On 23 May 1924, a tall, elegant man in his late thirties stood up in the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Parliament in Rome and began his speech. It was Giacomo Matteotti, the leader of the Socialists from the Po Plain. He publicly accused Mussolini of electoral fraud, of instilling a climate of fear in which the elections were held, and demanded that they be annulled. He has also recently published a book analysing Mussolini’s speeches, listing individual attacks by fascists on opponents, threats, kidnappings and even murders that took place between November 1922 and October 1923, as well as examples of corruption. He spoke for two hours, despite the whistles, interruptions and threats that poured in on him from the benches of the fascist MEPs. He was calm and did not fuss. Meanwhile, Mussolini, who had become Prime Minister in 1922, sat on his own bench and remained silent. It was only when he came to the offices of the Fascist Party that he burst out, “People like Matteotti should not be going around!”
On 10 June, Matteotti left his home at half past four in the afternoon. It was hot and the streets were deserted. As he was walking along the pavement, a black Lancia pulled up alongside him, two men jumped out, hit Matteotti, who defended himself, and pushed him into the car, which then sped off at top speed. A small boy playing outside a house watched all this. Since then, Matteotti has never been seen again. Mussolini denied any involvement in the kidnapping.
People started laying flowers at the site of the abduction, and someone drew a blood-red cross on the wall. The police found a black Lancia, the seats of which were covered in blood. On 17 August, a plumber found a jacket belonging to Matteotti in a canal 25 kilometres outside Rome and his mutilated body in a nearby ditch.
After five years of strikes, incompetent governments, street brawls and poverty since the end of World War I, Italy was exhausted. Those who opposed the fascist regime talked and debated, but no one did anything to bring about change. Matteotti’s death changed many things, for some it was a moment of change, and it marked the birth of the anti-fascist movement in Italy. For one family in Florence, ardent supporters of Giuseppe Mazzini, the hero of the Risorgimento, the day Matteotti was murdered changed their lives forever. For them, there was now no turning back. For Amelia, Carlo and Nella Rosselli, a new life had begun.
The family is split up
Amelia Pincherle was born in Venice in 1870, when Italy was finally united into a single kingdom. The Pincherle were Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492 and settled in Venice. Venetian Jewish girls were considered well-educated, well-mannered, their parents were wealthy and they participated in the city council. Amelia was no different from the others, she was eleven years old and it seemed to her that a new life had begun for her.
Although David Herbert Lawrence called Venice “a horrible, green and slippery city” and Ruskin considered its canals “full of human dung”, the city where Amelia grew up was still the most important point of call for all European tourists. Venice remains the city of music, the city where Vivaldi was born, where Monteverdi conducted for years and where Wagner worked on his opera Tristan und Isolde.
But strangers played no role in Amelia’s life. When she was 15, her father, a successful businessman, died and the family moved to Rome with her mother. But even then, Amelia had a strong sense of discipline, integrity and justice.
Rome was an unusual city as the capital of Italy at the time. There was no industry. Pius IX introduced electricity and supported the arts, but herds of oxen brought fresh fruit and vegetables into the city every morning. Rome was a large farm, with sheep and goats grazing in the open fields. Sometime in 1889, when Amelia was 19, she met Giuseppe Rosselli. The Rosselli family were also Jews, enthusiastic followers of Mazzini and of Risorgimento, who had freed them from papal rule. In April 1892, they were married in a synagogue in Rome and went on a three-month wedding trip around Europe.
Giuseppe Rosselli was a lawyer, but he was attracted to music, and when he suggested to Amelia that she move to Vienna to continue her musical education, Amelia was happy to accept, because Vienna was a city of music and art, and she was attracted to that. But her husband’s musical talent was mediocre and did not come to the fore in Vienna, so after four years in Vienna, the family – in the meantime her first son Aldo was born – returned to Rome.
Rome has already changed in their absence. The rapid unification of the seven Apennine states or countries into a united Italy happened so quickly that there was no time to discuss modern democracy. Corruption, bribery and power struggles prevailed. In Rome, the Rosselli family had a son, Carlo, in 1899 and another son, Nello, the following year. Amelia was shocked to the depths of her soul when she learned that her husband had a mistress, an opera singer. This broke and broke for her the highest moral commitment one makes in life, and she decided to live apart from her husband.
Florence has now become the city where the story of Amelia and her three sons actually begins. She moved there with her sons in 1903. Her husband Giuseppe officially stayed in Rome to take care of business matters. Of all the Italian cities, Florence was the most sensible choice for Amelia. Her husband’s uncle Pellegrino lived there with his wife Gianetta, who was an accomplished piano player.
Amelia and her family moved into a small villa near the Duomo. She had little money, some of which came from her novella Anima, which she wrote while she was still in Vienna and which brought her some literary fame, but she also hoped to earn some money by writing short stories and plays. She was aware that it would not be easy to bring up three sons in a country where the Catholic Church turned up its nose at independent women.
Raising children was not easy, as the boys were different from one another. Aldo had dark hair, the other two brothers Carlo and Nello had lighter hair. Aldo was more withdrawn in character as a child. Carlo was the most outspoken of the three, although very impatient. Nello was the calmest of them all and most like his mother. But all three were stubborn and only reluctant to admit defeat. But they were very musical, which made Amelia happy. Aldo and Carlo played the piano and Nello the cello.
