THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL MONUMENT in Rome is undoubtedly the Vittoriano, also known as the Altar of the Nation, in the Piazza Venezia. This mountain of dazzling white marble, an immense theatrical set, is loaded with symbolism that, to many people, is as incomprehensible as numerous other aspects of state, history (even recent history), and collective memory. Right from the start its saga was filled with some fairly unclear aspects, and it’s only grown more complicated as another meaning was laid over the original, creating a mixture of events and echoes of disparate nature and intensity.
To begin with, its name alludes not to victory, but to a specific Victor—King Vittorio Emanuele II—portrayed as the proud, stern, bellicose man in the equestrian statue perched atop an enormous pedestal at the center of the entire scene. He died of pneumonia in 1878, before his sixtieth birthday, and the monument was originally designed in his honor. The statue is so big that sixteen workers held a banquet inside the horse’s belly a few days before the monument’s inauguration. A famous photograph shows them with broad smiles as they raise their glasses toward the lens in a toast. The situation soon changed, and a decade or so later the “great king” was forced to share his monument with a second important figure, the Unknown Soldier. The latter’s presence, especially after the fall of the monarchy in 1946, was destined to overshadow that of the king.
The Vittoriano was dedicated in an opening ceremony on June 4, 1911, a rainy morning despite the swiftly approaching summer. Later on the sun came out, as did the royal family, accompanied by ministers of state and other high officials, who smoothly ascended the staircase to the stage on the monument’s lower terrace. The ladies flaunted the season’s latest millinery fashions, the little princes and princesses were dressed in sailor suits, and a few parasols were opened for shade. The dignitaries were flanked by wings of trade unionists, war veterans, soldiers, marching bands with bright brass instruments glinting in the sun, and a big crowd.
In keeping with a deeply rooted national tradition, not even this solemn occasion could occur without the requisite public debate: socialists expressed reservations about the monument’s appropriateness; republicans scheduled a separate demonstration that same afternoon at the statue of Garibaldi on the Janiculum Hill, which thousands of people attended; and Freemasons distributed bitterly anticlerical pamphlets pointing out that the new monument rose up “in sight of the ever-vigilant and expectant Vatican,” a sort of lay counterpart to the unsettling cupola of Saint Peter’s.
One of the most significant speeches at the monument’s inauguration was delivered by Rome’s mayor, Ernesto Nathan, who was also an anticlerical Freemason, follower of Mazzini, and a progressive. Nathan was born in London and didn’t become an Italian citizen until he was about forty years old. Elected mayor of the capital—one of the best the city has ever had—he was an advocate of public housing and educating all, including the city’s poorest. That morning, among other things, he proclaimed, “This impressive mass rising atop the Capitoline Hill as the Altar of the Nation is not just a monument to the king, but symbolizes the dawn of the Third Italy! And while the equestrian monument of Marcus Aurelius, emperor-protector of legal rights, stands on the Capitoline Hill, that of the Gentleman King, protector of the national faith, takes up the throne in the one we have just unveiled.”
Once inaugurated, the Vittoriano became the crux of a memorable year, which opened with fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of the Kingdom of Italy and closed with the war in Libya (to the notes of the song “Tripoli, bel suol d’amore”). Among the public-works projects undertaken for the national jubilee were the new Palace of Justice and the bridge connecting the Villa Borghese to the Pincian Hill, which still soars high above the Viale del Muro Torto. Large exhibitions were organized, including the international fine arts show at the Valle Giulia. Preparation for this exhibition involved the construction of a number of foreign academies, as well as the large building that later became the Galleria nazionale di arte moderna (the National Gallery of Modern Art, popularly known by it’s initials, “GNAM,” which also means “yum”). Two new bridges were built across the Tiber in 1911, the Ponte Flaminio (an audacious plan for that era, built of a single span of reinforced concrete) and the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele, which connected the old city with the newer residential neighborhoods across the river, as well as a lovely archaeological park. The extraordinary Naiad Fountain was installed to complete the Piazza dell’Esedra, the Castel Sant’Angelo and the Baths of Diocletian were restored, and the vast area between the Vigna Cartoni and the slopes of Monte Mario was cleared to host an exhibition in honor of the kingdom’s fiftieth anniversary and prepare for future development of the Mazzini neighborhood. Putting all questions of style and taste aside, no other urban administration could have done more to prepare the city for such an international event, even if, admittedly, the major flooding of the Tiber in 1870 had convinced the government to start building the huge embankments that now contain the capricious river.
In addition to the numerous people in attendance, another presence hovered in the air around the Vittoriano that morning—the immaterial yet palpable, downright intrusive spirit of Giosuè Carducci. This bard of “La Terza Italia”—the Third Italy, mentioned in Nathan’s speech, that emerged after unification—and a national poet if ever there was one, was a republican (although he wasn’t hostile to the monarchy), anticlerical activist, and Freemason. The monument resembled him, and he resembled the era so visible in the monument. The idea of liberty Carducci so often extolled in his poetry is the same one that appears in Delacroix’s famous painting Liberty Leading the People—exciting, bloody, and surrounded by smoke and commotion. Badly dressed but heroic soldiers advance over the barricades along with an old rifleman and a fearless twelve-year-old Gavroche, much like the little Lombard lookout in Edmondo De Amicis’s famed novel Cuore. Scattered throughout the scene are weapons and flags shredded by enemy assaults. This ragtag group is led by the young, beautiful, and courageous figure of Liberty; breast bared, she holds the tricolor (of France, in this case) high above the blood and mud.
