CHAPTER EIGHT

‘Non Mollare’

On 30 December 1924, the seconda ondata, the second wave of fascist violence, was unleashed. It struck in many parts of Italy, but Florence was its epicentre – by 1924 a quarter of all the fasci in Italy were said to be in Tuscany. Just as the city and its surroundings gave birth to an exceptional number of anti-fascists – entire families who by upbringing and instinct were profoundly hostile to fascism, young men and women driven by a sense of deep disgust, Catholics who considered it at odds with Christian teaching – so it was also home to Italy’s most corrupt and brutal squadristi.

In Florence, as elsewhere, the first squadristi had been war veterans and the piccola borghesia, shopkeepers and artisans, inspired by a hatred of the Bolsheviks and of the ‘mutilated victory’ of the war, and filled with a mishmash of pseudo-revolutionary ideas drawn from Garibaldi, Freemasonry and socialism. They were quickly supported by much of the aristocracy, who had never concealed their fury at having been ousted from local government by the socialists, along with military men, lawyers, notaries and rich industrialists. Many of the new podestà, the men who replaced mayors under the fascists, came from patrician families. Landowners in particular were eager to take revenge on the peasants who had rebelled against them, and happy to turn their estates into assembly points from where the squadristi could set out on their punitive raids. Further encouragement came from the Florentine Futurists and a handsome young man with glossy black hair and long black eyelashes called Kurt Erich Suckert, later known as the novelist Curzio Malaparte, who had greeted fascism as the rebirth of a virile Italy and who Gobetti called ‘fascism’s mightiest pen’.

Of the several different quarrelsome squadre in Florence, constantly struggling for supremacy, the most enduring and powerful in late 1924 was that run by Tullio Tamburini, head of the recently formed 92nd Legion of the city’s Militia. Tamburini had an office in the Post and Telegraph building in Piazza Santa Maria Novella and could count on some 2,000 members. Aged thirty-three in 1924, Tamburini was a wily, profoundly corrupt man, who had extorted cars and money in return for protection, and had once spent five days in prison for swindling. With his scented pomades and various bits of jewellery, he regarded himself as a modern proconsul. He had a terrible temper and a facial tic, which caused him to purse his lips and screw up his eyes, giving him a cynical and malevolent expression. But he had a gift for making people if not exactly like him, then depend on him, and had built up an intricate web of spies and informers. His enemies referred to him as another Nero or Attila, but Mussolini trusted him. During the darkest hours of the Matteotti affair, Tamburini had sent him a telegram, saying: ‘For you, for Fascism, for Italy’. When letters came to Rome accusing Tamburini of excessive corruption and brutality, Mussolini threw them away.

Renato Ricci, a member of the Fascist Party’s executive junta, arrived in Florence on 30 December to help Tamburini orchestrate the second wave of violence. The choice of targets for their ‘surgical strike’ was to be left to them. Tamburini called for a ‘general mobilisation’ of fascists for 2 o’clock on the afternoon of the 31st. Hundreds, then thousands, of men began to converge on the city by bus, train, lorry and car, carrying rifles, sticks, agricultural implements and manganelli. They carried banners with the words ‘Opponents, you have done enough!’ and ‘Duce, free our hands!’, and sang ‘For Benito Mussolini, dictator, Eia! Eia! Eia!’ Tamburini and Ricci addressed the excited crowd in the Piazza della Signoria and then despatched the men to march through the deserted streets from which the Florentines had fled to hide behind bolted doors. When they reached the offices of the Nuovo Giornale periodical, which had published attacks on Mussolini, they set about breaking them up, threw the furniture and the archives out of the windows, destroyed the printing presses and then set fire to the building. Firemen called to the scene were prevented from approaching. Their next stop was the Association of Independent Veterans, which they looted, after which they turned their attention to offices belonging to left-wing lawyers and to a Masonic lodge in the city centre. Any unfortunate passer-by who was slow to doff his hat was beaten up. Carabinieri and policemen stood by and watched. A small plane circled above, dropping leaftets: ‘Anti-fascists: Your last hour has come!’

The Disperata, one of Florence’s most brutal squadre

Towards six in the evening, the mob reached the Borgo Santi Apostoli. It was New Year’s Eve, and the Circolo di Cultura was empty. The reading room, which had seen so many heated debates on the meaning of democracy, was ransacked. Carlo’s comfortable armchairs, the newspapers and books, the rugs, the lamps and the American stove were all thrown out into the square below, where a pyre was lit. Soon, there was nothing left. The mob moved on. As soon as the fire died down, a rubbish lorry arrived to sweep up the ashes.

News of the attack soon reached Carlo, Nello and the other club members; they decided to make the Rosselli house in Via Giusti their headquarters. Amelia was out, there were gates at the front, and the garden behind would make it possible, in case of need, to escape. Look-outs were posted. From time to time the younger members were despatched to find out what was happening.

A ‘punitive expedition’ against a socialist trade-union headquarters

Late that night, Amelia returned. She found armed guards by the door, Carlo and Rossi writing press releases and young people asleep in the hall. Not long before, she had admonished Rossi and the others for the dangers into which they were leading her sons. Now, she said nothing beyond complaining mildly to Carlo that her favourite walnut table had been lost. Smiling and calm, looking elegant among all the dishevelled young men, she slipped away to her room.