But there was another Florence that Amelia was not yet aware of. There were around 3000 Englishmen, retired diplomats, poets and writers who no longer wrote, former governesses, doctors, historians and teachers who saw Florence as an Arcadia, a dreamscape in which the Italians were nothing more than a colourful part of it. After arriving in Florence, Amelia renewed her childhood acquaintances in Venice. She had not seen Angiola and Adolfo Orvieto for many years. The brothers published a magazine to which many provocative articles were contributed by Gabriele d’Annunzio, who had a villa in Florence and lived an unusual life there.
Her sons kept asking her when their father would finally move to Florence. But Giuseppe Rosselli fell seriously ill in 1911 and was sent to hospital in Naples, where he soon died, aged just 44. Amelia, who had not been attached to any man in the eight years they had lived together, was desperate, she dressed in black and it took a long time for her friends to persuade her to put it off.
War and post-war years
On 28 June 1914, the family was surprised by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, an event that promised war, and when it did break out, Italy was initially neutral. But the offer made by England and France to Italy if it entered the war on their side was tempting. It was promised the annexation of Trentino, Trieste, Istria, many islands in Dalmatia, Zadar and Valona in Albania.
Pope Benedict XV refused to bless the war because he considered it unjust, while others pointed out that Italy still had 60,000 troops in Libya, which it had conquered, and that they were failing utterly to put down the tribal rebellions. On 23 May 1915, Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary. In the Rosselli house, they were looking forward to the liberation of Trentino and Trieste. They dragged the national flag out of the wardrobe and hung it on a pole. Nineteen-year-old Aldo volunteered to join the army as a medical student and soon trains full of soldiers started heading for the northern front.
But the Italian army was weak, half of the conscripts were illiterate, many did not have guns, and many had wooden-soled shoes. The soldiers from the southern provinces, unspoilt by the mountains, froze at night, and the rain came and turned the roads to mud. Aldo, who was in the Alpine battalion in Udine, was visited by Amelia. He seemed to her changed, drier and also more masculine. He promised to write to her regularly from the front. Then the letters stopped coming. They told Amelia that Aldo was missing and that they were looking for him. Soon she received a message that he had been killed in a battle.
She was inconsolable. What scared her most was the thought that one day the war would be over and everything would be normal, but nothing would ever be normal for her again. Never again would the four of them sit together at the table, but only the three of them. In 1917, Carlo and Nello were old enough for military service. Carlo went to La Spezia and then to officer’s school in Caserta, and Nello to Lombardy for training. Then, in October 1917, Austro-Hungarian troops broke through the front at Kobarid, pushing the Italians as far back as the Piave River, and rivers of civilian refugees poured in all over Italy. On 4 November 1918, Amelia heard that Austria-Hungary had surrendered. What a relief for her. Carlo and Nello were still alive. She wrote to Carlo: “This is the last birthday we will spend apart.”
Aldo was only one of 47,000 Tuscan soldiers who did not return home, many of them wounded. The trains arriving at Florence station from the north were no longer bringing refugees, but exhausted soldiers who did not like post-war Italy. Gabriele d’Annunzio, the poet, braggart and nationalist, called the situation in the country humiliating, because Italy was not getting enough for its participation in the war on the side of the Allies. The town of Rijeka, an area that lay between the Kingdom of the SHS and Italy, thus became a target for Italian nationalists.
On 12 September 1919, the theatrical d’Annunzio, who had lost one eye in the war when his plane crashed to the ground, led a handful of disbanded war veterans into Rijeka, expelled the few Allied troops and declared the annexation of Rijeka to Italy. He appointed himself Regent of Kvarner. He was only expelled by regular troops of the Italian navy, but Rijeka remained annexed to Italy. Many Italians on both sides of the political spectrum thought d’Annunzio was mad, but not Benito Mussolini. He owned and published Il Popolo d’ Italia and admired d’Annunzio’s achievements.
In 1919, there were about 20 associations of ex-soldiers in Italy, calling themselves Fasci di combattimento. Mussolini invited their representatives to Milan in March 1919, and most of them came in black shirts. From them a nationalist political party slowly emerged. In October 1919, Mussolini appeared in Florence and was greeted by a crowd of sympathisers. In his speech he addressed the small tradesmen, clerks, students and job-seekers who had not got jobs, promising to rid the country of decadent politicians and make it strong again.
The Rosselli family did not attend the meeting. Despite the loss of Aldo, Amelia was happy to have her two sons by her side, and her financial problems were solved, as she was rich with part of her husband’s inheritance. Nello was looking for a future in academia, while Carlo could not yet decide where his future lay.
Gaetano Salvemini, a senator from the south of Italy and a historian who taught at the University of Florence, was closely associated with the Rosselli family. On 28 December 1908, he suffered a great personal tragedy when the earthquake in the Strait of Messina was followed by an aftershock in the sea, in which his wife, five children and a sister lost their lives. Nearly 100,000 people lost their lives that night.
The following year he moved to Florence. He was a great opponent of Mussolini and his fascists, including d’Annunzio. As a professor, he had the habit of sometimes inviting his favourite students to his apartment. Nello, who was still in uniform and looking for a subject to deal with, was his guest on several occasions and Salvemini inspired him to write about Mazzini, the revolutionary hero of the unification of Italy.
A few days later, Nello brought his brother Carlo, who impressed Salvemini with his energy. Later, Ernesto Rossi, once an admirer of Mussolini, now a fervent opponent, joined the circle. Soon the slightly older lawyer Piero Calamandreio was admitted to the circle, which began to meet every Saturday evening to discuss various subjects, European literature, philosophy and economics, keeping in mind two principles: Italy was in crisis and no political party was capable of solving it. The country needed reforms, but the landlords and the employers were resisting them.