Te giova il grido che le turbe assorda
E a l’armi incalza a l’armi i cuor cessanti,
Te le civili su la ferrea corda
Ire sonanti:
E sol tra i casi de la pugna orrendi
E flutti d’aste e fulminose spade
Nel vasto sangue popolar discendi,
O libertade.
(For you, the cry that deafens turbulent crowds / And spurs weakened hearts to battle, / For you, the people’s fury echoes on the iron cord. / Solely in the horrific times of brandished fists / And waving flags and fulminous swords, / Into the vast blood of the people you descend, / O Liberty.)1
The same spirit inspired Carducci’s Ode to Satan, which caused furious debate when it was published:
To thee my verses,
Unbridled and daring,
Shall mount, O Satan,
King of the banquet.
Away with thy sprinkling,
O Priest, and thy droning,
For never shall Satan,
O Priest, stand behind thee.2
Once again a few verses manage to provoke anti-Romantic polemics; reason, progress, the imminent future, and the positive spirit of the times rise up against the surrounding smoke, be it the smoke of ecclesiastical incense or of the more pernicious, muddled, Manzoniesque metaphors:
Carducci writes of an Italy that no longer exists, if ever it had. His pulsing visions of civic ardor and the flames of fantasy are so plainly dated that they either touch a sentimental nerve or make us chuckle. The Vittoriano expresses the same pathos, and its marble brings back the same spirit.
“At this particular point in its history,” the Socialist daily Avanti wrote in March of 1911, “the Italian bourgeoisie feels the need to step forward to receive the admiration of other national bourgeoisies, as well as its own.” You can think whatever you want about the monument—over the years it has, in fact, been compared to a wedding cake or a spectacular typewriter. The fact remains that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it embodied the image European nations believed they needed to project. Because it suited the prevailing taste of the times and encompassed the spirit of the period, the enormous Palace of Justice in Brussels resembles it, as does Walhalla, the German hall of fame in Regensburg, the Altes Museum in Berlin, the Opera Garnier in Paris, the arch of the State Palace in Saint Petersburg, and so many of the monumental buildings along Vienna’s ring road. And, had they not been destroyed in World War II bombardments, many of Berlin’s buildings would still look a lot like it. There’s no question that, upon its completion in 1911, the Vittoriano was an opportunity for the small and in many ways old-fashioned Kingdom of Italy to show other nations that, despite its many contradictions, it aimed to join the continental “concert.”
The monument’s construction began in 1885, consumed millions of lire, and caused a number of scandals. Its architect, Giovanni Sacconi, was born near Ascoli Piceno in 1854 (he died in 1905, before his magnum opus was finished). He decided to clad the monument in white Botticino marble to create a candid contrast with the warm Roman Travertine. This stone was quarried in Rezzato, near Brescia, and the Honorable Giuseppe Zanardelli, a member of parliament from the same region, had a lot to do with that choice. A mountain of marble blocks began to descend on Rome from Brescia, and they were refined, squared, and stored near the train station in Trastevere before being sent along to the building site.
Even photographs fail to capture the extent of the massive gouge dug into the side of the Capitoline Hill to create the monument’s foundations. Numerous Roman ruins were uncovered during the excavations; some were saved, others were incorporated into the Vittoriano’s foundations. One of the strangest finds was the fossilized skeleton of a prehistoric elephant embedded in a stratum of clay. A few of the bones were transferred to the university’s geological collection, the rest stayed where they had been found.
Large-scale demolitions preceded the excavations, and included the wonderful Tower of Paul III (a few photographs of it remain), as well as the bridge connecting it to the Palazzetto Venezia. The Ara Coeli convent was also largely destroyed—a perfectly executed amputation, but no less painful a loss. Traces of this are still evident in the lower terrace of the Vittoriano, where there is a walkway that marks, so to speak, the boundary between the new construction and the old; an impressive scar, not entirely sutured, is visible between the two buildings.
Some twenty years later, in 1931 and the following years, Mussolini ordered further demolitions in the area as he prepared for the tenth anniversary of the Fascist march on Rome. The whole area between the Coliseum and the Vittoriano, and part of the neighborhood on the Velian Hill, were completely razed to create the Via dei Fori Imperiali. Apartments, stores, and craftsmen’s workshops all succumbed to the wrecking ball, and the dense fabric of modest houses gave way to a broad arterial destined to become the stage for grandiose military parades.
