A Bold and Dangerous Family

by Caroline Moorehead

  Of all activities, l’arma azzurra, aeronautics, was the one dearest to Mussolini’s heart. With the appointment of Ferrara’s brutal ras, Italo Balbo, as minister of aviation in 1926 had come a craze for flying, Mussolini himself taking to the skies above Milan in a bowler hat and grey spats. Flight, Mussolini declared, was ‘the greatest poem of modern times . . . the contemporary equivalent of Dante’s Divine Comedy’. When in December 1930 Balbo took off from the lagoon of Orbetello in Tuscany with ten seaplanes to cross the Atlantic, the honour and prestige of Italy had never seemed to ride so high.

  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti had spent the 1920s extolling Futurist versions of art, sculpture, poetry, theatre, aeronautics and even food, in ways that perfectly matched fascist aspirations. For Marinetti, as for Mussolini, the skies were the place to impose domination over the earth. The 1929 Manifesto dell’Aeropittura futurista, of which he was a signatory, glorified man’s ability to conquer space and time through flight and he, like Balbo, had led seaplanes over the Mediterranean and to West Africa and Brazil. The pilot, said Marinetti, was the newest of the new men, one who soared over the pedantic realities of mere mortals.

  It was not enough, however, to be bold. Marinetti wanted to ‘fascistise’ all culture, do away with classical architecture and fill Italy’s Renaissance squares with electric trams and overhead wires. He wanted to industrialise Venice and ban everything foreign – films, food, orchestras and even languages – within ‘our virile, proud, dynamic peninsula’. And since the new man had to be futuristic inside as well as out, he launched a crusade against pasta, saying that it made Italians gross, lazy, complacent and stupid, and led to pessimism and prostitution. ‘Until now men have fed themselves like ants, rats, cats and oxen,’ he declared in an article on Futurist cooking. The new man would do better to eat black olives, fennel hearts and kumquats, and as he ate, stroke sandpaper and velvet, enjoying the contrast in taste and texture, while a waiter sprayed carnation-scented water on to the back of his neck and from the kitchen were relayed the roars of aeroplane motors. At the Holy Palate, his proposed Futurist restaurant in Turin, diners would be given a boiled chicken accompanied by ball bearings in whipped cream, served by a ‘woman of the future’, bald and wearing spectacles. Compared to the remorseless severity and humourlessness of most fascist dictates, Marinetti’s crazy fantasies had a certain innocent charm.

  And over it all presided the towering figure of Mussolini, boastful, canny, vain, cruel and erratic. In 1929, he had moved from his old office in the Palazzo Chigi to the Sala del Mappamondo in the fifteenth-century papal Palazzo Venezia. It was 18 metres long, gilded and frescoed, with a ceiling 12 metres high and a polished mosaic floor, and had a balcony looking out over the piazza below, perfect for speaking to the people, hands on hips, jaw thrust out, unsmiling. Mussolini positioned his desk at the far end of the largely empty hall, so that visitors faced a long intimidating walk to approach him. He liked encounters to be kept brief, no more than fifteen minutes – a loud, ticking clock was placed strategically nearby – and he came across as brisk, speaking quickly, seldom listening. He liked dramatic pronouncements and vast choreographed occasions, reviewing troops or inspecting the peasants draining the Pontine Marshes. On his desk was a picture of his much-loved Angora cat.

  Though his desk, like his hall, was kept free of clutter, Mussolini worked extremely hard. He made lists; the great speeches, designed to come across as spontaneous, were minutely prepared; as the head of several government ministries, he liked to be closely briefed about them all, even if he made little effort to work out how to turn words into actions. He would later say that in 7 years he had transacted 1,887,112 items of business. Boasting that he was never tired, he was a careful and calculating executive, controlling his entourage through a mixture of blandishments and bullying, playing one off against another, weaving a chaotic but cunning path between rational governance and fantastical myths.

