A Bold and Dangerous Family

by Caroline Moorehead

  Through Carlo and Marion, he had introductions to Bertha Pritchard and her circle of clever women friends, who in turn were being fed material on Italy by Salvemini, whose appetite for work was prodigious and who never tired of fresh onslaughts on the fascists. His book, The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy, had been published to considerable publicity, both in the US and in England, and a thousand copies smuggled into Italy. Salvemini, noted Mussolini, was full of madness and hatred; an Italian police report described him as ‘touchy, vindictive, proud, presumptuous, cultured and intelligent’.

  There were also invitations to dine with Don Luigi Sturzo, one of the most remarkable of Mussolini’s opponents, a tall, thin, beaky Catholic priest from Sicily. In 1919 Don Sturzo had bitterly attacked Mussolini, and become one of the founders of the Partito Popolare Italiano – a precursor to the post-war Christian Democrats – and for a brief moment the leader of 100 members of parliament. However, any coalition between socialists and his party had been unacceptable to the Vatican, and in 1924 Don Sturzo had been dismissed by the Cardinal Secretary of State Gasparri, on the wishes of Mussolini, and sent to London on prolonged study-leave for his refusal to endorse the fascists. Don Sturzo was still campaigning for a party based on Christian teachings, but not subservient to the Catholic Church. He was much loved by Bertha Pritchard, who helped translate his writings, and by Salvemini, who called him ‘one of the best things in my life’. He had reviewed Nello’s book, praising it highly. Together, they talked endlessly about liberty, ‘for all, and always’. Mindful of their seditious talk, Il Popolo d’Italia referred to them as ‘authentic international carrion’. Carlo and Don Sturzo had kept up an affectionate correspondence, which occasionally turned frosty when Carlo seemed too critical of the Church’s support for the fascists.

  In London, Nello saw Salvemini for the first time in five years. It was an emotional reunion. Soon after, Nello wrote his mentor and friend a loving, appreciative letter, in his usual open, almost jaunty style. Salvemini, he said, had taught him about political thought, about the great pleasure of serious work, about relating the present to the past. ‘My dearest Professor, only you know how much I owe you. You made me a man. Alongside you, under your influence, I became a man.’ But, once again, he needed guidance. He was about to be thirty, and felt himself both old, and yet still a child. What should he do? Could Salvemini suggest a subject that would both satisfy his need for historical research and at the same time have a bearing on contemporary politics? How could he steer his way between these conflicting sirens?

  Carlo and Marion had applied for passports to visit Nello in England, but as aliens and political refugees in France, these were refused, neither the French nor the British willing to make difficulties with the fascists. Word went out for the port officials in Dover, Folkestone, Newhaven, Southampton and Harwich to keep an eye out in case they tried to enter the country illegally. Ramsay MacDonald was back in power, once again with a minority Labour government, and there had been hopes among the antifascists that he would stiffen up British attitudes against Mussolini. But MacDonald was not prepared to provoke his displeasure. The ‘blood-thirsty organ grinder’, as the Illustrated London News described Mussolini, remained more a figure of fun than a despot for the English, who continued somewhat condescendingly to say that, while there would be no question of a dictatorship in England, a firm hand was probably necessary for the unruly and theatrical Italians and their suspicious weakness for the Bolsheviks. Mussolini, observed Harold Nicolson smugly, would never have been a fascist if he had been ‘an Englishman in England’. It would take the rise of Hitler for the British to see the dangers of totalitarianism.

  In the six years since Carlo’s visit to the Fabians, the London fascio had opened schools in Southwark, King’s Cross, Marylebone, Hackney and Stratford, moved into new offices in Greek Street, and were busy corralling the sprawling Italian community, inveighing against all who transgressed against italianità, referring to them as ‘fossils’ and ‘feeble crusts’ on the manliness of the new virile Italy. An Italian countess going by the name of Maria Vanden Heuvel had written an ode to Mussolini, ‘O tu, raggio di sole nascente’ – ‘Oh you ray of the rising sun’ – and sang it on all possible occasions, accompanying herself on the piano. But the Italian fascists in London also had their violent side: when Nitti’s book, Escape, was published by George Putnam, there were threats to blow up its offices.