The idea of honoring an Unknown Soldier as representative of all soldiers killed in war was proposed by Colonel Giulio Douhet, and began a tradition adopted in many other countries. In August of 1921, parliament approved a law that allowed “the remains of an unknown soldier” to be interred in the Vittoriano. For once there was little debate, and the vote was unanimous. This decision kicked off a glorious and macabre tradition steeped in nationalist rhetoric and despair. The Great War had ended a few years before, and a commission made up of officers, non-commissioned officers, and regular soldiers visited several war cemeteries around the country to exhume the remains of war dead. They rejected any remains that could be identified by dog tags or even a regimental insignia, and then chose six unidentified bodies to be placed in matching coffins. On October 28, 1921, Maria Bergamas, mother of a missing soldier from Trieste, chose one of the coffins by throwing her black veil over it. That was the one taken to Rome, and the other five were to be buried in the cathedral of Aquileia. During the rites Maria, accompanied by four soldiers whose service was honored with the gold medal for valor, held a white flower in her hands, which she was then to set on the coffin chosen earlier. She made a mistake, and either equivocated or was overwhelmed by emotion. Instead of tossing the flower on the coffin, she draped it with her mater dolorosa black veil, symbol of the mourning mother. The spontaneous gesture was perfect, though, because it unconsciously underscored the depth of an inconsolable grief.
The train transporting the coffin was manned by engineers, all decorated with medals for their wartime valor, and as it crossed Italy the tracks were lined by a nearly uninterrupted line of people, many kneeling as it passed, most with tears in their eyes. Women made up the majority of the front row—filled with sorrow, mourning, in great pain—and took close part in one of the most heartfelt collective commemorations in the country’s history. The rail convoy consisted of sixteen wagons, all of which became increasingly covered by wreaths and flowers. The car with the coffin was decorated with an inscription from Dante, “His shade returns that was departed,” and the date, MCMXV–MCMXVIII. A solemn funeral was held upon the arrival in Rome, and then, on the morning of November 4, the coffin was taken to the monument and buried there. A banner on the front of the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli read, “His name unknown / his spirit shines, wherever Italy is / with a weeping yet proud voice / innumerable mothers say, / “he is my son.” November 4 was then declared a national holiday.
Today the Vittoriano belongs largely to him, that poor rural infantryman who came from who knows what part of Italy, dead without wanting or knowing it, blinded by the darkness of the earth. But the monument also houses several interesting museums, including a naval museum and one dedicated to the Risorgimento. The latter is a treasure trove of objects and memorabilia of the nation’s unification: Nino Blixio’s pistol; the boot Garibaldi was wearing when it was pierced by a bullet at Aspromonte, as well as the bullet extracted from his wound; photos of the Mille, Garibaldi’s thousand troops; busts; swords; glorious flags; diaries; and the memories of an epic period we’re all descendants of, even if the many feelings surrounding our common past sometimes seem to tarnish it.
At one point there was a plan to demolish the Vittoriano, and proposals were submitted to use it in a variety of different ways, or just to let it grow over with plants, transforming it into a sort of marble forest. I think it’s fine as it is—actually, I find it quite beautiful. Regardless of what you might think about it, it nevertheless remains a testament of sorts to the ambitions of a newborn Italy; it’s a picture of what the kingdom wanted to be when it “grew up.” It’s a gigantic snapshot of the germinating national spirit, a dedication to future memory in which, unfortunately, it’s not always easy to recognize ourselves.
Not everyone has a good impression of what Rome was in the early twentieth century; the transformations wrought by the arrival of the “Italians” and the city’s designation as new national capital were enormous. The small breach Captain Alessandro La Marmora’s cannonade made in the walls of Rome, about 100 meters west of the Porta Pia, was in itself more symbolic than militarily significant, yet that small opening in the walls let fresh air enter the ancient city for the first time in ages. That cannonball ended centuries of isolation in Rome, and in only a few years—almost a matter of months—life was so transformed that it was actually traumatic for many of Rome’s citizens.
Everything changed: the population suddenly began to grow; the city’s urban fabric expanded, covering what had until recently been vineyards, pastures, and light forest with houses and streets; incomes rose, and customs changed; finally, even the language changed, as did pastimes, work and leisure schedules, and even the types of crime.
In the first two years after the walls were breached at Porta Pia the city’s population grew by 10 percent, and over the following years its rate of growth steadily increased. Within thirty years (according to the 1901 census) the number of Roman citizens had increased by 150 percent, surpassing half a million inhabitants. Fewer than half (46 percent) were born in Rome, and the new arrivals pouring in through the breach included officials, office workers, merchants, professionals, politicians, journalists, and a fair number of speculators who’d made a lucky guess at all the business that could be done—much of it with public funds. The plebian masses were changing as well, or at least were about to change. One journalist wrote, “Today’s rabble is not what it was one hundred years ago, or even half a century ago. Time changes everything, an incessant wave of civilization is penetrating everywhere, and not even the priests could halt it at the gates of Rome.”
But the greatest change, lagging a good century or so behind other capital cities, was that even Rome began to have a middle class. Under papal dominion the city’s population consisted of nobles, priests, and the poor. With the arrival of the Piemontesi (the Piedmont troops, Garibaldi, and Cavour) and modern public administration, an intermediate class was created, which would soon become the engine of further changes affecting everything from lifestyle to politics, publishing, and the performing arts.
