FASCISM, WAR, AND THE BAR ARRIGO
MY FATHER DIDN’T SHARE MUCH with me about events, customers, and the ways of the world in the years before World War II. For one thing, I didn’t see much of him, for the simple reason that when you have a restaurant, you’re never home at mealtimes. It was late in the evening when he came home, so I wondered then — and now I know — how my father and mother found time to talk, to share things, and to make love the way other mortals do, those who are not in the restaurant business. I mention this for the benefit of those who, unaware of the drawbacks, think that owning a restaurant must be fascinating and who also harbor a secret unsatisfied wish to have a restaurant of their own. When someone doesn’t know what to do with a country villa that he’s inherited and asks me for advice about opening a small hotel and dining room, I always reply, “Don’t do it!” Not unless you have a great passion, total dedication, and a longing to serve, to suffer, and to love that goes far beyond the daydreams of an amateur with an elegant old drawing room.
In any case, what Italy had in the years leading up to World War II was primarily fascism, at least that is how it looked to us. And the fear that poisoned my childhood has always made me hate fascism. I will never forget the terror of the war, the loss of freedom, the fear of talking in a normal voice because you could never be sure who might be listening. I remember trembling as I listened to the forbidden broadcasts of Radio London, but also feeling heroic, as if for a moment I were part of a plot to overthrow some great, idiotic monster. In those days we believed that the monster would die once and for all. Now I know that it’s not enough to slay fascism, but that we would need to stomp out everything that ends in -ism — all those blind irrational credos that transport human beings to the lowest depths of inhumanity.
The fascist owners of the leading hotel chains in those troubled years could not understand the success of Harry’s Bar, especially since it had an English name and was deemed somehow different from the Italic race. They never missed a chance to harass my father. For years, they spread the rumor that Harry’s Bar was a den of homosexuals — a very serious issue for fascist males. And then there was talk that it was the meeting place of Jews and antifascists. Every now and then groups of fascist party members would come to dinner and, on the pretext that the service was bad, they would lay the place to waste. This was usually during the winter, when the summer clientele, the tourists and the aristocrats, was not around to witness the destruction.
At that time the cook in the tiny kitchen was a former coworker of my father from his early days. He had cooked for the staff at the Hôtel Monaco, which meant he had started the hard way. The staff members were really difficult customers — more difficult than the most demanding diners. It is always like that. It is much harder to satisfy people who are accustomed to bad eating at home than people who are accustomed to good food and understand it.
This modest cook, Berto Toffolo, did everything on the four burners of the stove, following recipes that he developed with my father. That was when Casanova sole was invented, when crayfish Armorican was modified, as well as the croque monsieur and the cream crepes. We still serve these dishes, and they are as good as they ever were. I believe there is a sort of universal taste that is common to all peoples, regardless of what tastes they favor in their own country. I have always found that the food we serve at Harry’s Bar appeals equally to customers from every country, and that our regulars never tire of eating what we cook. Not all cuisines have this universal appeal: even when I dine at a fine Chinese or Spanish restaurant, I seldom want to return the very next evening. But we have always had customers of every nationality come back to Harry’s Bar night after night to savor the dishes Berto Toffolo and my father invented together in the difficult decade after 1930.
Then the war came.
The first tangible effect of World War II on Harry’s Bar was that we were required to change its “odious” English name: instead of Harry’s Bar, it became Bar Arrigo. My father was also forced to put up a sign: JEWS NOT WELCOME. Federico Keehler, a steady patron and a man of extreme sensitivity, came in one morning shortly afterward and removed the sign to the kitchen, where it remained until the new cook, Enrico Caniglia, took it down some time later.
Enrico Caniglia came from the Abruzzi region, and he was as capable as he was modest and grumpy. He worked at Harry’s Bar until the 1980s and never once set foot in the dining room. If you told him a joke, he laughed at it two days later. He worked seventy hours a week and was persuaded to change his trousers only after we started cutting an inch off the bottoms every day. He and my father had a real partnership. Together they decided what to add to the menu, and all the typical Harry’s Bar dishes were born during the thirties and early forties. Before we had written menus, my father told people what they could eat, and he gave no prices. Then we started having a written menu but still without prices. The prices were made to order.
Years later, when the time came for Caniglia to retire, I told him, “Enrico, I think that if you stop working all at once, you might die.” He had worked too hard all his life to just stop and do nothing day after day. So we agreed that he would work four or five years more, but each year one day less per week. And so it was. There were customers so fond of him that before he retired once and for all, they would come to eat only on the days he was in the kitchen. The countess Natalia Volpi, God rest her soul, claimed that the risotto with peas was never good on the days Caniglia wasn’t there. It was not true, but I’m sure it seemed true to her, which is all that matters.
The most important employee at Harry’s Bar during the war years was a Swiss, Renato Hausamann. My father had hired him in 1934, when Renato and some fifty other hopefuls, economic victims of the Great Depression, answered an ad in the paper for a junior waiter. Renata was the only applicant who admitted he had never worked in a bar before. He was a young boy at the time, barely fourteen, with a quick and clever air about him. He became a great barman, and was soon the only man my father trusted enough to let him run Harry’s Bar in his absence. Shortly before the war broke out, Renato told my father he wanted to become an Italian citizen. My father advised him against this step, and that saved his life. Every week throughout the war, he received a package full of all kinds of good things from the International Red Cross.
