CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Dancing for Liberty

‘I am not living, I am burning,’ Carlo wrote to Amelia in late 1930, six months after reaching Paris. Describing his life as ‘cyclonic’, he said that the days were devouring him. After the years of enforced inactivity on Lipari, he seemed possessed by the need to move, to meet people, to plan. He was everywhere, talking, organising, travelling. Marion, pregnant, with palpitations and constantly tired, was sometimes bitter and reproachful. She told him one day that Mirtillino, was asking ‘Where has Daddy gone?’ On another: ‘I am not at all happy, dear Carlo . . . I am also sick of so many paper kisses!!! . . . Very angry. Addio.’ Carlo was apologetic, but also stern. ‘You have always understood the importance of what I do,’ he wrote from one of his many journeys away from Paris. ‘It is an opera santa, a great and sacred cause, and even you must see that everything, except for the health of the children, has to be sacrificed to it.’ What Marion really minded was not being able to be part of it all; and when alone boredom quickly turned to depression.

By 1930, most of the Italian anti-fascists in exile who were not communists were envisaging a constitutional democracy once fascism fell but, believing that socialism would ultimately prevail, they preferred to analyse, rail and dream rather than to act. The communists, for their part, remained faithful to Marxism and a totalitarian ideology. Carlo, Lussu and Nitti still did not agree with what they saw as the Concentrazione Antifascista’s culpable passivity. Since Mussolini’s ‘ruthless fanaticism’ used violent methods, the only way to oppose it, they maintained, was through violence; since all legal means were closed, only illegal ones were left; since the old left-wing parties were mired in a failed past, and in any case political parties were too ponderous to respond dynamically, then what was needed was a wide-based, united fighting force.

Socialismo Liberale, Carlo’s one major theoretical work, its themes endlessly refined on Lipari and further hashed out in Paris with Tarchiani and Salvemini, was published in French in December 1930. It advocated the two Mazzinian ideals of republican liberty and social justice; a separation between Marxism and socialism on account of the deterministic nature of Marxism, and an overhaul of socialism to make it less sclerotic. Italy should pursue a mixed economy, agrarian reform, and an end to the complacent monarchy and the complicit paternalism of the Vatican. Local committees could lay down the basis of a new state, to be completed once the fascists fell by a constituent assembly, elected by universal suffrage. But first, a militant vanguard, ‘small nuclei’ of active fighters, would prepare the path towards the liberation of Italy, after which freedom for all citizens would follow.

There was more. It was not merely a question, said Carlo, of overthrowing a bad regime, but of putting in its place a ‘civilisation’. Like Gobetti, he believed that ethics, politics and culture should go hand in hand; like Amelia, that people should be responsible for their own actions. The difference between the fascists and the anti-fascists, he argued, lay not in matters of class but in moral sensibility: his ‘creative revolution’ envisaged spiritual redemption as a precursor to the renewal of the nation and its culture. In this, intellectuals had an important role to play in re-educating a people ‘suborned by an ignorant and brutal dictatorship’. Italians had been made ‘morally lazy’ by fascism.

It would be a mistake to try to pin down too neatly Carlo’s proposed new state. His ideas were not without flaws and even Salvemini found some of them a bit of an enigma. But what inspired him chiefly was the desire to destroy Mussolini as soon as possible. In any case, he regarded this concept of freedom not as static but as something fluid, constantly renewed in debate and argument, a set of rules for civil society rather than a collection of principles cast in stone. Carlo had sent his first draft to Nello, who commented: ‘You really are a star.’

He had expected criticism from others. But he was not prepared for the tidal wave of indignation and opprobrium which followed the publication of his book. The anarchists declared that he was far too respectful of government and state. The communists said that he was too privileged. His much-loved friend Turati called him a ‘presumptuous little bourgeois’, a ‘reactionary dilettante’, and said that by contrast Gobetti had been a serious scholar. Other communists called him a ‘socialfascista’. Claudio Treves announced that Carlo was in truth neither a liberal nor a socialist. Croce, who joined in the attacks from Italy, said that his ideas were like the mythical hircocervus, half-stag, half-goat, ‘an absurd and aesthetically unpleasant combination that purported to attach the rough, rude and shaggy body of socialist to the long and agile legs of liberalism’. The pages of the opposition papers in exile were filled with similar attacks, many of them vituperative and extremely hurtful, particularly when written by people he considered close friends. While the backbiting rumbled on, Carlo turned resolutely to what he really believed in: action.