In a well-mannered chronicle from that period I found a profile of a “middle-class” interior: “The maid, in her large white apron, was intent on ironing Grandfather’s starched collars with a charcoal iron; gold buttons attached the collar to a shirt and regularly slipped out of his hand. The buttons made me think of my father, who wandered through the house, moustache curlers immobilizing his lips … while my mother was seated in a dressing gown before her vanity, brushing out her long braids.” This domestic scene is already imbued with the atmosphere of Turin, or maybe Paris, or some city more continental than Rome, at any rate.
One of the bourgeoisie’s main ambitions was a buon partito, a “good catch” for marrying off their daughters. For a long time the plate glass windows of the Ronzi & Singer café, at the corner of the Corso and the Piazza Colonna, was called the “Campo Vaccino”—the name originally given to the cattle market that occupied part of the Roman Forum—because of the ostentatious display Roman matrons made of their marriageable daughters there. Foreign wives were also in vogue, “Russian girls, pale, plaintive, and passionate, came, as did English ones, who were tall, educated, rich or poor, and sometimes just extravagant, some looking for a husband and taking advantage of the craze that now reaches all the way down to the travetti, the bureaucratic class, to marry any kind of foreign woman, as a millionaire should.” The travetti, based on the French term for the mass of public-sector employees, had already defined, for better or worse, one of Rome’s chief characteristics. One fierce critic observed, “Travettismo really means a crowd of beggars in ministerial get-up.”
Naturally the birth of the modern city came at a certain price. The heftiest and most painful, due to its spectacular nature, was the criminal destruction of Villa Boncompagni Ludovisi. It now takes great effort to imagine the area of the Via Veneto, and the surrounding streets running from the Porta Pinciana to just beyond Palazzo Margherita (now the American Embassy), all covered by a centuries-old park decorated with statues and temples of such majesty and beauty that they inspired Henry James to remark on their beauty. The area was divided into lots by the owners, setting an atrocious precedent that would certainly have been followed by the Borghese princes, if it weren’t for the lucky addition of a few legal stipulations to their deed just in time to stop them.
In the preface I mentioned the book Dame al Macao by Alberto Arduini, a refined antiquarian with a shop on the Via Frattina that later moved to the Piazza di Spagna, next door to the Keats-Shelley House. The writer Ennio Flaiano maliciously described him as “the only Roman mentioned in Gide’s Journal,” referring to the French author’s notorious homosexuality. The Rome described by Arduini was more likely a desire than reality, yet it was a city that had the character and visionary imprint Arduini described, though it only existed in literature. We need to go back thirty years, from 1911 to 1881, to the moment one particular eighteen-year-old lad first set foot in Rome. His last name would have been Rapagnetta, had his father not permanently assumed the name of the relatives who had adopted him—D’Annunzio. Recalling his arrival, the young Gabriele described the Rome of those feverish years:
It was a time when the busy occupations of demolisher and builder were most turbidly fervent. Along with clouds of dust a sort of building craze swept through the city, with sudden whirlwinds.… It was everywhere, like a veritable contagion of vulgarity. In the incessant clashes of business, the almost ferocious furies of appetite and emotion, and the exclusive, disorganized practice of “useful activity,” all aesthetic sense and all respect for the past were utterly deposed.
Rome attracted the young poet, or, to use one of his terms, it bewitched him. D’Annunzio looked around as he left his modest lodging at Via Borgognona 12, and everything looked lovely to him, worthy of being retold in writing. He enrolled at the university, in the department of literature, which had been his original reason for coming to the capital, but he spent a lot more time at salons and newspaper editorial offices than in class. A few weeks after he arrived the fashionable periodical Cronaca bizantina published one of his sonnets. Rome’s residences and houses, the city’s outskirts—all of it attracted him. Above all, women fascinated him, awaking within him a highly sensual temperament. In February of 1883 he met Maria Hardouin di Gallese, fell in love with her, and three months later, after an evening walk through the Villa Borghese, they made love. The poet rushed to tell all in a short poem, Il peccato di maggio (May’s Sin):
Or così fu; pe’l bosco andando. Era sottile
la mia compagna e bionda. Su la nuca infantile
due ciocche …
(So it went, wandering through the forest. My companion / was slim and blond. On the youthful nape of her neck / were two fine tresses …)
The two strolled together, arms entwined, tender, and aware—it’s easy to assume something was about to happen. Something, indeed:
… La testa
in dietro a l’improvviso abbandonò. Le chiome
effuse le composero un serto ov’ella, come
per morire, si stese. Un irrigidimento
quasi un gelo di morte, l’occupò. Lo spavento
m’invase …
Ma fu morte
breve. Tornò la vita ne l’onda del piacere.
Chino a lei su la bocca io tutto, come a bere
da un calice, fremendo di conquista, sentivo
le punte del suo petto insorgere, al lascivo
tentar de le mie dita, quali carnosi fiori …
(… head / tilted back, suddenly in full abandon, her loose locks / composed a wreath where she, as if / about to die, lay down. A rigidity, / a near deathly freeze, overcame her. Fright / filled my veins … / But such death / was brief. Life returned in a wave of pleasure. / I bent above her mouth as if to drink / from a chalice, shivering at such conquest, I felt / the tips of her breast rise at the lascivious / searching of my fingertips, carnal flowers …)4
And so on. More than a poem, this is running commentary fit for radio broadcast. But because, at heart, it describes the intimacy of two “poor lovers” consummated behind the cover of a bush on a lawn of the Villa Borghese, we see just how gifted the young writer was at imagining and transforming. A well-timed wedding followed. In his own way, Gabriele loved his wife. His own way meant transforming the marriage into a relationship of convenience, separated from both his artistic pursuits and his numerous ties to other women.
