The Wilder Reaches of the Belle Époque
As Europe revelled in a time of peace, so the arts were allowed to flourish. Certain styles that had taken root in the continent’s consciousness now began to proliferate in all aspects of fashionable society. Art Nouveau and its cousins, Jugendstil and Modernism, became the normalised reaction to stilted academic concepts. Not content to influence only architectural methods, Art Nouveau embraced everything from jewellery to graphic and furniture design. A building could now represent a total work of art, with the edifice and its contents reflecting the prevalent school of thought. In Italy, the Modernist movement was rechristened stile Liberty in homage to the style of Archibald Knox whose designs were sold by London’s Liberty & Co department store.
By this time, Ernesto Basile (1857–1932) was already an architect of note. In 1891 he had taken over the completion of Palermo’s Teatro Massimo from his father, Giovanni Battista. The imposing theatre is the largest edifice of this type in Italy and was constructed in the neo-classical style, true to Giovanni’s vision for the building. His son’s public association with stile Liberty ostensibly began with a submission for the reconstruction of the Palazzo Montecitorio, the seat of the Italian Chamber of Deputies in Rome. Emerging from his residence at The Palms, Francesco Crispi organised a competition for the Chamber’s reconstruction and Basile won the right to pursue his ideas. Given Crispi had spent much time in Palermo, it takes only a small leap of the imagination to conclude that the then Interior Minister and future Prime Minister would have met Basile within the confines of the hotel, giving them the opportunity to share opinions on politics and architecture.
Frustratingly, the constraining ties of Byzantine red tape halted progress and the project did not receive the official go-ahead until 1903. It was clear from the outset that Basile intended on fusing the extant classical and Baroque elements with much Art Nouveau imagery, especially noticeable in the debating chamber itself. Terry Kirk, in his work The Architecture of Modern Italy, has described the Montecitorio’s redevelopment as one of the most important moments of early modernism in architecture. Considering the complexities of transforming the country’s seat of power, it was a much less daunting task to adapt The Palms in a similar manner.
The most obvious alteration to the exterior, as it existed prior to 1907, was the removal of the jardin d’hiver abutting the western end of the hotel. The substantial glasshouse extension and enclosed area harbouring exotic plant species were sacrificed to the overarching Liberty scheme. The hotel entrance was reimagined in the iconic manner it retains today. The pillars surrounding the doorway now supported the curved opaque awning with its gently flared skirt, protecting new arrivals from the excesses of the island’s climate as the porters unloaded their baggage.
The principal impact of the alterations, however, was felt inside the building, with three specific areas being of particular note. The ceiling of the Sala Caminetto, which the hotel has recently been using as an events and conference room, was inlaid with an intarsia technique of wooden segments. Despite Sicily’s own traditions in this field of decorative art, Basile employed English craftsmen to interlace the cross-sections between patterned end panels. His use of wood had already been evident in Rome’s Chamber of Deputies, where elegant arched niches sweep upwards towards intarsia strips supporting the pictorial frieze entitled The Italian People.
The foyer of The Palms was equally impressively remastered. The plaster ceiling was heavily inset and the floor laid with seamless marble. The faux columns on the walls were designed to support delicately branching brass wall lights; the arch separating the marble staircases leading up to the salons was also used to frame a large mirror with a rail-pattern design divided by thin brass bars. The overall effect of this decoration has been maintained throughout the ensuing decades. A bust of Wagner has long sat in the archway vetting the guests and proclaiming his connection to the establishment.
The Sala Specchi, as the Italian name suggests, is lined with mirrored decoration, ranging from unadorned reflective panels to ornately embossed strips of glass, with forms taken from nature and geometry, reminiscent of the work of Scottish architect and designer Rennie Mackintosh, but more elaborate in design. The luxuriant radiance in the room is enhanced by a transparent ceiling in a grid format, set back from the curved panels above the architraving, all of which is bordered in gold and white.
The substantial makeover was designed to enhance the hotel’s reputation, which was already riding high in aristocratic and intellectual circles. Dignitaries and wealthy merchants mingled amongst the statues, sofas and pillars of the entrance lobby. It was easy to bump into someone you wished to meet, or indeed avoid, as The Palms had become the social destination of most significance in central Palermo. Affairs of business or the heart were frequently settled within its confines, even if the symbolic gesture of a slap with a glove was enough to quash the ambitions of a rival.
One such notable frequenter of the hotel was Ignazio Florio Jr. (1869–1957), the inheritor of a vast fortune in shipping, banking, viticulture, tuna fishing and salt extraction. In fact, if Sicily had an important resource, Florio usually had an interest in mining, catching, processing or shipping it. He was a cultured man who had travelled widely and was familiar with several European languages. Florio had even been tempted to dabble as a hotelier, also employing Basile to convert Palermo’s Villa Igiea from a proposed tuberculosis sanatorium to a hotel. Amongst those more concerned with the arts, he is best remembered for his activities as an impresario at the Teatro Massimo and for his foundation of the free-speaking newspaper, L’Ora.
The Florio name is most associated today with Marsala wine, as it adorns the eponymously titled bottles produced by the winery Florio, founded in 1833. We have seen however that it was once associated with a vast array of entrepreneurial activities. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Florio was at the height of his considerable powers, but rivals were common and the family could no longer command the market in the same manner as the dynasty’s founding father, Vincenzo. Regular meetings and social gatherings at The Palms were but one demonstration of how Florio enjoyed the wealth of his family fortune but, without adopting prudence, he ran the risk of it draining away.
Such occasions were seen as a way to make connections and promote further enterprise, although they did not always have the desired effect. Nevertheless, Florio knew he had a privileged position and made contributions to aid earthquake relief in Messina after the catastrophic tremors of 1908, whilst also endowing a home for the blind in Palermo with his considerable largesse. These altruistic efforts were tempered with extravagances that included the latest tailored clothing imported from Meyer & Mortimer of London and frequent trips on his yacht, the Ettore Fieramosca.
Florio took his business too seriously and was too involved in the minutiae of cutting-edge development to be called a playboy, but his greatest weakness was the opposite sex. As Belle Époque Palermo indulged the last excesses of its aristocratic class, and elaborate carriages or the newest automobiles disgorged the glitterati of Europe at the steps of the Teatro Massimo, Florio took every opportunity to pursue his womanising habits. He had married Franca Jacona (1873–1950) in 1893, but that did not curb his wandering eye.
