CHAPTER NINETEEN

A Corneillian Tragedy

It was not until 2 o’clock on the Friday afternoon that Marion, having heard nothing from Carlo, telephoned the Hotel Cordier. A surprised concierge told her that her husband had not been seen since the previous day. Soon after, a reporter rang the bell of the flat in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. On seeing his expression, Marion began to cry. The maid quickly pushed the reporter out of the door, saying that Marion had a bad heart. The man went round to the offices of Giustizia e Libertà, found Cianca, and told him that he had heard that Carlo was dead. Cianca hurried round to see Marion. Mirtillino, hearing agitated talk and then seeing his mother’s anguished face, thought at first that it was about money, because he had often heard his parents exchange angry words about the amount that Carlo was spending on the anti-fascists. Normally, she spoke to him in Italian. Now she said, in English, ‘Darling, Babbo has been killed.’

In Bagnoles, the bodies had not been discovered for some time. Two men returning home from the fields had come across the half-burnt car in the ditch, seen what looked like a bloodstained glove on the seat and reported it to the local mayor. A carthorse had been sent to pull the car back on to the road. But it was only on the Friday morning that a blacksmith called Henri Jarry, stopping to relieve himself by the side of the road as he cycled towards Bagnoles, spotted the two corpses. In the police report, Carlo was described as lying on his back, his left shoe and right glove missing; Nello was said to have his face pressed into the earth, his trouser legs pulled up to his knees. The autopsy confirmed signs of struggle, and many knife and bullet wounds. The dagger was found lying nearby. On Saturday 12 June, Marion arrived to identify the bodies. Inadvertently, Mirtillino later saw the photograph of his dead father and uncle; his first thought was that their bodies looked alien and somehow shrunken.

The first telegram that reached Florence was unclear: ‘Serious accident, come at once’. Amelia assumed that there had been some kind of car crash in Normandy, and that both Carlo and Nello had been injured. Maria, who was breastfeeding Alberto, was staying with Zia Gì at Il Frassine, but Amelia asked for a passport and was given one at once – Bocchini later told Mussolini that he thought this a sensible move – and she left by train for Paris. Aldo Forti, their close friend and tenant in the top flat in Via Giusti, insisted on accompanying her; his wife, terrified for his safety, made him promise to take the train straight back. What Amelia spent the long night thinking, as the train wound its slow way northwards, one can only imagine. Whatever desperate hopes she may have clung to were dispelled as soon as she reached the Gare de Lyon. On the platform were many reporters and photographers. It was enough to see their faces.

Amelia was already on the train when Marion telephoned Zia Gì to tell her what had happened. Fearing Maria’s despair, Zia Gì asked the local doctor, a close family friend, to break the news. Nello’s two boys, Aldo and Alberto, were too young to understand, but Silvia was now nine and Paola seven. Nothing was said to them. No one could quite bear to. Their grandmother Luisa arrived to collect the girls and take them to her house in Mugello. Days passed. When after a month the girls were finally collected by Zia Gì, Silvia asked: ‘How is Babbo?’ ‘Well,’ replied Zia Gì, ‘he has a bit of a cold.’ They found their mother in bed. She had decided to see them in her nightdress, to conceal her black mourning clothes. She started to speak, stopped, cried, then said that Nello had gone off on a long journey and would be away for some time. When one of the girls said: ‘I do hope that Babbo will be back soon,’ Maria faltered and replied that he was very ill.

It was Zia Gì, when they went to Il Frassine, who told them the truth. Silvia asked: ‘So is our mother a widow?’ Zia Gì said that she was. Paola said: ‘So we are orphans.’ Then Silvia asked: ‘And Mellina and Andrea too?’ The girls were relieved when Zia Gì agreed: it made them feel less alone. But though they knew that their father was dead, when they saw Nello’s car driven back to the house, they thought that it was their father coming home.

News of Carlo’s death reached the Italian anti-fascists fighting in Spain on the evening of 15 June. Pietro Nenni wrote in his diary: ‘It was as if something broke inside us. I can’t sleep . . . Rosselli, Matteotti’s torch bearer.’ In Regina Coeli prison in Rome, Rossi and Bauer overheard the guards talking. Rossi said: ‘The future has suddenly become darker.’ To his mother, he wrote that the Rosselli brothers were part of his spiritual family, composed nowadays ‘almost all of the dead’, but who nonetheless felt more real and alive to him than the cell in which he lived. He and Bauer smuggled out a message written on cigarette paper saying that they would avenge Carlo and Nello’s deaths, but Salvemini, who was on a visit to Paris, decided not to make it public, on the grounds that it would only cause them more trouble, and they had enough of it already.

When the bodies were released by the police in Normandy and brought back to Paris, the coffins were taken to Rue Notre-Damedes-Champs for the wake. The many visitors, French and Italian, who came to pay their respects were received by Amelia and Marion, both of them grimly self-contained. They insisted on sitting all night by the bodies. The two coffins were draped in dark-red velvet, Carlo’s with the words ‘Giustizia e Libertà’ in black. The Rosselli cousins Sandro Levi and Sarina Nathan arrived from London. At some point during the long hours of darkness, Amelia said, in a low voice: ‘At times I seem to feel the cuts of the knife in my own flesh.’

