SET DOWN SUDDENLY IN ROME TODAY by an American army plane and still feeling yourself a part of the American war-machine that has clamped itself upon Europe, your first involuntary reaction to the Forum is likely to be that all that irrelevant old rubbish—the broken stones and the chunks of brick—ought to be cleaned up and carted away and the place turned into a nice public park. The columns, single prongs or small clusters, that have lost their companions or mates, give the impression of useless old teeth that ought to be pulled to make room for the bridgework of a modern colonnade. A playground for the Roman poor is what the Forum just now mainly serves for. Little children with gray clothes and dusty legs climb up on the loosely piled marble or play train, astride a fallen length of column, while their mothers sit around on scattered fragments. It is difficult to focus your mind to the consciousness that these rounded flags—with enormous lacunae among them, like the gaps in an ancient text—are actually the Via Sacra, where Horace met the bore. But the Temple of Faustina wrenches you up to confront that giant world, as it lifts out of the dirt and debris its tremendous steep brick steps and its façade of stupefying grandeur, a huge intact block of antique Rome. Below it, the Allied Commission has put up, for the instruction of the troops, a large sign in dubious English, which mixes Latin with Italian names:
Temple of Antonio and Faustina
Begun 141 AD following the death of Faustina, wife of Antonio Pius and who was declared a goddess by the Roman Senate. When the Emperor died he was made a Joint Patron Deity of the Temple.
Beyond, on the Palatine Hill, stretches the shapeless agglomeration of the Palaces of the Caesars, with empty eyeholes in their grass-sprouted brick and, at the top, a fringe of pine and cypress that seems to have grown like the weeds, with no tending. Faceless though they have mostly become, the old sallow arches and fractured walls have the look of faded old men with tufts of hair growing out of their noses and ears. When you explore the stripped carcases of these structures, with their entrails laid open and their naked ribs, you find them ugly and rather repellent: it is hard to make head or tail of what was once organization and splendor. Descending into the dark vaulted chambers, you find nothing but human excrement. And the elegances and luxuries of later times first gladden and then depress, as you find them defiled and neglected. You climb to a still thriving garden, enclosed by a low box hedge, which has roses hanging garlanded on stakes and plantings of red gladioli, yellow lilies and magenta dahlias, and think at first sight that this part has been kept up; but, entering the maze behind it—box paths with a palm in the middle—you discover that it is now a latrine and that the little walls of hedge have been broken down, where people have forced their way out. A grotto that must once have been charming, matted with a great growth of vines from which water continually drips, enshrines a green and limpid pool, the clearness of which, however, reveals only a pulp of old papers. The Renaissance stone lion that guards it has one front paw broken off and is scribbled all over with initials.
The Palatine Hill is a favorite resort for the black British Basutoland troops. The Italians are afraid of these Africans, and they herd away here by themselves, sauntering along the paths or milling quietly among the ruins. One finds groups of them, mingled with Sikhs, with whom they do not, however, associate, on a summit where a big arc of masonry opens to the empty sky, and where an unprotected gap in the walk discloses, in the bowels of a vanished palace, a great underground length of gallery: some cellar for stores and slaves, which, laid open, after a thousand years of darkness, by a recent collapse of the roofing, inspires, for the history-read visitor, a feeling of dread and awe. But, for the Africans—who have been recruited by being told that the White Father was in danger and who have been surprised to find other Negroes who say they live in the United States—the splendors of the Caesars, Italy, Europe itself, cannot mean very much more than they did to Attila’s Huns. The only consolation they find in Rome seems to be the low class of prostitutes who meet them toward nightfall in this part of the Forum. The girls take them to a part of the ruins that has a row of little compartments: just the thing for an informal brothel.
I found in the Allied Commission, in the department of food distribution, L.M., whom I knew from college, and I had from him a very realistic and highly entertaining account of the day-by-day workings of his organization.
