— DON PIETRO PAPPAGALLO —
The Forger-Priest of the Esquiline Hill
‘The history of the saints is predominately the history of insane people.’ So Italian dictator and founder of European Fascism Benito Mussolini is supposed to have commented when asked about his views on Christianity. Undoubtedly, many of those called to a holy life have been manifestly foolish in the mould of St Simeon the Holy Fool. Simeon was a sixth-century Christian figure who was imbued with a childish simplicity and became famous for his erratic acts: he kept a dead dog as a pet and went around the city of Edessa throwing nuts at churchgoers and anointing the sick with mustard, all the while subsisting on a diet of beans, which had exactly the effect on his digestion that you would expect. Perhaps unsurprisingly, such behaviour earned Simeon the epithet ‘The Fool’.
The question, however, of what actually constitutes folly is a complex one – indeed, the Bible itself dedicates much of the Book of Proverbs to working it out. There are perhaps degrees of foolishness between the extremes of an office job and dragging a dead dog around. Yet, very often, the line between foolishness and bravery is considerably more blurry than in the case of St Simeon. Are injudicious, death-or-glory types of valiant and self-sacrificial behaviour saintly or stupid? Putting one’s neck on the line, even for a seemingly doomed cause, is often part and parcel of saintliness. Indeed, the unsuccessful resolution of such efforts is a precondition of the crown of the martyr. Are those who commit such acts inspired or, as Mussolini clearly thought, insane?
One such example is of a man initially thought to be a bit simple but whose bravery led him to deceive the bureaucracy of the Nazis and save hundreds of lives. It was a bravery that led, also, to his betrayal and execution by the very regime he had hoodwinked so successfully. The man in question was the Italian resistance hero Don Pietro Pappagallo; which, translated into English, would be ‘the Reverend Peter Parrot’.
While not quite on the level of St Simeon, the chubby chaplain to a community of nuns hardly cuts the figure of your average resistance hero. Don Pietro certainly didn’t look like the bedraggled and foolish saints of old. Far from striking a gaunt and waiflike figure and subsisting on locusts and wild honey, he was something of a bon viveur. From the rich and creamy burrata of his native Puglia to the little cornetto pastries he would devour with his daily coffee, Don Pietro liked his food. The photographs that exist of him reveal that his not inconsiderable appetite took its toll, with his cincture and cassock barely holding in his sizeable gut. But if Don Pietro was big-bellied, he was even bigger hearted. His very Italian love of food was matched only by his very Italian hospitality. The city of Rome is filled with great, closed Baroque doorways, behind which her clergy live in gilded but isolated splendour. But Don Pietro Pappagallo was neither haughty prince of the Church nor saintly ascetic hermit (realistically, living on top of a pillar would have been both contrary to his naturally sociable nature and a logistical impossibility given his proportions). His table was an open one where he would break bread (accompanied, of course, by great quantities of olive oil and butter) with priests and prostitutes, sisters and soldiers, Communists and Carmelites. A bubbling generosity was hard-wired into his character even to the very end, giving blessing to all those – Jews, Protestants, atheists and those in between – who found themselves meeting their maker alongside him in the smoky gloom of the Ardeatine Caves.
As unlikely as he may have appeared, Pietro Pappagallo exhibited exactly the commitment to ideals that had led to the martyrdom of many saints before. Indeed, it was his casual attitude to his own safety that made it so easy to betray him. Furthermore, to us, with the benefit of hindsight, his strategy of helping everyone who came to his door, in a city awash with spies and double agents, might seem so foolish as to be practically suicidal. Whether Don Pietro Pappagallo really was mad to do what he did is for you, dear reader, to decide. But even if he was, it might just be a sign of his saintliness – brave and foolish in equal measure, as that quality so often proves to be.
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In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, set in the Adriatic coastal region of Illyria, the pompous Malvolio famously says, ‘some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them’. If Pietro Pappagallo was great, it was certainly not down to his modest birth on the opposite shore of the Adriatic, in the tiny town of Terlizzi, near Bari, in June 1888.