Of all the close friends, only Lussu, who had hastened back from Spain when he heard the news, did not wish to see the bodies. Writing about Carlo later, he said that he could not bear to ‘see so much physical power destroyed’. He preferred to remember his friend, the man to whom he had talked almost every day for the last ten years, as he had known him, ‘youthful, smiling, his eyes kind and, after the war in Spain, more thoughtful and penetrating’. Later, Guglielmo Ferrero said that Aldo, Carlo and Nello had as boys represented everything that was best in the Italian tradition: a hunger to learn, respect for intelligence and morality, a liberal spirit, humane ideals, simplicity of manner and seriousness about life. ‘I feel lost,’ Amelia wrote to Maria of Nello. ‘I don’t know where to be. I want to stay where he is, I want to hear people talking about him, and yet I also want to flee. Far away from everyone.’ What haunted her was the memory of saying to Nello, when he offered to take her place and go to meet Carlo in Bagnoles: ‘Of course.’

The funeral took place on Saturday 19 June. Before leaving for Spain, Carlo had requested that Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony be played in case of his death at the front. Marion had got to know Toscanini during his occasional visits to Paris and she now asked him whether he would come to conduct at the funeral; he was not able to get away from London, but sent affectionate messages. The bodies had been taken to the hall of the Maison des Syndicats and here, before an enormous crowd, an orchestra played the Beethoven symphony. The street outside was lined with wreaths and summer flowers. As she listened to the first bars, Marion, who had been staunch and composed, put her face in her hands and began to cry. She was heard to say softly: ‘Addio, Carlo.’ Speaking of Carlo in his funeral address, Cianca made a promise: ‘In your name, we will continue the fight . . . We will commemorate you every day, your spirit living on in our actions. This is not a farewell. It’s a vow.’

Every Italian anti-fascist organisation, every left-wing French newspaper, every group of foreign exiles had called on people to follow the coffins to the cemetery of Père Lachaise. Some 200,000 people did. Many were in tears, but along with the sadness there was also considerable anger. At the front walked Marion, Cianca, Tarchiani, Lussu, all Carlo’s close friends in exile. One carried the beret that Carlo had worn in Spain. Behind them walked a long, largely silent crowd of men and women in their dark clothes: trade unionists, writers, members of Blum’s government, French intellectuals, and many friends. Nello and Carlo were buried side by side, in a plot in the middle of one of Père Lachaise’s northernmost sections, not far from Gobetti, Treves and Turati. A bunch of white hydrangeas had been laid on the coffins, with the words ‘La Mamma’. A photographer had followed the cortege, taking pictures of the principal mourners. Copies were soon on their way to Bocchini, the names of the most important anti-fascists neatly transcribed by Antonio Bondi on sheets of tracing paper carefully pasted on top.

Amelia did not join the cortege. For days, she had been ferociously self-contained. But as the coffins with her two sons were carried down the stairs, she let out a low moan of pain and horror. It was like that of a wounded animal. For the two days that they had lain together in the flat, she had been able to think of Carlo and Nello as boys, sleeping, side by side. Watching them go, she knew that she had lost them for ever.

It took some time for the truth about the killings to emerge. In Italy, Mussolini’s skilled propaganda machine put out a story that Carlo, a ‘little and ridiculous dictator’, had fallen foul of his left-wing associates, angry because he was making peace with the fascists and intended to return to Italy. His murderers were variously said to be Spanish anarchists, the Russian secret services or even the giellisti themselves. Giovanni Ansaldo, Carlo’s former friend and now editor of Il Telegrafo – and branded not long before by Carlo as ‘obscene’ and a ‘prostitute’ for having gone over to the fascists – wrote that Carlo was an unscrupulous, ambitious, ridiculous ‘despiser of men’, and that he had probably been killed because he had approved the death of Berneri, murdered recently in Barcelona. These rumours were so deftly circulated that even the London Times ran a story speculating that these were the reasons for the murders.

But the Rossellis had many friends, both in England and in France. In London, several prominent writers and politicians signed a letter to The Times, calling these allegations ‘monstruous’. Two days later, evidently embarrassed by its earlier incorrect stories, the paper published a second letter, this time from Marion, who wrote that Carlo had been faithful to the end to his ‘ideal of truth and liberty’, and that to say otherwise was ‘worse than a crime’. In France, while a few of the more rabid right-wing papers referred to Carlo as a terrorist and urged the government to rid itself of this kind of ‘leprosy’ – and a cartoon showed Mussolini addressing an officer with the words ‘And you can add Bagnoles-de-l’Orne to the list of our victories!’ – there was an outpouring of anger and grief.