He had been trained, when he first came over, at a place called Tizzi-Ouzou near Algiers, where there was “a so-called school of military government.” Here American and British officers were for the first time quartered together and confronted with the problem of getting on. The tone as well as the routine were, however, set by the British. Instead of American reveille or roll call, they had British morning parade. They would line up in a huge courtyard, and the British commandant would appear on a balcony, look at his wrist-watch and announce: “Gentlemen, the time is now eight forty-five. Parade dismissed!” The Americans and British were mixed in the ranks and at the moment when they broke formation, the Americans would walk straight away, but the British had to execute a “right turn,” salute, bringing their hands down smartly, and march forward with a military step. They would thus run right into the Americans and a scene of confusion would result. The same thing took place morning after morning. And they were out of tune in other ways. The movements of British drill are usually calculated to make a sound in order to keep the men in unison: the British wore hob-nailed shoes and were always snapping their heels, whereas our men wore rubber heels and sometimes felt like ineffectual phantoms. Then there was the issue of tea: where Americans and British had a mess together (we had the same situation at our correspondents’ hotel), it always annoyed the former to be forced to wait till seven-thirty for dinner because the latter liked tea at five. Both sides, in this phase, however, were making efforts to be amiable together; but “the cleavage began from the moment when they got on the ship for Naples—and they’ve been cleaving ever since. The A.C. is a shot-gun wedding. There was a certain amount of fellowship at mess when we first arrived in Rome and we were all mixed up together, but later the Americans and the British separated out from one another completely.” (This, too, was true at our hotel, where, eating three meals a day in the same dining-room with the British, I heard only once of an English correspondent sitting at the same table with Americans.) The two armies, in the Allied Commission, were supposed to be represented equally, but they were equal, he said, only in the sense of the story about the wartime rabbit stew, in which it was discovered that “one part horse, one part rabbit” meant one horse to one rabbit. The proportion of British to Americans was actually something like sixty to forty, but the former, through various devices, had acquired the real control. Our army promotion system played into the hands of the British because it worked on a rationing basis: we could have only so many colonels, so many majors, and so forth; but with the British, the rank went with the job, so that, though any given department might be organized with equal numbers of equal ranks, the British could and did soon promote as many of their own men as they liked, and now outranked the American element. The real power behind Colonel Clark, the nominal head of the Commission, was an Englishman who told him what to do. We had become civil servants for the British, who treated us like colonials, “playing Santa Claus with our food, oil and man power. As Sumner Welles says, we’re the tail to the British kite!”
He had some amusing stories of Naples. The Neapolitans would take paving-stones out of the streets in order to slow up the American trucks and get a chance to steal the bags of flour. They would also slit the sacks in the trucks, and then later, when these had been taken out, the little boys would come around and scrape the flour off the floor. In the station at Naples there were two little boys who worked together in the following way. When they saw an American carrying bags, one would stick a hatpin into him while the other grabbed the bags, as he dropped them. At Civitavecchia, he said, a considerable amount of salt had been stolen with the connivance of the carabinieri—salt is a government monopoly—who, as their price, took a cut of the shipments. Someone had told him that the same thing was mentioned in one of the classical Roman historians.
But these were merely the pettier peculations. He knew of an American officer who had been offered a handsome villa to live in after the war if he would agree to let a load of supplies be diverted to an improper destination. In Sicily, a British officer had been living in a castle with a local countess and levying a personal tax on every cargo of wine that went north. He was now in Italy proper and the authorities were supposed to have the goods on him; “but did you ever hear of an officer—especially a British officer—being convicted by a court martial?” L. himself had had one experience which had struck rather a sour note. He had got to know an Italian family whom he had liked and to whose house he had sometimes gone. It was a kind of palace made of white soap. The father was a splendid old figure, with a pair of enormous baffoni and a great shock of thick white hair. He had the concession for making records of all the music that was played in the Vatican—the big organ, the Sistine Choir; but at the present time none could be made and the family were rather hard-up. One evening he had proposed to L., in the blandest and most natural way in the world, that L. should supply him with the flints that the Americans were shipping in for cigarette-lighters for the soldiers. He would sell them, and they would split the price. L. has decided, he tells me, that he can’t go to the house any more.
The Borghese Gardens—into which you pass, at the top of the broad Via Veneto, through the old chipped reddish weedy Roman wall and the stone gates with the modern eagles. Here one always finds an atmosphere of gaiety, of leafage, of light bright color—everything both larger and more casual than in a park in London or Paris, and enchanting with a freedom and felicity that are characteristic only of Rome—all a little not precisely tinselly, not precisely flimsy, but slightly both tempting and teasing the foreigner by a careless disregard of plan, a cheerful indifference to purpose, that, nevertheless, derive a certain insolence from blooming among the monuments of so much solid civic building, so much noble and luxurious beauty. With all this behind them, these immense rambling grounds can afford to lack foundation, be perishable—like D’Annunzio’s Elegie Romane and Respighi’s Fontane di Roma.