In September 1920, Alfa Romeo workers occupied the factory in Milan, demanding better working conditions and higher wages. They were supported by workers in Turin and Genoa. But all over Italy, groups of war veterans, petty criminals and disaffected students were uniting in spedizioni punitive (punitive expeditions) against workers’ and left-wing rallies and newspapers. These groups were armed with revolvers left over from the war and torches.
These squatters initially fought in the cities, but soon also in the countryside. Where they met resistance, they started burning down buildings. The police and the army merely watched, but often supported them. By March 1921, there were already 150,000 such groups, divided into hundreds of sections. One of their greatest opponents was the MEP Giacomo Matteotti.
Tuscany, with neighbouring Emilia-Romagna, soon became a centre of unrest, with labour strikes and peasants’ revolts being the most frequent. In August 1920, an ammunition depot was blown up, just a few days later the chief of police was shot dead trying to calm the rioters, and red flags flew everywhere in the factories. Carlo and Nello were in Florence at the time, studying hard and not taking part in the riots.
In November 1921, the Fascist Party was founded, and even then it could count on 217,000 supporters. By mid-1921, the Fascists, with their local leader Tullio Tamburini, already controlled a large part of Tuscany. By then Salvemini and his circle had managed to avoid the attention of the squadrists and to meet in secret. Then, in December 1921, they attacked Ernesto Rossi’s house and ransacked it. Fascism had become a power capable of intimidating everyone in Italy. Italy was exhausted and everyone wanted peace except the fascists. There were already 300,000 squadrists and it was becoming more and more difficult to keep them in check.
Fascism spreads its tentacles
In October 1922, Mussolini gathered the fascist leaders in Perugia, divided the country into 20 sectors and began preparations for the uprising. On 24 October, thousands of fascists at the congress shouted Roma, Roma, Roma! The atmosphere was heated and the message clear. They demanded that Mussolini become Prime Minister. Fascists began to arrive from all sides of the country, with the intention of marching on Rome. They travelled by carts, trains, bicycles, cars. The weather was fine and they seemed to be on a trip.
In the cities where opposition was expected – Milan, Turin and Parma – local fascist detachments quickly took control of the cities. In Florence, their leader Tullio Tamburini occupied the telephone exchange and the post office. He then sent 230 of his fascists by train to Rome. Meanwhile, Mussolini cunningly stayed in Milan and waited.
On 29 October, he was summoned by King Vittorio Emanuele and asked to form a new Italian government. The very next day, he travelled to Rome by sleeper. He accepted the post of Prime Minister and added the posts of Minister of the Interior and Minister of Foreign Affairs in the coalition government, from which the Socialists and Communists were excluded. Abroad, Mussolini’s march on Rome and his seizure of power attracted no attention.
Fascism soon spread its tentacles across Italy and was supported by the army, the aristocracy, the church and industry. But not Salvemini, from the march on Rome onwards he became its bitter opponent. In the Circolo di Cultura, as his circle was called, it was considered the duty of the members not to obey the laws but to oppose them. But however much he despised the fascists, he also despised the socialists for their incompetence and their willingness to compromise.
The Salvemini Circle also attracted new members. Marion Cave was an Aglagin, 27 years old and therefore a little older than the Rosselli brothers. She came to Florence to write about the Paduan philosopher Conti. She was not a beauty, but she had beautiful long hair and her eyes were quite luminous. In the summer of 1923, Carlo and Nello finished their studies and got top marks. Nello saw his academic career in historiography with his research on Mazzini, while the more impatient Carlo looked to the future.
Meanwhile, Mussolini triumphed, as his party won the elections by a landslide. Out of 535 deputies, 374 pledged allegiance to him. He was satisfied that he had proved himself a skilful administrator and a powerful political force, and publicly distanced himself from the most brutal use of force. More than anyone else, he showed that he understood the Italian penchant for drumbeats. Salvemini did not go to the polls despite being visited and threatened by fascists.
Mussolini’s prickles were the most painful of all Matteotti’s. That is why he must pay with his life, he was convinced. As Matteotti’s mutilated body was taken to his home in Fratta Polesine in Veneto, people on the roadside knelt and fascists shouted, “He was the first! The first one!”
After Matteotti’s death, the Rosselli brothers and their friends became convinced that Mussolini could not be defeated by legal means. The opposition was too fragmented to be united in the fight against the fascists. But the year before, in 1923, a group of young republicans who called themselves Italia Libera had attacked Mussolini at a rally, shouting “Viva la Libertá!” They also demanded free elections and the disbanding of the fascist militia. Mussolini dismissed them as “melancholic weaklings”.
But soon after Matteotti’s death, a branch of the movement was set up in Florence, and Nello immediately joined it. Soon his brother Carlo and the Englishwoman Marion Cave joined the movement. Within a few weeks, young Florentines were writing, printing and distributing anti-fascist leaflets. Soon they had almost a thousand supporters. They met in secret, had no membership lists, and the sign of a meeting was the codes in the weekly lottery. The police discreetly monitored them, but did not yet interfere in their work.
In the early hours of the Day of the Dead in November 1924, a pair of young men sneaked into the city cemetery and hung a large painting of Matteotti on the wall. Word spread quickly, and people began to arrive and lay flowers. The police quickly removed the picture, but people were still coming. Salvemini also came and was soon arrested.
He was taken to the police station, where the well-known professor was immediately identified and released. But Salvemini returned to the cemetery and was arrested again. The police inspector got upset and scolded his colleagues: “Don’t you understand! Salvemini wants you to arrest him!” Then the police left him alone. Carlo, Nello, Marion Cave and others escaped arrest.