Franca, a beauty of Mediterranean complexion, with green eyes and lustrous black hair, was the daughter of Baron Pietro Jacona della Motta and Costanza Notarbartolo di Villarosa from the renowned Palermitan family. Her fellow socialites called her the ‘Queen of Palermo’ and she did not lack admirers, including Kaiser Wilhelm II, the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio and the portrait painter Giovanni Boldini. Although she resisted temptation, Florio, on the other hand, paid heavily for his infidelities. Expensive diamond trinkets and bejewelled rings would be proffered in an attempt to smooth over his most recent indiscretion. They were frequently thrown back in his face or dashed to the ground by an irate Franca who, once calm, would retrieve them and realise she had little choice but to accept them and carry on as before, in the hope that the same scene would not be repeated.
When not placating an angry wife, Florio was fending off his amatory rivals. On one memorable occasion in 1912 he confronted Count Arrivabene in the hall of The Palms. A simple slap with a glove was not sufficient on this occasion and a full-blown duel took place with that most ancient of weapons, the sword, albeit in this case a fencing foil. The cause of the conflict was Vera Papadopoli Aldobrandini (1883–1946), the daughter of a wealthy Venetian banker, who had married Gilberto Arrivabene. A portrait by Umberto Brunelleschi from 1920 shows her in all her Art Nouveau glory, modelling a flower-patterned coat and saucer hat, her waist cinched by a black belt held by a large oval buckle, all against a stylised mountain landscape.
The bloodless duel and the resulting scandal caused Arrivabene and Vera to separate. It seems that having her two admirers fight in medieval combat for her long-lost honour was not dramatic enough to dissuade Vera from continuing her liaison with Florio. Ultimately, though, the emotional upheaval took its toll and Vera was seemingly plagued by opiate addiction for the latter part of her life. The road for the Florios would also be strewn with potholes; despite Ignazio’s best efforts his businesses appeared to be cursed with the worst kind of luck.
One enterprise after another hit the rocks. Explanations abound, from political choices, to the intervention of northern Italian business interests, the rise of Fascism and even the interference of the Banca Commerciale who took compensatory measures when Florio unsuccessfully sunk much of his capital into renovating Palermo’s crumbling docks. His intention had been to re-establish the shipping industry and divert its development from an expanding Genoa, but the attempt simply backfired. Seeking other outlets, Florio invested in banana plantations on the Canary Islands during the 1920s and returned to the family’s old associations with tuna fishing — neither venture was successful and the remainder of the firm’s capital slowly eroded to nothing.
The 1930s saw the Florios’ forced relocation from their apartment in Rome’s Via Piemonte to a small hotel in the Porta Pinciana district, where they lost all their servants and were reduced to selling the rest of their jewellery and furniture at auction. A disillusioned and depressed Franca decided to stay with friends in Florence, leaving Ignazio to pine for a wife he used to treat with querulous condescension. Following her death, the one-time raffish dandy returned to Palermo to die a broken man. Gone were the days of high living and liaisons dangereuses. Although long overdue, the duelling scandals of the Belle Époque came under legislative scrutiny from 1915 onwards. This was not before time, considering the ludicrous behaviour of Count Ernesto de la Conette and the Marquis Emanuele De Seta who challenged each other no less than seven times in the salons of The Palms.
The newly decorated hotel was not only a beacon for strutting aristocratic peacocks; it also attracted more serious-minded intellectuals. In 1917, the Uruguayan essayist José Enrique Rodó (1871–1917) reserved a room as part of a European tour as correspondent for the Argentinian magazine Caras y caretas. Rodó was born in neighbouring Uruguay across the River Plate to a Catalan father whom he had lost at a young age. It was due to this untimely death that Rodó left formal education at the age of fourteen in a bid to support the family. Through a series of relatively humble jobs he continued however to broaden his mind and educate himself for a future he envisioned beyond the mere existence of the daily grind.
Rodó’s talent for writing would have been recognised by his superiors in the scribe’s office where circumstances forced him to work. By 1895, despite his unassuming start in life, he was integral to the founding of the Revista Nacional de Literatura y Ciencias Sociales, a national periodical focusing on literature and social science. This publication brought modernism to Uruguay, mirroring developments in the fields of art and architecture, and brought fame to Rodó with one essay in particular: Ariel (1900).
Such was the impact of this lengthy essay that the thinking behind it entered the Spanish language as Arielismo and Rodó became the figurehead of Latin cultural values on the continent of America. Rodó used Shakespearian characters to express his ideological concerns, with the text being narrated by the character of Prospero from The Tempest. The eponymous sprite represents the guardian of Latin American identity in the face of Caliban’s utilitarianism. Caliban is the sharp-tongued incarnation of North American values in direct opposition to Ariel. Rodó was vociferous in his condemnation of the pragmatic philosophy that placed utility above all else in the search for human happiness.
Rodó believed the concept of utilitarianism forced individuals into a degree of specialisation that ignored the holistic and therefore stunted their educational growth. A human being could not be complete without an understanding of life through broader knowledge, thus avoiding the mediocrity he saw in a way of thinking that led to genius in one field and incompetence in another. These ideas even led to an attack on the state of democracy as he saw it: ‘Hanging over democracy is the weighty accusation of guiding humanity, mediocritising it, towards the Sacred Empire of utilitarianism.’ These are powerful words, not necessarily intended as an attack on democratic values, but rather a plea to avoid the dumbing down of the masses in the hope that those most capable in society could raise the holistic educational standards of the populace.
Rodó warned of nordomanía, South America’s obsessional concentration on all things North American, particularly developments in the US. The Spanish-American War of 1898 and the resentment he felt at the US’s interference in Cuba led to the publication of Ariel. The Cuban crisis was also a low point in Hispanic self-esteem which he did much to raise. It is no surprise that Rodó turned to politics, and from 1902 served in the National Chamber of Representatives until he clashed with José Battle, the then President of Uruguay, who was at the forefront of a measure to remove religious emblems from medical institutions. Rodó was so incensed by the measure that in 1906 he penned Liberalismo y Jacobinismo, characterising the political manoeuvre as ‘Jacobonism’. The fallout in Uruguayan society was considerable and his enemies grew.