The Rosselli house survived the night unscathed, but next day news came that the prefect of Florence had ordered that the Circolo, a nest of ‘anti-national agitators’, be formally abolished as ‘disruptive to public order’. The second wave spread to Arezzo, Livorno and Lucca. In Pisa the damage was such that the archbishop, Cardinal Maffi, sent a telegram to Mussolini expressing his ‘disgust as a Christian, and humiliation, as an Italian’. By 3 January, the raids had reached Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy. In due course, a sculpture of a Madonna and child, brandishing a club, was erected in Monteleone. It was known as La Madonna del Manganello, Protectress of the Fascists.

It was now, while Italy was in turmoil, that Mussolini staged his most brilliant coup de théâtre. He recalled parliament, which had been closed for the Christmas holidays, telling the deputies that he planned to deliver a major speech. Since the Aventine secessionists were continuing with their boycott, he knew that he could count on a clear majority. On 3 January, rising theatrically before a silent and partly empty Chamber, he announced ‘a me la colpa’, I am to blame, and that he personally, he alone, took responsibility for everything that had happened. He was responsible for the wave of violence, for the castor oil, the manganelli and the beatings – and for Matteotti’s death. He told the assembled deputies that he had admired Matteotti, whose courage and determination ‘sometimes equalled my own’, but Matteotti was, lamentably, dead, and Italy needed a firm hand; and he, Mussolini, alone, was the man capable of ‘dominating the crisis’. If parliament was willing to endorse his personal dictatorship, then he would speedily put the country to rights. The attributes of a great political leader were many, he said, but one of the most important was that of ‘having the power to halt, with a decisive show of will . . . the collapse of a situation which appears in every way to be crumbling and lost’. There were a few feeble protests, a few murmurs of dissent, but they fizzled away. The speech had been an audacious gamble, but it had worked. It was now a question, he said, of ‘fascistizzare la nazione’, imposing the full weight of fascism. ‘The opposition won’t be curbed: well, I’ll make them obey! In forty-eight hours, all will be sorted out.’

Hearing from Turati what had been said, Anna Kuliscioff observed: ‘We live in a country of slaves. They don’t lack certain sentimental values, but they are incapable of standing up to political brigandage.’ When the Chamber formally reopened on 12 January, one fascist deputy noted with satisfaction: ‘The blackshirts are now ready for everything that the opposition has to send at us. They are in a state of complete efficiency.’ It was indeed brigandage, at its most naked. The king, meanwhile, had approved a new cabinet, in which Mussolini, bit by bit, would assume control of all the major ministries. Under him, he brought in loyal fascists – Dino Grandi to foreign affairs, Italo Balbo to aviation. Roberto Farinacci, the former ras of Cremona, became party secretary. He was a crude, gross, vituperative man with a jaunty manner, immense black eyebrows, and a peculiar, V-shaped moustache. It was said that Mussolini kept hidden in his drawer a copy of Farinacci’s university thesis, with proof of plagiarism.

Across Italy, telegrams went out to local prefects to suppress all hostile reaction to Mussolini’s speech. Ninety-five suspect clubs and associations were closed down, 150 ‘public establishments’ suppressed, 25 ‘subversive’ organisations disbanded, and 111 ‘dangerous’ people arrested. And the cult of Mussolini himself took flight, that of a virile, decisive, paternalistic, above all sporting Duce, who swam, rode, fenced, flew, boxed and took cold baths. Thousands of photographs were taken of him, in hundreds of different poses, many with his manly torso on display, his piercing eyes glaring out at the camera, his mouth pouting and scowling, his large balding head thrown back. Even his colleagues grovelled. A journalist called Leo Longanesi coined the phrase: ‘Mussolini is always right.’

On 31 December, even before Mussolini’s triumphant speech, Carlo, Nello, Salvemini, Rossi, Traquandi and the others in Italia Libera had met in the Rossellis’ house to discuss starting an underground paper to stir up those they called the ‘feeble spirits’ who had appeared to accept fascism as a fait accompli. Someone proposed calling it Il Crepuscolo, ‘Twilight’, but the word seemed ambiguous and defeatist. Then Nello suggested Non Mollare – ‘Do Not Give Up’ – and the others agreed that this was precisely the message they wished to get across: resist fascism, work for Mussolini’s overthrow, despite the violence of the militia, the impunity of the squadristi, the decrees signed by the cowardly king. As Carlo wrote in the first issue early in January 1924, printed on two sides of a single sheet of paper, ‘We particularly honour Mazzini because he did not weaken . . . Since we have been denied the freedom to speak, we will take it upon ourselves to do so.’ Only by fighting back would Italians be able to regain their stolen liberty. Matteotti would be their inspiration, the man who had shown the world that it was possible to ‘non mollare’; the Risorgimento would be their ideology. Rossi said that it did not matter what they wrote, because the point of Non Mollare was to inspire disobedience, incite others to exercise their rights, available to all citizens of civilised countries. The young men had taken to repeating a joke doing the rounds of Florence: ‘There are three things that don’t go together: honesty, intelligence and fascism. He who is honest and fascist is not intelligent; he who is intelligent and fascist is not honest; he who is honest and intelligent is not fascist.’

Nello in his early twenties

Carlo in his early twenties

Salvemini and Carlo were to do much of the writing; Traquandi and Rossi agreed to find and deal with the printers. Marion typed and kept the files, and was soon to be seen with the pockets of her clothes bulging with bits of paper. Carlo and Nello would cover much of the cost from the income from their Siele shares, which had grown greatly in value since the end of the First World War. Traquandi’s talent lay in his ability to recruit trustworthy people and soon dozens of former supporters of Italia Libera were distributing copies all over the city, with instructions that, when read, Non Mollare was to be passed on, from hand to hand. ‘If we want to win,’ wrote Salvemini, ‘we will. Winning signifies for us a return to the laws of our fathers, a return to those liberties that guarantee a civilised life.’ ‘I sense’, wrote Carlo to Salvemini, ‘that it is our duty to provide evidence of character and moral strength to the generation that will come after us.’