This autumn, Nello met 19-year-old Maria Todesco, the daughter of a former colonel. They were also quite wealthy Sephardic Jews, but her father suffered from manic depression. It was rumoured that it was because he had to sign the death warrants of soldiers for desertion in the First World War. The family firmly refused to discuss politics. But Nello and Maria fell in love.
At the end of November this year, the 4th Congress of Jewish Youth was held in Livorno, and Nello attended and gave a speech. “I am a Jew, but first I am an Italian and a member of the glorious tradition of the Risorgimento. But because I don’t go to synagogue, I don’t speak Hebrew and Judaism is not the driving force of my life, I am no less a Jew.” His Jewish feelings may have seemed weak, but they made him happy, alive and strong.
On 30 December 1924, the second massive wave of fascist repression began, with Florence in the thick of it, home to a quarter of the country’s fascist cells. The first squatters were war veterans, small shopkeepers and artists, united by their hatred of Bolshevism, their dissatisfaction with the results of the First World War, and reinforced by a mixture of the pseudo-revolutionary ideas of Garibaldi, Freemasonry and socialism.
They were quickly supported by the aristocracy, which could not get over being forced out of local government by the Socialists. Finally, they were supported by the landlords, who wanted revenge on the peasants who had resisted them and were happy to turn their estates into meeting places for the radical right. They also received support in artistic circles, notably from the later famous writer Curzio Malaparte, who hailed fascism as the rebirth of Italy.
Italy enters a brutal dictatorship
The most brawling squadron of the larger number, which could gather 2000 men around it, was led by Tullio Tamburini, head of the city militia. He was the man Mussolini trusted most. In the darkest hours of the Matteotti affair, Tamburini sent a telegram to Mussolini: “For you, for fascism and for Italy.”
On the last day of 1924, in the afternoon, Tamburini called on his squadrons to assemble, and they came from all sides in buses, trains, carriages and cars, carrying banners that read: “We have had enough of you, opponents. Duce, give us a free hand.”
They then rampaged through the streets, first smashing the editorial offices of the newspaper Nuovo Giornale, which had published some articles critical of Mussolini. The editorial office was set on fire and the firemen who came to help were not allowed near. Then they attacked the rooms where Salvemini, the Rosselli brothers and others were gathered. They threw all the furniture and all the files into the street, made a pyre and set it on fire. There was no one on the premises at the time, and the Rosselli brothers decided that their new temporary meeting place would be in their own house. It had an exit to the garden at the back so that they could escape in time, and guards were posted to warn them of the approaching danger.
The Rosselli’s house remained undamaged that night, but the next day the Prefect of Florence banned the Rosselli Circle for “violating public order”. The riots then spread to Arezzo, Livorno and Lucca, and in early January 1925 to Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy.
On 3 January 1925, Mussolini called a parliament and began to lecture to a half-empty chamber that Italy needed a strong hand and that he was the only one who could give it to her, that it was time for the nation to go fascist and that the opposition had to obey him. In that case, all the problems will be solved in two days. There were some tepid protests, but almost nobody heard them. The King then approved the new Mussolini government, in which the fascists took over all the important portfolios; Dino Grandi foreign affairs, Italo Balbo aviation, and Roberto Farinacci became secretary of the fascist party.
The next day, the prefects of the provinces received telegrams to suppress any negative reactions to Mussolini’s speech. Ninety-five associations and clubs were banned, 25 organisations disbanded and 111 “suspicious persons” arrested.
The Rosselli brothers, Salvemini and Ernesto Rossi met and decided to set up an illegal newspaper called Non Mollare” (Don’t Give Up), which would oppose fascism, work against Mussolini and call for disobedience to the regime. Carlo Rosselli and Salvemini would contribute most of the texts, Rossi would take care of the printing, Marion Cave would do the typesetting and the archives, and Nino Traquandi would be the supporter who would distribute the newspaper in the towns and villages of the city.
The fascists became aware of them and went on the hunt for the writers and publishers of the illegal newspaper. But they were cautious. Each edition was printed by a different printer. A medical student, Vannucci, kept the texts in the freezer of the city morgue. Pilati, a former socialist deputy who had a construction company, used his workers to distribute the newspaper.
In March, the police tried to arrest a striker, Renzo Pinzi, but he escaped. Rossi advised him to leave Italy for France and gave him 1,000 lire to live on. Almost at the same time, the police arrested three socialist lawyers and found rolls of the Non Mollare newspaper in their possession.
Meanwhile, Renzo Pinzi was demanding more and more money from France, and when he didn’t get it, he agreed with the Italian police to testify at the trial of three lawyers in order to get a reduced sentence and some benefits. Carlo Rosselli, Rossi and Salvemini found out about his betrayal and went into hiding.
At the trial against the lawyers, Pinzi was interviewed. He did not know about the Rosselli brothers, but he told about Rossi and Salvemini. Rossi quickly fled to France, Salvemini was arrested and taken to Rome’s Regina Coeli prison, and a few weeks later he was transferred back to Murate prison in Florence. He was tried on 13 June, one of the last moments of legality before Italy finally sank into a period of dictatorship.
After reviewing the evidence, the judge found that the evidence was too weak for the prosecution and, as the witnesses had not appeared, he adjourned the trial and Salvemini walked out of the courtroom free to go. The squaddists who were in the courtroom went wild. Salvemini’s friends, who had surrounded him joyfully, ran away in fear and hid in nearby shops and houses, so that the fascists only caught and started beating those who were not quick enough.
Salvemini would no longer be alive if a Carabinieri officer had not hidden him on the ground floor of the Palais de Justice. He then slipped out a side door and immediately travelled to a friend in Rome.