The few young anti-fascists still at liberty in Italy had meanwhile formed themselves precariously into the very kind of networks Carlo was looking for. There was a small, mainly republican group in Rome; some followers of Gobetti in Turin; the railway-worker and Non Mollare distributor Traquandi in Florence; Lussu’s friends in Sardinia; more republicans in Trieste. In Milan, there were Carlo’s three close friends: Riccardo Bauer, austere, well-educated editor, recently released from Lipari; Ferruccio Parri, who had just benefited from an amnesty; and the lively, bold, brilliant, mocking Ernesto Rossi, Salvemini’s third spiritual son, considered by some to be a complete ‘madman’. A chemist, Umberto Ceva, who had helped with the escape from Lipari, provided invisible ink for their communications.

For a while there had also been Sandro Pertini, the young man who had escaped to France with Turati. He had proposed getting hold of bombs and clock parts and setting them off under the Palazzo Venezia, a plan that had to be abandoned when it was discovered that Bocchini, ever haunted about Mussolini’s safety, had not only had steel bars welded over all the basement entrances, but formed a ‘squadra di sottosuolo’ to patrol the sewers. In any case Pertini, who had slipped back into Italy, had been recognised by a childhood friend since turned fascist, subsequently picked up by the police, and was now serving a 10 year, 9 month sentence in solitary confinement in prison in the port of Santo Stefano, where ‘exemplary punishments’ with the manganello were often meted out by the guards. Pertini’s friends, following his fate, knew precisely what they risked.

Bauer and Parri had immediately joined forces with various friends in Milan who had been working under the name of Italia Libera to help prisoners’ families, arrange clandestine crossings to France and Switzerland, and send information on the fascists to those in exile in Paris. After his abrupt departure with Salvemini from Florence in 1925, Rossi, like Pertini, had infiltrated himself back into Italy – Rossi was a common Italian name – and managed to get a job teaching law and economics in a technical institute in Bergamo, avoiding Florence, where his mother Elide and sister Serenella lived. Elide was a woman in Amelia’s mould: brave, dignified, uncomplaining, as close to Ernesto as Amelia was to her two sons.

Travelling around Italy with two large suitcases full of clandestine material, his black eyes shining with honesty and passion, Rossi had managed to cross the border into France undetected on six separate occasions. He told Salvemini that he was not so much a man of politics as a sceptic, and that what really mattered to him was sympathy and instinct. He had recently become involved with Ada, a teacher of mathematics from the University of Pavia whose surname also happened to be Rossi. A fervent Garibaldian, she, like him, was leading a double life. The police were not fooled. A report by the head of the carabinieri in Bergamo described her as a ‘profound hater of fascism’ and said that she needed close watching. Few of the leading anti-fascists were women, but occasionally one would carry material in false-bottomed suitcases over the border, and these women were known as fenicotteri, flamingoes.

Bauer and Rossi, using invisible ink and writing between the lines of a French textbook, had sent Carlo, Nitti and Lussu warm congratulations on their escape and an outline of plans for actions to be carried out inside Italy. Rossi’s risky crossings had been replaced with a more secure route via socialist friends in Ticino and Lugano, where a young Greek scholar called Pietro Zani collected messages and propaganda material, hid them behind the panels in his car, and delivered them to couriers in Milan. Bauer’s diminutive and combative housekeeper, Rina dei Cas, kept their most precious notes on her at all times.

What the Milanese group proposed, in a manifesto called Consigli sulla Tattica, ‘Advice on Tactics’, was a two-tier approach: the education of the masses and the setting up of small cadres of active fighters to carry out very noisy, very public, very embarrassing attacks ‘with courage and sacrifice’. ‘We gathered around us’, wrote Bauer later, ‘the best, the dispersed, the believers, the young. We danced for liberty, for the republic, for social justice.’

This was precisely what Carlo had in mind: insurrection, through ‘squadre d’azione’, taking the greatest care to avoid harming innocent bystanders. Indiscriminate killing, Carlo and Salvemini agreed, was a ‘terrorist act’, and therefore illegitimate; ‘assassination’ and ‘tyrannicide’ were legitimate responses to state violence. Lussu, the self-styled Jacobin, regarded by the others as a brilliant logician, was put in charge of devising spectacular actions. Leaflets and pamphlets, written by members of Giustizia e Libertà – now known as giellisti – began to arrive over the border.