If we choose to view D’Annunzio as a turn-of-the-century chronicler, we easily see how quickly the lives of certain Roman classes became modern, uninhibited, and even licentious. Here’s his description of a woman undressing, a study in feminine sensuality:
She begins with slow, languid, sometimes hesitant gestures, stopping from time to time as if to listen for something. She removes her fine silk stockings
… and then unties the ribbon at her shoulder, which holds the last bit of clothing, her softest, most precious blouse.… The snow of this blouse flows across her breast, follows the arch of her loins, stops for a moment at her hips, and then falls at once to her feet, like a spray of sea foam.…
The poet gave the nascent bourgeoisie in Rome (and the whole country) the primary material with which to construct their erotic fantasies. In describing certain situations he also contributed to creating them; this happened when he transferred these visions into his narrative masterpiece, Il piacere, initially published in 1889 and later published in English as The Child of Pleasure. His disturbing female protagonist, Elena Muti, was based on two models: the Neapolitan journalist Olga Ossiani, who signed works with the pseudonym Febea and was his first lover after he wed; and Elvira Natalia Fraternali, a woman one year his senior, with whom he had a relationship of almost total and unlimited sensual harmony. Elvira—who he called Barbara or Barbarella, and took the last name Leoni after a brief and unhappy marriage—was the one woman who, of his many lovers, best knew how to satisfy his predilections. Their amorous trysts occurred on an almost daily basis between April and June 1887, and took place in two studios of his friends, one in Via San Nicola da Tolentino, the other in Via de’ Prefetti. This passionate affair lasted for five years. Here is an excerpt from one of the hundreds of letters he wrote her:
When I think back to the kisses I gave you all over your body—on your small, perky breast; on your belly, perfect as the statue of a virgin; on the rose as warm, alive, and soft on my lips as your mouth; on your thigh, soft as velvet, with the taste of succulent fruit; on your knees, which you tried in vain to deny me, laughing and writhing; in the fold of your knees, so delicate, soft, and childlike; on your golden back, scattered with golden beads, marked by a furrow where my tongue runs quick and wet in sweet caress; on your loins, and your marvelously beautiful thighs; on your neck, and your hair, and on your long, palpitating eyelashes; on your throat—when I think of the wave of joy that flowed through my veins when I so much as looked at you, nude, I shiver, burn, and tremble.…
What a difference from the rustic, brutal couplings of commoners written about only a few decades earlier in Belli’s work. Those primitive actions were replaced by the delights of seduction, the coarse clothes of common folk changed for the rustling of fine fabrics, perfumes, and suggestive penumbra. D’Annunzio initiated a cult of sensuality that continued through the course of time, often adapting to custom, and more often anticipating it.
Pietro Pancrazi, after thorough research, outlined the kind of life and events D’Annunzio described, “The receptions, auctions, foxhunts, streets, shops, concerts, fencing schools, the silvery shine of the courts, and the feathers that decorated the large hats of ‘Tiberine ladies’ [Roman women] all made up the choir of its [Rome’s] grand ballet.”
There are “interior” scenes that correspond to “exterior” ones, equally indicative of the era. In his essay “D’Annunzio arredatore,” Mario Praz discovered that these interiors and their furnishings painted a picture of strongly contrasting colors—Chinese vases, pseudo-Renaissance bronzes, musical instruments, ivories, arms, bits of Baroque altars, busts, sarcophagi, coats-of-arms, velvets, metal braziers, carpets, animal skins, African weapons, consoles, screens, fans, and palms.5 D’Annunzio created rooms and furnishings that contributed to forming the taste of much of the Italian middle class for decades to follow, but he also painted wonderful verbal pictures of the enchanted Rome he saw, or imagined, around him. Here are two instances from The Child of Pleasure, one sunny, the other rainy:
On this May morning Rome shone resplendent under the caressing sun. Here a fountain lit up with its silvery laughter a little piazzetta still plunged in shadow; there the open gates of a palace disclosed a vista of courtyard with a background of portico and statues; from the baroque architecture of a brick church hung the decorations for the month of May. Under the bridge, the Tiber gleamed and glistened as it hurried away between the gray-green houses towards the island of San Bartolomeo. After a short ascent, the whole city spread out before them, immense, imperial, radiant, bristling with spires and columns and obelisks, crowned with cupolas and rotundas, clean cut out of the blue like a citadel.6
…
It was raining. Andrea went to the window and stood for some time looking out upon his beloved Rome. The piazza of the Trinità dei Monti was solitary and deserted, left to the guardianship of its obelisk.… And as he gazed, one sentiment dominated all the others in his heart; the sudden and lively reawakening of his old love for Rome—fairest Rome.… On the distant heights the gray deepened gradually to amethyst.… Under this rich autumnal light everything took on a sumptuous air. Divine Rome!7
D’Annunzio didn’t ignore the fact that the oases of refined comfort his characters inhabited were surrounded by a sea of degradation and misery. The suburbs, crowded with the city’s newest immigrants, and the Roman countryside were still those Belli described with such dark realism. D’Annunzio’s aestheticism prevented him from really absorbing those aspects of life (except where they could be used to express disdain), but he did record them with a chronicler’s precision. In the following scene Elena and Andrea, the two protagonists of The Child of Pleasure, go to an inn for a glass of water during a horseback ride in the Roman countryside:
The people of the inn showed not the faintest sign of surprise at the entry of the two strangers. Two or three men shivering with ague, morose and jaundiced, were crouching round a square brazier. A red-haired bullock-driver was snoring in a corner, his empty pipe still between his teeth.… The woman of the inn, corpulent to obesity, carried in her arms a child which she rocked heavily to and fro.