Terlizzi was not a particularly auspicious place to enter the world. The town was notorious for its unhealthiness and poverty, even by the standards of late nineteenth-century southern Italy. It was also noted for its biblical plagues of locusts in the summer months, rendering agriculture, good health or going outdoors practically impossible. Pietro was the fifth child of eight born to Pasquale and Maria Tommasa Pappagallo. He was an artisan engaged in the rope-making business; she a devout, somewhat domineering housewife. It was Pietro’s devoted mamma who first decided that he might have a vocation to the ministry while he was working as an apprentice in his father’s workshop. Through scrimping, saving and selling off some property that the family had acquired, she managed, by the time Pietro was in his teens, to amass enough funding to have Pietro educated for the priesthood.
Pietro was not an especially accomplished student, but the Church was forgiving and Pietro was made a deacon in February 1914. The world that Pietro had grown up in was one marked by familiarities: the ancient trade of his father dependent on a regional economy unchanged since Roman times; the devout faith of his mother, with its prayers and patterns of worship unshaken since the Council of Trent; the political sureties of crown, people and altar that shaped the lives of most Europeans. That certainty was about to be cast aside forever in favour of the brave new world of the twentieth century. The murder of an Austrian Archduke must have seemed as remote to the newly ordained deacon in southern Italy as it doubtless did to the peasant farmers of rural France or the Bright Young Things of the London season, as remote even as it must have seemed to an out-of-work Viennese painter roughing it in Munich. Yet the war unleashed by Franz Ferdinand’s assassination utterly changed the course of these and millions of other lives; indeed, the trigger that was pulled in Sarajevo caused not only the deaths of the Austrian heir and his wife, but, in the two world wars that followed it, millions more as well.
Italy was a somewhat reluctant participant in the First World War. Initially thought to be on the side of the Central Powers, the opportunity to get one over on its old foe Austria–Hungary proved too tempting and so, on 3rd May 1915, Italy revoked its old alliance and, twenty days later, declared war against Austria–Hungary. The war was popular among all classes except the clergy. Pope Benedict XV, a bespectacled and bookish Genoese aristocrat, ordered a policy of neutrality on the part of the Church, presciently decrying the war as ‘the suicide of civilised Europe’. At the start of the conflict, he published a prayer imploring the intercession of Christ, who ‘felt deep compassion for human misfortunes’ and was ‘the Prince of Peace’, to end the conflict. It was this prayer that Pietro Pappagallo distributed among the congregation on Easter Sunday 1915, when he celebrated Mass for the first time, having been ordained a priest the day before. This call to compassion affected Pappagallo deeply.
He was soon sent to be an assistant teacher at a Church-run boarding school not far from his home town, a job that could hardly be considered a plum position. He remained in this less than glamorous role for ten years. However, his quiet, dogged pastoral ministry eventually made a mark somewhere, as, in 1925, at the age of thirty-seven, Pappagallo finally received something akin to a promotion. He was sent to further his study of canon law not up the road to the sleepy metropolis of Bari, but to the great pulsating hub of Rome.
The Eternal City was simultaneously the heart of global Catholicism and the capital of the adolescent Italian state; the exact status of the city, and the relative jurisdictions (both legal and moral) of the two competing authorities, had never really been resolved since the capture of Rome from the forces of Pope Pius IX by Garibaldi in 1871. As such, an uneasy tension reigned, with successive popes refusing to set foot on Italian soil, rendering them ‘prisoners of the Vatican’. Indeed, it was only in 1918 that the Vatican formally reversed its infamous Non Expedit decree which had banned Roman Catholics (who constituted about 95 per cent of the Italian population) from voting or participating in democratic politics in the newly united Italian nation. Realistically, as with Papal pronouncements on issues as diverse as the consumption of wine during Lent and contraception, many Roman Catholics merrily ignored the official doctrinal adjunction. However, large numbers toed the line and so Italian politics became markedly secular in its nature, lacking a coherent Christian Democratic Party (as existed in other European states) and with far left and far right wielding disproportionate influence. If the Papacy had hoped to wield some influence in Italian democratic politics, the lifting of the ban in 1918 was too little, too late. In the heady post-war atmosphere, a single figure pushed himself to the forefront of Italian politics and, in 1922, he marched on Rome, demanding that the diminutive and vacillating King Vittorio Emanuele III make him Prime Minister. The monarch, who had spent most of his reign following his father’s advice that all the knowledge a king required was an ability to ‘sign his name, read a newspaper, and mount a horse’, gave in to Mussolini’s demands and made the man who called himself ‘Il Duce’ (a title he borrowed from the one-eyed poet turned adventurer Gabriele D’Annunzio who had launched a short-lived city state in the Croatian coastal city of Fiume) the de facto ruler of Italy.