In Rome, Bocchini and Nudi were chafing over their continuing failure to produce culprits for the Milan bombing; the documents on the case filled fifty-five fat volumes. It was a clever young colleague of Bocchini’s, Guido Leto, who now proposed putting the blame on the giellisti, about whom they kept hearing rumours. Word had reached Rome that the printing of their material was being done in Milan and not in Paris, and that the conspirators met in the Café Tantal in Via Silvio Pellico. Two suspects were immediately arrested. Although Polpol and OVRA were never vicious in the way of the Gestapo, they were not altogether averse to using torture to get people to confess. One night, the two suspects were taken to the mortuary, shown the bloody remains of the victims of the bombing, and had their feet burned and their testicles squashed before being held for many hours in agonising positions.

Milan was clearly crucial. But Bocchini realised that it was Paris where the true heart of the conspiracy lay. He recruited more spies and ordered them to France to gather information, contacts, addresses, means of communication. Then were posted to ports and put on merchant ships; others were placed on the railways to act as couriers. A Captain Rey, controller of the wagons-lits between Rome and Boulogne-sur-Mer, was noted as having a ‘zèle débordant’ for fascism; in the Paris secret-service notes, he was described with ‘very piercing eyes’, a small face and a little moustache en brosse. Another useful man was a sly and resourceful policeman called Guido Valiani, attached to the Italian embassy in Paris, who smoked little Tuscan cigars, spoke French with an execrable accent, but knew everyone. Yet another was Livio Bini, who passed himself off as a Florentine socialist in exile and was a very canny exploiter of weak or deluded refugees. Then there was a journalist called Aldo Borella, who wrote meticulous reports, excelled at combing hotel registers for hidden information, and was paired up with one of OVRA’s most formidable emissaries to Paris, Vincenzo Bellavia, known as ‘Acquarone’. Discreet and manipulative, Bellavia was said to have several French policemen in his pay. He was given the specific task of watching Carlo. There was also the former director of a cooperative in Ravenna, Antonio Bondi, who longed to recant and go home, but was persuaded first to worm his way into the Giustizia e Libertà offices. All these men were in a delicate position. They had to be plausible, able to explain away the fact that they had money to live on, and they had to produce and stick to believable stories about their pasts. If rumbled by the anti-fascist community, the spies ran the risk of summary justice or vengeance against their families still in Italy.

Soon, reports from these men were arriving in Rome, either by special letter-drops in hotels or private houses, or poste restante to the main post office in the Piazza San Silvestro. They would be collected, typed up in three copies for the various archives, and a summary sent every afternoon to Bocchini, who extracted the most important information and passed it on to Mussolini. In the Ministry of Information, 400 shorthand typists were kept busy transcribing intercepted letters and conversations picked up in phone taps or prison cells. One report spoke of Rosselli proposing a ‘series of attacks’, and of the absolute necessity of getting rid of the ‘capo’. Another named Lussu as the ‘supreme commander of all the armed forces of the anti-fascist revolution’. Several others mentioned that quantities of explosive material were being shipped around.

The fact that many of these reports were full of exaggeration, invention and mystification only played to Bocchini’s fears about Mussolini’s safety. There was one wild assertion that terror attacks were about to be launched from Corsica, another that squads of militiamen were being trained in Paris. One of the more fanciful had Marion falling in love with Bassanesi, being forbidden by a jealous Carlo to visit him in Brussels, and having a row with Signora Nitti because, ‘being a hysteric, she had apparently made suggestive proposals’ to her husband. Though often absurd, the result of these daily bulletins was a climate of growing determination in Rome to break this ‘odious and criminal anti-fascism’.

It would prove surprisingly easy to pull off a first victory. For the anti-fascists were turning out to be extraordinarily gullible and none more so than the easy-going and credulous Carlo, whose instinct was to trust everyone.

Bocchini made one further recruitment before setting his trap.

Carlo del Re was a twenty-nine-year old lawyer, a Freemason, a polyglot, an extrovert, always willing and very presentable. He came from Friuli and had a pale face, floppy black hair, and a scar along his right cheek from an accident in which he had also lost two fingers on his left hand. For a while, acting as a lawyer for receiverships, del Re had made a lot of money. But he was a gambler. The day came when he owed 124,000 lire in poker debts: he was ordered either to pay them or go to jail. But there was a third option, that of selling his friends in Milan to the fascists, and he took it. Through a distant friendship with Italo Balbo, the Minister of Aviation, he was introduced to Bocchini.

With friends among the former left-wing journalists in Milan, del Re was just the man Bocchini was looking for. They made a deal. Del Re would infiltrate the group of anti-fascists suspected to be working in Milan, and if possible trace the network back to Carlo in Paris. Then he was to pin the Milan bombing on to Giustizia e Libertà, and to rake as many people as he could into the conspiracy. In return, his debt would be paid off, he would be guaranteed total secrecy and, once the group was ‘liquidated’, a job. Bocchini forwarded the proposal to Mussolini, who simply wrote ‘Si’ on it.

