innocent in the eyes of the strolling Carabinieri – to the dissident’s grocery shop or the suspended professor’s villa.
When did this begin? At first it was more an undercurrent, a concern shared by some we knew, a distaste rather than a menace, if never quite out of sight and mind; even in my earliest memories of Italy I cannot detach the country from the ubiquitous images of Fascism. Each time I returned there were more black-shirts in the streets, more marching and strutting, more boasts and lies in the newspapers, more posters on the walls. I saw what was to be seen, my mother interpreted and briefed me. What was being put over (by Musso & Co.) was, she was never in doubt, based on trickery and false values, sanctified aggression, pandered to false pride; it made ignorant youth feel important, gave foolish people spurious hopes – it was dangerous stuff. Alessandro, informed by an old, old patience, was more inclined to shrug it off: it was bad, there was little in politics that was not … Hadn’t they seen it all before, Invasion, Defeat, Occupation; Attila, Buonaparte, the Austrians … They come, they go, we survive, it will pass. Everything does, my mother would say, but when ? And meanwhile …? Oh, Italians have no talent for public life, they may be for it – justice, disinterested administration – but they don’t know how to get it: they accept corruption. (Crack jokes about it as you do, Alessandro.) When their rulers are too bad, they duck; retreat into personal relations, family relations – there you’ll find riches of good behaviour, devotion and honour as well as endurance and courage. Out in politics they are opportunists and show-offs, clever when they ought to be straightforward , rhetorical when they ought to go home and think, and they haven’t learned how to compromise without treachery. (She would turn to me, Oh how lucky you are being brought up in England, I’m so glad you are getting a liberal education.) It won’t stick, Alessandro said, Musso’s dream: playing lions, days without pasta, little boys carrying daggers, it’s too silly, we’re not cut out for regimentation.
Not individually. But what about the yelling in Piazza Venezia? Crowds are vulnerable to a harangue, to torches and lit-up façades and the prospects of glamour, even sham glamour – and not only Italian crowds, are there many people who have learnt to be consistently human en masse ?
* * *
As it happened I had just been sent for again so I was there in the summer of 1924 – we had taken a house on the Sorrentine peninsula – when Matteotti, the leader of the opposition as it were, was kidnapped and murdered. 1 We were out at sea in an open fishing boat that Augustday when another boat hove to and men shouted the news that Matteotti was dead – his body had been found in a hole. How shocked we were then and how hopeful. In the ensuing weeks people came to us, buoyed, euphoric, counting straws in the wind – the regime would not be able to weather such outrage, Mussolini was going to fall. Too soon it became clear that it had indeed been a turning point, that the deed, the criminal deed, the big enough deed had paid off (as nine years on, the burning of the Reichstag paid off): Matteotti gone, opposition suppressed, il Fascismo acclaimed, getting the upper hand. And so more tales – only they were not tales – of official chicanery, neighbours and relatives sacked from university posts or refused renewal of their annual patent to practise as doctors and lawyers because they had failed to become party members or to vote sì at the plebiscites, house searches next door (always for papers, books, not drugs nor arms), purges, disappearances, nocturnal arrests became part of our daily experience. It was early and at first hand that I learnt what life can be like when there is no freedom of thought, and rule by decree, not law.
One of Alessandro’s brothers went off to live in Ireland with an
When did this begin? At first it was more an undercurrent, a concern shared by some we knew, a distaste rather than a menace, if never quite out of sight and mind; even in my earliest memories of Italy I cannot detach the country from the ubiquitous images of Fascism. Each time I returned there were more black-shirts in the streets, more marching and strutting, more boasts and lies in the newspapers, more posters on the walls. I saw what was to be seen, my mother interpreted and briefed me. What was being put over (by Musso & Co.) was, she was never in doubt, based on trickery and false values, sanctified aggression, pandered to false pride; it made ignorant youth feel important, gave foolish people spurious hopes – it was dangerous stuff. Alessandro, informed by an old, old patience, was more inclined to shrug it off: it was bad, there was little in politics that was not … Hadn’t they seen it all before, Invasion, Defeat, Occupation; Attila, Buonaparte, the Austrians … They come, they go, we survive, it will pass. Everything does, my mother would say, but when ? And meanwhile …? Oh, Italians have no talent for public life, they may be for it – justice, disinterested administration – but they don’t know how to get it: they accept corruption. (Crack jokes about it as you do, Alessandro.) When their rulers are too bad, they duck; retreat into personal relations, family relations – there you’ll find riches of good behaviour, devotion and honour as well as endurance and courage. Out in politics they are opportunists and show-offs, clever when they ought to be straightforward , rhetorical when they ought to go home and think, and they haven’t learned how to compromise without treachery. (She would turn to me, Oh how lucky you are being brought up in England, I’m so glad you are getting a liberal education.) It won’t stick, Alessandro said, Musso’s dream: playing lions, days without pasta, little boys carrying daggers, it’s too silly, we’re not cut out for regimentation.
Not individually. But what about the yelling in Piazza Venezia? Crowds are vulnerable to a harangue, to torches and lit-up façades and the prospects of glamour, even sham glamour – and not only Italian crowds, are there many people who have learnt to be consistently human en masse ?
* * *
As it happened I had just been sent for again so I was there in the summer of 1924 – we had taken a house on the Sorrentine peninsula – when Matteotti, the leader of the opposition as it were, was kidnapped and murdered. 1 We were out at sea in an open fishing boat that Augustday when another boat hove to and men shouted the news that Matteotti was dead – his body had been found in a hole. How shocked we were then and how hopeful. In the ensuing weeks people came to us, buoyed, euphoric, counting straws in the wind – the regime would not be able to weather such outrage, Mussolini was going to fall. Too soon it became clear that it had indeed been a turning point, that the deed, the criminal deed, the big enough deed had paid off (as nine years on, the burning of the Reichstag paid off): Matteotti gone, opposition suppressed, il Fascismo acclaimed, getting the upper hand. And so more tales – only they were not tales – of official chicanery, neighbours and relatives sacked from university posts or refused renewal of their annual patent to practise as doctors and lawyers because they had failed to become party members or to vote sì at the plebiscites, house searches next door (always for papers, books, not drugs nor arms), purges, disappearances, nocturnal arrests became part of our daily experience. It was early and at first hand that I learnt what life can be like when there is no freedom of thought, and rule by decree, not law.
One of Alessandro’s brothers went off to live in Ireland with an
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