin, Nello did not fare so well. By 8 August he was back on Ustica, treating the whole thing with his customary good temper. The island, he wrote to Maria, was much as he had left it eighteen months before, and when he landed, not having shaved for a week and wearing a shirt rather like Robespierre’s, his friends told him that he looked like a Risorgimento martyr. Adapting himself to disagreeable surroundings very quickly, he added, had become so much a part of him that he wondered whether he was not suffering from an ‘advanced form of Arab indifference and fatalism’. But, he went on, it was probably only that he had grown a protective carapace against the calamitous times. ‘Not to take the world as it comes, now that would really be an act of folly.’

  Amelia felt none of her younger son’s cheerful resignation. ‘The persecution levelled so remorselessly against me by destiny’, she railed to Nello, ‘has become almost grotesque . . . I am sick to the very death of this life; and I am full of envy for people who are happy.’ She had put in an application to be allowed to visit Nello; it was refused.

  Mussolini had at first forbidden any mention of the escape in the Italian papers. Only on 9 August, twelve days after the three men left Lipari, did a terse three-line item appear in Il Popolo d’Italia. By now, however, what little remained of the underground press in Italy had circulated the story which, like Chinese whispers, had picked up many fantastical embellishments along the way. As an informer reported to Bocchini on 13 August, the ‘anti-fascist murmurations’ overheard in cafés would not have sounded out of place in the novels of Jules Verne.

  In Paris, even as Nitti was putting together a quick book on their escape with details about conditions on the penal islands, and Lussu was writing an article for the Atlantic Monthly, a counter-offensive was launched from Rome. Harold Goad, Marion’s former employer at the British Institute in Florence and a passionate fascist supporter, wrote an article for the Spectator describing Lipari as a charming island of grapes, figs, olives, wine and warm springs. Carlo replied instantly, pointing out that Siberia, too, had hot summers, cloudless skies, melons and corn, but that did not prevent either of them from being penal settlements. Goad responded with a patronising rejoinder that every ‘thoughtful’ Englishman regarded the ‘great moral and spiritual’ values of the ‘Fascist creed’ with justifiable admiration. Soon after, an adulatory article, written a year earlier, was reprinted in the North American Review. It took the shape of an interview with Mussolini, carried out by an American visitor, Katharine Dayton. The Duce, whom she compared approvingly to Napoleon, possessed ‘tremendous native dignity – a dignity with nothing of the strut about it’. His eyes flashed lightning and rolled and sparkled with humour as he chuckled, ‘shyly tapping the side of his nose’, before he kissed her hand.

  Mussolini was plotting his revenge. He ordered that more punitive conditions should immediately be put into place across all the penal islands. Then, to prove that Carlo and his friends’ words were nothing but fabrications, Mussolini sent Thomas B. Morgan, Rome manager of the United Press news agency to visit the islands. Morgan was evidently a good friend to the fascists, for the articles he sent back described a ‘charming picture . . . a spectacle of scenic beauty’, the men tipsy on the delicious local wine, reading, walking or ‘just loafing’. Next, Mussolini despatched the president of the Italian Red Cross, Filippo Cremonesi, to write a report on Lipari and Ponza, another colony just off Naples. Cremonesi was a mild and courteous man, but he was prudent and had no desire to fall out with the fascists, nor to alarm the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. He returned praising the beauty of the islands, the generous amount of space in which the confinati were allowed to roam, the ‘fairness, justice and equanimity’ of the regime. Cremonesi said that the men slept in a ‘sunny dormitory’ and that the illnesses they suffered were no different from those of the general population. What he failed to mention were the clubbings, the damp and dirt of the dormitories, the infections and loss of weight from lack of vitamins and proper food among those desperately trying to send money home to their penniless families. Nor did he touch on the punishment of forty months in prison meted out against Fabbri for his part in the escape, or the fact that Filippich, the mender of bicycles from Trieste, had been so badly beaten up by the militia and his head held underwater in a cistern, that he later died. The ICRC expressed itself ‘satisfied and reassured’.

  Mussolini’s love of Roman antiquity

  On 27 August Nello, apparently on Mussolini’s direct orders, was transferred to the island of Ponza. The journey took twenty-eight hours, in pitching seas. Ponza was generally regarded as the prettiest of the penal islands, but also the hottest, and the place where the most ‘dangerous’ anti-fascists were sent. The police and carabinieri had long since given up trying to keep order, and the confinati were ruled over by a particul
arly brutal militia centurion, whose wife egged him on to ever harsher measures, saying that the prisoners did not show her sufficient respect. His men, wearing a medley of uniform and civilian dress, swaggered around, half drunk, brandishing whips and cudgels. The walls of the little port were covered in obscene graffiti. Those the political confinati considered the ‘dregs’, the drunks, informers, spies and bullies, were all kept together in one dormitory, known as Manchuria, for its bleak, freezing conditions in winter.

  Nello admitted that he had been obliged to spend some days in a ‘stinking’ dormitory, but, as ever, praised the room he was finally allocated, looking out over the port and the surrounding hills. He said the houses were clean and well built and the road that ran along the seafront was the pride of the islanders. This ‘derelict’ place, he wrote, had a ‘pleasing crust of primitiveness’. He was particularly delighted by the close and loving relationship that had developed in Florence between Maria and Amelia. ‘In the midst of so many blows,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘what we have left is our incomparable intimacy and the solidity of our dispersed family.’ He was confident that Amelia would give Maria something of her own extraordinary richness and strength in the face of adversity, and that Maria herself, who shared his mother’s ‘moral stamp’, had much to contribute. His young wife, he said, was a woman who never had a bad thought, was trusting and lacked all artifice. With her, ‘one could imagine founding the kind of family you find in the Old Testament’. Seemingly so frail, and not yet twenty-four, Maria was turning out resilient and resourceful. Nello missed his family, and told Amelia that he found himself pulling faces like Silvia’s, ‘to remind myself even a bit of her dear little face’.