In a letter carried by most of the mainstream papers, Pablo Picasso and André Breton were among a group of intellectuals who wrote that if the death of Matteotti had signalled the death of liberty in Italy, that of the Rosselli brothers had signed its death warrant in the whole of Europe. In letter after letter, article after article, Carlo’s intelligence, lucidity, erudition and courage were warmly praised. He had been, said Tarchiani, ‘the supreme physical and spiritual force of the second Italian Risorgimento’. It was by becoming such an evident future leader of Italy, said Carlo’s friends, that he had signed his own death warrant. Even Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the communists, who had been so critical of Carlo, declared that his party would ‘dip our flag in memory of Carlo and Nello, promising that we will do all that we can to avenge them’. Carlo himself had had a keen understanding of the powers of the press, and his own use of it – exposing Mussolini’s lies about Spain and printing the unhappy letters of the so-called volunteers – had unquestionably played a part in the decision to have him killed.

In Paris, the government remained uneasily silent. They had no wish to stir up trouble with the Italians. In any case, ten days later, Blum fell, to be replaced by another short-lived parliament.

Bocchini had boasted on several occasions that the anti-fascists had been crushed. Each time he had been proved wrong. But Carlo’s murder threw the exiles into paralysis and disarray, and even though Lussu and Cianca kept Giustizia e Libertà alive, it had been seriously weakened. It was certain that the fascists had intended to silence their opponents’ most visible and effective leader; but they were not sorry to get rid of Nello either, slowly emerging as one of Italy’s most impressive and independent-minded historians. The killings sent a useful message that the fascists were organised, powerful, dangerous and had a very long reach. On Carlo’s dossier in the Rome police archives was stamped the word ‘Morto’ in large, bold, purple lettering.

Of all the Rossellis’ friends, Salvemini, who had loved them like sons, was the most tenacious at getting to the truth. In July, he wrote an article for I Quaderni, under the headline ‘Il Mandante’, ‘The Principle’. In it, he formally accused Mussolini of having given the order for their deaths. It was already perfectly clear to him and Lussu that French assassins had been hired by the fascists and that Nello had been killed only because he happened to be with Carlo at Bagnoles at the time. As Marion said, it was absurd to imagine that Mussolini and Ciano had not known precisely what was going on.

The French police had not been idle either. The search for the killers had set off in several different directions. Anyone known to have been in recent touch with Carlo was tracked down and interrogated. Car-drivers in the locality who spoke Italian were questioned. Appeals went out to trace a ‘big, swarthy’ man with brown hair swept back, seen at the Hotel Cordier. Names of possible assassins were bandied about.

The Cagoule had been clumsy: they had left several obvious traces. Hélène Besneux, the young girl who had cycled past the murder scene, remained bold and uncowed in her testimony, even after receiving anonymous threatening letters. In due course, Filliol, Bouvyer and Jakubiez were picked up, and Marion remembered Jakubiez’s face from the time he had called at the flat posing as a travelling carpet salesman. Then a senior figure in the Cagoule confessed that the organisation had indeed been responsible for the assassinations. More names were produced. In February 1938, the police staged a reconstruction, with Carlo’s car, and Hélène Besneux cycling past. Various alibis foundered; more confessions followed. It would be another year before seventy-one people from the extreme right were charged with a variety of crimes, among them the murders of Carlo and Nello, but by now there was little doubt in anyone’s mind about where the orders for the killings had come from.

As for the Italian spies in Paris, several were unmasked during the course of the French investigations. Bellavia was briefly arrested, then went back to Italy to work for OVRA in Turin. Others disappeared. A few were put to work under a new boss who gave them new names and identities. But with Carlo gone, something of the urgency had gone too. Bocchini turned his attention back to what was going on in Italy, and mopped up Pentecostalists and members of the Salvation Army.

From Alberto Moravia, Amelia’s much-loved nephew, there was total silence. No telephone call, no letter, no flowers. She did not take it well.

‘Everything still seems to me impossible,’ wrote Amelia to Gina Lombroso soon after the funeral. ‘Nothing is real, I can’t take anything in, I am like a robot, I can understand nothing except for the fact that my life is finished.’

She stayed on in Paris to help Marion, whose heart troubles had intensified, though she kept worrying that she should go back to Florence to be with Maria. The only thing that made life bearable, she told her Italian daughter-in-law, whom she had always found easier to love than Marion, was that they had descended together into the abyss, and that together, in these black and despairing depths, they would discover the strength to live. Marion’s grief was so extreme, so entirely focused on herself, that even Amelia felt irritated, telling Zia Gì that she found the degree of egoism ‘unbelievable’. It was beginning to dawn on her that, though she was sixty-eight, it would be up to her to look after the two widows and their seven children, decide where to live and how, and that whatever they all did, they would have to do it together. Amelia, wrote Sandro Pertini later, was like ‘the heroine in a Corneille tragedy’.