Consistently concerned with the deep connections between Latin America, Spain and the rest of Latin Europe, Rodó was long overdue a trip to the continent — a job as correspondent for the Argentinian magazine gave him the perfect excuse. His words from Naples illustrate the link he felt with Italy and especially the south’s profound association with Spain: ‘In Spain. And this first impression is corroborated as the soul of the city gives us a glimpse of its secrets and the evocation of the secular stones awakes in our imagination the heroic Spain that passed through here and let its spirit bloom.’ From Naples, he travelled down to Palermo, warmed by the April sun, and deposited his bags in The Palms.
Rodó’s health had never been robust, and he also suffered from depression, but his European trip had been a tonic, that is, until the night of 30 April 1917. The writer was rushed to the San Saverio hospital with a severe abdominal pain. The medics were unable to alleviate the terrible stabbing agony he felt in his stomach and he died at ten o’clock the following morning. A medical report on his death attributed his demise to typhus and nephritis. The latter can be ascribed to either an autoimmune disorder or infections and toxins that affect the major organs in the body.
This seems a perfectly plausible explanation for his death, but a few conspiracy theorists have hinted at foul play through poisoning, and any detective worth his salt would have found ample motive for a would-be assassin by reading through Rodó’s essays. The medical report is still kept in Palermo’s municipal archive but its pages lack detail and, by modern standards, it is rather incomplete, even omitting the cemetery of his burial. In fact, the body of the forty-five-year-old Rodó was embalmed and subsequently interred in the graveyard at Rotoli until 1920 when his remains were repatriated to Uruguay. The lasting trace of Rodó’s presence at the hotel is a plaque from the government and people of Uruguay fixed to the side of the building which borders Via Mariano Stabile. It attests to the fact that this is where Rodó stayed and wrote his last pages, calling him ‘el insigne escritor’ (the distinguished writer).
Two years after Rodó’s body was safely back in Uruguay, Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) came to power in Italy after thirty thousand of his supporters marched on Rome and demanded the resignation of the Liberal Prime Minister, Luigi Facta. The king, Victor Emmanuel III, denied Facta’s request for martial law and controversially appointed Mussolini in his place, opening the gates to a Fascist dictatorship. Il Duce was soon provoking international incidents, notably the 1923 invasion of Corfu by Italian forces. As John Julius Norwich has pointed out in his book Sicily: A Short History from the Ancient Greeks to Cosa Nostra, ‘the rise of Benito Mussolini left Sicily unimpressed. The island had always been considered the least Fascist part of Italy; in the elections of 1921 the party won no seats there at all.’
It was only after Mussolini’s power-grab that the island eventually succumbed to elected Fascists, although the killing of Socialist parliamentarian Giacomo Matteotti severely dented their reputation. Matteotti had denounced the methods by which votes were garnered and suffered a grisly end at the hand of his kidnappers who stabbed him several times with a carpenter’s file. His body was found in Riano, outside Rome. The resulting furore could have seen the end of the Fascists but the opposing forces were not quick enough to seize their opportunity.
Watching the rise of Mussolini and his army of Blackshirts from a small villa in the hills of Cefalù was a notorious Englishman, Aleister Crowley (1875–1947). Crowley had moved to Sicily in 1920 in a bid to establish his self-styled ‘Abbey of Thelema’. No stranger to controversy, Crowley had decamped to the US during World War I where he became involved in the pro-German movement. It has been revealed in subsequent biographies that he had supposedly used this guise of a turncoat Englishman to infiltrate German intelligence. Questions of national allegiance, though, were the least of Crowley’s alleged wrongdoings, which ranged from drug dependency, bisexuality and Satanism to soliciting, sadomasochism and the blood sacrifice of animals.
Amid all the hysteria, there was some truth to these claims. The son of deeply religious Plymouth Brethren parents, Crowley was nonetheless the product of an establishment upbringing, having briefly boarded at the prestigious Tonbridge School so hated by E.M. Forster. Between 1895 and 1898 he studied philosophy at Cambridge where he contracted syphilis from his enthusiastic use of prostitutes and experimented with same-sex partners, notably Herbert Charles Pollitt. Pollitt was President of the Cambridge Footlights, and would go on to become a female impersonator known as Diane de Rougy. The pair shared an interest in the type of art and literature that bourgeois society considered decadent.
At a time when exotic locations were difficult and expensive to reach, Crowley was incredibly well-travelled. His first mystical moments were experienced in Stockholm; he dabbled with the Russian language in St Petersburg and pursued alchemy in Zermatt with an English chemist. Also on his itinerary were the more colourful locations of Mexico and India. In 1900 he settled in Mexico City with a mistress he had selected from the local population; he later claimed it was the Mexicans who had initiated him in the rites of Freemasonry. Via Japan and Hong Kong, he ended up in India which provided a spiritual larder for his esoteric belief systems. Yoga and meditation became part of his everyday routine. Despite the malaria he contracted and various bouts of dysentery, Crowley indulged his more physically active side by attempting to climb K2 — the result was snow-blindness. After all this, a sojourn in Paris followed which must have seemed positively tame, although the man his own mother described as ‘the Beast’ was capable of turning any location into a wild maelstrom of counter-cultural deeds.
In this sense, Bohemian Paris was the ideal location and it is where he became attached to his future brother-in-law, the painter Gerald Kelly. The pair became acquainted with the sculptor Auguste Rodin, who inspired Crowley to write poems he later published as Rodin in Rime. In 1903, Crowley married Rose Kelly, Gerald’s sister, and during their honeymoon the couple travelled to Cairo — the destination that inspired Crowley to write The Book of the Law, an overblown text which claimed a new age for humanity with the author as its prophet. This pseudo-philosophical treatise full of ritual and mythical characterisation would become the cornerstone of Thelema, his religion. Rose and Aleister asserted that the text was dictated to them by Aiwass, a messenger of Horus.
The relationship with Rose only lasted six years; after having two children, one of whom died in infancy, the couple divorced in 1909. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rose was suffering from excessive bouts of drinking and, two years later, her former husband had her committed to an institution due to her alcohol-related dementia. Crowley moved on, as he always did, and found other ‘scarlet women’ to share his rituals, which often included a practice he called ‘sex magick’.
Crowley’s name is frequently associated with three organisations that represent a fin de siècle obsession with esoteric meaning in a rapidly changing world. The first of these was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which sought to explore the domains of metaphysics and the occult. Initiates could rise through the order as their experience allowed them to evolve in various practices (ranging from geomancy to scrying and astral travel). Crowley was introduced to the Order by a founder member, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, who progressed him through the various hierarchies. More sober members of the organisation, including the poet W.B. Yeats, were against his rapid ascent to the upper echelons. Crowley’s libertine lifestyle was an issue for many as it seems the pursuit of the esoteric was a serious business and not for the faint-hearted.