The riots lasted for hours and many people were injured. The next morning, a group of fascists knocked on the door of the Rosselli’s house looking for Carlo and Nello, who they apparently did not know had been studying in Berlin for a long time. They searched the whole house, smashed a bunch of furniture and precious china from Sevres and left in disappointment.
Salvemini knew he had to leave Italy. He went to Paris, where Ernesto Rossi was waiting for him. Carlo Rosselli had now taken over the editorship of Non Mollare, and Salvemini was sending him incriminating documents on Mussolini from Paris. Meanwhile, the fascists’ rampage continued. They were convinced that their greatest opponents were not communists but intellectuals, and the latter were increasingly the victims of their beatings.
One of Mussolini’s harshest critics was Giovanni Amendola, once a monarchist and parliamentarian. He had been beaten and arrested on several occasions, and then, one day, when he was returning home from a health resort and, as a precaution, asked the prefect to give him a detachment of carabinieri to protect him, the squadristi put a large rock in the middle of the road and stopped him, refusing to allow the carabinieri to protect him. They dragged him out of the car, beat him savagely and broke his chest. He had to undergo several difficult operations.
Always Stay Up to Date
Subscribe to our newsletter to get our newest articles instantly!
Violence in Florence
Non Mollare continued to be published, even though Carlo Rosselli suspected that the paper’s days were numbered. Meanwhile, Nello had also returned from Berlin. Amelia persuaded her two sons that they were on the arrest list and asked them to leave Florence. They went into hiding around the city, and Amelia left Florence to stay in a small hotel outside the city. One night, Amelia was woken up by a neighbour who asked her if she knew what was happening in Florence because she could see a yellowish glow in the sky. The two women stood at the window, wondering in whose honour the fireworks were being set off.
Amelia didn’t know that the squatters had come to her house, knocked on the door and, when they realised there was no one inside, blew it up and started looking for Carlo and Nello. They did not find them, so they threw the furniture into the street and set fire to it. They then went to the house of Consolo, a lawyer from whom they had found some copies of Non Mollare a few days earlier. He hid under their bed, they pulled him out from under it and shot him in the head.
The next victim was the famous and popular sculptor Pilati. When he refused to open the door, they climbed a ladder into the house and shot him in the face, leg and stomach. He died in hospital a few hours later. More fascists from the surrounding area arrived in Florence and the bloody dance continued. Eight people lost their lives, many shops were looted and set on fire, glass was broken on the floor, passers-by were beaten, smoke began to rise from the city by the Arno river and the skyline was lit up with fires.
At that time, the city was full of foreign tourists, drunken fascists harassed them, and
popular restaurants and shops were closed. Foreign newspapers ran stories about the riots in Italy and Mussolini was forced to expel 53 people from the Fascist Party. The city’s prefect also had to say goodbye to his post. Mussolini declared, “Violence is moral when it is appropriate, surgically performed and chivalrous, but private and individual uncontrolled violence is anti-fascist.”
Carlo decided to stop publishing his illegal newspaper for a while as a precaution. He moved to Genoa, as he still had some unfinished business there and in Milan. Amelia and Nello joined him for a few months until the situation in Florence calmed down.
When Amelia returned to Florence, her house was intact and the city was peaceful and full of tourists again. Many of her friends had made peace with the fascists and had even joined the party. She no longer visited them.
Meanwhile, Carlo Rosselli has found a new ally. Pietro Nenni, a Republican, former editor of Avanti and veteran of the post-war workers’ strikes, had once been friends with Mussolini. They were of the same mind that Mussolini had to be stopped and Carlo suggested to him that they should publish a new newspaper, Il Quarto Stato. The first issue was published in March 1926. But already in April Nennius was arrested by the police, and it was only thanks to his international acquaintance that he was able to spend no more than a month in prison. When he returned from prison, he found it best to join Salvemini and Rossi in exile.
Carlo lived under the illusion that no one in northern Italy noticed him. One day, while walking down the street, three men stopped him and beat him savagely. But there were happy moments too. In July 1926, Carlo Rosselli and Marion Cave were married in Genoa. None of the bride’s English parents attended the wedding.
Mussolini called 1926 l’Anno Napoleonico, the Napoleonic Year of Fascism. He turned the country into a dictatorship and saw three assassinations. In April 1926, he was shot by the daughter of the Anglo-Irish poet Violet Gibson. When the dictator visited Campidoglio in Rome, Violet, who was not being paid attention to, fired a pistol at him, hitting him in the nose. The Duccio’s nose, which was bleeding profusely, was quickly bandaged so that he could continue his bombastic speech.
The second assassination took place in September, when Mussolini rode into the Chigi Palace. There was a crash, as if someone had thrown a stone at a moving car. The driver immediately hit the accelerator and, when the car was 30 metres away, a grenade exploded, injuring eight people. The assassin was Carlo Lucetti, an anarchist worker from Carrara, who was arrested by the police before he could throw the second bomb.
Six weeks later, Mussolini was driving in an open car in Bologna when he was shot at by a 15-year-old press apprentice, Anteo Zamboni. It is not known why he fired, because the boy was immediately lynched and his body, impaled on an iron bar, was paraded in the streets.
The fascists did not have to wait long for a response. In November 1926, many new laws were passed, all political parties except the fascist ones were banned, anti-fascist organisations were disbanded, passports were confiscated, illegals crossing the border were shot without warning, and the death penalty was introduced and abolished in 1889. A national defence tribunal was also set up to try those deemed to be a threat to national interests.