I found myself almost every afternoon, when I had been to call for my mail, wandering up into the Borghese Gardens to read it and the Italian papers in a little out-of-doors café called La Casina del Lago. You went inside a special enclosure, shut off from the rest of the park by a little black iron fence, behind which were posted at intervals, whitish and dim in the shadow, a set of small antique statues, and walked along a gravel alley vaulted with fine straight green oaks, which seemed marvellously cool and reposeful after the dirty main drive and the meridian heat. The strange blend of informality and grandeur that is so much the quality of Rome! Outside, one would have passed a wall, loaded down with midsummer vines, which just revealed sculptured griffins and the flank of an embedded sarcophagus; and now one met a gray ducal stone lion grasping a sheaf of stone arrows in his paw but pedestalled on some makeshift brickwork which on one side it overlapped. The casina resembled a temple: a small portico with classical columns. In front of it were little round tables sheltered by ample umbrellas and surrounded by wicker chairs, and wide-branching pink rhododendrons growing out of large clay jars. A radio, concealed over the portico, was always warbling romantic opera or concert renditions of Mozart, often announced, as rather surprised me, to emanate—I suppose on records—from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York or the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The waiters were unobtrusive, sympathetic: they soon appeared, brought you apricot ice and little pink paste in frilled paper cups, then drifted into the background and let you alone.
I read letters from G. when I got them, and wished she were with me to go around with. Rome—even for Italians, apparently: the lovers in D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere—ought to be seen as an historical pageant and in company with someone else. I haven’t gone to many churches or museums. My idea has been that, sometime later on, I shall bring my children over to see them, as I was brought in my teens; and in the meantime, I have felt this spring as if the whole past of Rome has been pushed by the war into a history that is now finished. My attention is always on other things: on the phenomena of Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, Russian Soviet civilization that is taking over the world. The old routine of the tourist, reading up the earlier chapters of the story which is to culminate in his grandfather, his father and himself, seems relegated to the archives now, like the final instalment of a serial bound up in the completed volume of a suspended magazine.
One Sunday I was asked for lunch to a place in the country some distance from Rome, and was driven there, in an official limousine, by one of the other guests, a rather important man from the British Foreign Office. There was also a uniformed English girl, whose father was a well-known diplomat, then at the San Francisco Conference. They engaged in a conversation so low-voiced, laconic and private as to become almost telepathic. The first part of this peculiar interchange was more or less intelligible to a stranger—we were all sitting together in the back seat: Captain D. told Sir S. what she had done during the war with masterly matter-of-factness: she had apparently, in some capacity, been connected with the firing of anti-aircraft guns; and they talked about the effects of quinine—she had just “come out” to Italy—which you were supposed to take to ward off malaria, but which, the girl said, would turn you yellow, so that she felt she’d rather risk malaria. But then their voices sank still lower, and there was nothing but Christian names and nicknames, monosyllabic questions and answers in a kind of private code. The only name that I recognized was “Winnie,” who, Captain D. explained, lay in bed in the afternoon—“which nobody else is able to do”—and so came out “full of beans” at night, when the cabinet ministers were tired. And there leaked through to me rather dimly one of those inevitable British stories about someone who had snubbed someone else in a sharp and satisfactory manner. Sir. S. would occasionally raise his voice and address a remark to me, as if I were sitting in another room.