While under Mathers’ instruction, Crowley attempted something of a coup when he and his mistress tried to seize the organisation’s meeting chamber used by the senior ‘adepts’. After a court case, the takeover failed. Some biographers have even suggested that the whole scenario was an Intelligence Service plot to undermine Mathers and his power in the Order. Whatever the truth of the matter, Mathers and Crowley went their separate ways and apparently used magic rituals against each other’s interests.
Our self-styled magus was subsequently prompted to set up his own group in 1907, labelled with the cryptic title A∴ A∴, whose rituals included the downing of peyote, the psychotropic cactus used by the Huichol people in Mexico. Constantly hungering after new experience and a furthering of his knowledge, Crowley then became attracted to the occult order Ordo Templi Orientis. After yet another spat about the rights to shared mystical understanding, he eventually befriended one of the founders, Theodor Reuss. Crowley was nothing if not international in his search for the wisdom of ages, travelling to Berlin in 1912 to be inducted under the name Baphomet by Reuss himself.
All this travelling, drug-taking, sexual experimentation and pursuit of arcane experience was an expensive career choice. From 1914 onwards Crowley was living a precarious financial existence; his flow of inherited money had run dry and he was gratefully accepting donations from followers, whilst using membership fees to keep his head above water. In the US during World War I, his backing for Germany took a journalistic form and he wrote articles for The Fatherland, a puppet publication aimed at supporting Kaiser Wilhelm II’s government. Researchers who have written on intelligence and the occult, such as Richard Spence, assert that Crowley was a double-agent and the printed pieces were deliberately overwrought.
Back in London, he was labelled a traitor. To add to his woes, his financial difficulties multiplied and his health was affected by a severe bout of asthma. A doctor, presumably unacquainted with his enthusiastic use of narcotics, prescribed him heroin. It would prove his last signpost on the long road to ruin, a route Crowley had been travelling for quite some time. In 1920 he moved back to Paris and through consultation of the I Ching, the classic Chinese divination text, decided that Sicily was the answer to his problems, although finding somewhere cheap to live was probably more of a consideration.
Crowley’s prolific writing output, which always sought to advance his dubious theories, ultimately culminated in what were called The Holy Books of Thelema, at the heart of which was his Egyptian Book of the Law. Cefalù, on the northern coast of the island, was his chosen destination for the Abbey of Thelema, a grandiose title for a very simple villa. His American mistress, Leah Hirsig, accompanied him with their new baby daughter, and they were soon joined by another paramour, Ninette Shumway. The warring women would occasionally prove intolerable to Crowley, who used their disagreements as an excuse for fleeing to Palermo.
Cefalù, now a popular holiday resort, was once a simple fishing village with few amenities; anything beyond the bare necessities would have required a trip to the island’s capital. The essentials may have been the freshest available, but Crowley was a man used to the finer things in life and they were only to be had in Palermo. Despite budgetary constraints, he refused to stay in a simple pension and used to head for The Palms. For ‘the Beast’, the city was not only a gastronomic destination and a transport hub, but also a sexual supermarket.
Crowley would roam the streets of Palermo in search of prostitutes of both sexes that he could pay to take part in his sex magick; he would not have been short of choice. The island’s juxtaposition of rich and poor, so evident when the British merchants built their extravagant villas, had barely improved since the start of the 1920s. In fact, Italy was undergoing a wave of unprecedented mass migration to the US, and of the 4.5 million who emigrated between 1880 and 1930, over a quarter were from Sicily. These figures do not even take into consideration the large numbers who moved to Argentina and Brazil. A cursory glance at the Buenos Aires phonebook or the names on the shirts of the national football team is enough to indicate the Italian presence. Those forced by their situation into a new life overseas were often from the villages of the interior, but not exclusively. Some, by choice or circumstance, failed to make it to the Americas and were, instead, drawn to the big conurbations of Catania and Palermo.
The capital was taking in a jobless itinerant population of rural poor who were being crammed into districts already suffering from deprivation, particularly in the Albergheria. To make matters worse, World War I had not been kind to Sicily. The island had suffered from blocked export markets, and the consequent downturn in economic activity had affected those reliant on the kind of casual income gained from day labouring. It also encouraged the black market to flourish, creating a set of conditions designed to facilitate the spread of an already burgeoning mafia. Although the country emerged intact from the ruins of war, it did so at a cost, especially in the south.
Italian prime minister Vittorio Emmanuele Orlando, a former denizen of The Palms, represented Italy at the post-conflict Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Orlando had long been associated with the mafia, a fact he felt no compunction to hide. In one memorable speech in 1925 he gave a defence of values he championed as ‘Sicilian’, finishing with the declaration that he was honoured to be thought of as a mafioso: ‘If by the word “Mafia” we understand a sense of honour pitched in the highest key; a refusal to tolerate anyone’s prominence or overbearing behaviour … if such feelings and such behaviour are what people mean by “the Mafia”… I declare that I am a mafioso, and proud to be one.’ People turned to the mafia, as they still do, in order to obtain some form of employment; however, in the years following the war, it was a question of driving hunger that forced many into the arms of organised crime and others to turn to the oldest profession. The Cosa Nostra loves a void that it can fill, offering a dubious promise of better times and companionship.
Crowley’s reckless world had met the underbelly of Sicilian society, a world obscured by varying degrees of shade, both metaphorical and literal. The urban chancers of the Albergheria inhabited streets so narrow that a corpulent visitor could touch houses on either side of the rutted paving. It is easier to imagine a curiously attired Crowley picking up a whey-faced youth and sneaking his would-be partner into the hotel, than it is to picture him ritualising his sexual activity in the crumbling surroundings of a pseudo-squat in the district once home to the eighteenth-century charlatan Cagliostro. Although, if he was aware of the supposed Count Cagliostro’s origins in this area, Crowley may well have been attracted by the man’s self-promoting stories of alchemy, psychic healing and seduction.
The rise of the Fascists would prove problematic for Crowley, who was clearly the type of man they considered degenerate. Activities in Cefalù had heightened as followers were attracted to his ‘Abbey’. It is not unreasonable to think that denunciations may have led to the monitoring of his activities, especially at The Palms, where he was no longer part of a close-knit grouping that seldom ventured beyond their own milieu. As the Thelemite community grew, his rituals became more involved and outlandish. The walls of the villa (his Abbey) were adorned with pictures of goats and semi-naked women cavorting in orgiastic fervour, an enticement to celebrants. Crowley signed his frescoes with a letter ‘A’ and a pair of rounded legs, designed to represent a penis. In the centre of the main room, which he had turned into a temple, he placed a table that he called ‘The Throne of the Great Beast’.