No one had yet dared to make public the memorandum written by Filippelli, the owner and driver of the Lancia in which Matteotti had been kidnapped. In the fifth number of Non Mollare, in February, it was printed in full, with a run of 12,000 rather than the usual 3,000. Circulating from hand to hand, the paper was taken north by Rossi and given to Riccardo Bauer and Ferruccio Parri to distribute in Milan. Giovanni Amendola, fully realising the dangers he was running, published the second memorandum, by Cesare Rossi, in one of the very few newspapers still willing to print his contributions. What both statements made perfectly plain was that Mussolini was deeply implicated in Matteotti’s murder, that he was, in Filippelli’s words, the ‘inspiration’ behind it. Then Salvemini got hold of other incriminating documents and these were published in Non Mollare too. They caused a huge stir. The fascists were outraged. A hunt for these mysterious and subversive writers and editors was launched.

But the little group in Florence was both imaginative and canny. The editors changed their printers with every issue. Vannucci, the student doctor, kept the clandestine material in the freezer of his hospital morgue. Rossi had a secret compartment built at the back of a cupboard in his house. A former socialist deputy, Gaetano Pilati, who had lost his right arm in the war and had since risen from being a bricklayer to owning his own successful building firm, used his workers to distribute copies and went out at night himself and glued copies on to the walls for people to read as they went to work. Why not give me more copies? Pilati kept asking. As they came off the presses, they were collected by the district leaders, and in turn handed over to train-drivers and postal-workers. Each had a note: pass this on. Sometimes an issue would be printed in Milan or the Veneto. Though Carlo, Nello and Salvemini had yet to be formally identified by the fascists, Ernesto Rossi had his house raided eleven times. The police came away with nothing, but he was a marked man.

At the end of March, police closed in on a communist typesetter called Renzo Pinzi in the San Frediano district of Florence. He got away before he could be caught, and Rossi advised him to leave Italy. He gave him 1,000 lire, while Salvemini provided him with introductions to friends in Nice and Cannes. A month later, the offices of three socialist lawyers were raided and packets of Non Mollare found on the premises. The militia decided that this was the paper’s headquarters and charged the men with publishing attacks on the king and his government.

Pinzi, meanwhile, had been growing restless in the South of France and began demanding more money. Angry at not being given as much as he asked, he secretly approached the Florentine militia and negotiated a reward and immunity from prosecution in exchange for giving evidence at the lawyers’ trial. By now, the editors of Non Mollare had grown suspicious. After they intercepted a letter from Pinzi to his wife saying that he had made a deal with the fascists, Rossi, Salvemini and Carlo, fearing arrest, went to hide in a villa outside Cortona. Non Mollare continued to appear. When the king announced that he would be paying a visit to Florence, Non Mollare advised the Florentines to stay at home, saying that he could no longer be regarded as the King of Italy, but only that of the fascists. It bore unexpected fruit. On the appointed day of the royal visit, two rows of Blackshirts lined the route between Piazza della Signoria and Piazza Cavour; but of the Florentines there was little sight. A few bemused tourists looked on.

The trial of the three lawyers was set for 2 June. Two of them were released for lack of proof, and the last eventually sentenced to 19 months and 7 days in prison. But while giving evidence, Pinzi had also given names. He did not have those of Carlo and Nello, about whom he knew nothing, but he did give those of Salvemini and Rossi. Hearing that he had been denounced as a spy, Rossi was persuaded to escape to France. Salvemini, insisting that he had nothing to fear, decided to continue with his normal life. He went off to Rome, where he was sitting on a jury at the university. At 3 p.m. on 8 June, while he was at the Ministry of National Economy, police appeared, arrested him and took him in handcuffs to the prison of Regina Coeli. Salvemini had long been an irritant, and on more than one occasion fascists had tried to break down the door to his classes, and he had been saved by his students. ‘It is time’, announced Battaglie Fasciste, a party paper, ‘that this corrupter of minds’ be silenced.

Nello was away from Florence for much of the spring. Months earler, urged by Salvemini, who was constantly worried about the brothers’ safety, he had gone to pursue his research on Pisacane, Bakunin and Mazzini in Berlin, in the archives of the German Social Democratic Party. Stopping briefly in Munich, Nello’s first impressions were of architectural grandeur, disgusting food covered in sauces, and ‘catastrophic’ hotel beds. It was snowing. But he was working hard at his German, and he liked what he saw as far less class consciousness than in Italy, and the fact that the German girls seemed so free and independent.

In Berlin, Nello went to many operas and concerts, wrote long letters to Maria in Florence and kept a diary, covering the time between the death of Friedrich Ebert, the Social Democratic first president, and the election of Paul von Hindenburg, whose speeches he was taken to hear by the correspondent for La Stampa. Von Hindenburg, he wrote, had hair the colour of the froth on top of a glass of beer, a double chin, two pendulous cheeks, little damp eyes, and a ‘modest paunch, soft hands, characterless’. Guided by Salvemini, he enrolled himself in a course given by Friedrich Meinecke, the nationalist historian, observing that Meinecke’s reflections on the conflict between power and ethics had a horrible echo in Italy. Away from the day-to-day agitations in Florence, his sense of anger and indignation against the fascists had turned, he said, into one of profound sadness.