All this time we were passing through a region that had been absolutely laid waste by the fighting. Of whole villages there was nothing but rubble and empty walls—though the women still went back and forth, balancing jars on their heads, and the children played by the roadside, climbing on the old rusty guns that had been camouflaged with green dappling and now lay about, sometimes belly up. Spattered and speckled walls; balconies hanging in shreds. The pink, white or yellow houses looked almost too soft for real buildings: a railroad station presented the aspect of a partially gnawed graham cracker, and one was reminded by other ruins of loaves of bread with the crusts rather clumsily sliced off or of dilapidated cardboard boxes from which most of the paper coat had been ripped and the gray underneath partly torn. One house, with its staircase exposed, looked like a broken conch-shell which shows the interior spiral. Another, with the staircase destroyed, had been equipped with a long ladder which gave access to some still usable upstairs rooms. In another, on an upper story, a family of little children were sitting around in their Sunday clothes—black suits, green and red dresses—in a room of which only two corners were left: below them dropped a precipice of ruin; but they had brightened what remained of the room with little pots of flowers, and seemed to have got used to living in the open and in the danger of breaking their necks. In the main square of a fairly large town stood a headless unidentifiable white statue—with one arm still pathetically upraised in a gesture that had no longer any meaning—which perched on what looked like a rockery but was really a blasted pedestal.
Sir S. pointed out to his companion that the women were “very well-dressed compared to the women at home.” His tone about the Italians was invidious, but his opinion was not borne out by my own observation in England. The women in these roadside towns did look better than English women, but only because they had more chic. The bright little short dresses which they were wearing with bare legs were more vivid but less substantial than the clothes one saw in England. This was Sir S.’s only comment on the scenes through which we were passing till we came to a badly shelled cemetery which had once had a wall around it and which bore still, over its battered gate, the legend “IN CHRISTO QUI-ESCENTES.” “Sad to see that shattered!” he murmured.
We were on our way to lunch at the country place of a Roman prince, whose family went back to ancient Rome. I believe that he was still repaying, or had only lately repaid, a loan that his house had made from another equally ancient house sometime in the Renaissance. He had married an American woman, who was a patron of literature and the arts and had been particularly kind in guiding me to useful connections in Rome. The small castle, which, we were told, had been built about 1300, consisted of a low house and a square brown brick tower, with little rectangular windows and saw-teeth along the top; swifts and some kind of crows were flying in and out of the crevices. Rienzi—the popular leader, the Mussolini of the fourteenth century, who first carried all before him, then was murdered like Mussolini by the populace: the appearance and extinction of such leaders has been a recurrent feature of Roman history—had cut fourteen meters off the top as a punishment to the nobles, who, the Prince said, “doubtless needed to be punished, as they had in other cases.” Behind the castle, flat as a backdrop, granite and dark shrub-green, rose a mountain wall that looked quite sheer. At the top of this, on the right, one saw the old brown square buildings of an unlikely-looking town, which the American-born Princess never seemed to have got over regarding as rather quaint. There were a very swiftly running brook—the water here was filtered through the granite—and a little river, also rapid, at once dark and quite limpid—there were trout in it—with great beds of watercress, and across, on the opposite bank, gigantic elephant ears of some coarse mullein-like plant. The effect of this water was lovely and, like the little old castle, queer.
The Princess, though so active and generous in her efforts on behalf of the arts, had something of the dehydrated quality that Americans are likely to get when they have lived a long time in Europe. When I had met her first and asked an Italian who knew her whether she were intelligent, he had answered, “Not quite.” I felt that, in spite of her competence in the role she had chosen to play, she was somehow rather sadly displaced. Her only son had been pointlessly killed in the Italian invasion of Greece. The other guests made upon me an impression distinctly theatrical. They reminded me of the national types that had been caricatured so crudely in an early Soviet play, Sergei Tretyakov’s Roar, China, in which representatives of the capitalist countries were shown exploiting the East. Sir S. could not have been more the official Englishman. He did not take the foreigners seriously or pay very much attention to them, but went off and took photographs of the landscape and the castle. (The young girl who had been with us in the car was a somewhat deceptive case. She was actually not English but the daughter of a well-known Balto-Russian family, yet from lifelong residence in England she had come to have the attitude and appearance of a sturdy upper-class Girl Scout.) The Frenchman had no cultural nonsense and talked of nothing but commercial affairs. There were three other Americans besides myself: one of those supposedly important lawyer-banker-industrialist executives, conspicuous for their bulk, who get into public life, with his wife and a male assistant. He had been sent to Rome by the President on a diplomatic mission. The wife was the soul of a lack of tact and seemed a perfect example of the European idea of a vulgar rich American woman. She wore a small navy-blue sailor hat on her soft slightly curly hair that might have owed its yellow tint to peroxide, dark blue sun spectacles like horses’ blinders, large gold and blue rosette earrings on either side of her rectangular face, a string of pearls on the wrinkled neck under her square jaw and a row of large plain buttons down the front of her white dress. She complained that I was being called Wilson when I had been introduced to her as Warren, and when I was sitting next to her at lunch, passed her husband’s assistant a note asking him what my name was. He replied in the same way, and she then addressed a remark to me as Wilson but soon relapsed into calling me Warren. She announced at one point that she did not approve of international marriages, and when the daughter of the house laughed and said that she was the product of one, the non-internationalizing American lady said ungracefully, “You’re an exception.” The assistant to the big executive had a black spaniel that swam in the river, then shook himself and jumped on people and had to be shut up. There was a good deal of fuss about this in the tiresome American way.