Del Re set about his task with a degree of pleasure because among his many accomplishments he liked to think of himself as an actor. He went to Paris, met Carlo and Salvemini, and urged them to think up some really big action, preferably with explosives. Because he was able to travel in and out of Italy with no trouble, he was soon their preferred courier to liaise with Bauer, Rossi and Parri in Milan. Professing to have Masonic connections, he made friends among Paris’s Italian Masons, also high on the list of Bocchini’s suspects. Soon, he had become indispensable to Carlo.

Since the possession of explosives was useful in establishing guilt, del Re persuaded the chemist Ceva in Milan to experiment in making phosphorous bombs in one of their bathrooms. As luck would have it, exposure to air caused the phosphorous to explode, del Re’s jacket caught fire and Rossi put out the flames with his hands, burning himself in the process. Del Re urged them to make more bombs, but Ceva, a mild, retiring man, never keen on violence, refused. They were surprised when del Re got angry and argumentative, and even more surprised when he followed and watched when they insisted on taking the ruined explosives and throwing them into the river Brembo.

Del Re made a second attempt to plant bombs when he tried to persuade Carlo, in his Paris flat, to fill the seasonal panettoni with dynamite and send them to fascist officials. Carlo, appalled, refused. He would not dream, he said, of killing children on Christmas Day. Next, del Re engineered a meeting in a cemetery in Milan, attended by Ceva and Rossi, so that plainclothed policemen could photograph them. By now, he had amassed an impressive list of names and addresses of giellisti suspects.

Despite Ceva’s misgivings, plans were progressing to let off explosives in front of seven tax offices in different parts of Italy simultaneously. Because there had been so many botched attempts at capturing the group red-handed, Bocchini decided he could wait no longer. In any case, Mussolini was expressing considerable irritation at the delay and calling for ‘arrests on a vast scale’. On 27 October, 1930, the day before the eighth anniversary of the March on Rome, he struck.

Bauer, Ceva and Parri were picked up in Milan; Rossi was arrested from his institute in Bergamo; Traquandi was caught in Florence; several others in Rome. Bauer’s sister Adele, finding him gone from home, suggested to Ada Rossi that they ask del Re what was going on; the spy’s manner was so ‘urbane and strange’ that she hastened away to warn others. Del Re reported to Bocchini that Ada had told him that she had been able to destroy a lot of evidence. She was, he said, a ‘nihilist’ with ‘terrorist tendencies’ and extremely dangerous.

Ernesto Rossi and his mother Elide

That day, twenty-four people were caught. Most of them were professors, lawyers and journalists, described as ‘whisperers, sowers of alarm and discontent’. They were transferred to Rome, to be held in solitary confinement in the prison of Regina Coeli. Mussolini was reported to be calling for the death penalty for the ringleaders, accused of being terrorists, bomb-makers, insurrectionists and assassins, in league with plotters abroad. They were put into death cells.

Del Re still had hopes of luring Carlo and Tarchiani into a trap. He phoned them from Lugano, asking them to come south urgently to give him orders. They told him to come to Paris instead. Rumours had reached them of a man with two missing fingers being a spy, and del Re’s name had been mentioned. Del Re caught a train north and turned up in Carlo’s flat, where, clearly uneasy, he proceeded to tell a confused and tangled story. Carlo ordered him to produce his wallet: it was found to contain a small fortune in cash. Characteristically, Carlo let him go back to his hotel, having made him promise to return next day. After all, as he said later, he was not a killer. Del Re vanished.

Ernesto Rossi, meanwhile, had very nearly managed to escape. On the train taking him south to Rome late at night, he had made friends with his four guards, who had obligingly handcuffed him in front rather than behind. The carriage was extremely hot and stuffy. The guards dozed off. Rossi, helped by the sweat on his wrists, wriggled his way out of the cuffs. Because he had often made the journey, he knew that a moment would come when the train was forced to slow down. He eased the window up, and, before they could stop him, squeezed out. He fell hard, next to the rails, and briefly fainted. As he came to, he heard shouts and began to run; the guards had pulled the communication cord, but it was not working and the train carried on. It was now one in the morning. He came to a house, pushed his way in, and found a husband and wife in bed, ‘naked, enormous, fat, terrified’. He explained who he was. The man leapt out of bed, shouted at him, and drove him from the house. He ran on towards the pinewoods near Viareggio, and lay on the sand until a storm drove him to take shelter in a beach hut. He moved on again, met a man with a horse and cart who refused to help him, and finally reached a naval barracks.