One day, walking down the street, he observed a Jewish man trying to stand up to a hostile, jeering crowd. In his diary, he wrote: ‘I heard, in that crowd, a wave of hatred.’ To be a Jew in Germany now, he wrote to his mother, meant having to pretend not to be one: otherwise he would not be able to do all the things he planned to do. It made him feel ‘more Jewish’. He had felt very uncomfortable on the night of the elections, when he kept hearing, in mocking tones, the word ‘Jüden’. Asking his landlady whether she would like to see the Jews expelled from Germany, he was appalled to hear her say that she felt ‘a sense of physical repugnance whenever she happened to find herself near to one’.

Whenever he was alone, all Nello’s sense of worthlessness returned to haunt him. ‘I spend my time tormenting myself over everything I haven’t done,’ he wrote to Amelia, ‘over who I am and who I hoped to be.’ Another day he wrote: ‘This morning life seems to me a beautiful thing, yes, but something that passes us by (or passes me by?) without our ever being able to seize it . . . It seems to me always that everything escapes me . . . that everything I have not done and don’t do is beautiful, while all that I have done and do is mediocre.’ Was this normal? he asked her. Was it his age? Was he really a mediocrity? He doubted now that he had the talent to become a university professor, or, indeed, a writer. ‘A dilettante? the very thought humiliates me.’ The endlessly troubled Nello never shared Carlo’s mostly robust sense of himself, though others admired his candour and honesty and loved his affectionate and generous nature. As Calamandrei would later write: ‘It was enough to look him in the face to have faith in the future.’

Nello was still in Berlin when news reached him of Salvemini’s arrest. The abyss which now divided them, a small band of antifascists, from the mass of Italians, was, he wrote to his mother, growing rapidly deeper. For the first time, codes, which would soon become a standard part of all their letters, made their appearance. Salvemini had become ‘the child’; prison, ‘a clinic’.

Carlo, also mindful of the danger he was in, had been dividing his life between Turin, Milan, Genoa and Florence. For Amelia’s birthday, he ordered carnations and violets to be sent to her from the Riviera. He told her that he was lecturing to 500 students, that he felt twenty years older when they called him ‘Professore’ and wondered whether they would take him more seriously if he wore glasses. He had been to see Turati, who had made him ‘come alive again’, and Anna Kuliscioff, ‘sempre deliziosa’, always charming. For Anna’s part, she noted that Carlo was ‘tall and big and very dear to us’, and that he would turn up at all hours, was never punctual, talked incessantly and was always laughing. A new note of restraint had crept into all their letters. ‘Of this’, he said repeatedly, ‘it will be better if we speak face to face.’ In the late spring, somewhat injudiciously, he wrote gloomily: ‘Things are going very badly indeed. We are becoming flabby. Within the next three months, either we organise ourselves for a wide-based social revolt, or we will be slaves for eternity.’ What he suspected, but did not know, was that his letters were already being intercepted by the fascist police.

Carlo was back in Florence when, on 9 June, a young member of Italia Libera called Carlo Campolini painted a portrait of Matteotti on to a sheet, while his mother kept guard at the window – their house had been repeatedly ransacked – and then handed it to a former telephone engineer, who rang the bell of a convent on the Lungarno, saying that he had to check the wires. This man climbed from the convent roof onto that of the Palazzo Frescobaldi next door and fixed the rolled-up sheet to a gutter, leaving a cord hanging discreetly down. That night, another young man rowed a boat across the Arno, pulled the cord and released the painting.

Next morning was the anniversary of Matteotti’s murder. Crowds gathered, and it took firemen, carabinieri and militiamen several hours to remove the effigy. That same day – saying that these stunts were essential to make those who still resisted fascism feel less isolated – Marion, Carlo, and Alessandro and Sarina Levi led a party to lay a wreath of carnations in memory of Matteotti at the feet of the monument to Garibaldi on the Lungarno Vespucci. They were quickly arrested and taken to police headquarters, where the five men were despatched to spend a few days in Florence’s Murate prison, while the three women were released, the police saying smugly: ‘We fascists are gentlemen.’ In Battaglie Fasciste appeared a chilling warning: ‘To such provocations we always respond, and with persuasive arguments.’

For the first few weeks after his arrest, Salvemini was kept in Rome, in the Regina Coeli prison, and then moved to the Murate in Florence, formerly a convent. From his cell window he could see the hills of Fiesole and watch the swifts as they dipped and circled in the evening light. Among his fellow prisoners were a number of burglars, and they gave him lessons on how to break into a safe; they also taught him to play cards. Not long before, Salvemini had married Fernande Luchaire, mother of Carlo and Nello’s friend Jean, the talented young journalist, and she was now in Paris with her children. Daily life in jail, Salvemini wrote to her, ‘is not at all painful’. He joked that, as a student and a scholar, he was accustomed to long stretches of time shut up in small rooms. His one regret was that he could not finish correcting the proofs for a new edition of his book on the French Revolution. His trial had been set for 13 July. It would be one of the last moments of legality in Italy’s slow descent into total dictatorship.

There was a great turnout of friends, students and supporters inside the courtroom, but also a number of fascist militia, strutting about clutching their cudgels. Alessandro Levi was there, along with Marion, several former Aventine members of parliament, and university colleagues. Salvemini was in a cage, big, hirsute, with his wild grey beard covering most of his face, pacing up and down, cheerful, chatting, reminding people of a bear on a chain. When he caught sight of Carlo, he was furious: ‘Go away!’ he called out. ‘Your presence here is absurd. Do you really want to put your head into this trap? Go away. I beg of you. I order you.’ Reluctantly, Carlo left.

