CHAPTER SIX

Planting a Tree

Salvemini’s wish that Mussolini would rapidly destroy himself by his circus-like antics was soon disappointed. The Duce’s initial moves were calm and shrewd. Only five ministries in his first cabinet went to fascists; the other nine were offered to friendly allies. The philosopher Giovanni Gentile, a man with an international reputation, was made minister for education. When Mussolini appeared in parliament on 16 November, boasting that he could well have turned this ‘bleak assembly room into a bivouac for my platoons’, and demanding ‘full powers’ to reform the state, only the communists and socialists opposed him. All five liberal former prime ministers – Giolitti, Salandra, Orlando, Bonomi and Facta – voted with the majority. In the senate, where there were no fascist senators, just twenty-six people voted against.

Mussolini could now govern without having to seek parliamentary approval. Clare Sheridan, the English journalist, sculptor and diarist to whom he gave an interview for the American press soon after his victory, noted that he had effectively browbeaten the deputies into submission, but that as a character he was less impressive than Kemal Atatürk or Lenin, both of whom she had also interviewed. The Times was more approving: here, they said, was a very possible heir to Garibaldi. Even the legendary editor of the Observer, J. L. Garvin, spoke of him as a ‘volcano of a man’.

Settling briskly down to work with what even his enemies agreed was an impressive show of diligence and determination, Mussolini rose very early, exercised fiercely, ate a sparse breakfast and read several Italian and foreign newspapers before arriving in his office at 8 o’clock. Twice a week, he visited the indecisive and feeble Victor Emmanuel in the Quirinale. His previous threat to replace the king with the more energetic and martial Duke d’Aosta was not repeated, his earlier rantings against the monarchy and the Church forgotten.

Having moved the foreign ministry into the Palazzo Chigi, where there was a useful balcony overlooking a square, Mussolini set about making friends on the European stage. Sir Ronald Graham, the British ambassador, came away ‘agreeably surprised and favourably impressed’ from a first meeting. This was a man ‘with whom one could do business’, though he admitted that it was a bit strange that Mussolini drove about the streets of Rome with a lion cub perched at his side. ‘The Italians seem to like this sort of thing.’

In private, even if some colleagues complained that he was humourless, fidgeted constantly and seemed boorish and ill-versed in the niceties of governance, Mussolini could also be charming. He was still a bit gauche, a ‘sheep’ in private conversation, but ‘a lion in a crowd’. The Daily Express of New York compared him favourably to the Ku Klux Klan: both shared, it said, a mission to protect their countries from a decline in morals caused by corruption in the government and the judiciary, and by the presence of ‘inferior races’.

Not everyone was impressed, especially when Mussolini started to travel abroad. At his first foreign meeting, in Lausanne in July 1923 to discuss the Turkish peace treaty, he turned up late, brought a bodyguard of squadristi, and seemed very ill at ease. A British delegate noted that he was a ‘second-rate cinema actor’, an ‘absurd little man not destined to stay in power long’. In London, where he joined international leaders to discuss German reparations for the First World War, thirty Italian immigrant fascists who turned out to greet him at Victoria Station in their black shirts singing ‘Giovinezza’ had to be persuaded to leave their manganelli behind. Privately admitting that he had little patience with compromise or lengthy negotiations, he briskly demanded severity towards Germany. The British, who wanted to be lenient, referred to him as a ‘dangerous rascal’ and ‘possibly slightly off his head’. But these were early days, and Mussolini was learning fast.

At home, his appearances were far surer. They needed to be, as Italy’s main cities remained lawless, with squadristi battling it out in internecine squabbles and continuing to run riot. The ras remained all-powerful. At the end of 1922, in an attempt to curb the power of local thugs and enforce his own central authority, Mussolini had announced that he was turning the squadristi into a national militia, the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (the MVSN), responsible directly to him, to defend the ‘revolution of October 1922’ and to act as a political police force. The MVSN’s leaders would be known as ‘centurions’ and ‘consuls’ and receive good salaries, and its members were to display military discipline and obey the Fascist Party. An amnesty was declared for squadristi previously charged with violent crimes; those who had been wounded in the ‘civil war’ were to receive pensions. He also set up the Grand Council of Fascism, to run alongside and counterbalance the cabinet, in order to formulate policy; to this were appointed senior fascist leaders who had not got ministerial positions.

