Possess the Air, page 29
Though Fascism would survive for a time in Italy, its over twenty years of supremacy in Rome came to an end on that morning. Learning the news that evening, Romans, many in their pyjamas, left their homes to parade through the streets. The offices of the arch-Fascist newspaper Il Tevere, in whose pages Lauro de Bosis had been mocked as “una carogna,” were set ablaze—as so many Liberal and Socialist newspaper offices had been burnt by the squadristi—and the doors of the Regina Coeli prison, where Lauro’s comrades Rendi and Vinciguerra had been tortured, were thrown open, the regime’s political prisoners freed. As firemen pried metal fasces from the sides of buildings, portraits of Mussolini were thrown out of shops, schools, and offices, to be trampled underfoot on the cobblestones.
Though Marshal Badoglio announced an armistice with the Allies, the war was not yet over for Rome. As British and American forces, following their successful invasion of Sicily, fought their way up the peninsula, German columns marched up the Via dell’Impero, following the same route Hitler had taken on his 1938 visit. By that time, the King and his retinue had already abandoned his subjects to their fate, fleeing eastwards along the Via Tiburtina to the Adriatic Sea.
At the time, Wilder, who had been promoted to lieutenant-colonel and transferred to Caserta, two hundred kilometres to the southeast, dreaded what the Nazis would do to Rome. It was the city, after all, that had launched his literary career by providing the subject matter for his first novel, The Cabala. The Germans had declared that their erstwhile Axis partners were in fact a “gypsy people gone to rot,” and would be forced to pay for their treachery. There were rumours of torture, reprisals against civilians, and atrocities in the Jewish ghetto on the left bank of the Tiber. (It was only after the war that full details of the round-up on October 16, 1943, would be revealed: over 1,200 Jews, most of them women and children, were sent by train to Auschwitz, where all but 196 died.)
Rome’s official status as an “Open City,” a demilitarized zone, spared it the bombing that reduced much of Berlin and other Axis strongholds to rubble. The beleaguered Nazis—who had in fact turned the centre of the city into a parking lot for their guns and tanks—began a disorderly withdrawal. During their retreat, the Germans revived the vandalism of the barbarian hordes by cutting several aqueducts, thus flooding the Pontine Marshes and undoing one of the regime’s most persistent boasts: that Fascism had eliminated malaria from Italy. On June 4, 1944, Wilder, billeted in a tent in Caserta, learned that the main body of General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army had entered Rome, and that Jeeps and American half-tracks were parked beneath Mussolini’s balcony.
It was thus, in the first days of December, that Wilder found himself back in Rome, amazed that the city he had first discovered in his “wild wandering” as a visiting scholar at the American Academy was still intact. The ribbed Baroque domes, the listing Corinthian columns, the towering umbrella pines silhouetted against the bluest of skies—all were there, as he’d first seen them, seemingly untouched by war. Finding a gate unlocked next to the Cancellaria, the old papal palace on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, he entered an elegant palazzo, whose greenery-filled courtyard, bracketed by tiers of wrought-iron latticework, looked like it hadn’t been altered since the Renaissance. In the Palazzo Venezia, where Mussolini’s offices had been, he found an exhibit of paintings hastily gathered from collections in Naples, Rome, and Florence. He took a nostalgic drive to the Janiculum Hill, and once again gazed out over the rooftops of Rome, enjoying the view that had excited his wonder as a young man. Leaving the Albergo Maestoso at night, he used a flashlight to illuminate his way in a city where no street lights shone, letting the beam dance over the facades of the Villa Medici and the Quirinal Palace. By day, he carried out errands, bringing money to an aged writer, and paying visits to some of the ladies with whom he’d enjoyed cakes and tea as a student.
But the city, traumatized by years of dictatorship and conflict, had lost its old insouciance. Ill-fed Romans walked around in threadbare coats and perforated shoes. On the Via Veneto, demobilized Italian soldiers begged him for money, and prostitutes offered him their time. On his last night of leave, he invited some Roman acquaintances for a slap-up meal at a black-market restaurant: an actress who had performed in the Italian premiere of Our Town, an English music-hall performer angling for a part, the son of the Austrian novelist Hermann Broch. But the laughter was forced and the frivolity as simulated as the coffee. After picking up the bill, Wilder walked out on the party early.