Andrea, Silvia, Paola (back row) and Aldo and Melina (sitting) in Switzerland

Her first decision was that neither she nor Carlo’s children would set foot inside Italy again while Mussolini remained in power. Towards the end of 1937, Amelia rented a house in Villars, above Montreux in Switzerland, not far from the Ferreros in Geneva. Maria and her four children joined her and the older ones went to Swiss schools, where they were soon speaking good French. In the evenings, Amelia read to them in Italian, so that they should not forget their native language. To counter what she described to her friend Max Ascoli as their ‘torment of grief’, the two women threw themselves into plans for publishing all Nello’s writings.

Marion, restless, frantic, uncertain, stayed on for a while in Paris, then paid a brief visit to Villars. It was the first time the sisters-in-law had met since the murders. Amelia worried about how they would get on, knowing how very different the two young women were, and conscious that she had long managed with a different voice, a different way of being, with each of them. She told friends that she felt the pain three times over, for all three of them, and was comforted only by the thought that she herself would not survive long. Slowly, mourning together, dressed in black, the three women forged a shared bond in sadness.

They were there when, in Catalonia, the communists, anarchists and socialists created a nightmare of confusion and disagreement, spies and commissars carrying out brutal purges, unleashing a civil war within a civil war; and later when the Spanish Republic disbanded all foreigners fighting with them. It was in some ways a relief that Carlo had not lived to see his friends reduced to murderous in-fighting and the Republic fail to transform the Spanish Civil War into a global crusade against fascism.

The house in Villars was remote, and they saw very few people. Later, Silvia and Paola would remember their mother and grandmother listening to Beethoven’s Seventh with tears in their eyes. The solitude was such, Amelia wrote to Zia Gì, that ‘I no longer think that I belong to the species of sociable animals.’ She could find no religious faith to fall back on and reported that even the pleasure in books seemed to have deserted her. ‘The word future’, she wrote, ‘has no meaning for me. In fact, it frightens me. I go forwards, looking backwards.’ But Amelia was made of strong stuff, and she needed more than the silent Swiss mountains could provide. Switzerland was indeed peaceful, but it was peaceful intellectually too, and living so far from ‘the great universal problems, from great ideas’ was not good enough. What was more, it was not good enough for the children either, for whom she wanted ‘a country with wide horizons, a long history, intellectual richness’.

Amelia at Quainton in Buckinghamshire

Nello’s four children at Quainton

Maria had decided that England would suit them all better, and in October 1939, when the Swiss refused to renew the children’s visas on the grounds that they had enough Italian exiles already, they moved first to Eastbourne and then to the little village of Quainton in Buckinghamshire. But here the house was unheated and the pipes froze and, accustomed to the warmth of Italy, the women found the cold unbearable. There was no good local school so the girls had to be sent away as boarders, to a school where the windows were kept open at night all through the winter and Silvia was bullied until she learnt to hide her feelings and made the other pupils laugh with imitations of Mussolini.

Marion did not stay with them long. She roamed, unable to settle. ‘She sought vengeance,’ Mirtillino wrote later. ‘She hated.’ For a while, she went back to Paris, took classes in biology at the Sorbonne, but she felt too agitated to study. ‘There is no good reason for me to be in one place rather than another,’ she wrote sadly. She made herself more ill, and her tormented undecidedness maddened Amelia and Maria. She tried Cambridge, then decided that there was something about England she could no longer adjust to, so returned to France, this time to Nantes, to stay with her friends Françoise and Louis Joxe. It was while she was here that she had a stroke. It left her briefly paralysed and though her movement and speech came back, her hand shook and her words sounded blurred; she never spoke to the children in Italian again. Marion and the children were still in Nantes when the Germans invaded France in the early summer of 1940. The Joxes drove them to Saint-Malo, where they caught the last ferry to Southampton. They docked on the day that Italy entered the war.

Maria and Amelia fretted that the Germans, having occupied France, would invade England. Being Jewish and anti-fascists, they would not be safe. The news from Italy was not good, and though their friends the Cividallis had managed to emigrate to Palestine, Maria’s parents and many relations were still in Italy. Mussolini’s race laws – barring Jews from professions and their children from school – had been passed in November 1938. That same year, the pseudo-scientific Manifesto of Racial Scientists had asserted that ‘Jews do not belong to the Italian race.’ The goose-step had been formally adopted, and Mussolini was talking about setting up ‘concentration camps’ for dissident Masons and Jews, or resettling them in Somalia, where, with luck, they might be eaten by sharks.

Amelia, Maria wrote to the Cividallis, was as ever extremely strong and determined but she was, ‘alas, much aged’; her face was thinner, more deeply lined and she seemed worn out. Max Ascoli and Salvemini had been pressing the family to join them in the States. Maria was eager; Marion, ill, agreed. Visas were slow in coming, but Max Ascoli’s second wife, Marion Rosenwald, had well-placed connections and Eleanor Roosevelt intervened to speed up the permissions. In August 1940 they set sail for Montreal on a ship guarded by a convoy, in the last two cabins, just beside the engines, constantly mindful of the possibility of German submarines. The sea was very rough; Maria had bought leashes for the two smallest boys in case the boat was hit and they got lost. Amelia was now seventy. The eldest of the seven children, Mirtillino, was thirteen; the youngest, Alberto, three. ‘Everything unknown before us,’ Amelia wrote to Ascoli before embarking. ‘It’s like playing lotto.’