Processions, in full regalia, around his rented property marked out bizarre paths of esoteric significance and, when observed from afar, were enough to alarm the neighbours. As Giuseppe Quatriglio has pointed out in his book L’isola dei miti (The Island of Myths), the locals were both repelled and attracted by the secretive figure of Crowley. Their impressions were confirmed when his party descended from the hills of Santa Barbara for a spot of skinny-dipping. Worse still, in the confines of the villa, dogs and cats were sacrificed and the attendees at his ceremonies were supposedly required to drink the dead animals’ blood. It seems that nobody was clearing up after the previous night’s debauchery and conditions became unhealthy. The daughter of Ninette Shumway, Poupée, unfortunately died in 1920, but the grieving mother was soon to give birth to another daughter that she christened with the astounding name of Astarte Lulu Panthea.
Notable visitors drawn to Cefalù included American silent-film actress Jane Wolfe who, taking the name ‘Soror Estai’, became one of Crowley’s initiates, not to mention his secretary. She later published her magical experiences as The Cefalu Diaries. Others were less enamoured of the rituals, especially the occultist Cecil Frederick Russell, who balked at the same-sex performances he was asked to indulge in, especially as they involved several onlookers.
During the winter of 1921, the Abbey received a visit from another American who, in contrast to Jane Wolfe, was appalled by the scenes she witnessed. Hélène Fraux was Ninette’s sister and her job as a nanny brought her into contact with the higher echelons of Detroit society. Any sexual misdemeanours and drug use would not have been on display, keeping her respectable world untainted by vice. Crowley’s villa, however, was another matter with its unselfconscious displays of pansexuality and experimentation amid the squalor. Fraux found the situation so sordid that she was moved to report events to the police department in Palermo. It seems this contact finally provoked action and the forces of law and order raided the building, but found nothing they could use to bring charges.
It is also a matter of record that a complaint was made to the British Consul in Palermo, although it seems this report was not acted upon. The Consul at the time was Reginald Gambier MacBean, acting Grand Master of the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis-Misraim for Italy, another esoteric sect. Tobias Churton, in his biography of Crowley, has noted that the two men were initially on amicable terms; it is, therefore, unsurprising that sanctions were not imposed. MacBean would have been useful as a conduit to other diplomatic figures, and Churton specifically cites Walter Alexander Smart who Crowley already knew from his days in New York. Smart would become the inspiration for the Consul in Naples who features in Crowley’s 1922 semi-fictionalised work The Diary of a Drug Fiend.
The book focuses on Crowley’s time at Cefalù and the central characters are based on two more adherents, Mary Butts and Cecil Maitland, although the reality of their stay was far more disturbing than the portrayal in the book. The final nail in the Thelemite coffin was the death of Raoul Loveday, a devotee who brought his wife, Betty May, to Cefalù. Loveday drank from a stream and developed a liver condition that was to kill him, after which Betty felt compelled to tell all to the British press.
Enough was enough. On 23 April 1923, a police officer invited Crowley to accompany him to the Office for Public Security in Palermo. The Beast complied in an uncharacteristically subdued fashion, only to find on arrival that he had been issued an expulsion order from the Interior Ministry itself, signed by the Fascist Minister in charge of the department. Communication of the strange events unfolding must have been rapidly exchanged between a fearful local constabulary and the regional headquarters. As soon as the city’s forces of law and order received news of the latest sensation, whether or not they had Crowley under surveillance, they were compelled to report directly to Rome. Mussolini’s government stamped the forms and Crowley’s life in Sicily was history; his legacy as a magus forever to be judged as a disturber of public order in a footnote found in the Fascist archives.
Mussolini had a deep distrust of secret societies and rituals originating from the Masonic world. In his eyes, these were cells that could harbour anti-Fascist thinking and threaten his power. The regime was also aware of Crowley’s connection to the intelligence world, which must surely have been a major factor in his removal. By April 1923 Mussolini had already been active in monitoring foreign journalists who portrayed him in an unfavourable light, deporting some of the worst offenders from Italy. The English occultist was seen as a potential spy and propagandist, a Mason and a reprobate.
Crowley departed Sicily alone, a few months before his former landlord at The Palms, Enrico Ragusa, was to breathe his last. The proprietor of the villa, Baron La Calce, promised he would look after Ninette and the child. It seems that not everyone in Cefalù was happy to see the last of the Beast — some locals signed a letter requesting a delay in his expulsion in order to allow time to establish the reason behind his removal which the authorities had refused to divulge. The letter, quoted by Churton, mentions Crowley’s fame as a ‘poet, scholar and traveller’ but, crucially, expounds on his role in bringing visitors to the town who spent money in its shops and businesses. Those who profited from the Abbey of Thelema were prepared to look beyond its excesses.
MacBean, the Consul, had little option but to acquiesce to his own government’s requests for information. Shortly before the Fascists had swung into action, two British agents arrived in Cefalù, prompted by the death of Loveday which had been reported in the British newspapers. They were intent on discovering the nature of the activities taking place. In his attempts to break away from convention, Crowley was trouble for everyone. An air of mystery still surrounds his deportation, as to whether it was principally driven by political expediency or the moral high ground; his file however gives the official statement that his sexual activity was ‘obscene and perverted’.
Cultural degenerates were not the only targets for a rampant regime, and Mussolini also turned his attention to the mafia. Cesare Mori, a police officer from Pavia, was appointed as the head of the government’s task force charged with undermining mafia power. Mori knew Sicily well, having been previously stationed in Trapani. He did not have the rose-tinted vision of the organisation as the noble, almost philanthropic, society that Vittorio Emmanuele Orlando propagated. The historian Christopher Duggan points out that Mori knew the mafia’s violent methods were designed to garner money and power for uncompromising individuals.
Mussolini’s anti-mafia hitman and his squad arrested thousands in the years following the Fascists’ takeover. Charges of criminal association were brought without proof or distinction and the woolly judicial term employed for such charges required no specific evidence. Mori’s approach did not shy away from the kind of violence used by his adversaries, including torture and the hostage-taking of a mafioso’s wife and children. The idea was to persuade the poverty-stricken Sicilians, who had previously turned to the organisation, to look instead towards the State. Trials of notorious members of the mafia lasted until 1932, three years after the ‘Iron Prefect’ had left his job in Palermo. He was happy to declare the organisation dead but, as history tells us, this was far from the truth.
