“To think he was once so neat, Mario!” my mother said. “He was so meticulous, so fussy. He was like Silvio!”
“But now,” my father said, “he’s changed. Frances let me know the place was a mess. You lot are slobs!”
“Not I. I’m neat,” my mother said. “Look in my closets.”
“Hardly! You mess everything up! You couldn’t find my winter suit!”
“Yes, I did find it! I knew just where it was! But I put it aside to mend because it’s old. You can’t wear it anymore, Beppino!”
“There’s no way I’m getting rid of it. I wouldn’t dream of it. I’ll be dead before long so I’m hardly going to have a new suit made for me!”
“You had that suit made when you went to Liège! You wore it throughout the war! You’ve been wearing that suit for nearly ten years now!”
“So what if I’ve worn it? It’s still a very good suit! I don’t throw money away like the rest of you. You lot are all megalomaniacs!”
“Even my poor little mother,” he said, “always insisted that I get suits made. She didn’t want me to look bad when I went to visit La Vendée. My poor cousin Ettorino was very elegant and she didn’t want me to make a bad impression when compared to him!”
“At La Vendée’s place,” he said, “there were lunches to which fifty, sixty people were invited. There was an entire procession of carriages. Bepo, the porter, served at the table. Once he fell down the stairs and broke a large pile of dishes! When my brother, poor Cesare, was weighed after those lunches he’d have gained five or six kilos!”
“My poor brother Cesare was too fat. He ate too much. I wouldn’t want Alberto, who also eats a lot, to become fat like poor Cesare!”
“Everyone ate too much. In those days everyone ate too much. I remember my grandmother Dolcetta. How she could eat!
“On the other hand, my mother, poor thing, ate very little. She was thin. Poor thing. My mother was very beautiful when she was young. She had a beautifully shaped head. Everyone said that she had a beautiful head. She also gave lunches for fifty or sixty people. There was hot ice cream and cold ice cream. We ate very well!
“At those lunches my cousin Regina was very elegant. She was beautiful, ah, Regina, she was very beautiful!”
“But no, Beppino,” my mother said, “she was a fake beauty!”
“Ah, no, you’re wrong. She was very beautiful! I liked her a lot. Poor Cesare, he liked her a lot too. As a young woman, however, she was a bit silly. She was very silly! Even my mother often said it about her. She said, ‘Regina is very silly!’ ”
“My uncle, the Lunatic, sometimes went to those lunches of your mother’s,” my mother said.
“Sometimes, but not always. The Lunatic put on airs, he found the atmosphere too bourgeois, too reactionary. He put on airs, your uncle.”
“He was so nice!” my mother said. “He was such a nice man, the Lunatic! He was so witty! He was like Silvio! Silvio took after him!
“Most eminent Signor Lipmann,” my mother said. “Do you remember what he said? He would always say ‘Blessed are the orphans!’ He said that many crazy people were made crazy by their parents. ‘Blessed are the orphans,’ he’d always say. He understood psychoanalysis and it hadn’t even been invented yet! Most eminent Signor Lipmann,” my mother said. “I can still hear him!”
“My mother, the poor thing, had a carriage,” my father said. “Every day she went for a ride in her carriage.”
“She took Gino and Mario with her in the carriage,” my mother said, “and after a little while they started vomiting because the smell of the leather bothered them and they got the whole carriage filthy and she got very angry!”
“Poor thing!” my father said. “She was so upset when she had to give up that carriage!
“Poor thing,” my father said. “When I came back from Spitzberg, where I had gone inside a whale’s cranium to look for cerebrospinal ganglia, I brought back with me a bag full of my clothes covered in whale blood and she was too disgusted to touch them. I took them up into the attic and they stank beyond belief!”
“I never did find those cerebrospinal ganglia,” my father said.
My mother said, “He got all his good clothes dirty for no reason!”
“Maybe you didn’t look hard enough, Beppino!” my mother said. “Maybe you should have kept looking!”
“Sure! What a nitwit you are! It wasn’t as easy as all that! You’re always ready to put me down. What a jackass you are!”