Dawn was just breaking. Rossi, who had lost his jacket and his coat, was freezing. He approached the barracks where the sailors, who were just getting up, seemed friendly. They gave him some food and lit a fire for him to warm himself; they listened to his story, but then handed him over to the carabinieri.

It took Ada several weeks to discover that he too was now in the Regina Coeli. She was told that all the ‘Milanese dynamiters’ were in solitary confinement and had been turned over entirely to OVRA. Rossi coped by keeping himself fanatically neat in jail and insisted on polishing his shoes, something he later said stopped him from contemplating suicide.

Bocchini’s men had been quick to realise that the unassuming Ceva, alone in his cell, was defenceless and trusting. They played on his sense of guilt and loyalty and soon managed to persuade him that he had told them enough to incriminate the others, and that they intended to portray him in court as a traitor. The lonely days passed obsessively; to distract himself, Ceva solved mathematical problems in his head. Late on Christmas night, he decided that he could bear it no longer. He broke his spectacles, ground up the glass, mixed it with some mints and citric acid, and swallowed it; he died the next morning, in agony, soon after 7 o’clock. From his nearby cell, Rossi listened to his groans.

Ceva was a devoted husband and father. Before dying, he wrote two letters. The one to his wife Elena was long, full of memories and regrets and advice about how to bring up their two children. ‘My angel . . . forgive me. Not for what I am about to do, but because I was blind, lacking in judgement, unthinking over things that one should not take lightly. I didn’t realise . . . No one should mourn me.’ To Police Inspector Nudi, Ceva wrote that he had committed no crime, that his conscience was clear, and that he had been inspired only by ‘an overwhelming love of liberty’. ‘I never had, living my happy peaceful life, a sense of the reality of things . . . or of the perils towards which I was walking.’ But, he added, he feared being manipulated by the prosecution into incriminating del Re, a man he considered his friend.

Umberto Cevo with his youngest child

Ceva died still believing in del Re’s honesty but the others were quickly disabused. In Milan and Paris rumours of del Re’s treachery spread. On the walls of the prison yard in the Regina Coeli, Rossi used a bit of chalk to write: ‘Del Re is a spy for the regime.’ Elena Ceva was besieged by sympathetic visitors, among them Benedetto Croce and Toscanini. Bauer and Rossi, perceived as the ringleaders, were now in great danger of being executed by firing squad, and Carlo and Salvemini launched an international campaign to save their lives. In their letters and articles for the newspapers, Carlo referred to his two friends as ‘my brothers’, and Salvemini spoke of del Re as an ‘agent provocateur’. The Manchester Guardian published an appeal signed by thirty European intellectuals, from Arnold Toynbee to Thomas Mann, asking that the trial be held, not before the Special Tribunal, but in an open court. Only Bernard Shaw refused to sign, saying that though he did not agree with everything the fascists did, he still admired their work. Carlo tried to persuade some of his highly placed Conservative friends to bring pressure on the British government to advise Mussolini to behave with moderation. As Salvemini pointed out, criticism from abroad ‘was hitting him precisely at his weakest point’.

What became known as the ‘Trial of the Intellectuals’ opened in the Palace of Justice in Rome on 29 May 1931. The accused were in an iron cage. Women were banned from attending, which meant that neither Elena Ceva nor Rossi’s mother Elide was present. Not long before, Rossi’s much-loved sister Serenella had committed suicide, pushed over the brink by the horrors of his arrest. At three that same morning, Michele Schirru, an anarchist who had confessed to planning to murder Mussolini, and who, when caught, shot and wounded several policemen, had been executed. It was the first time that an intention rather than an act had been punished by death, and sent a clear message that this was the fate intended for those in the dock.

It quickly became apparent that Bauer and Rossi took full responsibility for every aspect of Giustizia e Libertà in Italy – though not, of course, for the Milan bombing. The remains of the explosives, retrieved from the Brembo with del Re’s help, were produced in court. Rossi gave an account of del Re’s perfidy, describing himself again as ‘distinctly and decisively anti-fascist’. Bauer, as he had in the Savona trial, turned the proceedings into an attack on the fascist regime. He had felt it his duty, he said, to try to break the cycle of violence and subjugation into which Italy had been plunged. Liberty, he declared, had been reduced to a ‘putrefying cadaver’, but he was convinced that the days of freedom would one day return. The thought of freedom alone would comfort and accompany him in the loneliness of his cell. His words were long remembered and quoted. There were brave cheers in the court, and even the president admitted that his speech had been ‘noble’.