Mussolini now brought the conservatives, monarchists and nationalists into a ‘marriage of convenience’, fusing the nationalist and fascist parties. He courted the Vatican, denouncing contraception and making swearing in public a crime against the state. In his years as a journalist he had loudly condemned the dangerous practice of censorship, but he now set about controlling and silencing the press. ‘What can save our country now?’ Kuliscioff wrote to Turati. ‘A revolution? a civil war? new elections?’ October 1922 was made the ‘anno primo’, and the Roman salute, an outstretched arm, became the official form of greeting. A fascist court uniform, a hybrid of diplomatic, military and naval dress, was designed. As Lina Waterfield shrewdly observed, Mussolini was enlivening ‘national vanity’. By early 1923, the number of fascists had almost trebled to 780,000.

The socialist leader, Filippo Turati, with his lifelong companion, Anna Kuliscioff

In May, George V and Queen Mary paid a state visit to Italy, travelling in the specially built Royal Saloon train carriage, which was kept in a little hut in Calais; it was hitched to Victor Emmanuel’s royal train at the Italian border. The British royal couple gave Mussolini what he called the ‘Gran Croce dell’ordine del Bagno’, which sounded absurd in Italian. To their embarrassment, they were greeted on their return to Victoria Station by a guard of honour of black-shirted Italian fascists.

Italy’s constitution was intact, and, for the time being, was not being challenged, but Salvemini was not alone in changing his mind: Mussolini was not after all a clown, but fast on his way to becoming a dictator. ‘The right has scored a clamorous triumph,’ Carlo wrote to his mother. ‘An enormous black plague has settled on the body of Italy.’

Fascism quickly spread its tentacles over the fabric of Italian life. The army, the aristocracy, the Church and industry, all were rallying to defend the rights of a usurper. Those who disapproved turned their backs and looked to their private lives; but not Salvemini. From the day of the March on Rome, he adopted a position of absolute moral intransigence towards the fascists; and he never abandoned it. There were to be no deals, no games, no concessions. What had been allowed to happen to Italy was a shameful betrayal and a terrible indictment of Italian intellectuals. In the Circolo di Cultura, wrote Ernesto Rossi later, Salvemini immediately ‘gave us our orders. Our duty was no longer to obey laws, but to disobey them. We had just one goal: to eliminate Mussolini and his accomplices. Violence had to be met with violence. Intentions were useless unless they were accompanied by actions. We were not to concern ourselves with the likelihood of success, but with saving our souls.’ Mussolini had to be proved utterly wrong when he spoke of the ‘putrefying corpse of liberty’. Salvemini’s passion, his total contempt for the paltriness of Roman politics, expressed wittily, brusquely, with touches of a kind of peasant malice, were very attractive to his young disciples. As Rossi said, he was ‘our perfect mentor’.

But he was not an optimistic one. In October, just a few weeks before the March on Rome, Turati, Matteotti and Claudio Treves, all three of them expelled from the Socialist Party, had founded a new party, the United Socialist Party, the PSU. But while wholeheartedly endorsing their views, and personally liking the men themselves, Salvemini had little faith in their ability to achieve much. In the Circolo, surrounded by Carlo, Nello, Rossi and Calamandrei, he would say that, much as he hated the fascists, there were times when he hated the opposition even more, for its reasonableness and compromises. ‘The more I think about it,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘the more I am coming to think that Italy is a country which is not worthy to exist, and that it is condemned to decompose, to fall yet again under foreign servitude.’ Carlo, whom the others were beginning to regard as Salvemini’s spiritual son, was of another mind. He was ready for a fight. But he needed to distance himself, if only briefly, from his mentor, telling Rossi that he could no longer tell what was his own thinking and what was Salvemini’s.

First, Carlo needed to complete his two university degrees. In December 1922 he went to Turin to search for a supervisor for his dissertation on economics from among the political philosophers who had made the city their home. Turin, with its sombre, imposing buildings and its vast open piazzas, its long straight streets built on a grid, and its neoclassical and baroque architecture, prided itself on being different from other Italian cities. Having played a decisive role in the unification of the country, its inhabitants regarded themselves as the nation’s moral guides. The Piedmontese values of hard work, honesty and reason, they claimed, had created a city ‘which works and which thinks’. Turin was home to heavy industry, to vast modern factories, to Fiat, to new working-class suburbs encircling the city, and to the Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci’s newspaper, L’Ordine Nuovo, with its call for a working-class elite dedicated not solely to material well-being but to human dignity. Its inhabitants, who had participated in the most violent and protracted strikes of the biennio rosso, were very outspoken against the industrialists, whose profits were immense and who kept their workers on the breadline. But Turin was also home to a collection of highly articulate liberals, communists, republicans and anarchists, all of them intent on challenging Mussolini. They were gathered around one of the most remarkable figures in the as yet very small world of anti-fascists.