“When I was at boarding school,” my mother said, “I also studied whales. They taught natural history very well and I liked it a lot. But at that school we had to go a little too often to mass. We were always having to confess. Sometimes we didn’t know what sin to confess and so we’d say, ‘I stole the snow!’ ”
“ ‘I stole the snow!’ Ah, how wonderful my boarding school was! How much fun I had!”
“Every Sunday,” she said, “I went over to Barbison’s place. Barbison’s sisters were nicknamed ‘the Blesseds’ because of their sanctimoniousness. Barbison’s real name was Perego. His friends wrote this poem for him:
Night or day there’s no grander feller
Than Perego and his wine cellar.”
“Let’s not begin again with Barbison!” my father said. “How many times have I heard her tell that story!”
NOTES
“negroism”: According to Shaul Bassi, the director of the Venice Center for International Jewish Studies, in the Judeo-Italian language of the Venetian Jews, in which Ginzburg’s father was raised, “negro” meant “foolish, awkward, or stupid,” and “negrigura,” which I have translated as “negroism,” meant “foolish thing.” Bassi claims that the words never had overtly racial content. Ginzburg, however, was very aware of the words’ racial significance and her deliberate placement of these terms on the opening pages of her novel resonates throughout the book.
the soft r: In some regions of Italy, notably Piedmont and other parts of the northwest near the French border, r is produced as an uvular sound in the back of the mouth. This is known as the erre moscia or soft r or to linguists as rhotacism. The use of this r has been regarded by some Italians as a sign of snobbery or as a speech impediment.
irredentist: The Irredentist Party was founded in 1878 to advocate for the union and recovery to Italy of all Italian-speaking districts subject to other countries. This included Trieste, Ginzburg’s father’s native city, which remained under Austrian rule until the end of World War I.
La Vendée: A staunchly royalist district in France renowned for its revolt against the revolutionary government in 1793.
boarding school: A collegio or boarding school in Italy is understood primarily to be a charitable institution established by religious orders for the education of children from underprivileged families or for children who due to learning disabilities or behavioral problems are unable to succeed at regular public day schools.
Metastasio: Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782) was an Italian poet and the most celebrated librettist in Europe writing during the eighteenth century for the “serious opera.” The verse here parodied is from part one of his oratorio Il Guiseppe Rinconosciuto (1756): Se a ciascun l’interno affano
Si leggesse in front scritto;
Quanti mai, che invidia fanno,
Ci farebbero pietà!
If each man’s inner stress
His forehead did express;
How many who invite our envy,
Would instead gain our pity!
nicknamed “Barbison”: In Milanese dialect “il Barbison” means a man with large whiskers.
Bissolati, Turati, and Kuliscioff: Leonida Bissolati (1857–1920) was a prominent member of the Italian Socialist Party until he was expelled in 1912. He then co-founded the right-wing Reformist Socialist Party. Filippo Turati (1857–1932) was the founder of the Italian Socialist Party in 1892; when he was expelled in 1921, he founded the United Socialist Party along with Anna Kuliscioff and Giacomo Matt
eotti in opposition to the emerging fascism. Anna Kuliscioff (1857–1925), born in Russia, was a Jewish Russian revolutionary, a medical doctor, a feminist, and an anarchist who converted to Marxism. She was a close collaborator with Turati and helped him found the Italian Socialist Party.
come to Bergamo on a military campaign: In 1859, during the Second War of Independence, Giuseppe Garibaldi and his army freed the city of Bergamo from the Austrian Empire to become part of the Kingdom of Italy.
fifty lire: At the time, the exchange rate was 19 lire to 1 United States dollar.
the Karst Plateau: The Karst is a region in southwest Slovenia and northeastern Italy near Trieste and is the location of the twelve Battles of Isonzo between the Italian and Austrian armies during World War I.
The Daughter of Iorio: A poetic play by Gabriel D’Annunzio about the fears and superstitions of peasants from the Abruzzi, which was first performed in 1904.