His thoughts were elsewhere. One of his most vivid memories of his student year in Rome was of the young poet who had invited him to read his plays in his studio in the Aurelian Walls, with whom he’d walked the ancient paving stones of the Via Appia Antica. At the time, he’d outlined the plot of a novel based on the life of Julius Caesar. Now, in his rambles through the city where he’d first met Lauro de Bosis, the idea came back to him.
As Wilder left Rome to return to his duties in Caserta, he was already mapping out a new version of the novel, one that would meld ancient and modern, in which the words of an idealistic poet would challenge and undermine the authority of an all-powerful dictator.
Mussolini hadn’t finished with Rome, but Rome was finished with him.
After his arrest, he would never again see the city that had embodied all his provincial ambitions. After being arrested at the King’s Roman villa, he was transferred to the heights of the Apennine mountains, a ski resort he bitterly referred to as “the highest prison in the world.” Amidst the chaos of the Victor Emmanuel’s flight from Rome, Hitler dispatched an SS glider team to the mountaintop to rescue his old friend. After being flown to Munich, Mussolini was restored by the Nazis to a semblance of power as the head of the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, known as Salò after the northern Italian town which, for nineteen months, the doomed German puppet state turned into its headquarters. Living with his family in the Villa Feltrinelli on the shores of Lake Garda, Mussolini was heard pathetically asking a Fascist henchman if he thought the people of Rome had already forgotten their Duce.
Though Romans had ceased to honour Mussolini with parades, hymns, and salutes, they would never be able to forget him. He had approved the slaughter of Africans with aerial bombs and poison gas, building—and by 1943, losing—what would prove to be one of history’s most fleeting empires. By consenting to join in the total war of the Nazis, he bore responsibility for the deaths of 400,000 Italians. He had approved, belatedly but fatally, participation in the Holocaust, dispatching 7,500 Italian Jews to the concentration camps, only 610 of whom survived. Over twenty years, his Fascist dictatorship was responsible for sending—by conservative estimate—a million people to an early grave.
For those responsible for the regime, and for those who had embraced it, the end had either come, or was fast approaching. Gabriele d’Annunzio, who had conjured to life the bellicose aesthetic of Fascism from the trenches of the First World War, had died in 1938, overcome by a brain hemorrhage while sitting at a desk in his eccentric aerie overlooking Lake Garda. The gluttonous Arturo Bocchini, whose OVRA spies had trailed Lauro de Bosis and assassinated anti-Fascists in exile, had died of overeating in 1940 after a lavish feast in a Roman restaurant. (Thomas Lamont of the House of Morgan, who had secured the loans that underwrote the early years of the dictatorship, died in the same year, shortly after the Italy America Society was finally dissolved.) Filippo Marinetti, the Futurist who had fantasized about driving his car into the ruins of Rome, died of a heart attack while fleeing partisans in Salò. The unlucky Count Ciano would be dispatched by firing squad in 1944, along with four other Fascist gerarchs, for daring to vote to end his father-in-law’s rule. Eugénie Sellers Strong, who had exulted as Mussolini promised to revive Augustus’s empire and secure Italy from barbarism, succumbed to cancer in a clinic six days after the Nazis marched into Rome. Ezra Pound, who had begun broadcasting shortwave rants excoriating Roosevelt and “Anglo-Jewish” capitalism over Rome Radio before the attack on Pearl Harbor, was arrested for treason and imprisoned outdoors in a floodlit, two-by-two-metre cage at the Disciplinary Training Center outside Pisa, alongside some of the worst criminals in the American army. His jailors threw the poet, who was then nearly sixty, scraps of meat through the wires of his cage. Deemed unfit to stand trial in the United States, the poet who exalted Mussolini would spend a dozen years confined in a Washington, D.C. psychiatric hospital.