The youthful Piero Gobetti, fierce critic of Mussolini

Carlo had heard a great deal about Piero Gobetti. Born in Turin in 1901, and thus two years younger than Carlo, Gobetti was tall and very thin, with a pale, gentle, oval face, an attractive, sensual mouth, and long, unkempt reddish-brown hair which flopped over his forehead. His sight was poor and he wore glasses; he also smiled a great deal. Indifferent to what he wore and despising all forms of elegance, so that he looked like a scruffy student, Gobetti had bright and penetrating eyes which conveyed both utter certainty and youthful power. People found his uncompromising gaze disconcerting, though no one left his company without feeling that they had met someone truly remarkable. He could be censorious, even a little prudish, but the strength of his lively and inventive character, and the unshakable certainty of his convictions, were magnetic. When he spoke of being a ‘sacerdote di se stesso’, a priest and master of his own conscience, and declared that people with ‘elastic consciences’ were evil, his friends listened. They also listened when he described his ‘inexorable passion for liberty’ and his contempt for the intellectuals who had gone over to the fascists. As a friend put it, Gobetti possessed a ‘democratic aristocracy of values’.

Gobetti was not quite eighteen when he started a monthly magazine called Energie Nuove, aimed at infusing the ‘tired’ cultural life of his ‘rancid and decrepit’ city with fresh ideas. Drawn to the cross-currents of European literature, he would say of himself that he was not a theorist, but an ‘organiser of culture’. By the time Carlo met him, however, Gobetti had abandoned his cultural review, largely as a result of listening to Gramsci on the struggles of the workers in Turin’s immense factories; he had, he would say, grown up, matured, read a great deal. He had taken a degree in the philosophy of law and recently started a new magazine, Rivoluzione Liberale, in which he had begun to alert readers to the dangers of fascism. Unlike Salvemini, he had never believed that fascism would quickly exhaust itself. Fascism, he said, was part of Italy’s ‘autobiography’, an expression of all that was lacking and all that had gone profoundly wrong in its history, and an indictment of the moral weakness of Italians. Youthful, enthusiastic fascism had been made possible precisely because of the authoritarian and elitist way in which the country had been governed since 1870, and because Italy had never had an Enlightenment.

Gobetti was running his magazine from his home in the heart of the old city, where he lived with his parents, and was about to marry Ada Prospero, a young woman no less remarkable than himself, with whom he had learnt Russian, and who also had a degree in the philosophy of law. Ada was nineteen. The two of them looked little older than children.

In Florence, in his cousin Alessandro Levi’s house, Carlo had been introduced to Claudio Treves, the socialist leader and Turati’s closest friend. In Turin, exploring his academic future, he met them both again. Levi considered Turati to be the ‘giant’ of Italian socialism. Everyone loved this soft-hearted, rumpled, quiet man, whom friends compared to ‘a kindly faun’ and who, as a small boy, had helped carry his school banner for Manzoni’s funeral. Turati and Anna Kuliscioff lived on the fourth floor of a building on Piazza del Duomo in Milan, its high windows looking directly on to the cathedral. Their apartment had become the main meeting place for young Marxists and intellectuals from all over Italy. Kuliscioff was now an old lady, her hands twisted by arthritis, her small face heavily lined but smiling. Though she had lived in Italy for over forty years, she still spoke Italian with a foreign inflection; it bore, said a young friend, ‘a quality of velvet’.

Carlo met Gobetti and Ada in their house in Via XX Settembre on his first visit to Turin, together with Carlo Levi, who was studying medicine. Levi had a long, serious face and a mass of dark curly hair; he, too, looked little more than a boy. Another frequent visitor was Giacomo Matteotti, the bold socialist deputy, whose wife Velia had recently given birth to their third child, a daughter called Isabella. Matteotti had already published his first, damning inquiry into fascist violence. Carlo was immediately struck by his seriousness, his obvious lack of egotism or self-aggrandisement. Matteotti exuded energy, he wrote, ‘he never adopted gladiatorial poses and he laughed readily’. What all these new friends were preaching was the need for a new, freer society in which men were neither tyrants nor servants, but took responsibility, courageously, for their own actions. To them all, the austere, implacable Gobetti was fast turning into a myth, reminding his listeners of the young Saint-Just, the eighteenth-century French revolutionary. As Carlo Levi later put it, ‘He seemed to me the most perfect man I had ever met.’

