Oh Capitano! by Vecoli Rudolph J.;Durante Francesco;Gabaccia Donna R.;Venditto Elizabeth O.;

Author:Vecoli, Rudolph J.;Durante, Francesco;Gabaccia, Donna R.;Venditto, Elizabeth O.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Electoral Intermezzo

Intertwined with the lengthy affair of the three Hawaiian youths, Moreno’s Italian pit stop in the early 1880s involved another matter of interest: Moreno’s attempt to build a political career. His Roman acquaintances were essential for this purpose, and one in particular was Giovanni Faldella. They met in February 1881 at a banquet at Rome’s Central Hotel organized by the colonia mondovita, people from the town of Mondovi in Piedmont. Moreno was a somewhat exotic attraction because of his recent exploits in Hawaii, and he was the object of toasts and compliments. Deputy Carlo Rolfi, a writer, journalist, and Faldella’s close friend, was enthusiastic about Moreno. Rolfi had written about him in the Gazzetta Piemontese and spoken about him to Faldella. Faldella later described Moreno as tall and robust, clothed in black evening clothes but wearing the Asian-style shoes of a sugar planter, and speaking with disdainful authority about Hawaii in an English accent.1

Faldella confessed that at first glance the man, though he appeared a “charade” worthy of study, seemed “almost unpleasant.” Never mind: Moreno won him over soon after, when he met him by chance in a modest trattoria behind the Chamber of Deputies, the Fiaschetteria Caselli, where the Captain “polished off a head of lettuce.” Faldella admired his “disdain for useless social mores,” “his emancipation from and disinterest in certain little social submissions,” which was a sign of “robust self-confidence.”2

Fostered by common memories of Piedmont, which Moreno recalled in his first known letter to Faldella, a friendship between the two men was born.3 Faldella was from Saluggia, in the province of Novara, today Vercelli. He was born in 1846, and after working as a lawyer and magistrate, he launched a brilliant career as a journalist. In 1873, the Turin newspaper Gazzetta Piemontese sent him to Vienna to cover the Universal Exposition, where he wrote his first book, A Vienna: Gita con il lapis. This work soon established him as one of the most capricious and original voices of the moment, in the vein of the Scapigliatura literary movement. With time, Faldella intensified his political activity. In 1872, he was elected for the left to the provincial council of Novara, where he kept his seat until 1908. In 1881, he entered Parliament, in the Chamber of Deputies, replacing his colleague on the right, General Bertolé Viale, who, elected the year before, had subsequently been named a senator. Not reelected in 1882, Faldella then returned in 1886 and was elected three times. He was finally named a senator in 1896.

Faldella and Moreno seemed made for each other. Moreno was a perfect figure to stoke the writer’s imagination. With his unique story of escorting the three exotic young Hawaiians, Moreno appeared, depending on the moment, as a mother hen with her chicks or a lioness with her cubs.4 In the Capitano Marittimo, Faldella saw the triumph of a dynamic philosophy aimed at “banishing the sectarian and Mephistophelian no, always responding yes to every offer of employment, always undertaking and

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