  Famously promiscuous and unfaithful, enjoying rapid seductions in the Sala del Mappamondo during which he seldom removed his trousers, Mussolini had eventually married his staid and squarely built Rachele in a church ceremony and moved into the Palazzo Torlonia near the Porta Pia. After the birth of their daughter Edda had come four more children, three boys and another girl, but the family had only recently moved to Rome to live with him. Meals were quick, not least because a severe duodenal ulcer kept him on a diet of fruit and milk. In April 1930, Edda, now twenty, married Galeazzo Ciano, the son of an admiral, in a vast and sumptuous ceremony to which 4,000 guests were invited. Ciano was a greedy, vain, elegant man of considerable charm and laziness, a good mimic and raconteur, most often to be found on the golf course, and already perceived as his father-in-law’s possible successor. He possessed, said his enemies, ‘the character and moral outlook of a popular gigolo’. Given to sexual dalliances, he enjoyed eating pheasants and oysters and kept an exercise bicycle in his office in the Palazzo Chigi.

  As important to Mussolini as his image of a loving family man was his ambition to be the architect of a sparkling, cleaned-up Rome, restored to the splendour of the Emperor Augustus, with Roman roads and stadiums full of statues of naked men. The ‘filthy and picturesque’ was to be replaced by towering imperial buildings in shining white stone, on straight lines. A Via dei Fori Imperiali was planned to run between the Colosseum and the Palazzo Venezia, and an entire town, EUR, to rise on the road leading to the sea. There was to be a 263-foot statue, with the head of Mussolini and the body of Hercules, his hand raised in the fascist salute, and his foot larger than that of an elephant. Meanwhile the Duce’s severe features, his triumphalist poses, were splashed on to posters, walls, coins. Now nearing fifty, he sometimes chose to jog rather than walk, in full uniform, the image of the steely soldier bearing the weight of Italy on his sturdy shoulders. As proof of his superior courage, he had himself photographed with a lioness.

  Mussolini as a family man, with his wife Rachele and their five children

  By comparison, pictures of the royal family, the complacent King Victor Emmanuel and his statuesque wife Queen Elena, were somehow paler and more insubstantial. Their son Umberto – who had survived de Rosa’s assassination attempt – was now married to Marie José of Belgium. Though her short-haired, stylish looks did not wholly conform to those of a comfortable fascist matron, Marie José obligingly agreed to be photographed breastfeeding her new baby. Mussolini considered monarchy, particularly one as supportive and accepting as that of Victor Emmanuel, useful to his notion of history.

  It was only towards the end of 1930 that Italians learnt what the sinister letters OVRA stood for. As Mussolini had said: ‘The more Italians are afraid, the quieter they will be.’ Keeping OVRA’s meaning secret had added to its sense of menace, in no way reduced by spelling it out in several different ways: sometimes the Opera Vigilanza e Rastrellamento Antifascista (Vigilance and Search), sometimes Opera Volontaria di Repressione Antifascista (Repression). It hardly mattered. Its function was perfectly plain. By the end of the 1920s, Bocchini’s vast apparatus of surveillance had been put in place, consisting of a relatively small, tight-knit bureaucracy answerable directly to him, and several thousand ‘trombellieri’, stringers, some permanent, some casual, all jostling for supremacy and preferment. There were spies and informers in restaurants, hotels and cafés; in brothels, factories and military barracks; in schools and universities, where teachers denounced their colleagues and students their teachers, and, sometimes, their parents and their parents’ friends. There was even a paid spy in the Vatican, Monsignor Enrico Pucci, a priest on the Pope’s immediate staff. Pucci was given the number 96 and received 3,000 lire each month.

  ‘We want’, Mussolini told Bocchini, ‘to create . . . a kind of magical eye which keeps Italians under control and can at any moment provide me with a complete, up-to-date picture of everything being said and done in the whole of Italy. Men . . . with the craftiness of a fox and the speed of a serpent, they need to learn the difficult art of
provocation, how to insinuate themselves into a crowd, how to fit into every situation and every social circle.’ Bocchini had done his bidding. Inspector Nudi’s first inspectorate, Zona 1, in Milan had been followed by Zona 2, in Bologna and its surroundings; more were planned for Bari, Avezzano, Palermo, Cagliari, Naples, Florence and Rome. And against the communists, until the early 1930s the main target for the fascists, OVRA had already proved extremely efficient: some 2,000 people had been arrested, most of the communist leaders sent to jail or the confino, and thousands more now lived ‘under surveillance’. Most of this was due to Bocchini and Nudi’s men.