Andrea Costa: Originally an anarchist, Costa renounced anarchy to co-found the Partito dei Lavoratori Italiani in 1892. He was married to Kuliscioff and they had a daughter, Andreina. Kuliscioff eventually left him for Turati. Costa remained an active politician throughout his life, serving as the mayor of Imola and a representative in the Italian parliament.
a friend of Father Semeria’s: Father Semeria (1867–1931) was a Barnabite priest renowned throughout Italy for his popular sermons and books on Catholicism.
Adele Rasetti, Galeotti’s sister: Adele Galeotti Rasetti was a distinguished painter and student of the artist Giovanni Fattori (1825–1908), the leader of the Macchiaoli group. For more about her see Andrea Baffoni, Adele Galeotti Rasetti: Vita e opere di un’allieva di Giovanni Fattori (Perugia: Effe Edizioni, 2011).
the paintings of Casorati: Felice Casorati (1883–1963) was an Italian painter. Born in Novara he moved to Turin in 1918. He was a leading figure of the Return to Order, a European postwar art movement that rejected cubism, futurism, and the extreme avant-garde and was associated with a revival of classicism and realistic painting. He was briefly arrested in 1923 for antifascist activity. The cover art of the present edition of Family Lexicon shows a detail from Casorati’s 1925 painting, Raja.
Nella Marchesini: The painter Nella Marchesini (1901–1953) was best known for her portraits and figurative work. She exhibited widely in the 1930s and ’40s but is now largely forgotten.
good friends with Petrolini: Ettore Petrolini (1884–1936) was an Italian actor considered to be one of the most influential figures in Italian theatrical comedy. He was famous for his character sketches, parodies, and comic musical monologues. Petrolini was a public supporter of the fascist regime in Italy though he satirized Mussolini in his famous piece Nerone.
Debenedetti wrote short stories: Giacomo Debenedetti (1901–1967) was a writer, journalist, and Italy’s foremost critic of twentieth-century literature. He was among the first to grasp the full extent of the genius of Proust. Debenedetti was Jewish and wrote under an assumed name during the fascist regime. With the Nazi occupation of Italy, he and his family were forced to go into hiding. Among his many works are two extraordinary essays about racial atrocities: “October 16, 1943” is a firsthand account of the roundup in Rome of a thousand Jews who were sent to the gas chambers in Auschwitz; “Eight Jews” was written in response to the Ardeatine Cave massacre on March 24, 1944.
my friend Pajetta’s place: Giancarlo Pajetta (1911–1990) was a prominent member of the Italian Communist Party and a politician. He served in parliament from 1946 until his death in 1990. He fought with the partisan Resistance in the Garibaldi Brigade during World War II.
the Pestelli who writes for La Stampa. His mother is Carola Prosperi: Luigi “Gino” Pestelli (1885–1965) was a journalist for La Stampa, one of Italy’s best-known and most influential daily newspapers, published in Turin. He worked there for twenty years and was an antifascist who fought for freedom of the press. Carola Prosperi (1883–1981) was a prolific journalist, novelist, and children’s book author. During her lifetime she wrote more than two thousand eight hundred short stories and thirty-five novels.
Adriano Olivetti: Adriano Olivetti was the son of Camillo Olivetti, the founder of Olivetti. In the 1930s Adriano would reorganize and modernize the company to make it a leading Italian manufacturer renowned throughout the world. Olivetti shared with his workers the productivity gains by increasing salaries, fringe benefits, and services. By 1957 Olivetti workers were the best paid of all in the metallurgical industry and showed the highest productivity. Adriano married Paola Levi in 1928. They had three children.
Rosselli and Parri: Carlo Rosselli (1899–1937) was an Italian political leader, journalist, historian, and the founder of Justice and Liberty (Giustizia e Libertè), an antifascist militant movement. In 1926, he organized, along with Ferruccio Parri (1890–1981, a partisan, politician, and the twenty-ninth prime minister of Italy) and Sandro Pertini (1896–1990, a journalist, socialist politician, and the seventh president of the Italian Republic), Turati’s escape to France. Rosselli and Parri were later captured, convicted, and exiled to the Sicilian island of Lipari.