Mussolini appoints Arturo Bocchini, former Prefect of Brescia and Genoa, as Chief of Police. Bocchini protected the Duce with real obsession. He reformed the police apparatus, which was outdated, and created a veritable cordon sanitaire around his boss. Whenever Mussolini travelled, the roads were closed and all suspicious persons were watched or imprisoned. A network of spies and informers or agents provocateurs operated throughout the country, seeking to infiltrate all anti-fascist groups, whatever their size or importance.
One of the victims of the new measures was Il Quarto Stato, a legal newspaper, the last issue of which was published in November 1926. The newspaper, which had been legal for seven months, had a readership of 10,000, which was a great success.
The second victim was the liberal newspaper Corriere della Sera, which the fascists turned into their mouthpiece in a matter of days. All opponents of the regime were aware that they would soon have to seek refuge abroad. Although contacts with foreign countries, especially Switzerland and France, were more or less regular through the post, thanks to the help of the postal officials in Lugano, the borders were closed and strictly controlled.
However, there were two ways to escape abroad. One was from the Rijeka via the bridge in Sušak to Yugoslavia, and the other was over the mountains to France or Switzerland. For this second route, guides had to be hired and paid for, and luggage had to be left in Italy to be taken across the border by a bank employee who travelled weekly to Lugano in Switzerland.
Carlo Rosselli was not worried about his own security, but he knew he had to get Filippo Turati, the leader of the Italian Socialists, abroad, whose passport had already been refused because he was going to Germany for medical treatment. Turati was under surveillance by the police, so he shaved his beard and wore glasses to avoid being recognised. Accompanied by Carlo, the asthmatic Turati, who was almost 70, slipped out of the house through a side exit and got into a car, which Carlo drove him to Savona during the night. Corsica was the exceptional route chosen for the flight to freedom.
In Savona, Carlo and Turati spent the night in a hotel, were joined the next day by Sandro Pertini, and on the night of 11 December, the boat with six rowers set sail for the open sea. But a fog descended and for a long time they did not know where they were. Twelve hours later, they saw the coast of Corsica. From there, Turati immediately sent a telegram to Briand, the French Foreign Minister, asking for asylum for himself and for Pertini.
The next night Carlo returned to Italy with the rowers. But the police were there to arrest them, even though they claimed they were just out for a little sea trip.
In confinace
While Carlo was in prison, his brother Nello married Maria Todesco on 22 December 1926, according to Jewish custom. The two brothers were quite different in character, and now their wives were separating them even more. Carlo was up to his neck in politics, as was his pregnant wife Marion. Nello, on the other hand, was in academia, had just won first prize for his essay on Mazzini and was looking forward to becoming a professor. His wife Maria had no interest in politics and they both wanted a quiet family life.
Carlo has now been transferred to a penal island off the coast of Sicily to await trial. Nello, meanwhile, spent his days at the National Library, returning home only for dinner. But one evening he was not home. He was arrested and imprisoned in the Murate dungeon. The police report stated that he was a danger to the country and that he should be prevented from acting further.
One day, when his mother Amelia and his wife Maria visited him in prison, they pushed a piece of paper into his hands, saying that he had been sentenced to five years’ exile on one of the penal islands. It did not say where it was to be. Three weeks later, he was put on a train and taken with an escort to the island of Ustica, near Sicily. This left Amelia alone in Florence with Marion, who soon afterwards gave birth to a son for Carlo, whom they called Mirtillino, and was joined by Nello’s wife Maria.
Life under fascism continued, leaving people no free time. The Dopolavoro regulated all the free time that people had left after their jobs were finished. It was necessary to take part in various games, mass cycling, excursions, rallies and the singing of the fascist anthem Giovinezza. Children between the ages of eight and fourteen were enrolled in balilla sections, they had their own uniforms and wooden rifles. Bocchini once again reorganised the police, which was now divided into seven departments, two of which dealt exclusively with politics. The new political police was the OVRA, which had almost unlimited powers.
On 9 September 1927, eleven people were tried in Savona, including Carlo Rosselli. The trial ended, to everyone’s surprise, with a sentence of only ten months’ imprisonment. Since all of them had already spent eight months in prison, the sentence was practically equivalent to acquittal.
But Mussolini quickly intervened. He announced that they would not be released after serving their sentences, but would spend five years in exile on one of the penal islands off Sicily. Il Confino, or confiscation in one of the mountain villages of southern Italy or on islands near Sicily, has been a common occurrence in Italy since 1927. People were accustomed to seeing chained convicts accompanied by two carabinieri on the trains going to the south of the country. Soon, on the islands of Ustica, Favignana, Lipari, Pentelleria, Lampedusa and Le Tremiti in particular, there were already thousands of prisoners sentenced to years of house arrest.
These islands were almost bare, with little water and even fewer original inhabitants. Strict rules applied to the Confinirans. They were not allowed to socialise or even to have a radio, they had to observe a curfew, their letters were censored, and offences could earn anyone a year or two more of confine. Apart from the bad food and the lack of water, the most difficult thing for the confinees was the endless boredom.
So Nello ended up in Ustica and Carlo was transferred to Lipari. All the islands had water problems, so they had to bring water from the mainland, everything was extremely dirty, the confinement was locked at night, electricity was scarce, there was no doctor, no hospital. The only advantage was that those who had enough money could bring their immediate family to these islands.