The Prince excused himself after lunch. He was trying to get the estate into shape again, and he had to oversee things himself. He was worried about the four months’ drought. He had remained in his country place all through the occupation. The Germans had brought in salt water to encourage the spread of malaria, and when German soldiers had pitched their tents on his property, he had not made any complaint, knowing they would have malaria. Later on, he had expressed surprise that they were not camping there again. “Oh, no: everybody came down with malaria.” “What a pity!” I found the Prince more sympathetic than anyone else. He was a musician, had composed an opera; there was a cultural tradition in the family. Stendhal had come to stay at the palazzo in Rome, and the grandfather of the Prince was said to have made the authoritative map of the three worlds of the Divine Comedy. Having been led to imagine the afternoon in terms that were almost as crude as those of any Soviet writer, I cast our host as the very best type of cultivated Italian noble, much concerned with the care of his lands and his people. I learned later that his mother was English and one of his grandmothers Polish, and I was prevented from continuing to idealize him when I was told that, at the time of the war shortages, he had been mean about providing his peasants with food. Friends told me that on one occasion when they had lunched there during the war, a local station-master who was out of work had come to the Prince to ask him for some corn for his wife and children. The Prince had refused—he explained that he had had to give all his corn to the ammassi, the government pools. The Princess had attempted to intercede, and when her pleading had failed, had suggested that her husband might be able to get the man moved to another station where the trains were still running. But the Prince had said no: that there was plenty of work to be done on his own place—that the peasants now wanted three hundred lire a day but would soon be forced to work for a hundred. I recalled that he had expressed the opinion at lunch that people ought always to be a little underfed: he had, he said, been reading about Byron’s dieting, which had apparently stimulated the poet’s mind. The light and delicate food had, however, been perfect: ravioli, lettuce salad, sheep’s milk cheese, some sort of rice dish with honey, fruit compote and white wine.
The company were subdued about politics and more or less resigned to the inevitable Leftist tendencies. I had seen the hammer and sickle scratched on the Prince’s Roman palace. An Italian journalist who was present said to me that there had been nothing like this in Italy since the days of Belisarius in the sixth century, when they had had to fight the Goths and the Ostrogoths. He talked with interest about Walter Lippmann.
But the longer you live in Rome—and as the charming and chilly spring gives way to the smothering summer—the more you feel the stagnation and the squalor that are the abject human realities left by the ebb of power and splendor. You notice, in a little side-street such as the Via dei Cappuccini, the stopped-up urinal that overflows the cobbles and the melancholy old sprawling black sandals that lie in shreds in the road; and you become unpleasantly aware of the long accumulation of excrement in the corners of the great grass-grown back stairs of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore. The beggars begin to get on your nerves. Corrado Alvaro, the novelist, who has done a series of articles on them, tells me that they have a bus of their own, which brings them into town in the morning. The supposedly crippled paupers jump briskly out of the bus, make water against the wall, then go into their professional act, becoming paralyzed, bent and pathetic. Not all are fakes, however, he says; and this soon becomes all too obvious. One sees in the streets many people who are wasted with malnutrition or suffering from various infections, some of them not even begging, but lying on curbs or in doorways in fevered stupors or with bloated feet. There are women with tiny ugly children whom they expose all day to the sun. Near the entrance to our hotel in the Via Sistina is a woman with a limp shut-eyed baby that always seems doped or dead: we try to think it is a fake made of rubber. One of the most ambitious begging efforts is a remarkable family orchestra which is absolutely indefatigable and always to be found in some public place. The father, with an accordion, is the principal performer, and around him cluster seven children, tooting and piping on instruments that look like miniature saxophones. One of the boys doubles with cymbals. The mother stands keeping time, holding a pale heavy-lidded nurseling. Sometimes they play Lili Marlene, sometimes the International.