  Amelia had also applied for a visa and when it came through she joined Nello in London. Bertha Pritchard and her friends were precisely the kind of women whose company Amelia most enjoyed. Then, at Nello’s invitation, Alberto Moravia came to visit them in London. The success of his latest novel Gli indifferenti, with its disparaging portrayal of young people under fascism, materially greedy and empty of all ideals, had made him the enfant terrible of the Italian literary world. But his notoriety also gave him some protection from the wrath of the fascists, and particularly that of Mussolini. Ever slippery in his attitude towards politics, Moravia enjoyed moving in fascist circles, though he was greeted one day by Mussolini’s mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, with the words: ‘You’re the cousin of that pig Carlo Rosselli.’ Carlo, who had finished reading the book on Lipari, considered it ‘amoral and morbid’. Amelia disliked its cool cynicism; she had become critical of her once much-loved, talented nephew and complained that he always seemed bored and disgruntled.

  On his way home to Italy, Moravia paused in Paris to see Carlo, who asked him to post a letter in Rome, written to an anarchist friend, because he feared it might otherwise be intercepted by the secret police. Moravia demurred. What if he were spotted? Carlo laughed. It would be wonderful propaganda for the anti-fascists if a writer of his renown were arrested. Moravia took the letter.

  Marion was again pregnant, despite taking precautions. ‘We are in despair,’ Carlo wrote to his brother; they were thinking about an abortion. Nello wrote a jocular letter to Amelia: ‘Madonna, what a couple of cats those two are.’ What worried them all was whether Marion’s heart would withstand another pregnancy.

  At the end of the year Nello met Maria in Switzerland. Mussolini had granted her a passport ‘to avoid the nuisance . . . of pressure by the Rosselli family’. The worry and uncertainties of the past two years had taken their toll and she was very thin; there were fears that she might have inherited something of her father’s depressions. But a cure in the mountains, away from the two demanding little girls, left in Florence with Amelia, lifted her spirits. At the turn of 1930, they settled into a hotel in Montreux, and Nello painted a portrait of his young wife in bed. He was enjoying, he told Zia Gì, a ‘second edition of my honeymoon’, and he did not know which of the two he found sweeter, his own intense happiness or the spectacle of Maria returned to such ‘joy and liveliness. She laughs at everything, is enthusiastic about everything, and has such a full and sane attitude to life.’ He persuaded her to unpin her chignon and leave her dark curly hair loose. She looked, he said, ‘adorable’. In late January Maria went back with Nello to spend a few weeks in London. When she was obliged to have a minor ear operation, Nello wrote an eight-page, closely spaced letter to Amelia, describing every detail.

  After further consultations with Salvemini, Nello had settled on the subject for his new book, a biography of Pisacane, the Neapolitan patriot and officer who fought at Mazzini’s side in 1848, was exiled in Lausanne and London and eventually committed suicide at the age of thirty-nine. One of his first readers was Amelia, who considered it a ‘vast and profound bit of work’, made all the more so because Nello had put so much of himself into it. Alessandro Levi agreed, but said that it made him feel nervous. He suggested that Nello tone down his words, since they seemed to allude so openly to the fate of the anti-fascists driven into exile. Salvemini’s teachings on the importance of relating the past to the present had borne fruit, but these were dangerous times. Even when softened and made more ambiguous, Nello’s book still read as a commentary on fascist persecution, with
barely veiled references to Mussolini, and much praise for the ‘very few’ honest and decisive patriots, who ‘non mollerano’, would not weaken. Even the normally fiery Salvemini urged tact and caution. What they did not know was that a spy was on their trail even in London, and that he had reported that ‘Rosselli, Mary, known in feminist circles’, speaking good Italian, was raising money for anti-fascist causes.

  Carlo and Nello had not met for three years. Though they wrote to each other constantly about their work, praising each other’s efforts – Nello said that Carlo’s short book on his escape from Lipari, Fuga in Quattro Tempi, showed the marks of a ‘great’ writer – what they longed to do was talk face to face. Since he was unable to come to England, Carlo kept pressing Nello to visit France. With his trusting and innocent nature, so heedless of possible dangers that it worried his friends, he reassured Nello that he was never watched, that his post was never intercepted, and that, providing they met somewhere other than Paris, it was ‘mathematically impossible’ that Nello would be compromised. ‘There are so very many things that I want to say and ask you, dear Nellino, and I feel such happiness and tenderness at the very thought of embracing you again.’ But Nello was wary. He had promised Maria that he would do nothing to provoke another sentence on the penal islands. And he was right to be anxious. His police file in Rome included notes on his every movement, on the names and addresses of the people he was meeting, along with Maria’s comings and goings. Amelia too was now closely watched. A note circulated by Bocchini’s men urged ‘the most diligent vigilance in order to keep track of her movements and observe everything she does’.