Carlo was not immediately drawn to Gobetti. He found him, he told Amelia, a little irritating; he was put off by his abrasive and dismissive attitude towards the Italian socialists, and his assertion that Mazzini’s views were nebulous and romantic, while Marx’s were ‘realistic and workable’. But when Carlo returned to Turin in February 1923, he was drawn into Gobetti’s inner circle and spent long hours in his house debating the Russian Revolution, liberal British politics and the way that industrialisation and urbanisation could transform not just politics, but how people thought. Gobetti, who refused to be pinned down to any one political credo, described his beliefs as ‘revolutionary liberalism’; he, Ada and their friends were talking of starting a clandestine anti-fascist movement, which they planned to call L’Italia Libera. Soon the tone of Rivoluzione Liberale shifted to one of open hostility towards Mussolini and his despotic and corrupt government; soon, too, Carlo began to contribute articles on the working-class movement and liberal economics, carrying on his disagreements with Gobetti in the pages of the magazine. In the summer of 1923 he published his first outline of what would become his defining political statement, ‘Socialismo Liberale’. Liberty, he said was something that had to be won, and once won, nurtured by people who remained constantly vigilant.

Gobetti’s renown was spreading, finding followers in Rome, Florence and Milan, where another group of teachers, lawyers and university lecturers had been inspired to start a magazine of their own, Il Caffè. One of these was a level-headed, wary-looking, yet idealistic economist in his late twenties, Riccardo Bauer. Another was the slightly older Ferruccio Parri, a teacher, war hero and journalist, a tall, slender, very pale man with a shock of unruly dark hair.

On 6 February 1923, Gobetti was arrested as he returned from his honeymoon with Ada and charged with subversion, and for ‘plotting against the state’. The house and library were ransacked and papers carried away. Gobetti’s father was also taken briefly into custody. The prison in which they were held was bitterly cold. When Gobetti was released, two weeks later, after influential friends intervened, he started a new publishing venture to which he hoped to attract literary critics, essayists, poets – all of them hostile to fascism. He had no intention of being silenced. Rivoluzione Liberale was no longer an eclectic magazine of culture and ideas: it had become a ‘battle unit’ for a great range of people, some younger, some older, some to the right, some to the left, but who all shared a passionate belief that ethics, politics and culture had to go hand in hand and that they had to be fought for and protected. Carlo was turning into one of its most important voices.

The historian Gaetano Salvemini, ‘Father Bear’, mentor to Carlo and Nello

Under Salvemini’s socratic influence the Circolo di Cultura in Florence was attracting many new members. When they could no longer cram into the Rossellis’ house in Via Giusti, Carlo and Nello decided to use some of the money they received from the Siele shares to rent and furnish rooms on the second floor of a fifteenth-century palazzo at 27 Borgo Santi Apostoli. Carlo took exuberant pleasure in finding chairs and tables, hurrying around Florence in search of books for the library and arranging for subscriptions to ninety Italian, French and English papers and journals, including the New Statesman, the Observer and the Times Educational Supplement.

He and Nello thought of the Circolo as somewhat like a London club where like-minded acquaintances could meet, read and talk. There were large, comfortable armchairs. Some sixty members gathered every Saturday evening for debates that ranged from syndicalism, Marxism and European federalism to the problems of the south, a subject always dear to Salvemini’s heart. Those who came were not all of the same political views, but they shared a deep revulsion towards the bullying behaviour of the squadristi who haunted Florence’s streets. At all their meetings, it was Carlo who was the organiser, but Salvemini the driving force, ‘a midwife’ wrote Ernesto Rossi later, ‘bringing the truth to light’. Salvemini was ruthless with those who spoke in abstracts or fell back on dogma and he criticised the ‘timorous and the indifferent’ for being complicit with the fascists. ‘Concretismo!’, Be concrete! he kept repeating.

‘He was planting a tree,’ Nello explained later, ‘in the hope that it would not be uprooted by the storm, and that one day men who came after him would rest in its shade.’

