The Secrets of Italy

by Corrado Augias

  Marie Louise came from Vienna, the capital of music at the time, and she devoted great attention to music and similar initiatives in Parma as well.

  The “good duchess” renovated the magnificent Teatro Farnese and built the Teatro Ducale (today’s Teatro Regio) from the ground up. It was inaugurated in May 1829 with Bellini’s Zaira, composed for the occasion. A few weeks later Mosè e Faraone by “the acclaimed master Gioachino Rossini” (as a contemporary poster proclaimed) was staged. It was a promising start. She also founded Parma’s famous music conservatory. Its alumni included Arturo Toscanini, who earned a diploma as cellist in 1885. Just one year later, at age nineteen, he picked up the conductor’s baton and brandished it for the rest of his life. The composer Giuseppe Verdi, born near Parma in Roncole di Busseto in 1813, received a scholarship from Marie Louise. He dedicated his opera I Lombardi alla prima crociata to her; it features the chorus “O Signor, che dal tetto natìo,” a slightly less melodic, darker version of the famous chorus “Va, pensiero” in his previous opera, Nabucco.

  Here I must veer off into another short yet essential aside. The opera Nabucodonosor was first staged (to great success) in March 1842 at La Scala in Milan, with a libretto by Temistocle Solera. Just two years later its title was shortened to Nabucco. It tells the story of Jewish prisoners exiled to Babylon, and in the justly celebrated chorus they travel, in their mind’s eye, back to the hills and hillocks “where the warm, scented, gentle breezes of the native land blow.” Up in Milan, which in 1848 was on the verge of an insurrection against the Austrian occupation that became known as the Five Days of Milan, that chorus poignantly evoked not distant Babylon, but instead current events in Lombardy and Italy. The comparison was apt. Therefore, one would have to be utterly ignorant of the history of music, and history on the whole, to try to turn the chorus of Nabucco into a hymn to so-called Padania, a small “country” spun out of thin air on the basis of often sordid commercial interests and tax breaks.10

  Going back to Parma, these musical initiatives show the direction the duchess was working toward, and also attest to the richness of talent in her territory. But we cannot discuss her years in Parma without considering the importance, and in some cases the weight, certain aspects of her private life had.

  On May 1, 1817, at the age of twenty-six, Marie Louise gave birth to a daughter, followed by another birth on August 8, 1819, this time a son. Both Albertine and William became countess and count, respectively, of Montenuovo, so that there could be no doubts regarding their parentage (Neipperg becomes Neuberg in German, and Montenuovo in Italian). Napoleon was still alive at the time, unhappily imprisoned at St. Helena under the watchful supervision of his merciless jailer, Sir Hudson Lowe. No one knew anymore whether his marriage to Marie Louise was valid, annulled, or had been null and void from the very start. As a precaution the two children were entrusted to a doctor, Giuseppe Rossi, who was also their tutor. Their mother and father paid them a visit each evening. Meanwhile, Marie Louise’s first son, l’Aiglon, was growing up in faraway Vienna. Thus the duchess spent her years, missing the son she only saw during rare visits to Vienna, as well as the two children with whom, though they lived in the same town, she could not be seen in public.

  Napoleon died on May 5, 1821, aged fifty-one. His widow, who had reached her thirties by then, wrote a very realistic funerary ode for her late spouse: “He was the father of my son and—far from having abused me as is generally believed, he granted me every respect. When all is said and done, that is the most one can ask for from an arranged political marriage.”

  Three months later, on August 8, 1821, Marie Louise finally married the father of her other two children. Theirs was a secret, morganatic marriage in the sense that neither Adam nor the two children ever shared the rank, status, and assets of their respective wife and mother.

  How did all these people end up? Adam Neipperg died of heart problems eight years after their wedding, in February 1829. Marie Louise grieved for him with sincere sorrow; she would have preferred to observe an official period of mourning, but an unexpected order from Vienna prevented it. Her first-born, the would-be Napoleon II, died of tuberculosis while still in his twenties, in July 1832 in Schönbrunn, officially unmarried and childless. The court had long kept Marie Louise in the dark about his condition. When she finally learned of his illness, she sped to Vienna and arrived just in time to embrace the unfortunate boy before he died, calling her name. As for the duchess herself, what was her fate? Aged beyond her years, she died prematurely at fifty-six, in 1847, of “rheumatic pleurisy,” as the official report stated. Her body, prior to being transported to Vienna, was embalmed by the same Dr. Rossi who had tutored the two children she bore out of wedlock. Field Marshal Radetzky, commander of the Austrian troops in Lombardy, sent a squadron of 150 hussars as an escort of honor. But perhaps the most significant fact is that, upon hearing of her death, a large crowd of Parma’s citizens gathered in front of the palace and stood in sorrowful, perplexed silence.