Nell’s wife Maria came to Ustica in September 1927. They rented the lower rooms of a small farmhouse in the lower part of the village overlooking the sea. In the meantime, Amelia was trying to get Nell’s pardon through her connections. On 29 January 1928, Nell found out that he was free. When he and his wife left Ustica, Nello was convinced that he had learned a lot. He later wrote to a friend: “Two months in prison, seven in confine, my wife is pregnant, I have had an incredible experience, my fate is uncertain.”
Nello managed to find a job in the Roman archives and later in the Turin archives, as the family moved to Turin. Working long hours alone in the archives, he felt increasingly alienated from everyday life in Italy. “Every flag I see fluttering in the sun, every boy dressed in a fascist uniform crossing the street, every poster I read, tells me: you are not one of us.” Even the birth of his daughter Silvia did not erase this feeling.
Carlo disembarked in Lipari at the end of 1927. “After a year of greyness, this return to life is delicious.” He rented a room in a white house at the end of town, overlooking the sea and the mountains, surrounded by cypresses and palm trees. The island of Lipari was considered the best of the penal islands among the confinement prisoners. Half of its 7 500 inhabitants lived in the harbour, which was clean and had a few shops, a butcher’s shop and even a café where silent films were shown.
The local people did not like the Confiniris and when dormitories were built for them, they resisted the arrival of the convicts, so the police had to intervene. Convicts could come out of their own homes, rented rooms in the houses of the locals, or from the common sleeping quarters at seven in the morning, but when the bugle sounded in the evening, they were subject to a curfew.
In January 1928, Carl’s wife Marion and their son Mirtillin arrived in Lipari and life became more pleasant. But Marion and her son came to visit for only a few months and left, returning again with fresh news, and Carlo suffered. He felt unnecessary and the monotony of life was killing him. I must escape, he convinced himself. But escape was not easy. He could humiliate himself, recant his political convictions and move closer to fascism, as Mussolini pardoned a few such penitents every year. But he did not want to.
Lipari was 35 kilometres from the mainland, there were always three police boats patrolling the sea, a lighthouse on nearby Vulcan that could illuminate the Lipari harbour, and 500 militia, police, carabinieri and financial guards on the island itself, where there were about 1 000 prisoners.
But four of them wanted to escape endlessly; Carlo, Lussu, Nitti and Dolci, and so they founded the Escape Club. Contact with the mainland was maintained by Marion, who came to visit Lipari several times. They took the decision to flee to Tunis, which was a French colony. Their friends bought a Sigma N motorboat in London, loaded it on a trailer in Paris, took it to Marseilles, changed the engine and arrived in Tunis via the Mediterranean.
It was agreed that on a certain day, at sunset, the prisoners would swim out to sea in a secluded spot and wait for a speedboat to approach. In the event of no boat, they would still have time to swim back to shore and arrive at their accommodation before curfew.
The first escape attempt was set for 17 November 1928. The sea was cold, the foursome gnashed their teeth, and the boat was nowhere to be seen. High waves prevented him from sailing out of Tunis. Then one of them, Dolci, was pardoned and only three remained. A new escape date was set for July 1929, as Sigma N proved unsuitable for the high seas. A new boat, the Dream V, with two powerful engines, was purchased from an Egyptian prince.
None of them knew that the news that some of them were trying to escape had reached the ears of the police, who immediately tightened their control over all those who were being questioned. Nevertheless, on 5 July, Carlo, Lussi and Nitti were released before curfew. Again, there was no boat. On the twenty-seventh of July, the experiment was repeated. At 21.15, there was a slight sound of an engine and a black shadow emerged from the darkness.
The three shadows rushed out of the water and climbed into the boat, which quickly headed back out to sea. By dawn, they had already passed the western part of Sicily and arrived in Tunis at 3 pm. They were free. They had only to go to Marseilles and then to Paris.
The fascist police reacted quickly to their escape. Marion was in Aosta with her son at the time, and she was arrested and imprisoned. The French and English newspapers were in an uproar. “Pregnant wife of Italian dissident arrested”, read the headlines. Telegrams of protest flooded Mussolini’s desk, and the Italian ambassador in London pleaded with Rome to do something. Two weeks later, Marion was free. She soon joined Carlo in Paris.
Nell fared worse and found himself back on Utica, before being transferred to Ponza Island, which was considered the most beautiful of the penal islands, but also unbearably hot. His wife, Maria, was eight months pregnant, so he was allowed to visit her, and in November, on the birth of their second daughter, he learned that the charges against him had been dropped. Amelia was the only one left alone by the fascists.
Emigration and death
Paris now became the centre of Mussolini’s opponents. There were anarchists, communists, socialists, trade unionists, opposition journalists and many others. They wrote articles, printed leaflets and sent them to Italy by secret channels, held rallies and demonstrations, held meetings, forged unsuccessful plots. There were around 150,000 Italians in the city and its surroundings, and around one million in the whole of France. They came in waves. Some managed to bring some possessions with them, others only saved their heads. But even their possessions were soon spent, and they moved from one cheap hotel to another, sometimes even hungry.
None of their activities escaped the watchful eye of the Italian secret police. Bocchini had been sending his own handlers to France for some time to infiltrate various Italian societies. The most notorious dissident action was when Giovanni Bassanesi learned to fly a plane, hired one, flew from the southern Swiss province of Ticino over Milan and the surrounding towns, and dropped leaflets from the air. Carlo was also involved in the founding of the Giustizia e Libertá movement, which was not affiliated to any political party. The slogan of the movement was: We Italians and no one else will defeat fascism.