It was Salvemini who introduced one of the very few women into the circle. Marion Cave was English and, at twenty-seven, a little older than the Rosselli brothers. She was the granddaughter of a postman, and the fourth child of a self-educated Quaker. Her family, all of them strong and tall, came from Uxbridge near London, where her father, Ernest Cave, was headmaster of a progressive school. Recognised at a young age as very clever, Marion had been sent to St Paul’s Girls’ School in London, where she had been thwarted in her desire to study the sciences – not deemed suitable for young ladies – but excelled in languages, before going on to Bedford College in London to read Italian. She was a keen musician and passionate about Italian opera – she claimed to have been to Madam Butterfly eleven times – and she had come to Florence to write her thesis on the Paduan philosopher Antonio Conti. She had had a bad bout of rheumatic fever, but refused to let it hold her back. To keep herself, she offered to give English lessons at the British Institute, which is where she met Salvemini, who planned to learn English ‘with the help of Miss Cave and her beautiful eyes’. Marion was both romantic and serious-minded; her Quaker father had brought her up in his own socialist mould. To prepare herself for her Italian adventure, she had conscientiously read Avanti! every day for six months.

Shortly after arriving, while staying in the American YMCA in the San Frediano district, Marion had witnessed a fierce battle between squadristi and a group of local men in the square below. Refusing to join the other lodgers in a safe inside room, she climbed up to the attic and watched the fighting through her opera glasses, until spotted and shouted at by a policeman, whereupon she slipped out into the streets to observe events more closely. She was standing near the river when she saw two lines of men, holding on to each other by either ends of their manganelli, drawing a cart: in it stood Mussolini, waving graciously. Marion had come to Italy, she told her friends later, because she believed in an imminent socialist revolution. She planned to ‘die on the barricades’, not to skulk in the background.

Marion was not exactly beautiful but her chestnut-brown hair was thick and curly, and her dark-grey eyes gleamed. Anna Kuliscioff called her a ‘ray of sunshine’ in the midst of Salvemini’s intent, earnest young disciples, and soon they all took to calling her Biancofiore, white flower. Salvemini was much taken with her. Like the Rosselli boys, she too addressed him as Father Bear.

To demonstrate how open-minded they all were, the members of the Circolo decided to invite two local fascists to come one Saturday to debate with them. Alberto Luchini, who had followed D’Annunzio to Fiume, spoke at length about the need for a curb on free speech and tolerance and became very angry when contradicted. ‘At that moment,’ Marion said later, ‘we understood . . . that there was an abyss between them and us, and that nothing would bring us together, not even language.’ To his mother, Carlo wrote: ‘The chains grow tighter, things are proceeding along their fatal course. We will see how, where and when they will halt.’ Three days later, he wrote again, to say how pleased he was that the fascists were becoming visibly more authoritarian, since it would open the eyes of those who had been fooling themselves. In his letters, Carlo was often brisk, jaunty. Nello’s letters were gentler, more ruminative.

Carlo and Nello completed their theses in the summer of 1923, having accomplished a remarkable amount in a very short time; both received the top marks, summa cum laude. It was clear that they were heading for impressive academic careers, though the direction each was taking reflected their very different natures: Nello, whose research into Mazzini had broken new ground in archival studies, was looking backwards, exploring history and the lessons it could teach. The more impatient Carlo, ever hungry for experience, was setting his sights forwards, to what could be done to shape a better Italian, and European, future. Both of them, along the way, had had bruising encounters with Salvemini, who returned the drafts of their theses covered with question marks and crossings out, repeatedly urging more intellectual rigour. Wherever Carlo used the words ‘I think’ or ‘I believe’, the margins were full of angry lines. Carlo, said Salvemini, was like a ‘volcanic eruption’ and lacked ‘criticism, equilibrium and substance’. The two young men had felt crushed. Carlo slunk away, railed, spent a few days hating Salvemini, then got down to work; Nello licked his wounds and immediately started revising his text. In private, however, Salvemini was delighted with his two young friends. ‘Carlo and Nello’, he wrote, ‘had their own characters. They were modest and they were honest. They knew how to listen and how to learn.’ The future, for both of them, seemed wide and full of promise.

While in the north, Carlo had met Attilio Cabiati, a friend of Salvemini’s and a distinguished economist working at Milan’s Bocconi University. Cabiati now offered him a post as unpaid assistant for a few months in the Institute of Political Economy, which would give him time to explore his interest in monetary policy and syndicalism, after which he would receive a salary. A part-time lectureship was also coming up at the Istituto Superiore di Scienze Economiche e Commerciali in Genoa, and Carlo accepted both jobs. That spring, Salvemini had been invited to London to meet Labour politicians and give a series of lectures on Italian foreign policy at King’s College. When Cabiati suggested to Carlo that he would do well to go to England to attend the Fabian summer school before taking up his posts in Milan and Genoa, it seemed an excellent idea that mentor and disciple should do so together. And Carlo was restless, looking for something new – not so much a new political order, but a return to fundamental values based on socialism and a ‘doctrine of liberty’, possibly, as he wrote to a friend, ‘a truly enormous front capable in the long term of overthrowing every adversary’. He was in search of inspiration.