Bauer and Rossi’s obvious moral honesty and courage paid off, and the campaign waged by Carlo and Salvemini clearly helped. The two men received prison sentences of twenty years each. Traquandi was given seven years. Parri, for whom no evidence of involvement could be proved, was absolved, but since he was deemed ‘capable of committing further acts’, he was ordered back to Lipari, where conditions had deteriorated further and TB was now rife. He begged to be allowed to go somewhere near a library and where the pains from the frostbite he still suffered after his first stay on Lipari might be treated. His request was refused. ‘The island’, a prisoner had written not long before, ‘is turning into a cemetery.’ The other fifteen people in the dock received short sentences or were freed for lack of evidence.

The Trial of the Intellectuals was considered a great coup for Bocchini. Mussolini used the occasion to announce that the Special Tribunal would be renewed for another five years. For the antifascists, 1931 had been a lethal year: 519 people had, between them, received sentences totalling 2016 years. Del Re was given 44,000 lire and a new name; in terror of retribution, he caught a boat for South America.

Ada was sacked from her teaching job in Bergamo and gave herself up to planning Rossi’s escape. Rossi’s mother Elide told Salvemini that she had never felt the need to appear strong so keenly, for Serenella and Ernesto had been very close and she feared what the solitary confinement in which he was being kept might do to her son. To a friend, she wrote: ‘I am so unspeakably sad that every moment is an effort’; when praised for her powers of resistance it seemed to her ‘almost like irony’. On one of her few permitted visits, she found her son in tears, but he asked her to say to Salvemini and Carlo that he thought about them all the time and that their friendship gave him courage. ‘Only my resignation and my serenity’, Elide said to Salvemini, ‘can save him.’ Forbidden to write anything, he had taken to scrawling on his window with a bar of soap until that too was taken away from him. It was Rossi who famously said, referring to the soup served in prison: ‘After the third worm, stop.’

On one of her own visits to Rossi, Ada suggested that they get married. The ceremony was performed by the local podestà on the anniversary of her own parents’ wedding, and they hoped to be as happy. She managed to get him moved to a prison in the north, which made visits easier. With the help of Carlo, who sent her money and a false passport, she explored the possibility of getting him out through the prison sewers. When that proved unworkable, she used the money to bribe a compliant guard and a helpful garage mechanic, but that too failed. When Rossi was abruptly transferred back to the Regina Coeli, she resigned herself to preparing courses in algebra, trigonometry, psychoanalysis, the classics and American literature, which she took to him in prison, and which he then shared with the others. Study kept them sane.

In January 1931, even as del Re’s machinations were continuing to unfold around him, Carlo found a new flat at 5 Place du Panthéon on the Left Bank; he was delighted by the move, saying that Passy was too philistine and he wanted to be near the Sorbonne and the constant bustle of young people in the streets. On 12 March, Marion gave birth to a boy; they called him Andrea, but he was soon known as ‘Aghi’ or ‘Eghi’. Marion had had two children in less than a year; she was thirty-four, but looked older. When Amelia arrived in Paris soon after the birth, she found the household in disarray. As Carlo wrote to Nello, it was all ‘assai pasticciato’, a bit of a mess; whenever either of her sons were in difficulties, they sent for Amelia. An informer reported to Rome that Marion was ‘very depressed, with bad heart troubles. She will soon die of a heart attack.’

On 14 April, elections in Spain brought a republic to power; King Alfonso XIII abdicated and left for France, where there was much rejoicing among the exiles. ‘The Spanish revolution moves and elates me!’ Carlo wrote to Nello. ‘Maybe in Italy too dawn will break.’ As the head of Giustizia e Libertà in Paris, he told his brother, he believed that he had ‘magnificent duties’ to go at once to lend solidarity to the new leaders, but these clashed, he admitted, with the ‘sacred duties’ he owed his family. ‘Nellino,’ he wrote, ‘help me and above all understand me . . . I am so happy to see a chink in the grey horizon.’

The magnificent duties prevailed; it was too exciting a moment to miss. Leaving Marion recuperating in a hotel in Cap d’Antibes with Mirtillino, and his mother in charge of the two younger children in Paris, Carlo took off for Barcelona. Tarchiani and Bassanesi went with him; Carlo, who loved speed and had no respect for highway laws, did the driving. At Perpignan he lost the car keys, but when new ones had been cut and they had hastened on to Barcelona, he found it all ‘majestic’. After the grey and lowering worries of Paris, he loved the light and the countryside and the fervour of the new republic. In Madrid, he had meetings with Manuel Azaña, architect of the new socialist-republican alliance, and a celebrated pilot called Ramón Franco. Carlo was hoping to win support and backing for new flights over Italy, but at dinner one night he quarrelled with Bassanesi, who suggested that they drop not leaflets but bombs over Piazza Venezia. What, he asked sharply, about the innocent civilians below? His letters to Marion were excited. Madrid, he told her, was ‘frantic and feverish’ and he longed for the day when he would see the same in Italy. A bullfight had first disgusted then entertained him. The Prado was magnificent. ‘Rest,’ he told her, ‘grow strong and above all be calm . . . Addio, dear little thing.’