In January 1933, Hitler came to power in Germany. Fascism was no longer an isolated phenomenon in Europe, but in Italy it was at its peak. For many Italians, these were miraculous years. Fascism went on and on; the fastest seaplane, the fastest cruise ship, the best football team, the fastest athletes, happy former emigrants returning from abroad to a happy Italy. Those Italians who lived abroad and wanted to visit their former homeland could buy half-price train tickets and visit the sights for free. Even Mussolini became a tourist attraction.
All this did not concern Nello Rosselli, his wife Maria, his children and his mother Amelia, who kept to themselves in Florence, knowing they were under police surveillance. In May 1936, after a torturous war, the Italian army invaded Addis Ababa and the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie went into exile. Italy was going mad because it finally had an empire and Mussolini had never been so powerful. It was then that Nello first thought of joining his brother in exile.
On 17 July 1936, the generals in the Spanish army revolted and two days later General Franco asked Mussolini to send him planes to fly his rebel troops from Morocco to Spain. The Spanish Civil War began. Carlo partly financed, from his own revenues, the creation of a special unit of volunteers with a squadron of planes, led by the French writer André Malraux, to fight on the Republican side.
Carlo did not hold out in Paris during these watershed events. On the 19th of August he travelled to Barcelona and joined the anarchist-syndicalist column of Francesco Ascano. As a war veteran of the Alps, he was given command of a group of 40 volunteers. In November, he was asked to give a speech over the radio which would be broadcast in Italy. He spoke with passion and commitment: ‘Comrades, brothers, Italians. An Italian volunteer is speaking to you from Barcelona. The revolution is winning in Spain and a new order is being born, based on freedom and social justice.”
Four days later, a police report was on the desk of Italian Foreign Minister Ciano, saying that Carlo Rosselli was the most important of the Italian volunteers fighting on the Republican side in Spain. Moreover, his name was mentioned in the event of the fall of the regime in Italy, and he was also mentioned as a possible successor to Mussolini.
Later, things started to go the wrong way for the Republicans. Carlo was blamed for failures and collaboration with the anarchists, the conflicts between anarchists, socialists and communists increased and Carlo returned to Paris in January 1937.
In Florence, Nello and the family were still under surveillance, but police reports said there was no political activity. His wife Maria was pregnant for the fourth time and Nello seemed to have no interest in anything other than his academic career. Florence was not a very friendly city for the Jews there at that time. Mussolini’s attitude towards the 50 000 Italian Jews was always ambiguous.
Then 230 Jews took part in his march on Rome, and they were called “fascists from the start”. The militant new Jewish movement, with its newspaper La Nostra Bandiera, was a loyal supporter of the fascists. Meanwhile, French politics in the 1930s was very unstable. When Léon Blum’s Popular Front came to power again in 1936, it banned all extreme paramilitary organisations. La Cagoule, the new far-right organisation, therefore operated illegally and vowed armed resistance if Bolshevism won in France.
In early 1937, representatives of the movement met with Italian intelligence and agreed to destroy anti-fascist groups in France. The final conclusion was that Rosselli had to be eliminated. This task was to be carried out by six men and two women who took different routes to Normandy, where Carlo was receiving treatment for injuries to his leg sustained in the First World War. Carlo was also very much looking forward to the visit of his brother Nello and went to the railway station to wait for him.
On 4 June, the Prefect of Florence reported to the Ministry of the Interior in Rome that Carlo and Nello Rosselli were staying at the Hotel Cordier in Bagnoles-de-l’Orne. On 9 June, Marion travelled back to Paris and the brothers took her to the train station. A few kilometres from Bagnoles, the killers were waiting on a road surrounded by woods with almost no traffic.
As the brothers were returning to Bagnoles, Carlo came around a bend and saw a Peugeot on the road with a few people around it trying to change a tyre, so he pulled over and stopped the car, and Nello got out to see if he could help. Then someone in the group pulled out a revolver and fired. Nello staggered and tried to protect himself, then collapsed. The second thug ran up to him and stabbed him 17 times with a knife.
Carlo jumped out of the car and rushed to his brother’s aid. He was hit by gunshots, fell and was stabbed several times. The road was full of blood. The killers searched Carlo’s pockets, took his wallet and some documents. A cyclist rode past, saw a group of people and pools of blood and, terrified, drove on at full speed. The killers dragged the bodies into the woods, got into the car and drove to the agreed place, where they tried in vain to set the car on fire.
The next afternoon, Marion called the Hotel Cordier from Paris and was told that her husband had not been seen since the previous day. No bodies were found in Bagnoles for some time, but a half-burned Peugeot and traces of blood were found and the police were informed. Finally, the mutilated bodies were found in the woods.
Marion came and identified the bodies and sent a telegram to Amelia in Florence: ‘There has been an accident. Come at once.”
The truth about what happened has only slowly come out. The Italian press tried to blame it on the mutual reckoning between anti-fascists. But the French police kept looking. A cyclist who was passing by at the time of the murder came forward, and slowly the names of all those involved came to light. But it took a year before 71 people from the Cagoule movement and the extreme right were charged with various crimes, including the murder of Carlo and Nello Rosselli. Pablo Picasso and André Breton were among the intellectuals who wrote that if the death of Matteotti meant the death of freedom in Italy, the death of the Rosselli brothers meant the end of freedom in the whole of Europe.
In September 1944, after the liberation of Rome, an inquest was opened into the deaths of the Rosselli brothers. But many of those involved were already dead, and those who remained alive were constantly changing their statements. In April 1951, the remains of the brothers were transported from the Pére-Lachaise cemetery in Paris to Florence. They were buried in the Trespiano cemetery, on a hill overlooking the city.
Carved in the stone: “Carlo and Nello Rosselli. Giustizia e Libertá. They died for her. They lived for her.”