The street boys, the “ragazzini,” are all intent on illicit business. They are the visible communications of the network of the black market. If you so much as glance at one, he slides up to propose to you a woman and a room or to offer to buy your cigarettes. Cigarettes are the great medium of exchange, and their price goes up or down in proportion to the number of Americans who happen to be in Rome that week. The normal price of a package seems to be two hundred and fifty lire, that is, two dollars and a half, but it once sank to one hundred and twenty-five, when there were a lot of soldiers here on leave. The boys buy from the American soldiers food, clothing and cigarettes, and take them home to their parents, who sell them at central exchanges. On one occasion, a white G.I., who found himself with a dead-drunk Negro, asked a band of ragazzini whether they wanted “to buy a black man.” They paid him twelve hundred lire, and the boys took the Negro off, stripped him and sold everything he wore at a profit of several thousand lire.
The nights in Rome are unlike nights that I remember in any other city. It seems queer, in the midst of a town that is populated as densely as this, to hear roosters crowing at dawn and the persistent moan of a screech-owl. It came back to me that the Latin word for screech-owl was strix, and that there must always have been screech-owls in Rome since the Romans had first called them that. I couldn’t at first imagine where these chickens and owls made their homes, but came to the conclusion later that they must be in the Villa Medici. The absence of nocturnal traffic, due to the lack of oil and light, makes the city unexpectedly quiet, so that the noises seem terribly loud: a shopkeeper pulling down his tin shutter startles you with a shattering crash, the exploding exhaust of a truck gives the effect of a ten-inch gun, the yowling of starved and exacerbated cats seems to emanate from souls in Hell, and the songs howled by drunken G.I.’s are not very much more cheerful or pleasant. There is no way of missing a note of the depressing and interminable pounding of somebody playing the piano in the British Other Ranks hotel a few doors down the Via Sistina: he knows only two or three tunes, but he occasionally attempts to vary them by starting on something new, always, however, giving it up, after groping out the first few bars, and returning to the same old melodies.
And there is the desultory whistling of trains that do not sound as if they were really going anywhere. One seems to see them just standing in the station and peep-peeping at the sight of a brakeman, as a dog will start suddenly yapping at the sound of a passerby—but futilely, annoyingly, pathetically. They make you feel as nothing else does that there are no more communications in Italy and that you lie there imprisoned in this pit of the past, where the flimsy constructions of the Fascist regime—which was supposed to have made the trains run on time—have collapsed and joined the rest.
Under the clear pale-blue innocent dome of the sky, the swallows, at certain times of day, go flickering and twittering in swarms. There is a revue called Ma le Rondini Non Sanno, and, according to its eponymous song, what the swallows are fortunate not to know is “what’s going on down there.” As June turns into summer, the atmosphere of Rome seems to become more corrupt and turbid. The mess in our correspondents’ hotel, the rations assigned to which are obviously being sold to the black market, has recently been getting so bad as to be sometimes completely inedible. The correspondents take it out on the waiters, who have been shifting from servility to surliness; and one day an American officer, who has something to do with the management, threw an unappetizing dish on the floor, provoking, by this overdemonstration, the suspicion that he himself is responsible for our not getting the proper food. In order to escape these meals, we have been going to the Fagiano in the Piazza Colonna, once one of the best restaurants in Rome and now a dining place for Allied personnel; but the Fagiano itself is deteriorating. As one drifts out, after a hot afternoon, into the tepid air of evening, down gray avenues where the slow apathetic people are spreading all over the pavements or through the dark cobbled pavementless side-streets where brawlers are shouting at the top of their lungs, one feels that there is nothing left of the bright and varied surface of Rome but a brackish iridescent scum. At the Fagiano, with its old Roman columns embedded in a modern façade, one has a fancy that the respectable dinners which were still being served there this spring have been actually dematerializing, vaporizing, into the murk of the summer dusk, itself the foul emanation of a humanity decaying and crawling, like slugs in a fisherman’s jar that has been left too long in the sun. The space around the Marcus Aurelius column is the Bourse of the black market. You cannot sit down in one of the cafés of the square without someone’s sitting down beside you and making you some sort of proposition. Now, you note, we have put up a barbed-wire barrier in front of the Fagiano to protect the army cars and keep the bickering and haggling crowd at bay. The little boys get in, however, and stand at the open windows, and sometimes people hand them out bread.