Mussolini had begun life as a committed socialist and a key part of his appeal to ordinary Italians was his claim that Italy was a proletarian nation locked in a struggle against plutocratic forces (in particular, Britain) who sought to constrain her economic development – an easily believable lie for the millions that made up the Italian working underclass. He was also an ardent opponent of religion, in particular Catholicism. Realising that Mussolini’s populist secularism was beginning to hold sway with large parts of the working class, the Roman Catholic Church began to send clergy out specifically to partake in industrial mission. One such cleric was Pietro Pappagallo, who, in 1927, left his studies and found himself helping to run a hostel.
It had been set up for workers at the enormous Rome textile plant of the chemical giant SNIA SpA, situated on the Via Prenestina, to this day a grim industrial district at the back of the Termini station, a far cry from the pavilions and palaces for which Rome is best known, which made the ropery of Terlizzi look idyllic by comparison. The conditions in the hostels were appalling. The work, too, was incredibly dangerous, with almost all workers exposed to harmful chemicals. Medical care for the resulting sicknesses was non-existent and, consequently, many found their lungs filling up with bubbling fluid, leading to a death as horrific as any on the Western Front. In this abyss of human existence, the workers headed into a downward spiral, seeking pleasures where they could find them: a flurry of sexual encounters, consensual or otherwise, with prostitutes or each other; pay spent on vast amounts of tobacco and, of course, drink. Crucially, the company could demand unlimited overtime and sacked anyone who lagged behind, as well as paying their Roman workers a fraction of what they paid in their primary factory in Milan. What Pappagallo saw shocked him and, for the first time in his life, aged nearly forty, he decided to stick his head above the parapet.
Pappagallo wrote to the Vatican secretariat on workers’ affairs, detailing the abuses he saw and commenting, ‘I do not find all of this just’. Doubtless aware of the Fascist rhetoric of a need for all classes to struggle in order to attain greater glory for the Italian fatherland, Pappagallo included these lines: ‘I cannot be brought round by arguments about political convenience, that indeed don’t interest me at all.’
There Pappagallo might have stayed; a workhorse slum priest, faithfully ministering in the slough of despond that was Rome’s industrial underbelly. Instead, with Vatican insiders determined to come to an arrangement with Mussolini’s new regime, it was considered that the would-be worker priest was too troublesome to be involved in industrial relations and so, after barely a year in the post, Pappagallo was sacked. Little did those insiders know just how much more trouble the plump padre had in him.
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Dismissal from the factory might have been the end for Pietro Pappagallo but, in fact, it was only the beginning. Despite opposition from the grey suits at the Vatican (every profession has its jobsworths), his bishop pleaded his cause and so, in 1928, Pappagallo was given a role at the very bottom of the food chain (he was, specifically, in charge of dunking the long line of children brought for baptism) at the great Papal Basilica of St John Lateran. That position, too, was to be short-lived. Pappagallo had made a reputation as something of a loose canon and, after barely a year in the job, he was informed again that his services were no longer needed. Pappagallo became desperate; a return to the stultifying atmosphere of southern Italy was a serious possibility and, while his affection for his siblings back in his home town remained strong, he felt a powerful calling to remain in Rome. Perhaps he sensed it was there that he’d finally make a difference. Perhaps he just didn’t want to make rope. However, if he could not find a position – ideally one that required minimal input from the Vatican diplomats who had taken against him – then a one-way ticket home to Terlizzi was inevitable.