Carlo arrived in Paris, by overnight train from Turin, very early on a fine morning in late July 1923. He had never been to France. His immediate feeling was one of dislike. He hated the architecture, the tall grey buildings, the ‘hideous’ churches, though he was impressed by the speed of the cars whirling round the Place de la Concorde. But once he had visited the sights and been to the theatre and the opera, he began to experience a pleasing sense of the weight of history; and he felt very grateful to his mother, he wrote, for having made him learn French and for the long hours they had spent together reading French literature. He was expecting Salvemini to join him, but Mussolini had refused to grant him a passport – a new form of control over his opponents – and Salvemini was now somewhere on the border, trying to find a way to cross clandestinely.

When, by the 26th, Salvemini had still not turned up, Carlo caught a ferry across the Channel on his own. A room had been booked for him in a boarding house off Russell Square. London, as he immediately wrote to Amelia, was so ‘immense, grandiose, vertiginous’, so busy and bustling, that he felt ‘stupid’. Though disconcerted by the formality and coldness of officials, he was charmed by the warmth of his new friends. The historian Professor Tawney took him off to meet George Cole, the political economist and exponent of the guild movement, and L. T. Hobhouse, author of Liberalism. When Salvemini finally arrived, having been helped out of Italy by a friend and a false passport acquired in Paris, teacher and disciple visited the House of Commons together. Carlo was particularly taken by the Underground, which now had eleven stops, and its escalators, which he described in detail to Amelia, marvelling at the men in their top hats and the women clutching packets and babies, as they sank down into the subterranean depths on these ‘rolling carpets’. He was finding England expensive, and, in one of his few lapses of English, told Amelia that ‘yesterday I expensed four shillings’. At twenty-three, Carlo was a strange mixture of boyish excitement and cool, critical reflection.

Neither Carlo nor Salvemini was at all eager to embroil himself in the political tensions simmering in London’s large Italian community, though it was becoming increasingly difficult to avoid them altogether. The first Italians, pedlars, organ-grinders and jugglers, had arrived in London early in the eighteenth century, and settled in Clerkenwell, turning its narrow, modest streets into a little Italy, where few of the women spoke English. England had been welcoming to these exiles, as it was to the artisans, barbers, asphalters, carpenters, tool-makers, cooks and ice-cream makers who travelled up through France and across the Channel all through the nineteenth century. Arriving in Clerkenwell, they felt at home among the flowering window boxes and the sheets hanging from the windows. Some sold ice from the back of a horse and cart. Others opened boarding houses. Pasta was made at home, then hung from the washing line to dry. During their periods of exile in England, both Garibaldi and Mazzini had promoted the idea of Italian schools and written articles to sway public opinion in favour of the Risorgimento.

News of the violence in Italy, of the squadristi raids and the manganello, was initially greeted with revulsion. But by 1921 London had also become home to a sizeable number of Italian bankers and industrialists, along with hotel managers and the owners of shops, many of them in touch with the embassy, where a career diplomat and warm supporter of Mussolini, Giacomo De Martino, was ambassador. In June 1920, a weekly Italian paper called La Cronaca had been launched, financed by Fiat and Pirelli. In theory, it proclaimed itself to be above party politics, but since its views were shaped by the staff at the embassy, and by a group of pro-Mussolini lecturers in the Italian department at London university, its tone became gradually more bracing and nationalistic.

In the winter of 1921, a group of prosperous Italian Londoners – some of them war veterans with experience of fascism at home – together with their friends Sir Rennell Rodd, former British ambassador to Rome, and Camillo Pellizzi, a lecturer at London university, had met to establish the first foreign fascio, a ‘nucleus of vibrant patriots of the purest Italian spirit’, open to men over twenty-one and women over eighteen ‘of excellent morality’. On hearing of its existence, Mussolini called it ‘my first-born abroad’. It was proposed to pull together all existing Italian organisations in London, from the Ice Cream and Temperance Refreshment Federation to the Molinari Sporting Club, under the discipline of squadre d’azione, to ‘tutelare’ the Italians in London in the true path of fascism. The general spirit of good cheer in which they seemed to be living had to be replaced by a more rigorous ‘concordia fascista’, and schools set up for London’s Italian children, since English ones, though good on moral and physical education, lacked a ‘spiritual drive towards nationalism’. It was only a pity that the particularly slow pace of life in Britain, ‘il metodo Londinese’, meant that nothing would happen very fast. At the fascio’s meetings in its new headquarters in Soho, and at its launch at a reception in the Savoy Hotel, many of the men wore black shirts. The manganello made its appearance on the streets of Clerkenwell. At first little interested, the British public took note when, after the March on Rome, a group of young squadristi laid a wreath in Westminster Abbey and raised their arms in the Roman salute.