Franz Joseph: Franz Joseph (1830–1916) was the emperor of Austria, apostolic king of Hungary, king of Bohemia, king of Croatia, king of Galicia and Lodomeria, and grand duke of Kraków from 1848–1916.
Salvatorelli will be there: Luigi Salvatorelli (1886–1974) was a historian, political journalist, and author. He was the co-director of La Stampa from 1921 to 1925; the director of the weekly magazine La Nuova Europa from 1944 to 1946; and a founding member of the Action Party in 1942. He returned to La Stampa as an editorialist in 1949.
Vinciguerra, Bauer, and Rossi: Mario Vinciguerra (1887–1972) was a historian, editor, and author. He was a well-known antifascist activist and a member of the National Alliance for Freedom. Ricardo Bauer (1896–1982) was a historian, politician, and antifascist activist, and a member of the Action Party. Ernesto Rossi (1897–1967) was a politician, journalist, and antifascist activist; a member of the Action Party; and a founder of the Justice and Liberty movement.
Guglielmo Ferrero: Guglielmo Ferrero (1871–1942) was a historian, journalist, and novelist. His best-known books are The Young Europe (1897) and the five-volume Greatness and Decline of Rome (1907). When the fascist Blackshirts forced intellectuals to leave Italy in 1925, Ferrero refused and was placed under house arrest. In 1929, he accepted a position at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. Ferrero was invited to the White House by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908.
the Justice and Liberty group: An antifascist Resistance group founded in 1929 in Paris by Italian refugees Carlo Rosselli, Emilio Lussu, Alberto Tarchiani, and Ernesto Rossi. Carlo Levi and Leone Ginzburg were the leaders of the Italian branch based in Turin.
“De vulgari eloquentia”: “On Eloquence in the Vernacular” (ca. 1304) is an essay that was part of an unfinished book by Dante Alighieri on the historical evolution of language, the relationship between Latin and vernacular, his search for illustrious vernacular, and literary genres.
named Sion Segre: Sion Segre Amar was an antifascist activist and a member of Justice and Liberty in Turin.
They arrested Ginzburg and . . . Mario in Turin: This event came to be known as the Ponte Tresa affair. Fifteen young Turinese Jews were arrested in conjunction with Mario’s trips carrying antifascist literature over the border from Switzerland.
Pitigrilli’s cousins: Pitigrilli was the pen name for Dino Segre (1893–1975) a popular novelist and journalist. He was later discovered to be a spy for OVRA, the fascist secret police. He had infiltrated the Turin group of Justice and Liberty and betrayed many of its members including Leone Ginzburg, Vittorio Foa, and members of the Levi family.
a literary magazine called Literary Lions: Le Grandi Firme was published in Turin from 1924 to 1938, when it was banned under the Race Laws of the fascist government.
“It’s like the Dreyfus Affair!”: The Dreyfus Affair was a famous political scandal that erupted in
France in 1894 over the conviction for treason of the young French artillery officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was Jewish. In 1906, after it was proved that the evidence against him had been falsified, he was released from a penal colony in French Guiana, fully exonerated, and reinstated as a major in the French army.
this particular Margherita: Margherita Sarfatti (1880–1961) was a journalist, art critic, socialite, and propaganda adviser to the National Fascist Party. She was also one of Mussolini’s mistresses and the author of the biography The Life of Benito Mussolini, originally published in England in 1925 and the following year in Italy under the title Dux. It was a huge success, reprinted seventeen times and translated into eighteen languages.
“Carlo Levi is locked up as well!”: Carlo Levi (1902–1975) was a painter, writer, medical doctor, antifascist, and political activist, and a co-founder of the Justice and Liberty movement. As a result of his activism, from 1935 to 1936 Levi was exiled to Aliano, a remote town in an impoverished region of southern Italy. His memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli recounts his experiences there.
Professor Giua has been locked up too!”: Michele Giua (1889–1966) was a chemistry professor at the University of Turin and an active member of Justice and Liberty. From 1948 to 1958 he was a senator for the Italian Socialist Party.
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