The order of the Oblate Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus were an odd bunch. In the poky Roman town house that served as their convent, they lived a life dedicated to the principles of a spiritual childhood, taking joy in the simple things. They were not, properly speaking, really nuns at all, but, rather, ‘oblate sisters’ – lay women dedicated to the education and religious instruction of girls and young women. The order had originally been founded by Anna Moroni, a seventeenth-century washerwoman who found herself too attractive to serve as a domestic servant (the men of Rome were not famed for marital fidelity even then). Faced with prostitution, she turned to the Church and, under the auspices of educating other would-be prostitutes, set up a lay order of women dedicated to education and simplicity of life. Each of its communities had a house with a place of worship attached, where otherwise redundant clergy often found gainful employment offering spiritual guidance and religious services to the women. The community in Rome had a house on the Via Urbana, a thoroughfare on the Esquiline Hill, a maze of sleepy streets still dominated by the ruins of ancient Roman buildings, marking the last time the area had been fashionable. It was here that Don Pietro Pappagallo found refuge and found his niche.
In return for saying Mass daily for the community, Don Pietro was given an apartment with a terrace that overlooked the Eternal City, a small stipend and a devoted, dauntless housekeeper called Maria Teresa Nallo. She was eight years older than Pappagallo and had been born in Fondi, a marshy town on the Appian Way between Naples and Rome that had supposedly been founded by Hercules. How, when or why she came to the Italian capital is not known, but, with her good cooking and gentle chastisement of his idiosyncrasies, she and Pappagallo were a perfect match. In one photograph, Don Pietro sits, beaming, on his terrace, while behind him, allowing the infectious joviality of the priest to spread a thin smile across her lips, stands Maria Teresa, formidable, faithful, and, for fifteen years, Don Pietro’s closest companion and confidante.
Quickly populated with basil plants from Puglia, and diffused with the scent of Maria Teresa’s excellent cooking, Don Pietro’s little terrace became the centre of the neighbourhood, where the pair spent long hours entertaining Pappagallo’s fellow clergy with copious bottles of good red wine, putting the world to rights late into the night with local political leaders, or shedding a tear of sympathy over a cup of coffee with a girl from one of Rome’s street corners. While the garrulous Don Pietro would play the host, Maria Teresa would bustle around, keeping a careful eye on who came and went and making sure that everything was kept in order – the perfect foil to Pappagallo’s more laissez-faire attitude. There were, of course, rumours that the chaplain had done what many Roman Catholic clergy have done before and since and taken a wife in all but name. Whether theirs was a romantic or a platonic love we will never know, but it is impossible not to notice the affection between them in those sepia moments on the terrace in Rome. Like her beloved Don Pietro, Maria Teresa was not born great, but as the cleric’s life and activities became riskier and riskier, imperilling them both, she never wavered in her loyalty or her love.
The grainy voice over the wireless in September 1939 that announced, in cut-glass received pronunciation, that Great Britain and her Empire were now at war with Germany, must have seemed as far from the Via Urbana as the shot in Sarajevo had felt from Terlizzi. Although we know that he was an avid follower of the news (mostly to provide gossip for his terrace dinner parties), Don Pietro probably didn’t even hear it. Despite being the cradle of European Fascism, Italy did not, in fact, enter the Second World War until the summer of 1940. Mussolini had spent the 1930s grandstanding but, unlike his more ideological political allies in Germany, didn’t see the war as being a great or worthy struggle: ‘I only need a few thousand dead,’ he said to his chief of staff, ‘so I can sit at the peace conference as a man who has fought.’ Little did Il Duce know that victory was far from assured and that, less than five years later, his bloodied corpse would be strung from a lamp post in Milan.