Those who hadn’t given up on liberty and democracy—those who had the courage not to change when the world around them did—found their faith rewarded. During the German occupation, Lillian de Bosis allowed the family’s palazzo on Via dei Due Macelli to be used for clandestine meetings of the Central Committee of National Liberation, which brought together leading anti-Fascists to organize the resistance. A secret room was outfitted with supplies in a narrow passage, and a bomb was hidden in a potted geranium in the event the gathering was discovered. The meetings included men who would go on to plot the course of the post-war Italian Republic, among them future prime ministers Alcide de Gasperi and Ivanoe Bonomi. Against great odds, the institutions of a free society—and Italy had existed as a modern democracy for only four and a half decades before the March on Rome—had survived the dark years of dictatorship and war, to be kindled back to life by those who had never given up on them.
For those people, Lauro de Bosis would always be a hero, a light, and an inspiration. Though his National Alliance was derided by left-wing anti-Fascists for its support of the King, Lauro had made it clear to the confidants he most respected—La Piana, Sturzo, and most of all Salvemini, who would be able to return, in triumph, to his old history-teaching position in Florence in 1949—that his monarchism was strictly tactical. In a series of unpublished essays, he set out a vision of a post-war Italy as an independent republic, and imagined a future in which democracy, shorn of the corruption and colonialism that had discredited nineteenth-century Liberalism, would trump blood and race in a united Europe. In the end, his instincts proved well-founded: it was the King who would ultimately depose the dictator, before discrediting himself—along with the entire institution of the monarchy—by putting his own self-preservation before the fate of his people. And Liberal democracy, rather than Communism, Socialism, Fascism, or Anarchism, would prevail—albeit shakily, and never purged of corruption—in an Italy whose borders would eventually blur into a European Union.
Giorgio de Santillana, who more than anyone understood his childhood friend’s convictions and complexities, tried to imagine how Lauro would be remembered by generations to come.
“His enemies have done all that was expected of them,” de Santillana wrote, a dozen years after Lauro’s disappearance. “His action was ridiculed, his sacrifice hushed up, even now Italians are sedulously kept under a vague impression that he is still alive somewhere…
“In the years to come, he shall come to life again, and then perhaps we shall not know him. He is, up to now, the only man who has given his life purely and simply for Italian freedom… I think that it is his deed, more than his words, that will inspire the youth of tomorrow. He will dissolve in the halo of legend. For among the many sides of his nature, there was that which the Latin mind cannot really assimilate: the unwavering devotion to an abstract principle, which is part of his Puritan ancestry.”
In Lauro’s sacrifice, de Santillana discerned the wit, wisdom, and self-devotion of such historic martyrs to an ideal as Sir Thomas More. It was a characteristic that put him at odds with the pragmatic malleability of many of his fellow Italians, who, as the English-born writer Iris Origo observed, “are prepared to yield in principle, where they can gain in practice.” But, in the final gesture of this child of the Eternal City, there was also something distinctly Roman, a sense of civility that predated the nineteenth century, or even citizenship as it was understood under the ancient Empire.
For his friend, Lauro was “the flower of a line that goes back through the Renaissance and the Feudal Ages to the majesty of Rome… back still to the very dawn of our race: that quality which our Latin fathers had in mind when they coined that beautiful term, vir liberalis et ingenuus.”
Lauro was indeed a vir ingenuus, a man both “free-born” and “noble-minded.” But he was also a vir liberalis—a “liberal man.” Not in the modern political definition, but in a sense intended by Cicero and Seneca, who contrasted it with the slavish obsession with private profits and pleasures.
When to be “liberal” was to be generous, devoted to the common good, and—above all—a lover of liberty.
Italy’s dictator died trying to flee the country he had brought to ruin. On the morning of April 27, 1945, Mussolini was found by members of the 52nd Garibaldi brigade in the back of a truck bound for Switzerland, ignominiously disguised in the greatcoat of one of the retreating Nazis whose convoy he’d joined. The following day, he and the last of his mistresses, Claretta Petacci, were taken to a villa outside the hamlet of San Guilino di Mezzegra and executed by partisans. Their bullet-ridden bodies were driven to a piazza in Milan, where a large mob pummelled them with sticks and their bare hands.
