In defiance of Il Duce

The details of Mussolini’s fascism are perhaps not quite as familiar in this country as they might be. Even quite well-meaning people have a tendency to treat him as, in part, a joke. Just how horrible the period was needs to be explained with reference to individual lives. Caroline Moorehead’s book about the Rosselli family, who were central to the principled resistance, has a valuable and sobering subject.

They were intellectual and idealistic Jews. The matriarch, Amelia, from an eminent Venetian family, had married a clever and dissolute man. They had three sons together before Amelia had enough of his philandering, and left him with the children. She settled in Florence, and made a place for herself in radical Italian society.

The family had memories of the heroes of the Risorgimento, and now they aligned themselves with advanced opinion, including Filippo Turati, the leader of the Italian socialists. Amelia was supported by her husband’s investment income — eventually, their shares in a mercury mine would make them guiltily rich — but she also wrote. Her plays were staged, some with success, and her children’s books were published and read.

The intellectual milieu is fascinating. Italy was immensely fragmented, effectively speaking any number of mutually incomprehensible languages, and mostly very backward. Half the Italian soldiers who fought in the first world war were illiterate. At the top of society was an intricate meshing of aristocracies springing from different historical patrons, and then a furiously advanced intelligentsia. The revolutionary ideas emerging from the prewar salons included Futurism, whose leaders proposed the abolition of pasta and the filling up of the canals of Venice, but also radical communist and socialist proposals. There was, as so often, a real love of the prospect of violence — for aesthetic purposes in the case of the Futurists, but for others, it seemed a necessary political step forward.