As Italian enemy-aliens, Amelia, Maria and her children were detained for a short while by the Canadian customs officers, while the English Marion, Mirtillino, Melina and Aldo wandered around Montreal waiting for them to be freed. Then they caught a night train to New York. Max Ascoli and his wife boarded their train as it passed through Croton, on the Hudson. They took them to have breakfast in the dining car, where they were given bacon, cornflakes and grapefruit, which none of the children had ever seen before.

Early in May 1921, eighteen months before the March on Rome, Mussolini had received a telegram from a group of Italians in New York, most of them members of a shooting club. ‘The first Italian fascio in the United States’, it said, ‘today salutes the fasci of Italy!’ The 1920s and early 1930s saw a flowering of pro-Mussolini associations and newspapers among the four and a half million Italians living in the US, eager to celebrate their italianità and to praise the man they held responsible for saving from the Bolsheviks a homeland they remembered with sentimental nostalgia. Many were ultra-Catholic, hostile to newcomers, ignorant about what Italy had turned into since they emigrated, and delighted to abandon, as instructed, ‘barbaric dialects, worthy of Harlem negroes or the slum dwellers of London’. Italian consulates across the country acted as cover for Bocchini’s men, while Italo-American businessmen and bankers, who had done well in their adopted country, willingly put money into training their young to march, sing ‘Giovinezza’ and raise their arms in the fascist salute. In New York, ‘well born’ Italian ladies joined a women’s fascio. The Duce himself was described by a reporter sent by McCall’s magazine to Italy, as a ‘despot with a dimple’.

Arrival in the United States

When Rudolph Valentino died in 1926, squadristi formed a guard of honour round his bier, on which had been placed a garland with the name of Mussolini on it. Not all this adoration was peaceful. The 1920s and 1930s also saw brawls between Blackshirts wielding manganelli and their opponents in the streets of Boston and New York.

By the time Amelia and her two grieving families reached America, however, much of this noisy confrontation had quietened down. The anti-fascists were now a considerably larger group, their numbers increased by successive waves of people driven into exile. New York, rather than Paris, had become the capital of the Italian fuoriusciti. Max Ascoli had turned the New School for Social Research in New York into a haven for many of the professors among the refugees, saying that they were a ‘small group of survivors of what was European civilisation’ and represented the many others who had been murdered or silenced.

Waiting for them in New York, the Rossellis found Lussu, Cianca, Tarchiani, Parri and Don Sturzo. And, of course, Salvemini, a little older, a little balder, with his round black-framed glasses and his neat beard and moustache, his look knowing and benign. Salvemini had spent his years of exile in a fever of work, putting out book after book on fascism, full of scholarly research and statistics, writing fast and well, lecturing all over the country in his erratic English about the ‘suffocation and paralysis’ inflicted by Mussolini and his men. Time had done nothing to temper his passion or his strong, impatient views, and he was much attacked as a ‘drifting shipwreck’, filled with ‘mad, bitter hatred . . . and a macabre obsession’. Salvemini liked the language of the American liberals and their commitment to justice but grumbled that they were too obsessed by Nazis and communists to pay proper heed to the dangers of Italian fascism.

Amelia and Maria still had an income from shares in Italy and, for $80 a month, they took a small mock-Victorian house in Larchmont, Westchester, a forty-minute train ride from Grand Central Station. It was not elegant but it was comfortable and the local schools were good. Ruth Draper and Max Ascoli, who said that Carlo and Nello had been his closest friends and that their children would want for nothing, helped with the fees. Amelia, who had once had cooks, maids and menservants, presided over the running of the house with the help of a single part-time maid; Maria cooked and organised the children’s lives. Marion, ever restless and uneasy, rented a second house nearby. Soon after moving in, they received a visit from a neighbour who assured them that one of Larchmont’s attractions was that it was ‘free of negros and Jews’. But we, said Amelia coldly, ‘are Jews’. Next day, a large bunch of flowers was delivered.

If Amelia worried that Silvia and Paola would lose their ‘beautiful simplicity’ among the American schoolgirls she considered ‘painted, permed, playing at being women’, she was also deeply grateful for the security in which they now found themselves. Every morning after breakfast she retired to her bed and did her correspondence, writing and receiving dozens of letters, in French, Italian and English, from all over the world, and making arrangements for the publication of her sons’ works. More than either of her daughters-in-law, she approached the New World with curiosity and openness and, determined to make the most of what it had to offer, regularly took the children into New York to visit museums and go to concerts. They went to Niagara Falls and to the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station. For Alberto’s sixth birthday, she gave him a violin.