While Elena drank the water out of a rude earthenware mug, the woman, with wails and plaints, drew her attention to the wretched infant.
“Look—signora mia—look at it!”
The poor little creature was wasted to a skeleton.…8
One of the driving forces behind the new life animating Rome was Queen Margherita, wife (and cousin) of King Umberto I. For a quarter century Margherita was the true engine of Rome’s worldliness, and she was certainly the regal figure more suited to the role than any other the Kingdom of Italy ever had; she was the first queen in a city that, for centuries on end, had been ruled by bachelor kings. Margherita opened new hospitals, gave highly frequented receptions, offered patronage to writers and poets, and when her carriage drove up the Corso it met with large applause. Despite her conservative ideas she performed a priceless service of branding and public relations, as we would say today, for the kingdom, the Sabauda Dynasty, and the city of Rome itself.
Following her example and driven by complex national events, life in Rome was enlivened by an attempt to conform to other European capitals. New neighborhoods rose up, and the sea of buildings made for an ever-increasing population including a few eccentricities that are also stylistically interesting. The self-taught architect Armando Brasini built a curious castle of sorts, at Via Flaminia 489, from materials salvaged from buildings demolished in the historic center. It is a complex of towers, pinnacles, spires, and buttresses, but comes closer to something from a fairy tale than anything truly medieval. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc had done something similar in France about ten years earlier, using his restoration projects to reinvent a canon of Gothic architecture.
Gino Coppedè did much the same thing when he built a whole neighborhood in the early 1920s. He constructed about forty small apartment buildings and houses in a rectangular area of over seven acres along the Via Tagliamento. In a city where building patterns were often disorderly, the Coppedè neighborhood was distinguished by its sense of unity and the rationality of its urban design. Coppedè took the so-called eclectic style that flourished at the turn of the century to its extreme. His designs borrowed genially from any and everything, giving the results a fantastical quality: pinnacles, spires, balconies, small towers, hobnailed doors, and heavily embossed street lamps. Two key buildings on the Piazza Mincio, the so-called Ambassadors’ Palaces, were joined by a huge arch decorated with a mask, giving the piazza a theatrical backdrop. The Frog Fountain is at the piazza’s center, and is a reworking of the theme of the famous Turtle Fountain in the Piazza Mattei; local lore claimed this was the meeting place of witches. The Palazzo del Ragno was named after the spider motif in the mosaic decoration framing its doorways. The spider was seen as a silent and indefatigable weaver, and was hence a symbol of industriousness repeated in architectural decoration. The Villino delle Fate, or House of the Fairies, was enlivened with frescoes that recall a sort of mythical Renaissance Florence more imaginary than real. It’s not difficult to see the models the architect was drawing on in each of the buildings—medieval castles, Swiss chalets, Victorian mansions—creating a sort of eclectic architectural folly that has gained an evocative patina over the last century.
Equestrian sports were imported from England, and the upper bourgeoisie and so-called white nobility—the new aristocracy created by the Kingdom of Italy, as opposed to the so-called black nobility created by the popes—began to attend races at the track of Capannelle, Tor di Quinto, and the Villa Gloria. The lugubrious, deserted countryside was suddenly enlivened by the passing thunder of foxhunts. Clubs for chess and hunting opened in town, and exclusive salons appeared. Rome, now populated by huge numbers of foreigners, had two courts, one belonging to the pope, the other to the Savoia. It also had two diplomatic corps, and for a few decades the Roman nobility was split between two allegiances that many felt were irreconcilable—the throne and the altar. In January of 1875 Pope Pius IX (Giovanni Mastai Ferretti), now prisoner of his own reactionary positions, exhorted the nobility “to abstain from public activities,” recommending them to “stay in your houses and attend to your domestic responsibilities.” Most of the aristocrats loyal to him—the Aldobrandini, Altieri, Barberini, Borghese, Chigi, Corsini, Lancellotti, Massimo, Orsini, Patrizi, Rospigliosi, Salviati, Soderini, and Theodoli families—did just that. Others, however, came to terms with the new regime, and included the Boncompagni, Ludovisi, Cesarini Sforza, Colonna, Doria, Odescalchi, and Santafiora families.