The judge, on learning that the prosecution witness Pinzi had not yet even been tried himself for distributing prohibited material, and finding the evidence before him so feeble, took the surprising decision to adjourn proceedings and free Salvemini. As Salvemini’s friends left the court, the enraged squadristi swarmed out of the side streets like angry bees. The friends scattered. Some took refuge in a pet shop nearby, others in a typists’ office. Police and carabinieri were shamed into trying to protect them while waiting for a lorry which had been summoned to get them away. But more fascists had been alerted and came running. They surrounded the lorry, forcing it to a halt. Then they burst into the pet shop and the office, ransacked the premises, hauled out Salvemini’s friends and set about them with their cudgels. The British writer Sylvia Sprigge, in Florence to cover the trial for the Manchester Guardian, received a blow to her head. Alessandro Levi spent eight days in hospital. Nino Levi, one of Salvemini’s defence lawyers who had come down for the trial from Milan, was left with one hand permanently disabled. An old friend of Salvemini’s, the distinguished archaeologist Umberto Zanotti Bianco, was chased to the pensione where he was thought to be staying. When it proved to be the wrong one, the fascists moved from pensione to pensione in search of him, severely beating any owner who refused to hand over their register. Zanotti Bianco got away, but worse was to come. Salvemini’s other lawyer, Ferruccio Marchetti, was attacked a few days later in Siena and died not long after of head injuries.

Salvemini himself would certainly have been lynched had a carabinieri officer not hidden him in the basement of the Palace of Justice. At midnight, he was driven home. Instead of dropping him by his front door, however, the police pushed him out at the far end of his street. Rightly sensing a trap, he made his way instead to the Rosselli house in nearby Via Giusti. Amelia was with Zia Gì at Il Frassine, Carlo had gone back to stay with friends near Arezzo, and Nello was still in Germany. But Ada the cook and Mariapò the maid were there. The women greeted Salvemini affectionately and gave him a bed. He left next morning before dawn to take refuge with a friend in Rome.

The following night, towards 10 o’clock, there was a banging on the gates of the Rosselli house. Ada and Mariapò temporised, but in the end were persuaded to allow the two men standing outside to come in to see for themselves that Carlo and Nello, ‘i due signorini’, were not at home. When the women opened the gates, they saw, hidden in the shadows, a dozen more men, who now forced their way in, and, brandishing revolvers and twirling their cudgels, rampaged their way through the house. As Ada and Mariapò begged and pleaded, they set about shattering a magnificent Sèvres vase, then a Venetian cupboard full of valuable objects. Having discovered Carlo’s study, they tore the lid off the grand piano, then pulled an immense bookcase on top of it, smashing both. Before leaving the house, they made a vast pile of the furniture, with Carlo’s desk upside down on the top, and crashed their way through the bedrooms.

Amelia’s old friend Angiolo Orvieto appeared at Il Frassine the next morning. She was still in bed. Bit by bit, trying not to frighten her unduly, he described what had taken place. As they drove down towards Florence, Amelia thought that the countryside had never looked more beautiful, the air sweet and soft in the early morning summer warmth. The hall of the house in Via Giusti had a carpet of shattered glass and porcelain. The two sitting rooms and Carlo’s study had ‘ceased to exist’. In her own study, Amelia found a police inspector going through her papers. When she remonstrated, he told her that he would arrest her unless she showed him proper respect. She remained composed and dignified. As he left, taking with him letters from her brother Gabriele, now a member of the Senate in Rome, he told her, slowly and deliberately, that what he had found was ‘very, very interesting’. Amelia felt a sense of profound menace closing in around them all.

Later, two squadristi were arrested for the destruction of the house, but when Amelia pressed charges she was given to understand that it was all a question of ‘national security’ and that no one was therefore to blame. The judge at the hearing was rude and hostile. Later, too, Amelia worked out that it was the gardener, Arturo – whose wife was a ‘fascista furiosa’ – who had informed the militia that Salvemini had taken shelter in the house. Arturo was, she wrote later, ‘a real spy, camouflaged as a rabbit’. Amelia stayed in the house, camping in the three rooms that had not been destroyed. Carlo, ever robust in the face of calamity and deeply relieved that his research notes had escaped unscathed, said jokingly that he had never much cared for his Steinway and would now be able to buy a Bechstein. ‘If i signori fascisti don’t have a better idea,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘then they might as well go to sleep. They will have to wait a very long time indeed before I give up the struggle.’ To Amelia, he said that it was vital that the family appear ‘almost hard, indifferent and not damaged’ by what had taken place. From Berlin, Nello wrote a calming letter to Maria. For the moment, he told her, he would extend his ‘forced holiday’ in Germany. ‘But I feel extremely serene, and will remain so, even if these troubles keep on coming. I am “decisissimo”, most decided a non mollare.’