The all-powerful government eliminated dissent wherever it arose, dampening down any sparks of revolt before they could ignite and spread. Police investigations served the State and not the populace, as would become evident with the case of the Frenchman Raymond Roussel (1877–1933). The rather effete writer and poet was an unlikely figure to choose Fascist-era Palermo as a bolthole. He checked into room 224 of The Palms at the beginning of June 1933, accompanied by Charlotte Dufrène, otherwise known as Charlotte Fredez, who took the adjoining room of 226. On the morning of 14 July, Roussel was found dead in his room, in a supine position, on a mattress he had dragged from the bed.
Roussel was born into an affluent Parisian family, whose wealth he inherited at the age of sixteen on the death of his father. This allowed him to pursue his literary and musical ambitions. He is best known for his works Locus Solus and Impressions d’Afrique (Impressions of Africa), both of which have a rigid structure based on the use of homonymic puns. Roussel explained how the use of two similar-sounding words would trigger other homonyms that took the text in diverging directions. He also used a system of brackets that was based on Morse code to encrypt hidden messages within the text. The American poet John Ashbery, who died in 2017, gave a startling description of Locus Solus in an introduction he wrote for Foucault’s Death and the Labyrinth. This snippet gives a flavour of Roussel’s experimental eccentricity:
After an aerial pile driver which is constructing a mosaic of teeth and a huge glass diamond filled with water in which float a dancing girl, a hairless cat, and the preserved head of Danton, we come to the central and longest passage: a description of eight curious tableaux vivants taking place inside an enormous glass cage.
Doubtless some of Roussel’s imagery was conjured from his prodigious intake of barbiturates which, after affording him much-needed sleep, provided a resulting euphoria. Raymond had long suffered from a form of neurasthenia which caused fatigue, anxiety and lassitude. The barbiturates were both his crutch and his curse. Before leaving Paris, it seems he had put some of his affairs in order, making a last will and testament, although there was a shock in store for his nephew and heir, Michel Ney, the Duke of Elchingen, which would only become apparent on his death. He was surprised to find that he would inherit nothing since there was barely a penny left. Roussel even apologised for this state of affairs which he considered his greatest failure, leaving Ney convinced that the writer knew he was not long for this world.
Charlotte Dufrène, the woman Roussel had taken with him to The Palms, was not his lover, hence the adjoining rooms. She was, as Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia memorably describes her in his book on the Roussel case, a ‘demimondaine’, a kept woman from the world of the demimonde. Her role, aside from settling accounts and monitoring Roussel’s health, was to give an acceptable outward appearance to a society who would not tolerate homosexuality — an unmarried liaison was much less of a scandal. Dufrène used a pseudonym to hide from bourgeois society given that she was a convent-educated girl who wanted to conceal her dubious occupation from her parents. She kept a list of Roussel’s drug consumption which reads like a pharmacy stocktake. Sciascia, in his Atti relative alla morte di Raymond Roussel (Documents Relating to the Death of Raymond Roussel) quotes from the extensive list:
On the 8th, 20 pills of Somnothyril and a bottle of Neurinase: without eating, but in euphoria throughout the whole day. On the 9th, 11 pills of Phanodorme. The 10th, two bottles of Veronidin at 9pm; a good sleep. The 11th, at the same time, 34 pills of Rutonal; three hours sleep and then a ‘tremendous euphoria’…
Given this ill-advised intake, repercussions were inevitable. Approximately a month before his death, when Dufrène had departed for Paris to pick up more of his belongings for an extended stay, Roussel was found senseless in his room. The Palms’ director, Leopoldo Serena, called the hotel’s medic, Professor Lombardo, who managed to bring the unfortunate Frenchman to his senses. Several days later, when Dufrène had already returned, Roussel was discovered in the bathroom, his left wrist slashed and suffering from considerable loss of blood. Lombardo again attended, stitching the wound and tending to the other self-inflicted lesions on his body, although interestingly he never reported this obvious suicide attempt, possibly to avoid any scandalous associations with the hotel’s good name.
Dufrène had been pleading with Roussel to cut down his drug use as it was obviously having a deleterious impact on his mental and physical health. By 13 July his nerves were so frayed that, according to the waiter, Tommaso Orlando di Gaetano, he had to be helped from his chauffeur-driven car to the lift and thence to his room — which raises the question as to how he later summoned the strength required to move his mattress from the bed to the floor. To make matters worse, Palermo that day was in full festive mode, celebrating Santa Rosalia, the city’s patron saint who had supposedly saved the populace from the plague. Roussel would have heard the uproar from room 224 which, at that time, backed onto Via Mariano Stabile — the street that now displays Rodó’s plaque.
He took Sonéryl, a barbiturate that Sciascia affirms was his preferred tablet, given that it assured him a good night’s sleep and considerable subsequent euphoria. However, the effect was fatal. The Sicilian author is convinced that Roussel did not intend suicide on this occasion, merely to absent himself from the world for a little while. Raymond had taken far higher doses previously but escaped the ultimate fate.
There are inconsistencies and omissions from the official report that Sciascia quotes from at length. Officially, the porter, Antonio Kreuz, found the prone body of Roussel in his nightshirt, underpants and black socks. At around ten o’clock in the morning, Kreuz had informed Orlando that Roussel had not surfaced and the pair returned to room 224. Everything was silent, apart from the noise of a running shower in room 226. Recently, Raymond had been locking the connecting door to Dufrène’s room but he always left the door to the passageway unlocked so that room service could be placed just inside without disturbing him. Uncertain as to how to proceed, and wary of previous events, the two staff members crept away; eventually, Kreuz plucked up the courage to return and enter the room.
In the police report, Dufrène is said to have entered Roussel’s room ‘at the same time’ as Kreuz, although this mysteriously disappears in further judicial memoranda. She even contradicted herself, by firstly declaring that ‘they told me of his death’, then correcting herself to say she entered the room with the porter. Sciascia posits the idea that a worried Charlotte had already tiptoed along the empty corridor into the adjoining the room and discovered Roussel dead on his mattress. Rather than report matters herself, she had decided to bury her head in the sand until she realised the hotel staff had discovered the truth.