For the children, Amelia had rapidly become their main figure of authority, imparting a certain old-fashioned code of behaviour which revolved around truthfulness and justice, and she would brook no dissent. She regarded her own role as one of providing stability in a country in which they were Jews among Protestants, Italians at a time of war with Italy, and a household of women without men. Stability and love: none of the children would ever forget the solidity of the love she surrounded them with. Mirtillino, Silvia and Paola were excellent students, but Melina remained volatile and awkward. Maria clung to Alberto, the baby born so soon before Nello’s death, and Aldo showed signs of depression. It took Amelia a long time to coax Maria out of her black mourning clothes, persuading her to wear a little white collar. There was always a sense of waiting – waiting to go home, waiting to resume real life. Amelia would tell friends that she felt herself to be profoundly an exile, too old to put down new roots.

When visitors came to call, they found Amelia sitting very upright in a high-necked blouse, her white hair parted in the middle and piled high on her head; they addressed her as Signora Amelia and used the formal ‘Lei’. One recent Italian arrival came to pay his respects on a particularly hot summer day, and asked whether he might take off his jacket. ‘No,’ she replied. Amelia never complained; complaining was not in her nature, though her letters to Italian friends were sometimes despairing. ‘How can one explain’, she wrote to Gina Lombroso, ‘all this terrible suffering and bloodshed, the collapse of all those spiritual values which were once our reason for living?’ Whenever he could get away, Salvemini came to see them. The two old friends approached each other with a sort of tenderness and clasped hands, murmuring ‘Che piacere, che piacere’, ‘What a pleasure’. ‘La vecchia Signora Amelia’, he wrote to Ernesto Rossi, ‘è meravigliosa.’

Amelia, Marion and Maria were endlessly busy. Maria had emerged as a strong and capable woman, and started a charity shop in Larchmont to raise money for Italian refugees. All three women were involved in the Mazzini Society, set up by Salvemini and Ascoli in September 1939 to inform the American public about Italian fascism, to counter fascist propaganda and to help the newly arrived refugees settle. It was not an altogether easy enterprise, its members split between those who saw themselves as Americans of Italian origin and those who, like Lussu, Cianca and Parri, were simply waiting for the moment they could go home. Over time, schisms developed and acrimonious exchanges led to resignations. There were moves to expel the ‘intransigent and quarrelsome’ Salvemini. Amelia was among those who stepped down, saying that she refused to take sides. She seemed to age and to grow frailer, telling friends that it required ever more courage to go on living, but she was never, at any point, as Silvia remembered much later, ‘what you might call an ordinary grandmother’.

In the summer of 1943, after most of the Grand Council voted against him, Mussolini was ousted from power and Pietro Badoglio made head of state. When Italy joined the Allies in September and the Germans moved to occupy the whole country, Lussu, Tarchiani and Cianca hurried home to meet up with Carlo Levi, Rossi, Bauer and Ginzburg – all now freed from the confino – to see if they could serve with the partisans, and to start drawing up plans for the governance of post-war Italy.

Having been imprisoned in the Gran Sasso, Mussolini was rescued by German forces and installed in the town of Salò to preside over a corrupt and incompetent puppet state known as the Italian Social Republic. In the mountains in the north, groups of partisans, taking the name Partito d’Azione and some under the banner of the Rosselli Brigades – Primo Levi among them – were fighting bitter battles against the retreating Germans. As a ‘gypsy people gone to rot’, declared the Germans, the Italians would have to pay heavily for their treachery.

For months on end in Larchmont, there was no news of the fate of Amelia’s friends or of Maria’s family, as Jews in grave danger now of arrest and deportation by the Germans. Maria’s five-year-old niece Gianna had been given a different name, Pallina, and put for safety into an orphanage; her parents Max and Luisa were being hidden in clinics in different parts of the city. The house in Via Giusti and L’Apparita, to protect them from being seized as Jewish property, had been nominally sold to Maria’s Catholic sister-in-law. They heard that Zia Gì was safe, but had taken refuge in the house of the parish priest after the Germans looted Il Frassine at gunpoint.

Finally came word that the 3rd, 4th and what remained of the 2nd Rosselli Brigades – for there had been many casualties – were among the first men to liberate Florence. ‘Does this not seem to you a dream?’ Amelia wrote.

In September 1944, after the liberation of Rome, an investigation was launched into the murders of Carlo and Nello. Ciano was by now dead, shot on his father-in-law’s orders in January for having voted against him the night that he was removed from power; in his diaries – from which various pages had vanished – he had said nothing on the subject of Carlo or Nello. Santo Emanuele implicated Anfuso, currently still Mussolini’s ambassador to Berlin. A former head of military intelligence, General Giacomo Carboni, testified that Ciano had once said to him that Emanuele’s great merit lay in ‘having been the author of the elimination of the Rossellis’, but that Ciano later regretted their murders, for Carlo ‘could have done good for Italy’. Anfuso admitted to having been in touch with the Cagoulards, but said that it had been Emanuele’s idea to get rid of the two brothers.