Marion’s answers, perhaps not surprisingly, were curt. ‘I envy you your lack of preoccupation with those far away . . . I wish that I loved you a little less so as not to suffer quite so much when you are materially and spiritually absent . . . A kiss from your Marionellina, who has become old old and is the mother of three children.’ She was having constant palpitations, and Amelia told Zia Gì that the doctor had said they were due at least in part to her nervous state; he ordered her to stop taking her temperature. Contrite, Carlo begged her to be patient. With their friends in jail, having made so many sacrifices, how could she not see that it was his ‘tragic and imperative duty’ to battle on? Marion too was now contrite. Her health was better and she and Mirillino were going back to Paris. It was just that she felt cut out of everything and she wanted so badly to be part of it all. And if ‘for two days I don’t hear from you, then the world goes black’. They made it up. Admitting that his visit to Spain had yielded little, he wrote: ‘We love each other too much. I love you.’ Spain, he told her, was ‘delicious’ but ‘extremely Latin’.

At 8 o’clock on the evening of 3 October 1931, a snowdrift of 400,000 white leaflets floated down from the sky above the Palazzo Venezia, where Mussolini was sitting in council. For almost half an hour the little plane circled 300 metres above central Rome, down the Corso, past Palazzo Chigi and then over the Spanish Steps and the gardens of the Quirinale. It was still just light and the streets were crowded with people going home from work: they picked up the leaflets and read appeals for them to abandon ‘the most tyrannical and corrupt of governments’. And then the plane flew off, never to be seen again. The only mention in the Italian papers was that it was the work of ‘una carogna’, a skunk.

The Pegasus, as the plane was called, was flown not by a member of Giustizia e Libertà, but by a twenty-nine-year-old poet and dramatist, Lauro de Bosis, best known for Icarus, his verse play about the man who dreamt of a new world in which all would be free and equal. As a boy, de Bosis had been inspired by D’Annunzio and had later worked for the Italian American Society in New York, peopled increasingly by fascist supporters. But, as with Carlo and Nello, Matteotti’s murder had changed the course of his life. Having got to know Salvemini and Don Sturzo, and become the lover of the American actress Ruth Draper, he had founded the Alleanza Nazionale with friends, writing pamphlets calling on ‘men of order’ to bring back a more honest Italian government. He was in America when his friends were arrested, tortured and given long prison sentences. When a photocopier was discovered under her bed in Rome, the fascists also arrested his sixty-six-year-old American mother for helping with the pamphlets. Asked why she had done so, she reminded them that Mussolini had declared Italy to be a country of 40 million good sheep ‘ready to give their wool to the regime: and I am not a sheep’. De Bosis decided to ‘bear a message of liberty across the sea to people in chains’. The three plagues of Italy, fascism, monarchy and the Vatican, he told Salvemini, ‘must all be eliminated, one by one’.

Though friends begged him not to, de Bosis moved to Paris and cycled every day to an airfield near Versailles, where he learnt to fly. He made friends with Dolci, who described to him Bassanesi’s flight over Milan. De Bosis was a solitary figure, with something childlike and innocent about him. He bought the Pegasus in Germany, and took off for Rome from Corsica. The weather was good, the temperature 25 degrees, and the meteorological office reported clear skies all the way. A last photograph taken of him leaning against his plane shows a good-looking man in a suit, bow tie and white shirt. He probably never believed that he would survive; there was fuel enough for only part of the way back. Before leaving Corsica, he wrote a six-page testament and left it with a friend. The problem, he wrote in ‘The Story of My Death’, was that no one took fascism seriously. ‘This is a mistake. It is necessary to die. I hope that after me others will follow and rouse public opinion . . . they will reap what I have sown.’ To Ruth Draper he wrote: ‘Be happy for my sake! not only proud but happy . . . I could not have wished for a happier solution to my wish to serve my country and my ideals.’ It was later thought that the Pegasus had gone down 40–100 kilometres from the coast of Corsica. De Bosis’ testament was published in Le Soir in Brussels, the Sunday Times in London and the New York Times. Mussolini was reported to be enraged; several airforce officers lost their jobs.