In La Cronaca, along with advertisements for Chianti, Asti Spumante, olive oil, alabaster, pearls from Venice, leather bags and the Barbetta Bakery – ‘Specialists in Panettoni’ – on the Hampstead Road were warnings about Bolshevism and how, without a firm hand, Italy could easily sink into ‘Mexican or Balkan-style chaos’. Early in 1923, it reported on the great success of a ‘Black Shirt Gala Ball’, at which Italian and English guests alike had sung ‘Giovinezza’. Socialists were described as a ‘bunch of waiters’, Salvemini as a man who, ‘blind and deaf, denies the light of a truth he refuses to see’.

Not all the Italians in London were happy with this fascist onslaught. In July 1922, an anti-fascist paper, Il Commento, had been launched. It, too, professed to be truly ‘independent of every group or vested interest’, and said that it intended to inject a ‘disinfecting current of ozone’ into the over-heated Italian community. Soon, however, it began commenting unfavourably on the violence happening in Italy, and filled its pages with cartoons portraying the fascists as toads and flies. Mussolini’s speeches were reported in mocking tones, and fascists referred to as ‘Knights of the manganello’. When, in September, Mussolini announced that ‘sporadic, individual, unintelligent, uncontrolled’ violence had to stop, Il Commento asked: ‘What, then, is intelligent, controlled violence? Is it instructive, kindly, evolved, well-mannered, knowing, perspicacious, courteous, genial?’

The Fabian Society conference was to be held in Hindhead in Surrey, where a boarding school, empty for the summer holidays, had been taken over. The Fabians were the oldest surviving social group in Britain; their 2,000 or so members, who saw themselves as practical reformers, spoke of reconstructing society ‘in accordance with the highest moral possibilities’. Their motto was ‘Educate, agitate, organise’. By the early 1920s, the Fabians had long been dominated by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who lectured regularly on the state of the world. As Shaw had written, ‘My hours that make my days, my days that make my years follow one another pellmell into the maw of socialism,’ which was precisely what Carlo wanted to learn about. The summer school, now in its seventeenth year, was the highlight of the Fabian calendar.

On Friday 3 August, Carlo, Salvemini and Carlo Levi, who had joined them in London, caught a train for Hindhead. St Edmund’s School sat on a low hill surrounded by heather and pine trees. It had a nearby tennis court, golf course and open-air swimming pool, as well as a large wooden hall, perfect for the Swedish drill laid on every morning for ladies in bloomers and tunics. Alcohol was forbidden, but glee singing, concerts, fancy-dress parties and excursions on foot, by bicycle and charabanc, were all regarded with as much seriousness as the lectures. The mood was friendly, polite, seldom confrontational; nothing happened in a hurry. It was a far cry from the turbulence and frenzy of Florence and, to the three Italians, a source of marvel and humour.

The weather was sunny and rather windy, much like Italy on a spring day, noted Carlo approvingly; he did not care for great heat. On Saturday, they joined a party of fifteen and walked to nearby Frensham Ponds for tea. That evening, Salvemini gave an impromptu talk on fascism: Carlo remarked, not without a certain smugness, that his English was ‘improvised’. On Sunday, there was croquet, a discussion on the growth of public ownership, and dancing. Carlo was led round the dance floor by many ‘dear and sympathetic Fabians’, as he told Amelia later, charitably refraining from further comment. The visitors’ book lists a housewife, a number of teachers, a couple of journalists, some civil servants, and a ‘blouse manufacturer’ among those present. Under ‘Publications’, the housewife has written ‘two children’. On Tuesday, a Miss Hawkinson led a party ‘into the wooded portion of the grounds’, where they sang ‘“à la Wolf Cubs” until 11 pm’. Whether Salvemini and Carlo joined them is not recorded.

During the first week the weather remained dry and fine and lectures were held outside. Sidney Webb gave a talk called ‘Is Civilisation Decaying?’ There was much admiring chat about Mazzini. Carlo intervened in praise of the Bolsheviks, about whom his listeners seemed strangely ignorant. One day, he joined the swimmers: the water, he reported was ‘freddissima’. He could not quite come to terms with the fact that while no one dreamt of mentioning any embarrassing physical ailment – though someone did once refer to what he called a ‘tommy ache’ – they seemed perfectly happy to go naked into the shower or swimming pool. He put it down to ‘fascinating’ puritanism.