  What, then, does the court of Marie Louise and her beloved General Neipperg have to do with the small court of Prince Ranuccio Ernesto IV? Very little, perhaps nothing whatsoever. The two tales have not a single historical point of contact in common, nor did this man I just mentioned bear any resemblance to the city’s earlier leaders. Prince Ranuccio reigned over an invented city, a place that is both Parma and not Parma, a town that, historically speaking, looks more like Modena but in any case is undeniably set in the Italy of those years—and perhaps set a bit in our present day as well. By bringing up Ranuccio Ernesto IV we have gone from real, historical Parma to a town transfigured by Stendhal, around which he built his masterpiece, The Charterhouse of Parma. As we saw at the beginning of this journey, Stendhal adored Italy precisely because of its shortcomings—that is, the impetuous passions found all across the Peninsula, in both North and South, that can drive people to commit crimes of passion or lose their minds by loving to the point of desperation. In the preface to his novel, which he dictated in a flurry over the course of only fifty-two days (November–December 1838), Stendhal wrote:

  Italians are sincere, honest folk and, not taking offence, say what is in their minds; it is only when the mood seizes them that they shew any vanity; which then becomes passion, and goes by the name of puntiglio. Lastly, poverty is not, with them, a subject for ridicule.11

  They are beautiful words, especially the last few, where he separates the state of poverty from the possibly attendant feelings of inferiority or ridiculousness. Slightly farther down he adds:

  To what purpose should I give them the exalted morality and other graces of French characters, who love money above all things, and sin scarcely ever from motives of hatred or love? The Italians in this tale are almost the opposite.12

  The principality might be fictional, but the environment conjured up by the author is rather realistic: a small court held afloat by delicate balances, where love, deception, jealousy, and blackmail intertwine on a regular basis. Fabrizio del Dongo—the handsome young protagonist agitated by erratic passions and sometimes grotesque thoughts—moves within the circles of that court, as well as on the battlefield of Waterloo. He has the archetypal romantic hero’s typical lack of awareness, and so he is naive but also aware of the protection his aunt, the alluring Duchess Sanseverina, grants him. She is the official mistress of the powerful prime minister, Count Mosca, but actually nurtures an incestuous love for her nephew. Italo Calvino correctly considered this a “melodramatic” plotline, which is undeniable, and accurate insofar as lyric opera (particularly of the most melodramatic sort) was one of the keys through which Stendhal had discovered, described, imagined, and come to love Italy. But the author combines this transfiguration of a small fictional kingdom in the post-Napoleonic Restoration period with the gloomy shadows of Renaissance history—in this case, the life of Alessandro Farnese.

  Things went like this: While in Rome, hunting for source documents that would help him reconstruct Italian histo
ry, Stendhal had discovered some random loose annotations regarding the origin of the Farnese family. He was so struck by the document that he scrawled in its margin: “Tale full of truth and spontaneity in Roman dialect. Rome, 1834.” In fact those records held hardly any truth—they were littered with historical inaccuracies and outright inventions: mangled names, wrong dates. On the other hand, this was exactly what the writer sought for inspiration. He additionally notes: “Most noble families made their fortunes with the help of a whore or two. Such a thing would be impossible in New York, but then New York is so boring you can easily dislocate your jaw from all the yawning. Here the Farnese family has made its fortune thanks to a whore.”

  Stendhal is alluding to Giulia Farnese, who had entered a marriage of convenience solely so that she could then become the mistress of Rome’s most powerful cardinal, Rodrigo Borgia, the future Pope Alexander VI. Cardinal Rodrigo lost his head the very instant he first set eyes on Giulia. She was fourteen, he was fifty-eight, but no one dared dream of resisting such a powerful man. Indeed, Giulia posed no resistance, in part because her mother strongly pushed her to yield to his will. She was first married off to a mediocre man named Orso Orsini, who officially rid her of her maidenhood. Once she had become a woman, she was offered to the cardinal. Within a few months all of Rome knew about it, and chroniclers openly wrote that Giulia had become “the concubine of the (future) pope.” As soon as Rodrigo ascended the papal throne he repaid the favors of his young lover by making her brother Alessandro a cardinal at the age of just twenty-five. Alessandro in turn became Pope Paul III, thereby forever establishing a connection between his sister Giulia’s adulterous passion and the city of Parma.

  The truth is, Stendhal loved whores, and had known many in his day. He once confessed that the hypocrisy of “good women” made him nauseous. He also felt strong “elective affinities” with adventurous characters like Alessandro, who had spent his youth “among women and wine,” and he must have done something big indeed to deserve being locked up in the dungeons of Castel Sant’Angelo—apparently he had become his stepmother’s lover. He managed to escape that horrible cell, however, by climbing down a long rope—which is exactly what Fabrizio del Dongo does when, in a fictitious Parma, he is locked up in the nonexistent Farnese Tower.