A first trial opened on 29 January 1945, with witness statements by Lussu, Garosci and Calamandrei. By the time the conspirators had finished changing their statements and accusing each other, Anfuso, on the run, had been sentenced to death for collaboration and life for the Rosselli killings, and Emanuele to life imprisonment. In 1946, Anfuso’s sentence was lifted, and even Emanuele was granted amnesty in 1947. In 1949, the Court of Appeal opened a new hearing, which either absolved the accused, or dropped the charges on the grounds of lack of evidence.

Had Mussolini ordered the killings? As with Matteotti, it was impossible to be certain. By the end of April 1945, he was dead, stopped by partisans near Lake Como as he fled to Switzerland, then shot with his mistress, Clara Petacci, and their bodies hanged from meat hooks in a square in Milan. Salvemini was only one of many who believed that, even if he had not given a direct order, Mussolini certainly knew what was happening. As for Ciano, he was beyond doubt complicit.

In France, there was also a further inquiry into the killings. But Charles Tenaille, the Cagoule leader, was dead, fighting for the Nazis on the Russian front, and Deloncle had been killed by the Gestapo. Filliol, Bouvyer, Huguet and Fauran were all condemned to death – in absentia. Alone of the principal murderers, Jakubiez was sentenced to life with hard labour. In the court, he admitted that he had taken a hand in the murders, and said that while Carlo was ‘killed in an instant’, Nello had fought back, been stabbed again and then finished off with a pistol.

Amelia never believed that she would live to go home. But in June 1946, having delayed their return to wait for Marion, who had suffered a second stroke, the family boarded the Vulcania, bound for Naples and Genoa. Marion had not set foot in Italy for fifteen years; the others had been away for seven. Alberto, who had no memory of Italy, was now ten. All the children spoke better English than Italian.

In their absence, their fathers had become heroes.

When they docked in Naples, friends boarded the ship to tell them that the royal train had been sent to meet them. As they travelled north they looked out of the windows at the devastation of the Italian landscape. At every stop, people were waiting with flowers. At Rome, they were taken to spend the night in a suite in the Grand Hotel, and next morning, while the three women met the new political leaders of Italy, many of them old friends, the children were given a tour of the city in a horse and carriage. Florence was dark and silent; in the enclosed carriage sent to meet them at the station, they listened to the clip-clop of the horse’s feet. In the house in Via Giusti, Maria’s parents were waiting; her father Max was wearing a white suit and a panama hat. There were so many flowers that it looked like a garden. They ate figs, melons and prosciutto.

None of them found arriving home easy. They learnt that Carlo Pincherle, Amelia’s brother, had died, as had her dear friends Guglielmo and Gina Ferrero. It shocked them to realise how many of their friends and acquaintances had willingly cooperated with Mussolini and the fascists. Perhaps saddest of all, for Amelia, was her nephew Alberto Moravia’s behaviour. Early in 1945, he had written to say that, since he had been so closely watched by spies, he had thought it prudent to wait until then before telling her how much he had minded the deaths of his cousins, Carlo and Nello. ‘But I was close to you in your grief.’ Amelia did not reply. Moravia had acted, she said, ‘out of opportunism, or, at its most charitable, out of weakness’.

But then Moravia chose to write a novel, Il conformista, closely based on Carlo’s story, in which his murder is described in gruesome detail; instead of Nello it is Marion who is murdered, sensual and shapely in death. Carlo – Quadro – is portrayed as cynical, imprudent, didactic and pompous, and Marion – Lina – as a woman who is sexually aroused by other women. Prepared to sacrifice young friends with a ‘cruel indifference to human life’, Quadro, urged his converts to ‘bold and dangerous undertakings which were almost always disastrous’. Though the novel received almost uniformly bad reviews, and the rest of the family refused to have anything more to do with Moravia, Amelia was surprisingly forgiving. Moravia himself never expressed the slightest hint of remorse, nor explained why he had chosen to write as he had. If asked about the Rosselli brothers in interviews, he would produce a few vague anecdotes about their childhood. It was as if the past held little interest for him.

Of the three women, Marion found return to Italy the hardest. She was bewildered and appalled by the changes, saying that nothing in post-war Italy seemed to reflect the values that Carlo and Nello had fought for, nor the sacrifices they had made. Amelia and Maria set up house together in Via Giusti, and often went up to L’Apparita, where a kind neighbour had saved Nello’s library. Silvia and Paola got engaged to two brothers, Francesco and Marco Forti, the sons of Aldo Forti, who had accompanied Amelia on the terrible train journey to Paris in June 1937. Maria took the girls to Paris to visit the graves in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Marion stayed on for a while in Florence, but she found the stairs in Via Giusti too hard, and felt excluded on the ground floor from the rest of the family above. Amelia’s devotion and closeness to Maria were sometimes difficult for Marion to bear. Soon, she drifted back to England, where Mirtillino was doing his military service after graduating from Swarthmore College in the US. He was always the child she loved the most – ‘il mio adorato Mirtillino’ – and with Melina, who was often moody and prone to depression, she continued to have a difficult time. Andrea had a solitary childhood.