With the stultifying atmosphere of Rome in June has come to be associated a book that I have been reading through these summer days: Roma 1943 by Paolo Monelli. This is a political and social history of the demise of the Fascist regime, and so full of the jokes, the slogans and the jargon of the streets and the papers, with which I was unfamiliar, as well as so complicated in its chronicle of duplicity and confusion, that it took me rather long to get through it. I would apply myself to it after lunch and usually fall into a dead and perspiring sleep—so that the book, with its gray wartime paper and the queer stale flavor of its prose, seemed saturated with exhalations from the Roman streets in summer, as the popolo romano of these streets is given a character for me by Monelli’s account of their behavior in the last days of Mussolini’s reign.
Paolo Monelli is an able journalist, and Roma 1943 is an historical document of value. Monelli worked, during the Fascist regime, on such papers as the Gazzetta del Popolo and the Corriere della Sera—journals which had some tradition of independent political thinking, though they eventually succumbed to the official line. Monelli, in any case, is anxious to let us know that he was not always uncritical of the government and sometimes tried to take a line of his own, and his book has obviously been prompted by a feeling of political guilt which makes the reader, too, rather uncomfortable. In order to write such a book, as he says, in order to perform an autopsy on Fascism, one has to conduct an examination of conscience. But, to a foreigner, this is a little repellent. He shows the abject servility of the Fascist press, which he saw from the inside, with a detail which we cannot think funny because it is so disgusting, and he exposes the faults of his countrymen with something almost like complacency, declaiming and waving his hands over the national humiliation, yet he snatches with an embarrassing eagerness—wherever it is possible to do so—at the courage of an Italian regiment or the industry of an Italian colony.
What is most curious to the foreign reader is the style in which the book is written. Giovanni Papini once said that the trouble with Italian prose was that it had never gotten away from the ornamental periods of Boccaccio; but if one has just been reading Silone or Moravia, one has come to expect a style that has escaped from mandarin requirements and come closer to the colloquial language. Now, Monelli, in spite of his journalist’s slang, is still enmeshed in the ancient rhetoric of festooned sentences that go on for pages, show-pieces of literary vocabulary that accumulate adjectives and nouns with a minimum of “functional” effectiveness, convolutions of statements that grow up inside statements, like the whorls of a navel orange, and that give the impression at once of exasperating deliberation and of eyebrow-heaving vehemence (there is in a single sentence of Roma 1943 one parenthesis two pages long that contains a subordinate parenthesis of over a hundred words). This is a style that one associates most readily with the intrigues of a Renaissance court or the maneuvers of the Council of Trent, and which it seems at first queer and absurd to find used for a critical analysis of the backstage of Fascist politics and for the history of military movements that one has read of in press dispatches.
But then, as one reads on, one has to accept the fact that modern Italy is still partly like this. It is precisely Monelli’s style which explains why he was able to live through Fascism and more than half swallow its grandiose pretensions. While Mussolini was spoiling and wobbling, while his associates were conspiring against him, distrusting and double-crossing one another, while the generals were slipping away, evading their responsibilities and leaving Rome open to the Germans, they still talked a language of literature, still fell back on heroic poses. Among the consequences, writes Signor Monelli, of the “intellectual laziness” of Italians are “the habit of making everything into literature—ideas, theories, feelings, and social and moral behavior, so that we want our action to be literary as well as our writing. And since love is one of the favorite themes of our literature, we import an amorous point of view into our opinions and our activities in the field of international politics.” Of the first of these tendencies there are many examples among the events recorded in Roma 1943. When, in the summer of 1943, the opposition to the war was mounting and it was plain that Italy had to withdraw, the King is supposed to have said to Badoglio of the old anti-Fascists like Bonomi and Orlando, who had been proposed to form a new government: “But they are all ghosts!”—to which Badoglio is said to have replied: “Your Majesty and I are also ghosts.” And in the second of these tendencies Monelli himself indulges in a later passage: “It was not all at once that tyranny revealed itself at the beginning of the dictatorship; it only matured slowly, in the course of a series of arbitrary acts on the dictator’s part and a series of concessions and abdications on the part of the people, who, as happens in the case of the concessions that the man in love makes to the woman he loves, believed itself to be perfectly free while it was allowing itself to be robbed of its freedom and its privileges.”