Events are further clouded by the behaviour of Roussel’s chauffeur who was not staying at The Palms but who, nonetheless, would have discovered the situation relatively quickly. Instead of making himself known to the authorities, he disappeared from Palermo in very short order — a fact that Dufrène found unremarkable. Furthermore, Roussel’s nephew Michel Ney did not hear of his uncle’s death from the authorities but from the mouth of the self-same chauffeur. Sciascia does not see this as an altruistic act, but reads the motive as an opportunity to extort money, especially as Ney was unaware of the presence of Dufrène. It is not inconceivable that Dufrène and the chauffeur were in a relationship, or even that Roussel was the chauffeur’s lover.
The Fascist authorities were little concerned with decadent littérateurs hell-bent on self-destruction. The physician Doctor Rabboni was asked by the appointed judge to examine the body officially, and summed up his statement with the following metaphorical sweep of his hand: ‘I consider the above-mentioned Roussel has died a natural death, probably caused by an intoxication of narcotics and sleeping draughts, found in great quantity in the room, therefore I consider an autopsy fruitless.’ Frustratingly, the judge’s report does not annotate his own questions. We simply have the letters ADR (a domanda risponde) meaning a witness was responding to the judge’s question, a subtle way of hiding any judicial oversight from inquisitive eyes. It was standard practice.
Other glaring absences include any reference to the chauffeur, a lack of investigation into Charlotte Dufrène’s contradictions and any mention of Orlando’s observation that Roussel had ejaculated during the night of his death. Remarkably, the whole legal process was wrapped up by the end of the following day. Many questions remain unanswered, questions that an autopsy would have been useful in solving. However, the path Roussel was treading could only lead to one destination. He had sworn to Dufrène that he would seek help in a Swiss sanatorium but quickly reneged on attempts to cut back on barbiturates. Leonardo Sciascia is one of the champions of the theory that Roussel had not intended to kill himself, whereas Michel Ney was convinced that his actions were deliberate. Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in between and the Frenchman was playing Russian roulette with his own life, knowing full well that sooner or later his body would not be able to withstand the elephantine amounts of narcotics to which it was being subjected.
During the course of our own reading on the topic, we have consulted various texts. In the Spanish version of Sciascia’s Atti relativi, the translator, Julio Reija, appends his own thoughts on the matter. He makes the convincing case that the suicide of Sciascia’s brother may have led the writer to seek the absolution of Raymond Roussel, although Sciascia’s ire is chiefly aimed at the lackadaisical investigation by Mussolini’s forces of law and order. The death of an effeminate dilettante drug addict mattered little to the men who could sentence hard-bitten mafiosi to years in prison.
One man intrigued by the Roussel case was the eccentric Italian writer Baron Agostino Fausto La Lomia (1905–78). In her book Alla scoperta dei segreti perduti della Sicilia (In Search of Sicily’s Lost Secrets), Clara Serretta makes the claim that La Lomia’s favourite room in The Palms was 224 – as we know, the scene of Roussel’s demise. He shared his many stays at the hotel with a pet blackbird he called Don Turiddu Capra and a cat who accompanied him everywhere, going by the equally glorious name of Sua Eccellenza Referendario Paolo Annarino.
La Lomia boasted of his popularity and, as if to prove it, spent time in his room writing letters to himself which he duly took to the reception for delivery. He would subsequently return and collect the post he had penned hours earlier. The Baron was also famous for his amorous conquests, not all of which were gained through his charm and individuality. It seems he would pay beautiful women to spend the night in his hotel room. One anecdote, which appeared in an article for the Italian national newspaper, La Repubblica, tells of chambermaid and room service staff finding La Lomia on his knees after such a night. As if completely drained by the experience, he turned to them asking for help.
The aristocrat was born in 1905, and inherited palaces in Canicattì and Palermo. Amongst a long list of his unconventional acts was the establishment in 1922 of the Accademia del Parnaso (the Academy of Parnaso), a genial society located in Canicattì and designed to promote poetry and other cultural pursuits. However, the statutes for entry to the Academy were as bizarre as its subsequent events. The society deemed a ‘poet’ anyone who had come of age and believed in eternal love along with the faithfulness of women. Another statute recognised the muse in anyone who was not happy with simply having the right answer but, furthermore, needed to try and win a battle. There were other requirements in a similar Quixotesque and quasi-medieval vein.
Members of the Academy were taken from all levels of social standing and included illiterate peasants, a priest, a lawyer and even a local thug. The priest owned a donkey that, with the addition of wings as a poetic gesture, became the symbol of the society. With members convinced that further embellishments were needed, a lion was added to the crest and the design was sent to Palermo for printing on to stationery. The printers only had the impression of a dog to hand so they substituted the king of beasts with man’s best friend. Unfazed, La Lomia and his friends issued a decree declaring the dog to be a lion, irrespective of appearances.
Meetings of the Academy would see aphorisms, dialectal poetry, epigraphs and satire exchanged between the associates who glorified in the title of ‘Arcadians’. To give a semblance of weight to the proceedings, the Baron liked to claim that the origins of the gathering dated back to the time of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, and that his Spanish grandees were the first to set up this tribute to Parnassus, the sacred mountain of the Muses. Underlying the superficial appearance of such an institution was a subtle satire directed towards the Fascists. The honour of high-level Arcadian was only given to peasant poets and local vagabonds, with the likes of Nobel Laureate Luigi Pirandello receiving a mere honorary membership at the lowest level. Clearly, Pirandello was never moved to become an actual participating member.
Gaetano Savatteri, who has written wonderfully on La Lomia in his book I siciliani (The Sicilians), feels that this inverted hierarchy was a rebuff to the Fascist desire for fanfare, status and vainglorious decoration. The Academy even landed itself in hot water with the authorities over a debate concerning the Italian ancestry of Christopher Columbus. In Spanish, Columbus’ name is Cristóbal Colón and La Lomia used to enjoy the kudos of name-dropping Gian Francesco Collion, one of the supposed originators of his society from the days of Spanish rule whom he considered a relative of the famous explorer. The Baron and his friends concluded that all Colóns and variants thereof had to be Spanish, an opinion that eventually reached the hallowed grounds of Spain’s Salamanca University. This assertion filtered back to Italy and must have annoyed the Genoese, who proudly claim him as their own. As a consequence, the Fascist authorities were sent to investigate the society.
