Iris Origo by Caroline Moorehead

Author:Caroline Moorehead [Caroline Moorehead]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780749016616
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2014-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Only man is mad

All through the 1930s, while Iris was coming and going between Italy and England and the United States, Fascist rule and Fascist customs were spreading to every corner of Italian life. In order to force a country and a people still very half-hearted about their masters to live up to Fascist ideals of duty and discipline – most of which ran counter to the Italian temperament – the Fascist leadership imposed what they considered to be models of efficiency, productivity and decisiveness. Other European countries were held to suffer from extreme decadence; Italy, under the rule of Mussolini’s ‘collective significance’ of life, was to be a very different place. (Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, a close supporter of Mussolini, took a different view: he blamed what he saw as his compatriots’ lethargy on too much spaghetti. ‘By eating it,’ he wrote, ‘they develop that typical ironical and sentimental scepticism which all too often dampens their enthusiasm.’ The British, by contrast, did well on their cod and roast beef, and the Germans flourished on a diet of sauerkraut, smoked lard and sausages.)

Towards the end of the 1930s the Fascist Party numbered just over two million members. The Party secretary, Achille Starace – his name was later used to refer to the period, ‘era Starace’ – was given the task of reshaping Italians into Mussolini’s mould. People were forbidden to shake hands and instructed to use the cleaner, more ceremonious Roman salute instead. They were told to gesticulate less. Mussolini – and Starace opposed him in this – decided that the traditionally polite form of address using the second person plural lei was to be abandoned, and the more familiar voi used in conversation. Women’s clothes were no longer to be ‘straight and angular’ but to have ‘womanly curves’. The ‘stile fascista’ dictated that Italian national sports teams were to wear only black. Good Fascists were to walk as much as possible, and avoid fashionable restaurants. What became known as the passo romano was modelled on the German goose-step. In the hideous new marble Forum erected by Mussolini in Rome, elderly party leaders who had been ordered to take exercise could be seen from time to time, scrambling up its slippery walls. Mussolini had no interest in art, once boasting that he had never set foot in a gallery before he accompanied Hitler to the Pitti Palace and the Uffizi during the Führer’s visit to Florence. He told Count Galeazzo Ciano, his son-in-law and Foreign Minister, that he would have liked museums to have fewer pictures and statues and more enemy flags captured in battle. Italians, he added, were not to be influenced by the writings of such men as Robert Graves, Axel Munthe and Machiavelli, who were ‘unsuitable to the Fascist spirit’.

The Fascists loved their uniforms. Part of the pride of being a high-ranking Party member or serving in the army lay in the superb outfits they were allowed to wear. The Commander of the Fascist Militia, for example,

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