The book ends with the account of an incident which, to the friendly American visitor, cannot fail to be moving as he reads it. Monelli tells how, after horrible weeks of futile fighting and general demoralization, the Allies arrive in Rome. The Piazza Barberini is empty and bright in the moonlight. “An enormous armored car has stopped at the corner of the Quattro Fontane; when we get there, we see a line of other cars which have also stopped further up the street. A curious and eager little crowd is making a hum of voices about them, but does not shout or acclaim them. A lean and very tall soldier is standing in front of the first car and chewing something. The people stare at him but do not speak. I call out [in English]: ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘From Texas,’ he replies. I feel myself suddenly giddy amidst limitless open spaces which receive and dissolve the pain, the anguish of nine months, and in which relief itself is lost. Two little girls come up with a tricolor flag in their hands and give it to the soldier. He turns and looks up seriously at his comrades, who are sitting on top of the car and dangling their legs: ‘Here’s a flag,’ he says. One of them stretches out his hand, and takes the flag, and hoists it on the turret.”
But even this proves depressing when one has finished the book and reflects how little freedom our “tricolor” has brought them.
The young Italians who have come to manhood just before or during the war and who have fought in the resistance movement do seem to make a race quite distinct from any of the older people who have had in one way or another to adapt themselves to the Fascist regime. A young man of this kind, whose acquaintance I have made, a poet and teacher of literature, strikes, by his spirit and candor, a note that is at least hopeful. He points out that there have been always in Italy the same sharp and startling contrasts of character. The people of a city like Rome are predominantly distrustful and cynical; the men lend themselves to all kinds of servilities and frauds, the women all too easily become prostitutes. It is difficult to make them believe in ideas; but their indifference is always redeemed by the emergence of heroic individuals who are willing to die for ideas. Even in the sixteenth century, when Italy was ruled by Spain and under the heel of the Inquisition, when the self-respect of Italians was at one of its lowest ebbs and Italy mainly a field for the battles of alien armies, you had a man like Giordano Bruno; and then later, Garibaldi and Mazzini. (I had realized, since coming to Italy, that my friend Carlo Tresca had been made in this mold. I remembered how the coldness and rigor with which he had talked about politics had contrasted with the bombastic language of the articles in his paper, Il Martello, through which he had harangued his followers. Such men were incorruptible, and, except by execution, as in Bruno’s case, or by assassination, as in Carlo’s, absolutely indestructible. They revived the antique virtue which had never quite died in Rome.) And now, my friend went on, it was not altogether impossible that Italy, having sloughed off Fascism earlier than the rest of the world and finding herself in ruins again, as she had done so many times before, might produce, as she had done before, some new movement that would lead the world. But the Mazzinis and Garibaldis of the future would have to think, not as Italians, but as Europeans.
At that time, though I did not know it, the Italian moving picture, Città Aperta, based on the resistance movement, had just been finished in Rome; and, as I put these notes in order, it has just been shown in New York. This picture is very much to the point in the connection of which I have been speaking. How could we correspondents, drowsing and grumbling about Rome in our antiquated tourist hotel, have imagined that a work of such power, at the same time intense and restrained, had been produced in the Via del Tritone, where the prostitutes thronged every evening and through which we walked to reach the Fagiano, out of a patchwork of old lengths of film bought in the black market and with no kind of studio light, so that everything had to be shot during the daytime; or that the Roman Anna Magnani, that brilliant and intelligent actress, whom we saw in the revue Cantachiaro, impersonating a D’Annunzio duchess in the manner of Beatrice Lillie and satirizing the Allied occupation, had just given her marvellous performance as the mistress of an underground worker. It is the antique virtue again, and you can see it come to life in this film.