Pouring further oil on already troubled waters was the decision to award higher Arcadian status to Mussolini’s regional prefect, who soon worked out that his fellow members at the same level were simple peasants, not to mention homeless wanderers. He refused to brush aside the slight and issued the Academy a list of subjects that members were forbidden to take lightly. If La Lomia found his humour restricted politically, he was less circumspect with matters concerning death. Years later, in 1969, the Giornale di Sicilia newspaper carried a formal notice announcing the death and funeral of Sua Eccellenza Referendario Paolo Annarino; the announcement of the cat’s death was made by an undoubtedly sorrowful Turridu Capra.
There is no reason to think that La Lomia took his faithful pet’s death lightly; it was just his way of showing respect and grief. Absurdist humour was his vehicle and defence mechanism for dealing with life. He is often famously quoted as saying that the silly things in life should be enjoyed in order to make the world one’s own. He really thought that everything in this world was frivolous to a lesser or greater degree, although it seems he believed true life existed only in death. His black humour was most visible when he staged his own mock funeral in 1967 which he attended with heart beating and breath in his lungs, still very much full of life. The Baron was pictured next to his tomb, which was only missing the inscription of the inevitable date to come. A suitably extravagant band played the distinctive brass music that can be heard to this day at Sicilian funerals and he supplied all his guests with almond pastries. His excuse for the charade was the fact that one should only think about death when one was happy.
La Lomia’s plans for his real funeral were even more lavish. He wanted over four hundred guests, who would be served ice-cream and the traditional Sicilian dessert, cassata. Instructions were also left for professional mourners to be drawn from various countries of the Mediterranean. One of them had to represent a notary with a crooked hand, one a Christian Democrat deputy with a pitchfork and another a banker with a noose. These tableaux vivants were designed to symbolise the impounding of his palazzo in Palermo, one of the reasons he spent so much time in The Palms.
The article in La Repubblica mentioned earlier contradicts somewhat Clara Serretta’s assertion that 224 was his favourite room, believing it to be 124 instead. The newspaper purports that the reason for his choice was the fact that he believed he had been conceived in the room. To further cloud the issue, we have also seen the Ambasciatori Hotel given as the site of his conception. Whatever the truth may be, the confusion is redolent of a man who liked to obfuscate and satirise reality, especially when it concerned the momentous events of life and death. He declared himself a fervent Christian, whilst at the same time behaving like a Lothario. A picture exists of La Lomia with a large crucifix around his neck and, as if to counterbalance this perception, a Panama hat with a feather jutting from the band at a jaunty angle. His abundant hair and beard soften the collar of a cape which is draped over his shoulders in a Bohemian manner. Sadly, the Baron’s actual funeral did not live up to expectations and barely fifty people attended an event that did not reflect his wishes.
The backdrop to La Lomia’s creatively eccentric zenith was the Fascist era, a period that threatened the satirical free-thinking meetings of the Academy. Despite heading up such a bizarre association during dangerous times, the aristocrat escaped any serious repercussions due to his noble standing in society. Not all visitors to The Palms were so fortunate. In 1937, the Italian fleet was on manoeuvres in the Tyrrhenian Sea and using Palermo harbour as its base. Sicily and Sardinia had become strategically important owing to their location in relation to the Iberian Peninsula, and Mussolini’s government had unwisely become embroiled in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39).
Francisco Franco (1892–1975), the figurehead of the Spanish Right who led his troops stationed in Morocco across the Straits of Gibraltar to march on Madrid after acclaiming a military rebellion, had lobbied the government in Rome for military assistance. Italian agents on the ground in Spain had already forewarned the Fascists back in Italy that an uprising was imminent. Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s playboy son-in-law, supplied the planes that shuttled the soldiers to the mainland, although three were lost through mechanical failure before they even reached Morocco. Prominent Italian Generals, notably Mario Roatta, warned the government that its forces would be drawn into Spain’s vortex with dire consequences.
Little by little, despite Mussolini’s feigned disinterest in Spanish matters, Italy did increase its involvement through naval and air assistance in addition to the CTV (Corpo truppo volontario, the Corps of Volunteer Troops). Evidence from the field also reveals that regular Italian units were deployed as well as the aforementioned Fascist militia. To the south of Sicily, the country had also become embroiled in expansionist colonialism in Libya and Abyssinia. To add fuel to this combustible mix, certain members of the War Ministry, especially Alberto Pariani, the Under-Secretary, were increasingly convinced that conflict with the British and French was on the horizon.
It is no wonder that the Italian fleet had chosen this moment to make a show of strength off the coast of Sicily. It was the year that Mussolini had returned to the island to promote agricultural reform in another attempt at rallying the half-hearted populace to the Fascist banner. No doubt he had an eye on the grain that would be required during a time of war. The navy had recently launched two new battleships, the Littorio and Vittorio Veneto, the most modern of the Regia Marina (Royal Navy) taskforce. Major treaties of 1922 and 1930 were torn to shreds and there was a rush towards rearmament.
The Spanish Civil War had made the British look in depth at the Italian navy’s Mediterranean capability. In the Mediterranean Historical Review, Michael Alpert makes the claim that Britain was aware that it had stretched its seaborne competence in defence of far-flung outposts of Empire and therefore had a lack of strength from the Straits of Gibraltar to Cyprus should its forces become engaged in a fight with the Italians. Mussolini’s government resented Britain’s refusal to recognise its growing naval power and subsequent rights in its own backyard. Consequently, it threw money at anyone who had a shared ideology and was prepared to stand up to British interests in the region, especially anti-British Nationalists in Malta and Egypt. Furthermore, the Regia Marina dominated routes from Sicily to Spain, leaving the Republican forces aligned against Franco at the mercy of a quasi-blockade.
Agents from all the active powers in the region were covertly at work on the ground, gathering intelligence in each other’s territories. Information on naval movements in the Tyrrhenian Sea and the capability of new ships would have been vital for those charged with uncovering the nature of the threat presented by a potential enemy. In 1937, an Englishman, whose real identity still remains a mystery, checked into The Palms. By this time, the hotel must have been under constant surveillance by OVRA (Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo, the Organisation for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Facism). Mussolini’s secret service had been initially charged with monitoring anti-Fascist activities, but was used during the war and its prelude as an intelligence agency actively engaged in rooting out spies and creating double agents. The mysterious Briton, ensconced in room 322, attracted the wrong sort of attention. He was found in a pool of blood on the bedroom floor with a dagger protruding from his back. The case was conveniently hushed up by the authorities as Europe moved inevitably towards war.