A combination of Mussolini’s studied reticence to engage on any front other than ones with clear territorial significance to Italy, as well as the Italian military’s consistently incompetent performance, meant that the realities of war did not trouble the Italian peninsula until sometime into the conflict. The Italian government deliberately ignored or mislaid requests from their mighty northern ally to move against their Jewish population, not least because Mussolini’s own intellectual mentor, biographer (and lover), Margherita Sarfatti, was herself Jewish. They made only cursory, disastrous moves against British troops in North Africa, and focused considerably less effort on tactical movements than on loud propaganda (including the claim that their bombing of Scotland had been so heavy that the Loch Ness Monster had been killed). On the Via Urbana, Maria Teresa’s coffee still flowed on the terrace, the sisters continued their teaching and Don Pietro Pappagallo still said Mass.
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All this changed in July 1943. In a series of lightning strikes against what they had correctly deduced to be the weak underbelly of the Axis alliance, British and American troops landed on Sicily and their respective air forces began to bomb Rome. A couple of weeks later, in the face of major Allied gains, the Italian King sacked Mussolini and had him arrested. As he was being transported to prison in September, however, Il Duce was rescued by Nazi paratroopers and installed as puppet dictator over the ‘Italian Social Republic’ – the parts of Italy not yet under Allied control, an area that included Rome.
The Germans were now in a position to take direct control. They poured thousands of troops into Italy and lost no time in importing their infamous secret police, the Gestapo as well, in order to ensure that all laws against Jews, partisans and others perceived as a threat to the Fascist order could be executed with the utmost speed. Rome became a city under lockdown, as the Germans sought finally to weed out the undesirables left hitherto untouched by Italian incompetence and lack of zeal.
In these final months of 1943, as the Roman winter began to bite, those who had once come to Don Pietro for his jollity, his good coffee or his spiritual guidance began to come to him desperate for help. Don Pietro cannot have thought that he might possibly outfox the Third Reich, but it was not in his nature to say no to anyone in need. And so, confronted with a partisan wanted for sabotage against the Germans, the priest turned forger and put together a false identification card, using what he had in his desk (fortunately for Don Pietro, the Roman Catholic Church loved nothing more than flooding his office with pieces of official-looking paperwork). Against all expectations, the ruse worked – though, in fairness, the infrastructure inherited from Mussolini meant that the Germans were barely capable of keeping on top of essential paperwork, let alone ensuring the authenticity of every pre-issued identity card. Regardless, what began as a trickle became a flood. Jews, anti-Fascist intellectuals, deserting soldiers desperate to get home, Don Pietro helped them all. His little apartment became a veritable factory as he sat in his study constructing new identities for all and sundry, while Maria Teresa bustled around playing hostess, ensuring the often cold and malnourished deserters and escapees were treated to the full force of Roman hospitality. Although Don Pietro was heard to proudly declare that ‘all it takes is a stamp and a photograph’, sometimes the process would be protracted, as more and more high-profile fugitives sought the clergyman’s help. Rather than turn them away, Don Pietro and Maria Teresa took them in, giving them a bed for one night, two nights, a week. In a move that illustrated his almost childlike naïvety, Don Pietro kept careful lists of those that he had helped, almost certainly so he could regularly pray for them. In the end, these names ran into the hundreds. This hive of activity was all the more remarkable given their location – a ten-minute walk from the headquarters of the Gestapo on the Via Tasso, where lists of the very same names were being scoured daily to ascertain the whereabouts of those earmarked for arrest and execution.