  But the secret services had not been altogether successful. They had spectacularly failed to prevent a bomb going off at the entrance to a trade fair in Milan, minutes before the king was due to arrive. Eighteen people were killed and more than fifty injured. Though the police combed the city, 560 people were arrested, rewards were offered for information and a young man, mistaken for his anarchist cousin, had three ribs broken during interrogation, no culprit could be identified. Bocchini’s failure to anticipate Carlo’s escape from Lipari – despite warnings – was another black mark, as was Bassanesi’s flight over Milan. The methodical, painstaking Nudi asked for, and was given, more men. Manhunts intensified.

  Mussolini remained deeply ambivalent about the Italian intellectuals; he wanted their imprimatur, but he also feared their dissidence. He preferred them to be inside Italy, where they could be watched and threatened, rather than abroad where, like Salvemini and Carlo, they could mount campaigns against him. That Nello was able to live and work, and even travel abroad, relatively unmolested was revealing of the strange nature of fascism itself, a mixture of scrutiny and looking the other way, of menaces and promises of immunity, of violence towards those considered total enemies and accommodation with those who might be redeemed. It was a slippery world, and Nello would have to navigate his way.

  Benedetto Croce, Italy’s best known anti-fascist, was allowed not only to speak and write fairly freely, but also to continue producing his magazine, La Critica. Several times a year, he travelled north to Milan and Turin. Wherever he went, he was a magnet for those trying to keep some kind of independent thought, and this too the fascists tolerated, even if they usually kept a policeman outside his door. In the summers the anti-fascists still at liberty went south to visit him in his house near Naples, or they met somewhere in the mountains, in the guise of tourists. ‘We felt that we were living on an iceberg,’ one of them was to write. Even meeting just a few times a year broke their sense of profound isolation. When Nello managed to join them, tall, rosy-cheeked, he reminded them of a ‘putto, grown enormous, with great candour’.

  By the same token, Luigi Einaudi, Carlo’s former mentor, was allowed to go on teaching at Turin university, making no secret of his liberal views, or the fact that he contributed articles to the London Economist. Nello was under no illusions that, not having the fame of Croce or Einaudi, he would be allowed any such latitude. It was just how far he could operate as an honest historian that he needed to discover. As he wrote at the end of his book on Pisacane, ‘The traveller, anxious to cross the torrent, throws one stone after another into the depths.’ Watching the stones disappear, he can only hope that they are there, out of sight, ready to bear his weight. ‘Pisacane, too, seems to have disappeared into the void. But by his life and by his death, he laid one of the granite blocks on which the Italian edifice is built.’ It was clear that he saw himself and Carlo as such blocks.

  With Pisacane published to respectful reviews, Nello was thinking of starting a magazine to ‘detoxify’ the telling of nineteenth-century European history from the ‘nationalist bacillus’. It would include articles by historians from across Europe and would deal with nothing later than the First World War in order to avoid the thorny topic of contemporary politics. By placing Italy firmly in a wider European context, he told friends, he intended to make Italian readers feel ‘less alone’. His cousin Alessandro Levi, the Ferreros and the Orvietos were all encouraging, as was Croce; even Volpe expressed interest. Nello found the choice of the nineteenth century, with its articulate and heroic Europeans, comforting. ‘When I am with these men,’ he said, ‘I am where I belong. I am at home. The men of today are foreign to me.’

  It was as well that Nello had money, for Italian academia was now closed to him. Unruly and independent-minded schoolmasters had already been purged. In November 1931, after years of increasing restrictions, university professors, who were also employees of the state, were ordered to sign an oath of fealty to the king and to the fascist regime. It caused consternation in academic circles. Some professors were only too happy to obey; others procrastinated, and were threatened. (One joked that the letters of the Fascist Party, PNF, could also stand for ‘Per necessità familiare’, for family reasons). But by 18 December, all but 12 of the 1,200 or so had signed and the recalcitrant dozen were dismissed or had resigned in disgust. The Pope had obligingly made things easier by issuing a communiqué allowing Catholics to take the oath. The academic world throughout Europe protested loudly and in London Mrs Crawford published a letter comparing the fascists to the Ku Klux Klan.