These problems were lessened, though they didn’t entirely disappear, when the pope died, which remarkably happened just a few weeks after the death of Vittorio Emanuele II. The king, who’d been excommunicated after the fall of Rome, died at the Quirinal Palace on January 9, 1878, and even after his death he was attacked by the most extremist Catholic newspapers. When the pope died, on February 7, the atmosphere was so tense that Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster, feared the worst, and suggested the conclave be held in Malta. Rumors about reprisals the Freemasons were planning for when the pope’s corpse went on public display ran rampant throughout Rome, but nothing happened. Nevertheless, the fear was real enough that the maintenance of public order was entrusted to a battalion of infantrymen. Many people wanted to pay their last respects to the pope, each in his or her own way. The police official Giuseppe Manfroni wrote in his memoirs that, while the faithful waited patiently in line to pay homage to the dead pontiff, “court ladies, secretary generals, other ministry officials, senators, and deputies with their families,” as well as members of the papal nobility, entered the basilica by a side door.
The religious “black” nobility’s estrangement from the new state soon vanished. Sooner or later everyone understood that the pope, deprived of his power, could only promise them the distant blessings of heaven, while the new regime offered more immediate and promising business opportunities, especially when it sold former agricultural land, valued at its weight in gold, for real estate development.
In this same period the demand for spectacle and entertainment also increased. Because not everyone could be received at court or in noble palaces, several public venues for entertainment opened, a novelty the city had never had before. The first café-chantant, or music hall, opened in the early 1880s, and with it came many kellerine and sciantose (Roman corruptions of the German Kellnerin and French chanteuse, respectively), the women who sang in the new clubs. For a little while café-concerts, with musical entertainment provided solely by an orchestra, competed with the café-chantant. As a note on the concerts dated 1893 reports, “songs in Roman dialect are all the rage. At the Cornelio, now impeccably adapted for the orchestra of the wonderful maestro Alberto Cavanna, there is, and always will be, loud applause from the refined public.” Queen Margherita, the beloved of all Italians, had both a theater and a Neapolitan pizza named after her. There was even a music hall named for Umberto I; the rest of the variety halls resorted to the usual exotic names—Alhambra, Trianon, Olympia, Eden, Kursaal, and Alcazar.
The peculiarity of the café-chantant was that theater seating was replaced by small tables in an interior decorated with velvet and mirrors and beneath a ceiling populated with amorous stucco allegories. Thus, while the variety artist or chanteuse was performing on stage, the hall was filled with the constant bustling of waiters and animated conversations. This atmosphere encouraged exchanges between the audience and the stage, the public and the artists. These were lively places, popular providers of a mild eroticism that was just enough to satisfy the peaceful middle class’s modest hunger for transgression and bad behavior, and seem to have come straight out of a Maupassant story. Because they were so popular these cafés also had relentless critics. In the Almanacco Italiano of 1899 we read that “the café-chantant has caused immense damage to the theatre. It has corrupted taste and spoiled the very character of the theatres themselves.” (This is more or less the same accusation now aimed at television with respect to the movie industry.)
The dynamic entrepreneur Domenico Costanzi opened the new opera house in November 1880, in the city’s so-called De Merode neighborhood. It had twenty-two hundred seats, the most advanced staging technology of the time, splendid lights, and broad foyers. It opened on the evening of the 27th with a performance of Rossini’s Semiramide. The public admitted that there was no comparison with the older Roman theaters (Tor di Nona, Argentina, and Valle), and complained only about the fact that “Il Costanzi,” as the opera house came to be called, was built all the way at the top of the Via Nazionale, far away from everything.
Cultural life also improved. La Sapienza, the historic University of Rome, was expanded, the musical academy of Santa Cecilia and the Accademia dei Lincei were restored, and a science laboratory destined for a glorious future opened on the Via Panisperna. Innovative art shows opened at the new Palazzo delle Esposizioni, an enormous exhibition hall on the Via Nazionale, and archaeological excavations and the creation of parks intensified.
Let’s be clear, though—deep down Rome remained the same old skeptical and uncultured city it’s always been and always will be. Rumors about speculators manipulating public works projects spread, and veritable scandals erupted. All told, however, the Third Rome of Umberto I and city politician Giovanni Giolitti was culturally more lively and better suited to its times than papal Rome ever had been, and more adapted than Fascist Rome or the post–World War II city of the Christian Democrats would be.
There’s just one last aspect of this period I’d like to mention—its major court trials. Crime and judicial news is always a powerful way to see the reality hidden beneath the official veneer. The birth of a new Rome, accompanied by an overwhelming shift in behavior, a rapid increase in population, and the beginning of numerous public and private building projects, couldn’t help but leave a significant mark in the legal record books.
The most outrageous scandal at the end of the nineteenth century was, without a doubt, the one at the Banca Romana. Its president, Bernardo Tanlongo, was nominated senator on the eve of the announcement of sensational charges against him. It had come to light that the bank, which was among the few authorized to print paper money, had put into circulation a double series of bills with the same serial numbers. This was the most conspicuous part of a vast web of fraud. It was clear, when the affair was completely unraveled, that the banks highest officials, as well as other bankers, politicians, and journalists were all involved.