Then came 1943, the year Italy surrendered and Mussolini was deposed. It was a moment of shame to some, but to my mind it has always stood out as one of the more illustrious moments in Italian history. Mussolini was ousted on July 25. As of July 24, Italy had approximately forty-nine million fascists, and the very next day there was not a single fascist to be found anywhere in the country. There was not even the trace of a fascist. I say this with some pride, because it means that in Italy, good sense counts for more than blind faith.
In any case, on September 8, 1943, King Victor Emmanuel III and his faithful marshal General Badoglio signed an armistice with the Allies. And barely half an hour later they did something that demonstrated great courage — they sailed for Egypt and left Italy and its army to deal on their own with the wrath of their former German allies. Almost overnight, the Germans occupied all of Northern Italy, and they lost no time freeing Mussolini, who promptly founded the Republic of Salò, so called because his government set up its headquarters in that delightful town on Lake Garda. He could no longer rule from Rome, since that city had been liberated by the Allies.
During this terrible period from 1943 to 1945, when Venice was occupied by the Germans while the south of Italy could breathe free, Harry’s Bar — pardon me, the Bar Arrigo — was requisitioned by the fascists and turned into a mess hall for Mussolini’s navy. Someone had taken his revenge.
So my father left his trusted Renato Hausamann in charge of the bar and stayed home. He had given shelter to the whole family of his brother, my uncle Enrico, who was in the stocking business in Verona and had moved to Venice because it had not been bombed. My father made fresh bread and sweets every day, and my aunt Adelia, Enrico’s wife, rolled out tagliatelle so fine and delicious that they could make you lose your mind. My mother cooked the main dishes, and my aunt Gabriella, heedless of the bombing and machine-gun fire, went to the countryside once a week to buy black market chickens from the peasants, as well as eggs, flour, and whatever else she could find to feed us. Between fathers, mothers, children, and grandchildren, there were twelve of us, and we all lived in the same small house.
And soon there were at least five or six additional hungry customers who stopped by in the evenings for an aperitif and stayed on for dinner. With my father’s less-than-tacit approval, the word had spread among the habitués of Harry’s Bar that while the Germans occupied what they believed was the restaurant of Giuseppe Cipriani, Mr. Cipriani would be happy to serve his former customers a fine meal and a glass of wine at his private residence.
So our fears during these trying times were, if not quieted, at least garnished by these crowded, noisy, and cheerful daily gatherings. My recollections of those two years at home include a cream puff battle between a famous Venetian lawyer and a pharmacist who, after a couple of martinis and a few glasses of white wine, had dared to suggest that pharmaceutical medicine was far more important than jurisprudence. The circle of clients also included Signorina Miari, who gave me piano lessons in return for meals. She was a spinster lady who would certainly have starved without us. Whether it was for fear that we might all die from one moment to the next, or because food was the only pleasure possible at the time, the truth is that during these years, lunch and dinner at our house were feasts fit for a king.
In the summer of 1944, my father began to take me out boating every day, sometimes rowing and sometimes sailing. I was still just a boy; machine-gun fire terrified me, and in those days the only things planes did not strafe were the gondolas.
One morning the wind an but dropped and we were almost motionless in front of Ca’ Giustinian, the German military headquarters about a hundred yards from Harry’s Bar. A horrible explosion suddenly rent the air. An the windows in the palace shattered, and thick black smoke poured out over the Grand Canal. The partisans had bombed it, and two Germans were killed.
Instinctively, my father decided not to go back home. And a good thing it was, because that afternoon a squad of fascist militiamen went to the house to arrest him. If they had found him at home, he would have been shot with six other innocent men, who were executed a few days later on the Riva degli Schiavoni by way of reprisal. They were innocent men. The ones who had planted the bomb were in hiding, although everyone knew who they were.
My father was exonerated the following day, thanks to the esteem the German consul had for him — he had always been impressed by my father’s fluency in German — and the fascists were ordered to leave him alone.
This experience did nothing to discourage us from our maritime outings. Almost every day we rowed as far as the entrance to the port, because my father was convinced that the Americans would arrive from the sea. He was right. I will never forget the great experience of standing by the water’s edge in front of Harry’s Bar at three o’clock on the afternoon of April 25, 1945, to watch the arrival of the foamy amphibious vehicles on the calm water of the Grand Canal, across from Dogana Point. They carried the advance guard of New Zealand liberation troops. What a surprising experience it was, to feel for the first time what seemed like an explosion, an almost painful burst of the gigantic, irresistible emotion of freedom.
Freedom. Not to have seen and felt these things is like never having been in love. I know now that my antifascism will never die.
A few weeks after the liberation, my father was summoned by the U.S. commander of the Allied forces. “You are not a good Italian,” he told him sternly.
“Why?” my father asked.
“Because you have not reopened Harry’s Bar.”
For the first time in his life, my father did not feel inclined to quibble with the authorities.