A Bold and Dangerous Family: The Remarkable Story of an Italian Mother, Her Two Sons, and Their Fight Against Fascism by Caroline Moorehead

Author:Caroline Moorehead [Moorehead, Caroline]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

Nello, ostensibly free but in fact kept under constant surveillance on the mainland, was also at work on the shape of Italy’s future, only in his case it was a question of getting at it through the lessons of history. Volpe, keen to prove that his young protégé was dedicated only to his studies, had assigned him research in the archives in Rome, Naples and Palermo. Maria loved Rome, and they rented a house in the city centre. Nello had come round to thinking that the seeds of fascism dated from long before the recent right-wing governments. They lay in the nature of Italy itself, its backwardness, its unhealthy, uneducated, illiterate population, its weak infrastructure, its few resources, and its south largely under the yoke of bandits. It was, he maintained, a country independent only in name and rightly regarded with extreme wariness by the rest of Europe.

Working alone in the archives, however, Nello was feeling increasingly cut off. ‘Every flag I see flying in the sun, every little fascist boy in uniform I pass in the street, every poster I read, says to me: you are not one of us,’ he wrote to Amelia. ‘There’s no place for you here. Go.’ To counter this sense of isolation, he told his mother how close to her he needed to feel, how often he wanted to see her. He said that he was thinking of looking for a house in the country, where he and Maria and all their future children could live ‘peaceful, rich, inner lives’. In May he went with his childhood friend Leo Ferrero to Naples and they called on Benedetto Croce, living his secluded, watched existence. Surreptitiously, Nello had also contacted some of the few young anti-fascists still at liberty and there was talk of him contributing to Pietre, one of the last independent magazines not yet suppressed by the fascist government. Given his promises to Volpe, and the fact that he was closely observed, these acts were perilous.

On 11 July, at 2.25 a.m., Maria gave birth to a daughter. The baby was to have been born at home in their flat in Rome, but at the last minute complications arose and Maria was taken, ‘uttering great cries of pain’, to a hospital and the little girl delivered by forceps. They named her Silvia, which seemed to them ‘both intimate and robust and also very Roman’. She weighed three kilos and was ‘pale pink’ in colouring, with small, perfect ears. Nello wrote to give the news to Zia Gì: ‘Pretty? No. Ugly? No. A dear sweet little Silvia, yes.’ Nello’s happiness, Amelia added, was ‘really touching’, and though the baby was indeed charming, her nose ‘occupies rather a large surface on her minuscule face’.

Silvia was thirteen months younger than Mirtillino and she too soon acquired a nickname: Pisellino, little pea. From Lipari, Carlo wrote that for a Jew and a non-believer like himself, only procreation gave any guarantee of ‘relative immortality’. But, he added, thinking over the

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