The visitors’ book records ‘our Italian visitors again entering into the fun’, though what the Fabians made of their exotic guests it does not say. At this point, Carlo, Salvemini and Levi were sharing a room, and for that night’s fancy-dress carnival and ball they came down in their pyjamas, with chains around their wrists and ankles, as Italian prisoners of the fascists. Carlo felt himself drawn still more strongly to Salvemini, who had shown a side of himself Carlo had not seen before, full of unexpected subtlety and refinement. Thunder and the rain drumming on the wooden roof of the hall completely drowned out a lecture entitled ‘Is International Anarchy Curable in a Capitalist Society?’ but it had cleared in time for a farce, in which all joined, called ‘Bananas on Trial Through the Looking Glass’. Italy and its concerns, Carlo told Amelia, had ‘shrunk’. There was something in this mixture of high-mindedness and innocent, unworldly fun that delighted him.

The three Italians were not greatly impressed by the lecturers: their minds seemed ‘ossified’ and they depended too heavily on facts, though Carlo was struck by their pleasing lack of rhetoric and posturing. What they relished were the long conversations, held over scones and hot chocolate, in which Carlo explored the intricacies of the Anglo-Saxon mind, the ‘very rich interior’ that lay behind these rational, practical exteriors. His English improved dramatically and what he was learning about the guild movement – which called for workers’ control of industry through a system of national guilds – and British Labour Party politics was making him rethink some of his own work on a non-Marxist approach to socialism. He decided to extend his stay, for another week of eurythmics, tennis, cabarets and talk about British parliamentarianism.

Salvemini, Carlo Levi, and Carlo at the Fabian summer school

Levi and Salvemini stayed on too. One night, Salvemini came to a fancy-dress ball as Janus, with two faces, two stomachs and two pairs of spectacles. Carlo put on a voluminous gown and passed himself off as a ‘formidable but courteous English lady’. He told Amelia that the three Italian friends had ‘made these grave English people laugh’.

And then he left for Birmingham and the Midlands, to see what he called ‘the real England, smoky, dirty, industrial, ugly, productive’, as compared to the ‘dead England’ of the Home Counties, where the countryside, with the sunshine gone, seemed to him grey and sad and featureless. The only blight on the excellence of his Fabian weeks, he wrote to his mother, was the food. ‘Here’, he said, ‘is the bad part . . . I loathe English cooking, a mixture of spices, sauces, little sauces, big sauces, marmalade jams, fats, minced meat, barley, horrific combinations of still more horrific ingredients’; how people could survive on them for long he could not imagine. Only the brioches at tea were bearable. Salvemini felt the same way. ‘If you but knew’, he wrote to a friend, ‘what an infernal thing is this English cooking!’ But, as he wrote to Rossi, the three weeks had been ‘magical’, and Carlo ‘had stirred up a storm among the ladies’. There had even been a comic occasion when he and Carlo, both taken by a Junoesque Irish lady, had gone walking in the woods, Carlo throwing himself into seduction ‘with youthful high spirits, me limping along behind’. To both men’s astonishment, the Irish lady chose Salvemini. Carlo left. ‘What happened then,’ wrote Salvemini, ‘under the light of the moon, I cannot tell you: because nothing happened. English women are like Italy: nothing ever happens and nothing lasts.’

Before leaving England, Carlo paid a short visit to Oxford, where he fell in love with the colleges and their soft green velvet lawns. He was taken to the National Liberal Club in London, where the WC was so big, he wrote, that the Circolo di Cultura could easily have fitted into it. On reaching London, he had learnt of the assassination of General Tellini – sent to Corfu to arbitrate over a boundary dispute between Greece and Albania – and of Mussolini’s decision to bomb the island, claiming insufficient apologies and indemnity. After terms exceedingly generous to Italy were negotiated, Mussolini agreed to withdraw his troops, but not before Harold Nicolson remarked dryly that he had not only succeeded in muzzling the League of Nations but also extracting money from Greece ‘without evidence of guilt’. The weeks of innocent fun were sharply brought to an end. The Italian newspapers came out loudly in praise of Mussolini’s firm stand. ‘Do they not realise’, Carlo asked his mother, ‘into what a terrible, infernal volcano we are plunging our hands?’