Carlo followed de Bosis’ adventures with interest. Though the republicans in Spain had not followed up their goodwill with any practical help, he was still pushing ahead with plans for a new flight of his own, spurred on by the increasingly over-excited Bassanesi. This time, the idea was to fly from Konstanz in Germany over both Turin and Milan, where giellisti would organise demonstrations of support. A highly dubious German former army officer, Viktor Haefner, who had been jailed on various occasions for selling military secrets and for fraud, volunteered to produce a plane. Carlo paid 9,000 marks for a second-hand Junker Junior and at the end of October he and Tarchiani set out for Konstanz with 350,000 anti-fascist leaflets in the boot of their car.

There was almost nothing about the plan that was sensible. Bassanesi, who had taken to adopting the most improbable pseudonyms, was by now well known to informers and police forces all over Europe, as were Carlo and Tarchiani; de Bosis’ flight had put security at airports on alert; and news had already been sent out by Bocchini’s men about a possible flight by Italian exiles. On 11 November the conspirators met at the airstrip and loaded the leaflets on board. It had been raining hard, and the ground was not just covered in thick grass but very muddy. With the still inexperienced Bassanesi at the controls, the Junker lumbered its way down the airstrip, narrowly missed the terminal, and crashed into a ditch. Undaunted, they unloaded the leaflets, put them back in the car, and decided to try again the following day. But in the morning the police were waiting. Bassanesi was arrested as he approached the plane; Carlo and Tarchiani, observing what was happening, took off in their car unseen, but the French secret services put out an alert for a ‘yellow-brown, 4 door Ford Cabriolet, with 2 spare wheels’. At Freiburg, near the border, it was spotted by a sharp-eyed youth, who reported the foreign number plate to the police, who quickly linked it to the botched Konstanz flight.

‘Bin in haft aber gesund Brief folgt.’ ‘I am well but in jail. Letter follows,’ Carlo cabled Marion.

In Konstanz prison, Carlo’s cell was warm and clean. Meals were sent in by a local restaurant. As ever, he was cheerful, uncomplaining and optimistic. ‘No candidate for martyrdom this time,’ he wrote to Marion, asking her to send pyjamas, socks, toothpaste and German books so that he could ‘take up the broken threads of my intellectual work’. Marion noted dryly that she was enjoying being useful and pleased to discover that ‘the stupid life I lead has neither rusted nor put me to sleep’. On 16 November, Carlo celebrated his thirty-second birthday with a loving telegram from Amelia. Requests arrived in Paris for more books and deliveries of the Corriere della Sera, the Manchester Guardian and Le Temps. To Mirtillino, Carlo wrote that prison was not at all bad and that he was going to bed every evening at the same time as the children. With so many of his friends in jail in Italy, he said that he was enjoying a rare sense of communion. ‘When I am free,’ he wrote lovingly to Marion, ‘we’ll have a second and a third honeymoon.’ But Marion, after her initial burst of revolutionary energy, had fallen into loneliness and anxiety. ‘No one writes to me any more,’ she commented sadly when letters failed to come from Nello and Amelia. Carlo begged her not to let herself be led astray by ‘distorting fantasies’. She said that she was dreading the coming winter, but taking comfort from five-year-old Mirtillino, to whom she was extremely close, and whose intelligence, she said, ‘resembles an explosion’.

Carlo was intending to repeat his success at the Savona trial and turn the occasion into a further public attack on the fascists; eminent European democrats were offering to act as witnesses in his defence. But having initially bombarded Germany with ever wilder accusations against the plotters, then realised that he would be giving Carlo another platform, Mussolini dropped all charges, though not before hundreds of the leaflets had been spirited out of police hands by German social democrats and posted into Italy. A possible ten-year prison sentence was turned into a fine and expulsion from Germany. The three men were freed. Cheated of his day in court, Carlo was comforted by a letter from Nello: ‘I am proud of you and your activities. Bit by bit, your name is being mentioned everywhere as a future leader in Italy . . . If you sometimes feel alone and unheeded, forget it . . . You will end up – we will end up – the victors as long as we never give up [non mollare], not for a moment, not by a hair on our body.’

Bold flights over Italian cities were now abandoned. They were too expensive, too unpredictable, too dangerous. Bassanesi continued to roam erratically around Europe, dreaming up ever madder schemes, alienating his friends by his truculence and closely watched by Bocchini’s spies. He finally took up with a pretty law student at the Sorbonne called Camilla Restellini, described by Turati as the ‘flower of exile’, and had four children with her. But the giellisti never quite trusted him again.