  And now Volpe, hounded by Mussolini over Nello’s suspiciously long absence, wrote sternly to his young protégé to delay no longer. Reassuring Volpe that he had no intention of breaking his promise, Nello nonetheless asked Carlo to warn him if things were happening that might make his return to Italy dangerous. They devised a code: the words ‘affectionate regards’ meant that it was perilous; ‘excellent, have a good journey’ that it was safe. The brothers worried ceaselessly about each other’s safety, telling each other again and again: take care, don’t make a joke about the dangers, do not go out on the lake, do not take public transport, try always to have a friend with you. Still Nello hesitated about going home, while at the same time fearing that the longer he stayed away, the harder he would find it to go back. ‘I cannot tell you’, he wrote to Carlo, ‘with what reluctance I return to my cage.’ But with Maria and the children in Florence, he really had no choice.

  The two brothers met only briefly as the train taking Nello back to Italy paused in Paris.

  The cage to which Nello chose voluntarily to return was very nearly fully enclosed, a vast prison in which all aspects of life were regulated and all attempts to escape foiled. Since the liberal state had been unruly and disorderly, the fascist state would be all about order, unremittingly enforced. As Mussolini put it, ‘In a certain sense, you could say that the policeman preceded the professor in history.’

  The early 1930s were a golden age for fascism: the regime seemed secure, the anti-fascists, widely regarded as traitors, were exiled or silenced. From the top of Italy to the heel, men, women and children paraded in their uniforms – some senior fascist officials had twenty different outfits– to the sounds of ‘Giovinezza’. They venerated the Duce and tried their best to obey the rules. Newsreels beamed around the world pictured natty child fascists mimicking grown men, saluting, singing, marching. In the Pontine Marshes south of Rome, malaria was retreating as a programme of public works drained the swampy soil. In Sicily, fascist policemen sent from Rome were busy purging the corrupt officials and curbing Mafia killings and extortion. A plebiscite reported 8½ million people as endorsing the fascists, and 135,000 refusing to do so. And where everything was not quite as it should have been, no one was allowed to say so. As Mussolini declared in 1928, ‘Italian journalism is free because it serves just one cause and one regime; it’s free because . . . it can and does act to control, to criticise and to make progress.’ There was very little, now, to distinguish one newspaper from another.

  The acrimonious, mistrustful relationship between Church and state had been at the heart of Italian politics since the Risorgimento. Having suppressed Freemasonry, the Church’s implacable enemy, Mussolini had spent the late 1920s inching fitfully towards accommodation with the Vatican. Early in 1929, at a ceremony of considerable pomp held in the Vatican Palace, he signed the Lateran Accords, making the Vatican a fully independent enclave and its citizens exempt from fascist laws. The Church was given authority over marriage, religious teaching was made obligatory and crucifixes were returned to the classroom. In return, the Vatican recognised the fascist state, and Pope Pius XI graciously described Mussolini as the ‘man whom Providence sent us’ – though he cannot have been altogether reassured when Mussolini announced that fascism was itself a religion, ‘a passion, a faith, an apostolate’. In Britain, the Catholic Tablet called the Duce an ‘intellectual giant’. Journalists hinted that fascism had somehow even inoculated Italy against the economic depression sweeping the west. Don Sturzo was offered an appointment as a canon of St Peter’s Basilica – on condition that he renounce all political life. He turned it down.

  While the fascist propaganda machine was busy spewing out self-congratulatory statistics – litres of milk distributed, numbers of summer colonies for children set up – a ‘corporate’ state was coming into being, made up of a great many phrases, but also a great deal of what Salvemini described as ‘humbug’. ‘Don Quixote’, said Mussolini, ‘attacked windmills as if they were real monsters.’ He would deal with them ‘as if they were windmills’. Before the ‘advent of the saviour’, Italy had apparently been a country of loafers, dandies and drunkards. Now it was one of sportsmen and fecund mothers. This, at least, was the theory. In practice, Italians had been riding bicycles and producing large families long before the March on Rome. What was more, by the early 1930s, there were a million Italians out of work, and those in work had seen their personal rights, political liberties and bargaining powers vanish. In Bari, the southern showcase town for the fascists, a quarter of all inhabitants lived four to a room. In Sicily, the policemen sent to round up suspected mafiosi had used the occasion to mop up political opponents and had merely driven the Mafia underground.