On 13 October 1949, by now so breathless that she found it hard to walk, Marion died in a hospital in West Isleworth. She was fifty-two. ‘I loved her like, and perhaps more than a daughter,’ Amelia wrote to Mirtillino. ‘She represented for me the presence of your father, and all that life of excitement and passion of which I too was a part.’ Speaking at a memorial service, Salvemini, who was back in his old job at Florence university, said that Marion had never recovered from the loss of Carlo and that the rest of her short life had been marked by a lonely, remorseless decline. Not long before she died she had told him that there was no day on which she did not miss Carlo. The Rosselli heroes left sad family legacies of depression and troubled minds. Melina, in particular, suffered from her family history. She became a talented and successful poet, but would commit suicide by throwing herself out of her attic window near the Piazza Navona on 11 February 1996, the anniversary of the death of Sylvia Plath, whose work she had translated.

Every one of Mussolini’s boasts and slogans proved illusory. Fascism had brought not stability, prosperity and victory, but war, humiliation, penury and foreign occupation. The ‘Corporative State’ had been expensive, cumbersome and useless to the economy. Some 13,000 people, among them a generation of Italy’s cleverest and most promising men, had spent many years on the penal islands, where dozens had died and many more seen their health permanently destroyed by malnutrition, untreated diseases and lack of all proper sanitation. Bassanesi, the dreamer who had dropped leaflets from his plane over Turin and Milan, was in a lunatic asylum.

Bocchini was dead by 1940, after a Lucullan feast in a Roman restaurant (both Himmler and Heydrich had attended his funeral). The Futurist Marinetti had died fleeing the partisans at Salò. Both Farinacci, the brutal ras who had been responsible for so much violence, and Gentile, who had given fascism such legitimacy, were shot. Some 10,000–12,000 active fascists were pursued and killed by the partisans at the moment of liberation. In July 1944 a High Commission for Sanctions against Fascism was set up in Rome, in order to purge the administration of fascists, prosecute those guilty of crimes and to retrieve stolen property, but many were soon granted amnesty, for without them Italy would have had few civil servants, teachers or policemen. The commission found over 130,000 dossiers on fascist suspects in the archives. A list of 622 of the most egregious spies and informers was published, and they were generally ridiculed, but few suffered more than passing shame. There had of course been many more – the historian Mauro Canale puts the number at 815 Polpol men, but if you include all those who worked for them, and all OVRA’s operatives, the figure was probably close to 10,000. One way or another, most wriggled out of censure.

It became known that forty-two separate individuals, at one time or another, spied on Carlo.

Ferruccio Parri, the man whom Carlo had loved as a brother, became the first post-war Italian prime minister, presiding over a radical democratic party, the Partito d’Azione, with the same political creed of justice, liberty, federalism and republicanism that had inspired Carlo’s Socialismo Liberale. Both Lussu and Rossi served in it; Tarchiani was made Italian ambassador to the US. But Italy was in a turbulent state and neither Parri’s uncompromising nature, nor the Partito d’Azione’s lofty ideals were a match for the canny new Christian Democrats under Alcide de Gasperi. They were out of power within a year. Piero Calamandrei, who became rector of Florence university and took on something of Carlo’s mantle in post-war Florence, later wrote that fascism had dealt such a devastating blow to Italy because it struck down ‘the best men, who had to be assassinated one by one, only to leave behind them desolation and a desert in our political life’. Mussolini had been shrewd in knowing whom to murder. Matteotti, Amendola, Gobetti, Gramsci, Carlo and Nello would all have made future leaders.

But, Calamandrei went on, the battle for the liberation of Italy had shown that there were still young men and women faithful to the spirit of the Rosselli brothers, conscious of duty and responsibility, ready to defend the ideals of Mazzini and the Risorgimento that they had held so dear. It was no accident that many had taken the name Rosselli for their partisan groups, for they, too, believed in liberty and justice. Carlo and Nello, his two smiling young friends, would live on, alive and very present, symbols of what it meant to non mollare. For himself, he wanted to remember them ‘when they were still men of this world’, standing side by side, as in a portrait, Carlo in front, Nello at his shoulder, a little in the background, but illuminating the ‘poetic secret of the whole picture’.

As for Amelia, she lived on, as upright and uncomplaining as she had always been, apparently serene, slightly remote, a little daunting in her elegant mauve and pale grey high-necked blouses, loving and watching over the children, worrying about Melina, sharing her life with Maria, who grew stronger and more decisive as the years passed. Amelia died the day after Christmas 1954, at the age of eighty-four, leaving life, as a friend said, on the tips of her toes, without fuss, giving no trouble, slipping very quietly away. ‘Addio for today,’ she had written a few days before to Mirtillino. ‘There is so much that I would like to write to you, but I am rather weary . . . I kiss you tenderly. Nonna.’