Pappagallo viewed his ministry as being for all and his illicit activity simply as an extension of that ministry. This remarkable generosity of spirit was to prove his undoing. In early January 1944, a young, shy, blond man turned up at the priest’s quarters on the Via Urbana. He claimed to be an officer who had deserted Mussolini’s puppet army and offered his help to the priest in his endeavours. This was nothing unusual. Don Pietro had built up an impressive network of informers, receivers and spies, enabling him not only to produce identity cards for those wanted by the Nazis, but to assist in smuggling them to safety as well. Maria Teresa immediately took against the young man. There was, she would later say, something clumsy in his manner that she did not trust. Don Pietro calmed her fears with words of priestly wisdom and the young man, one Gino Crescentini, was accepted into Pappagallo’s circle. By the start of February, the priest had been arrested and sat, languishing under torture, in the very cells on the Via Tasso from which he had saved so many others. When the Gestapo and their Italian collaborators burst into the priest’s apartment to take him away, he was there with several others. In the confusion, Maria Teresa made sure that key documents were removed, hidden in her dress and later burned, in a last-ditch attempt to save Don Pietro from his fate. She could not, however, reach the priest’s infamous rubber stamps in time; these objects, that had saved so many lives, also acted as the fatal proof.
Don Pietro was imprisoned on the Via Tasso for months. Every week, Maria Teresa came with a mercy package, bringing clean clothes, medicine and food to the imprisoned cleric, all items that Don Pietro made sure were distributed first and foremost to the other prisoners in his block before taking what remained for himself. On her visits, Maria Teresa watched and waited, observing the comings and goings from the notorious building. On 27th March 1944, she obtained the evidence she needed, making a note of Gino Crescentini strolling out of the building with two plain-clothes police officers. Her testimony was crucial when, less than a year later, Crescentini was arrested and imprisoned by the new democratic government for his part in the betrayal of Don Pietro. In the judgement passed on Crescentini in February 1945, he was referred to as the betrayer of ‘the great martyr of the Ardeatine’. Three days prior to Maria Teresa’s visit to the Via Tasso, on 24th March 1944, Don Pietro had been bundled into a lorry and transported, with three hundred and thirty-four other prisoners, to the Ardeatine Caves, a network of natural tunnels and caverns just south of Rome. There, in reprisal for a bomb attack on a Nazi unit the day before, they were massacred by the SS.
The killing was messy and haphazard as the SS unit in question was made up of young officers, barely out of training. Their commanding officer had arranged for the unit to drink a case of brandy beforehand to steady their nerves, if not their aim. Amid the smoke and screams and chaos in the caves, as the drunken young officers dealt in death, one figure stood out. Don Pietro Pappagallo calmly blessed the dying, called out comfort to the terrified and prayed for the dead until he too was dispatched with two bullets to the back of the head, delivered as he knelt in prayer.
One of the reasons we know all this was because the man to whom Don Pietro was shackled was Joseph Raider, an Austrian deserter from the Wehrmacht who had been apprehended in Rome under suspicion of being a British spy. As the unlikely pair were caught in a bottleneck caused by the hasty SS attempts to herd too many prisoners into the caves at once, Don Pietro managed to loosen his bonds, and Raider’s too. Raider took the opportunity to dive behind a bush at the entrance to the cave network during the chaos and escaped. In an act of selflessness that mirrored so many other similar acts in his life, Don Pietro chose to go into the caves to his death, in order to comfort those who had not been so lucky.
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The history of Italy during the Second World War is a complex one, the history of the Roman Catholic Church more complex still, yet what stands out about the tale of Don Pietro Pappagallo is his simplicity. His simplicity of devotion to his calling, the simplicity of his pleasures and the simplicity of what he did, stamping bits of paper that ultimately saved lives. Perhaps he learned it from the sisters.
His story served as a redemptive tale for a Church and nation scarred by the horrors of war, with his quiet, brave resistance earning him recognition as a martyr by his Church and as a posthumous hero by his nation. Don Pietro never saw this recognition, nor, sadly, did Maria Teresa, who died in early 1945, not even a year after Don Pietro, some say of a broken heart.
What inspired Don Pietro Pappagallo to do what he did? What led him to make those cards and save those lives? What made him take those risks? How could he take those bullets with such calm? Could it be saintliness? If the history of the saints truly is, as Mussolini thought, the history of insane people, there can be little doubting that the actions of the forger-priest of the Via Urbana were mad enough – brave enough – to qualify.