At the height of his power, Mussolini had envisioned a glorious interment in an Eternal City purged of all foreign influence, and eternal rest in the newly restored Mausoleum of Augustus. Instead, his mutilated corpse was hoisted up on a meat hook, to be displayed for all to see, where it dangled upside from the girder of an unfinished Standard Oil gas station.
* * *
** Lauro de Bosis’s nephew, Arturo Vivante, suffered a similar fate. At the age of sixteen, he was interned near Liverpool and shipped to Canada along with two thousand prisoners of war. Ruth Draper secured his release after writing to Prime Minister Mackenzie King on his behalf. Vivante went on to study medicine at McGill University, before moving to the United States, where he became a noted author who contributed vivid stories to the New Yorker about his uncle Lauro and his grandmother, Lillian de Bosis.
Epilogue
“If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth.”
—Vaclav Havel
The Obelisk
The American Academy, though long since overtaken by the city whose outskirts it once dominated, remains an oasis of serenity and scholarship on the Janiculum Hill.
The institution survived its first century of existence with difficulty. During the Second World War, it was kept running by its librarian Albert Van Buren (Fellow in Classical Studies and Archaeology, 1906), who escaped internment as an enemy alien thanks to a group of Italian scholars who served as his guarantor during the Nazi occupation. As the Allies were liberating the city, a former student, wearing the uniform of a lieutenant-colonel, found Van Buren in his office, absorbed in a volume of Latin inscriptions as Italians cheered the American tanks rolling past outside his window. (“The professor said hello to me and he was very nice,” the student told a reporter. “But I think I made him lose his place.”) After being reopened in 1947, the privately funded Academy suffered from periodic budgetary shortfalls, and by the late eighties had fallen into disrepair. Fellows recall having to stay warm by sleeping in their coats, cooking meals on a stove with only one burner, and carrying flashlights on nighttime visits to the communal bathrooms.
Since revitalized by donations, the Academy has benefited from a thorough renovation. In front of a studio once occupied by the novelist Ralph Ellison, rows of kale, cabbage, and broccoli are harvested from an organic kitchen garden first planted by the chef Alice Waters. In the Main Building, where a billiard table is overlooked by an excruciatingly detailed Chuck Close portrait, middle-aged waiters carry espressos to young classicists in chinos and button-down shirts. Don Delillo was a recent guest, joining a list of creators—Aaron Copland, Mary McCarthy, Joseph Brodsky, William Styron, Elizabeth Bowen, Anthony Doerr—who have, for a time, made the Academy their home in Rome.
The Academy’s tranquil heart remains the reading rooms of the Arthur and Janet C. Ross library, where wrought-iron staircases spiral upwards to lofty mezzanines. Among the over hundred thousand volumes on the library’s shelves is a novel by a former student, a visiting scholar in Classical Studies, 1921. Opening the title page of Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March reveals a dedication to:
LAURO DE BOSIS
Roman poet, who lost his life
marshaling a resistance against
the absolute power of Mussolini;
his aircraft pursued by those of the Duce
plunged into the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Wilder was misinformed about Lauro’s fate. No evidence ever emerged that Pegasus was pursued by Italian planes. Ruth Draper was nonetheless delighted by the tribute from her lover’s old friend. In the novel, written in the form of documents purported to have been rescued from antiquity, Lauro is discernible as the poet Catullus, who opposes Julius Caesar’s growing power by organizing “The Broadsides of Conspiracy,” chain letters like those the National Alliance directed against Mussolini. (In a preface, Wilder wrote that the idea had been suggested to Lauro by George Bernard Shaw; Ruth sent him a letter pointing out that this was not the case, and Shaw had long persisted in expressing his admiration for the dictator.) Wilder’s Caesar is less recognizable as a surrogate Duce. Though portrayed as an aspirant dictator intent on ending the Roman Republic, he also grapples with his lack of faith in the old Roman gods. He is less ancient tyrant than doubt-ridden modern, a portrait in part based on Wilder’s friendship with the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.