Salvemini was very reluctant to leave Italy, but friends were trying hard to persuade him that it was now quite simply too dangerous for him to remain. The American art historian Bernard Berenson was living at I Tatti, a villa at Settignano in the hills above Florence, with his wife Mary. I Tatti had become a meeting place for art-lovers and intellectuals and Salvemini had been a frequent visitor. There was now a thought that Salvemini might use Berenson’s passport to travel abroad – the two men looked vaguely alike – but Berenson demurred, not least perhaps because it soon became known that the fascists, thinking that Salvemini might take shelter in I Tatti, had laid siege to the villa. Salvemini realised he had to flee. But he did not plan to leave empty-handed. Through good contacts in Rome, he managed to buy, from a corrupt official and for a substantial sum, 350 pages of incriminating documents against Mussolini, tying him still further to the Matteotti murder. Then Salvemini slipped quietly down to a friend’s house in Sorrento and, a few days later, across the border into France, taking with him only the documents and a change of clothes. Rossi was waiting for him in Paris. Exile, now, was becoming an option that increasing numbers of the dissidents were being forced to take. Foreseeing the likely seizure of all Salvemini’s possessions, Mary Berenson spirited twelve cases of his books out of his apartment and up to I Tatti. From Paris, he wrote to tell her that he was planning to spend some time in England, which he considered ‘the land of my heart, free among free people, a man among men’.

In the middle of the summer, Amelia, Carlo and Nello met up at Siusi, in the Alto Adige. There they were befriended by a group of sympathetic anti-fascists. Later, Amelia would write that these people had all taken to Carlo, saying that he was exceptionally eloquent, but all felt that he was behaving too rashly, and should learn to be less foolhardy. During the days they had together, Amelia and her two sons talked and talked. Reflecting on the lawlessness into which Florence had descended, she said that it felt like living at the time of Dante. Carlo had taken over the full editorship of Non Mollare and was continuing to put out damaging attacks on Mussolini, fed by the additional documents now sent by Salvemini from Paris. It was becoming insanely dangerous, not only to publish proscribed material, but even to read it. The fascists had got hold of the names of subscribers to all papers of a vaguely independent nature, and were now going after them. By the summer of 1925, Il Caffè, Bauer and Parri’s irreverent and accusatory magazine – one issue was wittily composed solely of quotations from the fifteenth-century visionary Savonarola, Garibaldi, the writer Manzoni and the philosopher Cattaneo – had been raided so often that it was obliged to close down altogether. As the fascist paper L’Impero noted, the time had finally come to do away for ever with all these ‘pestilential sewers’.

But Non Mollare kept appearing.

The violence did not stop. In Critica Fascista in May, an article had appeared saying that the most ‘terrible and determined’ enemies of fascism were not the communists, but the intellectuals, whose habit of ‘verbosity, compromise and equivocation’ contrasted so glaringly with that of the ‘mature, virile, self-aware’ fascists. Of these intellectuals, Gobetti was one of the most hated. In March 1924, Mussolini had sent a telegram to the prefect of Turin asking him to be ‘vigilant in making life difficult for this stupid opponent of the Government and of Fascism’. The prefect did what he was told. Gobetti was followed, beaten up, his house repeatedly searched. Towards the end of the summer 1925 came a particularly brutal attack: as he was walking towards his parents’ house one day he was set upon by a dozen young men with cudgels. He haemorrhaged blood, but told his mother that it was nothing. Ada was pregnant, and Gobetti was beginning to think that they had little choice but to join the anti-fascists already in exile. Friends who saw him at this time found him frail, his smile gentle, his skin like ‘alabaster’.

Identified by the fascists as the leading and most outspoken ‘man of the Aventino’, and loathed by Mussolini for his publication of the Rossi memorandum, Amendola too was in considerable peril. The once staunch monarchist and parliamentarian had become Mussolini’s loudest critic. He had already received four ‘lessons’ – beatings and arbitrary arrest – when, towards evening on 20 July, he left a spa at Montecatini to drive to Pistoia. Conscious of the probability of further attacks, he had requested protection from the local prefect. A lorry full of carabinieri turned up to escort him. But they did nothing when a crowd of fascist thugs, summoned from all round the countryside, blocked the road with a large rock, dragged him out of his car, set about him with their cudgels and broke his sternum. He was taken to hospital and underwent several operations. ‘This time,’ he told a friend, ‘they mean to make an end of me.’

Giovanni Amendola, another thorn in Mussolini’s side

Non Mollare was still going. Working ever more frantically now that Salvemini and Rossi had gone, and conscious that the paper’s days were numbered, Carlo continued to put out bulletins on fascist brutality. Tamburini and his men, unable to track down the authors, decided that the Freemasons were behind it, not least because 20 September, the day on which Non Mollare published yet more evidence tying Mussolini to the Matteotti murder, was also an important day in the Masonic calendar. And the Freemasons, who had initially supported Mussolini, had indeed recently withdrawn their approval. Battaglie Fasciste now published a manifesto, calling on fascists throughout Tuscany to ‘strike at the Freemasons in their persons, their property and their interests’. Over the next few days, Freemasons in Florence were duly hunted down and beaten up. While this was going on, Mussolini was in Vercelli, addressing a group of Blackshirts: ‘If necessary, we shall use the cudgel, and also steel. A rising faith has to be intolerant.’ Lest the message had not been fully understood, on 3 October Battaglie Fasciste repeated the point. ‘Freemasonry’, it declared, ‘must be destroyed and to this end all means are good: from the cudgel to the revolver, from the smashing of windows to cleansing fire.’ And, as it turned out, to murder.

That afternoon, in Florence, a squad of fascists under the leadership of a small-time local boss, Giovanni Luporini, went to the house of a Freemason called Napoleone Bandinelli. They would not have found him at home, for he had taken his wife and child to the cinema, except that he had come back to collect a coat for his child. A neighbour, a train-driver and head of one of Non Mollare’s sections, Giovanni Becciolini, came to his help, drew out his own revolver, and in the confusion, with everyone firing, Luporini was shot dead. Who precisely fired the bullet that killed him was never established. But Bandinelli was chased across the rooftops and gunned down, after which his house was ransacked; the sound of his piano crashing from the window on to the cobbles below resounded down the street. Becciolini was battered, taken to fascist headquarters nearby, brought home half dead, stabbed again, then had his head held under the water in a nearby fountain. He died in hospital soon after.