  The Italians were fed inconsistencies, falsehoods, contradictions, differing interpretations, all designed to mystify and confuse, many of it transmitted in stentorian, martial style over the radio. It was forbidden to mention failures. When, in the early 1930s, the young journalist Luigi Barzini was sent by the Corriere della Sera to report on Sardinia, he was instructed not to mention poverty, malaria or banditry for, officially, these no longer existed. In reality, much of the south remained as it had always been, mired in backwardness and lawlessness.

  By 1931, when Nello returned to live permanently in Italy with Maria and his two young daughters, a new generation of Italian children who had never known anything but fascism was growing up. The Opera Nazionale Balilla, with its two million children, controlled every aspect of sport and physical training. The First World War had revealed Italian men to be in poor condition, many with heart problems, rickets and congenital illnesses. The new physical instructors were to be ‘biological engineers’ and builders of a more perfect ‘human machine’. Throughout the 1920s, federations of cyclists, footballers, motorcyclists, tennis and rugby players, roller-skaters, weightlifters, skiers and sailors had been set up. They were paying off. The Olympic Games held in Amsterdam in 1928 had yielded a mass of gold medals for Italy. Pot-bellied Fascist Party leaders were to be found crammed into tight gym clothes, bouncing on trampolines. In the new Foro Mussolini in Rome, huge naked male statues were stationed around a running track.

  As for girls, who had to be protected from the ‘unnatural desires of English suffragettes’ and the frivolity and worldliness of ‘French coquettes’, they were made to dance, garden, iron and knit, and
given ‘doll drills’, in which they were taught how to hold babies the correct way. When, in the early summer of 1928, thousands of girls between the ages of sixteen and eighteen were brought to Rome for the first gymnastic-athletic competition, they were told to discipline their muscles and take part in rifle practice, while at the same time to study ‘good mothering’, in order to become ‘neither feeble . . . nor gloomy’. (Pope Pius XI protested about the rifles: if girls raised their arms, it should ‘be always and only in prayer and charitable actions’.)

  And yet fascism sent out conflicting messages to girls. Young women who tried to join an air club in Bologna were turned away on the grounds that ‘in fascist Italy, the most fascist thing women can do is to pilot the making of children’. The fascists wanted their women at home, producing babies. They liked wide hips, florid complexions, good bones and passive dispositions, but they also wanted girls to exercise, which made them thinner, more athletic and less passive. The press was instructed never to portray women with dogs (child substitutes), wasp waists (unsuited to motherhood and probably syphilitic), or as excessively thin (probably sterile).

  Long before the end of the first decade of fascist rule, schools were resounding to Eia! Eia! Alalà!, the cry of the Roman legions. Both boys and girls wore white gloves, and marched along their school corridors in perfect order and silence like well-drilled soldiers. When visitors came, the children rose to their feet, and, at a given command, simultaneously stretched out their right arms in a Roman salute. On the walls of their classrooms hung framed fascist maxims and photographs of Mussolini, along with little lamps, surrounded by flowers, to honour fascist martyrs.

  Under a new Ministry of National Education, real ‘fascistizzazione’ began. Schools were no longer places to foster curiosity and learning, but rather agencies of indoctrination. Spontaneity and initiative had given way to stifling uniformity. Five separate commissions sifted through existing school books, rejecting all that seemed to weaken ‘italianità’, and replacing them with eulogies to heroic aviators and explorers. The story of Pinocchio was jettisoned as being mawkish and sentimental. Essays and drawing competitions were set on edifying themes: ‘The glories of Ancient Rome’, ‘The mother of the hero’ or, best of all, on the Duce as hero. Patriotic songs punctuated every class, every gymnastic exercise. Life, declared Mussolini’s brother Arnaldo, ‘should be attacked like a mountain range which can only be crossed with difficulty’. Action, not thought: thinking was harmful to health.