  Florence, once the recognised cultural capital of Italy, had become the home of ‘exquisitely fascist’ artistic activities. A ‘moral cleansing’, was launched, with campaigns against swearing, pornography, immoral plays and indecent fashions. ‘Eroticism’ was to be done away with, wherever it occurred. Girls were enjoined not to dance the Charleston, and to wear thick stockings and blouses with long sleeves. Dance halls were closed down. There were calls to ‘ostracise Northern habits’, such as Christmas trees. The following spring, a meeting was called to discuss immorality on Tuscan beaches, and a Decalogue of Moral Hygiene urged readers not to take bribes, to rise early and not to believe that ‘it is chic to appear discontented’. Number 1 of the Decalogue was ‘Read Mussolini’; number 10, ‘Reread Mussolini’. Some of this spirit of joylessness and fervour had entered the Lyceum, the club in which Amelia had spent so many interesting hours, and from which she now resigned. Those who took her place were committed fascists: in Mussolini’s Italy, there were now very few arenas where intelligent, liberal women could have a voice. It was another indication of the ambiguities of fascism that the Lyceum invited Maria to become a member, despite the fact that she was known to be the wife of a declared anti-fascist. She refused.

  With many of their former acquaintances reluctant to be seen in their company, Amelia, Nello and Maria lived quietly, meeting few people apart from the Orvietos and the Zabbans. Nello’s ‘moral conduct’, noted his police report, was ‘orderly’. Amelia had acquired a smooth-haired terrier called Bubi. Their friends the Ferreros had left for Switzerland. Amelia had resigned from all her publishing ventures and had ceased to write plays, but she continued to turn her hand to children’s stories and to read aloud to Paola and Silvia. On Sundays, Nello went on long walks in the countryside around Florence with Piero Calamandrei, Alessandro Levi and the few other independent spirits still hanging on in fascist Florence. ‘We deluded ourselves’, as Calamandrei put it later, ‘that we could find in the hills our lost freedoms.’

  Nello was the youngest of the group and the most vigorous, a ‘simple and sane’ figure, striding out, sweet-natured, laughing. In his diary he wrote. ‘We are fighting to acquire the pleasure of a normal life.’ But it was scarcely normal. He and Maria had decided to protect their daughters from all contact with fascism: the girls neither went to school nor attended the semi-compulsory after-school activities, but had a Swiss or German governess instead. Whether they realised how closely they were watched is not clear. In their many letters to each other, to Carlo and Marion, to friends in exile, they were very guarded, using only nicknames – Lussu had become carciofo (artichoke), Tarchiani ‘Matilde’, Nitti ‘il presidente’; but their letters ended up copied, typed up, and filed in Bocchini’s ever fatter dossiers. And for all his apparent cheerfulness Nello was often low. ‘H
ow sad, my dear professor, is our life in Italy,’ he wrote to Salvemini. ‘I mean the life of the ‘non-ralliés’ (whether party members or not), condemned to perpetual discontent, isolation and social uselessness.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Dancing for Liberty

  ‘I am not living, I am burning,’ Carlo wrote to Amelia in late 1930, six months after reaching Paris. Describing his life as ‘cyclonic’, he said that the days were devouring him. After the years of enforced inactivity on Lipari, he seemed possessed by the need to move, to meet people, to plan. He was everywhere, talking, organising, travelling. Marion, pregnant, with palpitations and constantly tired, was sometimes bitter and reproachful. She told him one day that Mirtillino, was asking ‘Where has Daddy gone?’ On another: ‘I am not at all happy, dear Carlo . . . I am also sick of so many paper kisses!!! . . . Very angry. Addio.’ Carlo was apologetic, but also stern. ‘You have always understood the importance of what I do,’ he wrote from one of his many journeys away from Paris. ‘It is an opera santa, a great and sacred cause, and even you must see that everything, except for the health of the children, has to be sacrificed to it.’ What Marion really minded was not being able to be part of it all; and when alone boredom quickly turned to depression.