Giovanni Becciolini, courageous supporter of Non Mollare

From his headquarters, Tamburini sent out a call for fascist volunteers. Handing them lists of names and addresses, he told them to ‘take the initiative of serious reprisals for Luporini’s death’. Luporini had been, he said, ‘one of the most brilliant figures of Tuscan fascism’, lured to his murder in an ambush. Vengeance must follow. In what became known throughout Italy as the Night of St Bartholomew – after the 1572 massacre of the Huguenots in France’s wars of religion – thirteen lawyers’ offices, a dress shop in Via Tornabuoni, and seven other shops were ransacked. Papers, dresses, typewriters, files, shoes, bags, tables and chairs were flung into the street and set on fire. These bonfires had become standard squadrista practice.

Nello had just returned from Germany, and he and Carlo learnt that their names were on the list of wanted men. Persuaded with great difficulty by Amelia to leave the city, they were driven by Zia Gí to collect Nello’s car, then set off for a friend’s house outside Cortona. Amelia, wanting to remain close by, left Il Frassine and went to stay in a pensione in San Domenico. That night, a fellow guest called her to look at the strange rosy light in which Florence seemed to be bathed. The two women stood at the window looking out over the city below and asked each other whether some kind of fireworks celebration was taking place. It was at almost exactly this moment that squadristi reached the Rosselli house in Via Giusti. Failing to get an answer to their repeated banging, they fired a fusillade of bullets into the heavy doors. Ada and Mariapò kept the lights off and lay low.

Just after midnight, the squadristi, having commandeered two buses and moving from house to house, ransacking as they went, reached the home of Gustavo Consolo, one of the lawyers arrested previously for having copies of Non Mollare in his office. The family was woken by shots against the shutters. Consolo rang the police, who did nothing, and then hid under the maid’s bed. The fascists broke down the door and herded Signora Consolo, her two children and her niece on to the terrace, while she pleaded on her knees for her husband’s life. The squadristi then searched the house, discovered Consolo under the bed and shot him dead.

A second squadra had gone in search of Gaetano Pilati, the audacious, much-loved builder who had distributed so many copies of Non Mollare. Two men put a ladder up the side of the house and climbed into the bedroom in which Pilati and his wife were sleeping. They fired two shots at him. Using his one good arm to try to protect the room in which his son was sleeping, he was shot again, after which the fascists left, one man saying: ‘Let’s go and get a drink. I have silenced him.’ An ambulance was called. In the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, Pilati was found to have been wounded in his face, his leg and one shoulder, and his intestine had been perforated in five separate places. Before dying three days later, he said to his wife: ‘The Austrians disabled me, and the Italians have killed me.’ Later, Rossi would describe Pilati as a man of ‘luminous humanity’. Both Consolo and Pilati had made themselves much hated for refusing to be bribed or blackmailed.

The attacks went on. More fascists, summoned from the surrounding countryside, arrived in Florence and gave themselves up to an orgy of looting. By the time the violence was spent, eight people had been murdered, the villa belonging to Domizio Torrigiani, the Grand Master of the Freemasons, had been sacked and set on fire and forty businesses and houses belonging to Freemasons and lawyers who had been brave enough to act on behalf of some of the fascists’ victims had been reduced to rubble. In the streets, anyone remonstrating against the violence was forced to kneel before a portrait of Luporini.

A campaign of whispers, lies and rumours was spreading around the city, terrifying people into telling on their friends. Old scores were paid off. As Nello’s friend Leo Ferrero wrote: ‘Every ring on the bell can signal the arrival of the police to arrest us, or that of friends come to warn us that the concierge, the cook, the concierge’s daughter, the concierge’s daughter’s friend, the maid’s friend . . .’ had denounced them. He kept a diary, in which he described his father Guglielmo, a distinguished historian now in his fifties, as having no mental skills with which to deal with the ‘pazzi’, the lunatics who patrolled the streets, or with the harassment and surveillance. ‘All his wisdom’, wrote Leo, ‘is like an instrument that no longer works, a key when the lock has been changed.’

When Amelia returned to Via Giusti, she found the streets of central Florence littered with broken glass and crockery. Over the city hung a pall of acrid yellow smoke. Had they been there, she knew, Carlo and Nello would certainly have been murdered. People were speaking to each other in whispers and looking over their shoulders. Florence, she observed, lay ‘under a monstrous incubus’. When she went to the local police station to ask for armed guards to protect the house, she was told that there were very few available, so many having already been called to protect others.

As the extent of the damage and the violence emerged, St Bartholomew’s Night sparked widespread shock and indignation. Florence swarmed with foreign visitors who had been manhandled, seen their favourite restaurants and theatres closed and witnessed the looting and burning. There were protests, complaints, unfavourable articles in the newspapers. One of the lawyers whose premises had been destroyed was the legal adviser to the British colony. The Italian Financial Commission was due to leave for the United States to negotiate new terms for war debts. The anarchical rampages in Florence could not be seen to go unpunished, and the Fascist Grand Council decided that the time had come to curb the violence.