On January 21, 1893, the Corriere della Sera described Bernardo Tanlongo, star of the scandal, as having “never been a ladies man, he never gambles, he is the antithesis of elegance, and his frugality closely resembles avarice.” Tanlongo, called “Sor Bernà” by his close friends, was seventy-three years old, always dressed in worn-out clothes, and had grown up in the Rome of the “pope-kings,” where he learned every type of trickery. The citywide scheming intensified in the feverish building boom following unification in 1870. In Garibaldi’s Rome Tanlongo acted as a spy for the French, and when the political winds shifted, he sought favor with both the Jesuits and the Freemasons. He leant the bank’s money with shrewd wisdom, taking special care of his own interests, and secretly adjusted the bank’s books. When it became clear that accounting tricks were no longer enough to hide its stunning deficit of 28 million lire, he began to sign double banknotes with the complicity of the bank’s treasurer and his own son.
The real “insurance” he was counting on, though, was the information kept in his own files. When the Corriere della Sera interviewed him on the eve of his arrest, Tanlongo spoke clearly; “if they want to hold me responsible for crimes I didn’t commit, I will be forced to create a scandal.” Parliamentary members Francesco Crispi and Giovanni Giolitti, who nurtured a mutual hatred, understood the message and began a race to see who would be the first to blame the other for having known about the mess and covering it up. Tanlongo, not surprisingly, was acquitted at the end of July 1894, providing further proof that only simpletons, chicken thieves, and those foolish enough to have neglected preparing a defense for their crimes ended up in jail. This scandal still resonates in the history of fiscal crime, as it anticipated our own corrupt “modernity.”
Great interest was also stirred up by several trials for individual, semi-private crimes, generally of a sexual nature. One good example is the political-marital scandal that led to the murder of Raffaele Sonzogno, publisher of La Capitale newspaper. The trial for the murder of “Countess Lara,” the pseudonym aesthete Eva Cattermole Mancini used to sign her “D’Annunziesque” poety, was also closely followed. Daughter of an Englishman and a Russian woman, Lara wrote a column called “il Salotto della signora” (“The Lady’s Salon”) in the tabloid La Tribuna Illustrata. She was best known, however, for her highly active and tempestuous love life. Married at a young age, she separated from her husband when he killed one of her lovers in a duel. She quickly replaced him with numerous other lovers, and in the end one of them killed her.
The notorious “Fadda Trial” excited public curiosity and was also of great interest to journalists. It even caught Giosuè Carducci’s attention, and he wrote an off-the-cuff essay about it included in his collection Giambi ed epodi (Iambics and Epodes). The indignant poet wrote, “The deliberations of the trial held in Rome from September 20 to October 21, 1879, for the assassination of Captain Fadda, committed by Riding Master Cardinali at the instigation and with the assistance of Raffaella Saraceni, the captain’s wife and the riding master’s lover, had, among the enormous crowd that attended it, a large number of matrons and maidens from the best families of Roman society.” Scandalized by this excessive and morbid interest, Carducci shot off fiery verses condemning the hypocrisy of the many women present in the courtroom.
This was Rome in the years between the bersaglieri’s entry into the city at the Porta Pia in 1870 and the inauguration of the monument to Vittorio Emanuele II in 1911. In this period the old city finally entered the modern era, although it held on to many peculiar traits, including some major defects in the collective behavior of its inhabitants. Reading the newspapers reveals a situation no better or worse than that of any other great European city, though there was an extra sense of anxiety, as if the city wanted to make up quickly for lost time while the rest of the world rushed toward the future.
Looking at these people and events with a comfortably distanced hindsight, we can clearly see, in their nascent state, many of the characteristics that still distinguish the city. In those forty years Rome shed its skin; the city, along with the whole country, gained a secular ruling class, political representation, and the middle class that had been absent for centuries, which brought with it real productive activities. All these small, laborious moments of grandeur and remarkable misfortune made Rome what it is today.
1. Giosuè Carducci, Opere di G. Carducci VI, Juvenilia e Levia gravia (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1891). No English translation of this volume has yet been published.
2. Giosuè Carducci, Poems, trans. Frank Sewall (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1892), 58.
3. Giosuè Carducci, Poems, trans. David H. Higgins (Warminster: Aris & Phillips Ltd., 1994), 35.
4. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Il peccato di maggio; this poem hasn’t been published in English translation, but is discussed in the Italian edition of Salvatore Quasimodo’s Poesie e discorsi sulla poesia, edited with an introduction by Gilberto Finzi (Milan: Mondadori, 1971), 256–57.
5. Mario Praz, “D’Annunzio arredatore,” in La botte e il violino, 1964, no. 1, 79–90. Although this essay hasn’t been published in English, see Praz’s excellent book An Illustrated History of Furnishing from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century, trans. William Weaver (New York: Braziller, 1964).
6. Gabriele D’Annunzio, The Child of Pleasure, trans. Georgina Harding (Boston: The Page Company, 1914), 86–87.
7. Ibid, 175, 178.
8. Ibid, 63.