  Stendhal uses Fabrizio del Dongo as a means for setting Alessandro’s sixteenth-century adventures in his own time, the nineteenth century. According to Italo Calvino, Stendhal aimed to demonstrate that there was “a continuity in the Italians’ vital energies and passionate spontaneity, which he never tired of believing in.” There is no Farnese Tower in Parma, nor has there ever been, but by creating that lofty, enchanted place in his imagination the writer allows the story to move even deeper into the realm of adventure. It also allows Fabrizio, and us readers, to enjoy a dizzying view out across all of northern Italy. As soon as Fabrizio gets to his appointed cell:

  He ran to the windows. The view that one had from these barred windows was sublime … There was a moon that evening, and at the moment of Fabrizio’s entering his prison it was rising majestically on the horizon to the right, over the chain of the Alps, towards Treviso. It was only half past eight, and, at the other extremity of the horizon, to the west, a brilliant orange-red sunset showed to perfection the outlines of Monviso and the other Alpine peaks which run inland from Nice towards Mont Cenis and Turin … Fabrizio was moved and enraptured by this sublime spectacle.13

  To enjoy such a scene in real life, you would have to get on a plane and fly a few hundred meters into the sky. It is a fantastic, fictitious point of view, but precisely because of that it impresses upon us the equally fantastic, fictitious realm in which Fabrizio lives.

  The other made-up place is the Charterhouse itself, which gives the novel its title, and is where Fabrizio retires at the end of his countless adventures. Stendhal settles the issue in two short lines at the very end of the novel: “On the following day, having forwarded to the proper authorities his resignation of his Archbishopric and of all the posts … he retired to the Charterhouse of Parma, situated in the woods adjoining the Po, two leagues from Sacca.”14 Scholars have wracked their brains trying to locate this place, and finally found its model in the Charterhouse of Paradigna, currently home to the archives of the University of Parma. The location of the actual place does not really matter. The Charterhouse imagined by Stendhal is inaccessible, hidden in the woods near the Po, more a spiritual place than a real building in which you could feasibly live. Moreover, not even Fabrizio del Dongo lived long enough to enjoy many years in the imaginary Charterhouse, since his earthly existence came to a close, so to speak, not long after he retired there. But the memory of his seductive presence lives on, and has come down to us intact through Stendhal’s text. Both these figures—the fictitious Fabrizio and the very real duchess—helped make Parma a unique, kind, and profoundly human city.

  9.

  MILAN, BOTH GOOD AND BAD

  Try to imagine, for a moment, what Milan looked like on April 25, 1945, when it was liberated, just as World War II came to a close. Consider this: 60 percent of the city’s homes had been destroyed or damaged by the bombings; 1,400 buildings, 250,000 properties were in need of repair; much of its industrial infrastructure was completely destroyed or rendered unusable; and the main monuments—the Castle, the opera house at La Scala, the Brera art academy and museum, the main hospital, the glass-covered Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele right near the duomo, and the Triennale exhibition space—had all sustained major damage. Milan paid a high price for its dense industrial development, and had lived the last months of the atrocious Nazi-Fascist occupation under tragic conditions, rife with gunfights and sudden raids, searches and seizures of goods by militia officers (both real and fake), three or four partisans sentenced to death each day, and relentless hunger everywhere.

  Nowadays it is not so easy to convey what those months and years were like. Whenever I try to tell younger generations about it, I get the feeling that they cannot fully relate to the sheer weight with which those circumstances affected people’s lives on a daily basis. It was a very material weight, inflicted by hardships and privation, but also a psychological burden, the nightmare of leaving home in the morning without being sure you would return that evening. Imagine what it meant for families, for children, to know that bread—stale and tightly rationed—was distributed only three days a week, and basic staples like milk, rice, butter, and sugar were virtually impossible to find. Sometimes you could get them on the black market, but only at horrifyingly high prices, or at the cost of having to barter off some valuable family heirloom. Any word that a certain store or unmarked door had some scrap of food for sale became a ravenous secret, swiftly whispered from person to person. Electricity was limited to a few hours a day; otherwise people relied on candles, lanterns, and odorous acetylene lamps, which occasionally exploded. Although I grew up in Rome, not Milan, I still have vivid memories of running my hands along the walls as a young boy and feeling heat from the pipes running through them—now that the war was over, the heat was beginning to work again. No more chilblains, nor the need to wear fingerless gloves to do our homework. Mozart wrote his music with gloves like that, in even colder temperatures, but I only learned that many years later, and it only consoled me up to a certain point.

  Things were worse in Milan than they were in Rome, and not just because of the harsher climate. Rome was liberated on June 4, 1944; the liberation did not reach Milan until the following spring, and winter of 1944–45 was the cruelest of all, in all respects.

  But even though Milan was starving and lay in partial ruin, each evening the curtains opened up on new theatrical performances, cinema lights dimmed, and, amid the thick smoke of scrounged cigarettes, film screenings lit up the dark. The La Scala opera house had been bombed, but the company staged performances just the same, at the nearby Teatro Lirico.

  Let us journey back to a frosty February day back in 1947, as Paolo Grassi and Giorgio Strehler stop
to look at a few spaces in the center of Milan, on Via Rovello, a small side street off Via Dante. One building has an illustrious past, having belonged to the Count of Carmagnola, a fifteenth-century adventurer. By the early twentieth century it had become the seat of an amateur theater company founded by a group of city employees. During the occupation, members of the Legione Autonoma Mobile Ettore Muti—a renegade Fascist military corps—had commandeered the space and turned it into barracks where they detained and tortured people.