Roberto Farinacci was despatched from Rome to clear up the mess, but his lightning inquiry concluded that the troubles had all been caused by anti-fascists. Since this verdict satisfied no one, the buccaneering ras of Ferrara, Italo Balbo, arrived in Florence to conduct a more thorough investigation. He needed scapegoats. The city’s prefect was forced to retire, the questore was transferred elsewhere, Tamburini was sent to the Italian colony in Tripolitania and it was not long before the hot-tempered and brutal Farinacci himself, whose whitewash report had done nothing to restore Italy’s reputation, lost his position as secretary general of the Fascist Party. At the end of October, fifty-three prominent Florentine fascists were expelled from the party. Writing in the monthly Gerarchia, Mussolini announced: ‘Violence is moral, provided it is timely and surgical and chivalrous . . . private and individual ungoverned violence is anti-fascist.’

What few people seemed to grasp was that all this left fascist powers fundamentally undiminished. A series of trials of squadristi accused of the worst excesses followed, but each was more absurd and corrupt than the last; the few that ended in convictions saw them rapidly overturned. Signora Pilati was threatened, offered bribes, told that if she identified her husband’s killers her son Bruno, too, would die. The family business was bankrupted. But she was a brave woman. Insisting on appearing in court, she pointed to the principal killer and declared, her voice barely audible for the jeers, that her husband had ‘made of Italy something great. You have dragged it into the mud.’ The five men accused of the murder were all absolved, and a banquet was held by local fascists in their honour. Signora Pilati and her son emigrated to South America.

Peace, of a kind, returned to Tuscany. Florence, noted Amelia, ‘began to breathe again’. Marion Cave, writing to Salvemini in Paris in her perfect Italian, said that the city was indeed calm, but that legal oppression was beginning to take the place of squadrista violence. The killing of Pilati and Consolo had effectively dealt a death blow to the city’s socialists. ‘All but the arch intransigents like us’, she wrote, were either withdrawing from public life or tacitly joining the fascists. Their letters, now, were full of oblique references to things going well or badly and friends were spoken about only by their code names. Rossi had become ‘il burattino’, the puppet.

Marion’s rheumatic illness had returned and she had begun to suffer from heart troubles; she had been put on valerian and digitalis and forbidden tea, coffee and cigarettes. In the preceding months, she and Carlo had become very close, and there were thoughts of an engagement. Amelia, however, was not in favour. There was something about this spirited, bold, emancipated young Englishwoman that made her uneasy and she begged Carlo not to meet Marion while he reflected on his future. Amelia, herself so determined and independent, remained curiously old-fashioned about women who chose to pursue careers, suspecting that it was self-indulgence; her instinct was that wives should keep house and support their husbands in their work. She could not quite see Marion Cave doing either.

In any case, it was no longer safe for Carlo or Nello to remain in Florence. Nello wrote to Maria that he felt ‘humiliated, humiliated because we are Italian, and in spite of this, we are hunted down by Italians as if we were game’. Carlo was reluctantly persuaded to close down Non Mollare. His jobs in Genoa and Milan required him to spend his weeks between the two cities and Amelia and Nello decided to join him for the next few months. By coincidence, Marion was on the train that took them north; she was much hurt when Nello pretended not to see her. She was sure, she wrote sadly to Salvemini, that he and Amelia, so apprehensive after the loss of one son, would keep a close watch on Carlo all winter. What she feared, in her revolutionary heart, was that they would entice him back into their comfortable world, and that then he would never achieve anything politically. Because, as she put it, ‘that world is like a heavy eiderdown which suffocates every generous impulse, and in which a man of character or an act of daring cannot exist’.

The Rossellis were all in Genoa when Anna Kuliscioff died soon after Christmas 1925. The funeral took place on a very foggy New Year’s Eve in Milan. Flowers and wreaths poured in from all over Europe, and Turati laid a cushion of violets on the coffin. Thousands of people came to pay their respects to this remarkable woman, calling out ‘Viva Turati! Viva il maestro!’ as the coffin was carried past. But among the crowds were many fascists. Setting about the mourners with their cudgels, they ripped the ribbons from the wreaths and tried to break through the cordon of friends guarding the coffin, which was almost tipped over in the scrum. Turati had to be helped to escape by climbing over the cemetery wall. He and Kuliscioff had been together for almost forty years; he despaired of a life without her.

This was only the first of several painful deaths. Amendola, unable to recover from his last attack, died of his repeated injuries in Cannes. He was just forty-three. Lina Waterfield, who visited him shortly before, wrote that he was calm and not at all bitter. Amendola had been, Carlo wrote to Gina Lombroso, a ‘second Matteotti . . . the best of men during the worst of times’.

Next to die was Piero Gobetti, alone in a hospital in Paris. He had stayed on in Turin for the birth of his son Paolo, then left for exile in Paris, telling a friend that it was a sad thing to be ‘spaesato’, ejected from one’s country. Ada and Paolo were due to follow shortly. But Gobetti had been much weakened by his many beatings. On 11 February 1926, he came down with bronchitis and was unable to shake it off. Four days later, he was dead. He was twenty-five. In his short life, he had edited three periodicals, founded a publishing house and written several books of history and politics. At a memorial gathering in his book-lined study in Turin, a friend spoke of him as a captain, who had led his troops to their first victory, then vanished like one of the mythical heroes of antiquity. Gobetti’s mantle, he went on, should now pass to Carlo, who would inherit his ‘bloodstained legacy’.

‘When everything that crushes and humiliates us now is over,’ Salvemini wrote to Ada in one of the thousands of letters she received praising her young husband, ‘then he will be remembered as one of the noblest and most effective’ of all the thinkers who had begun the anti-fascist movement.

‘I weep for you, Signora mia,’ wrote Carlo. ‘I don’t know what else to do or say.’