Possess the Air, page 30
On its publication in 1948, the book was ignored by the critics, who had long-since consigned Wilder to middlebrow status. But it sold well, and the author judged it his best novel. And The Ides of March served another purpose. Just a decade after Mussolini had mounted elaborate celebrations of the cult of Augustus, Wilder reclaimed the ancient Romans from the Fascist myth-making machine, portraying not caricatures of empire-builders in togas, but complex human beings riven by worldly passions and philosophical doubts.
There are two volumes missing from the Academy’s library. In 1936, Ruth sent Amey Aldrich personally inscribed copies of her translations of Icaro and The Story of My Death, which she promised to place in the collections. They are no longer on the shelves, and there is no record of the name “Lauro de Bosis”—the Italian-American poet whose portrait once hung on the Academy’s walls—anywhere in the catalogue.
To find a memorial to Lauro in the city of his birth, you must turn left out of the main gate of the Academy, and stroll for a few minutes down the tree-shaded Passeggiata del Gianicolo. The promenade at the top of the Janiculum, lined with statues of those who fought to unify the nation in the nineteenth century, has been turned into an open-air shrine to the heroes of the Italian Risorgimento. Just past a piazza dominated by an impressive statue of Garibaldi—the anti-clerical general is mounted on a horse whose backside is directed at the Vatican—a bust of Lauro de Bosis, a larger version of Nancy Cox McCormack’s 1922 bronze, is poised on a white plinth. Unlike the Risorgimento patriots around him, most of whom are portrayed with long beards, Lauro’s bust wears only a wispy moustache. His head is turned away from the panorama of Rome’s rooftops, the heart of a metropolis whose population now exceeds three million. Instead, his intelligent, inquisitive gaze is directed towards the west, as though he is scanning the sky for another dot to appear from over the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Or perhaps expecting an ambush. A dark line circles Lauro’s neck, as though he has been garroted. The bust was dedicated in 1954, the year that also marked the last time Ruth Draper performed her monologues. Two years earlier, Lillian de Bosis had died in Rome at the age of 87. Two years later, Ruth would die in her sleep, at the age of 72. Her ashes were scattered over the sea, to mingle with Lauro’s remains in their final resting place. In the years that followed, Lauro’s statue on the Janiculum has frequently been the target of vandalism by Fascists and neo-Fascists. The latest damage suggests a complete decapitation, followed by a hasty and incomplete repair.
The legacy of Fascism remains contested in Italy, a fact that continuing a stroll in its erstwhile capital makes clear. While Berlin rapidly purged itself of the symbols of Nazism, traces of twenty years of Fascist rule are to be found all over Rome. East of Termini Station, multiple helmeted heads of Il Duce glower over Roman eagles on the facade of the Senior Judicial Advisory Office, just across the street from the German embassy. Four of the Fascist-erected marble maps showing the spread of Italian power in the Mediterranean still stand on the Via dei Fori Imperiali, as the Via dell’Impero is now known (the fifth, showing Mussolini’s short-lived African empire, was vandalized during the war and removed). In the Sala della Mappamondo of the Palazzo Venezia, tourists from around Italy line up to take selfies giving straight-armed salutes from Mussolini’s famous balcony. In EUR, the most Fascist district of them all, the Museo della Civilità Romana houses the centrepiece of Mussolini’s 1937 celebration of Romanità and Augustan imperialism, the vast scale-model of Imperial Rome. A sculptured relief on one of EUR’s government buildings portrays Il Duce, helmeted and on horseback, as the culmination of Roman civilization. His face, which was chiselled off after the war, has recently been restored.
The politicians who lived through the dictatorship tried to make it impossible for Fascism to ever take root in Italy again. A 1946 referendum ended the monarchy that had enabled Mussolini’s rise to power, and the constitution of the new Italian Republic made the Fascist Party illegal. Decades of rule by centrist Christian Democrats, during which Communists and leftist intellectuals exerted a strong influence on the nation’s cultural life, meant that anything that smacked of Fascism was subject to ritual denunciation. Yet in Rome, the material remains of the regime are everywhere. And a society that tolerates and accommodates the symbols of a shameful past risks seeing the memory of violence and repression—and all the sacrifices required to end them—forgotten. Mussolini’s cadaver now occupies an honoured place in a crypt in his birthplace of Predappio, where visitors can file by an eternal flame and an altar inscribed with a giant letter “M.” In cities throughout Italy, the media-savvy neo-Fascist group CasaPound—named after Ezra Pound—terrorizes the Roma population and stages stunts like planting hills with pine trees that spell out the word “DUX.” (Its leader has d’Annunzio’s slogan Me ne frego—“I don’t give a damn” tattooed on the back of his neck.) In spite of the constitutional ban, a neo-Fascist party has been a presence in Italian politics since the nineteen-fifties, first as the Movimento Sociale Italiano (with its suggestive initials “MSI”), then as the Alleanza Nazionale, which enjoyed a long power-sharing coalition with Silvio Berlusconi. The party’s leaders forgot—if they ever knew—that “National Alliance” was also the name of an anti-Fascist group whose propaganda campaign maddened Mussolini and his chief of police at the height of the dictatorship.
Reassuringly, the contemporary map of the city is dotted with the names of Second World War partisans and heroes of the resistance. Rome’s first Fascist-built bridge, the Littorio, is now the Ponte Giacomo Matteotti, in honour of the Socialist deputy who was kidnapped and stabbed to death on the nearby banks of the Tiber. The park across from Ostiense Station, built to welcome Hitler, is now the Parco della Resistenza 8 Settembre, commemorating a doomed 1943 battle to drive the advancing Nazis out of Rome. And, on a bend in the river south of the ancient Ponte Milvio, a square at the foot of Monte Mario bears the name “Lauro de Bosis.”
The piazza is bordered to the east by a busy riverfront drive alive night and day with the buzz of Vespas. To the west, it provides an entrance to the Foro Italico, the vast sporting complex formerly known as the Foro Mussolini. Originally built for choreographed displays of Fascist athletics, it is now home to a stadium that hosts raucous matches between the arch-rival soccer teams, Roma and Lazio. The Foro’s expanses of concrete are now favoured by skateboarders, whose polyurethane wheels roll over mosaic tiles that reiterate Fascist slogans: MOLTI NEMICI MOLTO ONORE (“Many Enemies Much Honour”); NECESSARIO VINCERE PIV NECESSARIO COMBATTERE (“You Must Win But Above All You Must Fight”).
It is easy for a stroller to miss the square’s name, which is written in lower-case letters on a standard municipal street sign. One’s attention is instead monopolized by the monumental structure, as tall as a six-storey building, at the centre of the piazza. It is a stylized version of an Egyptian obelisk—a modernist take on the ones the Roman emperors and Fascist colonizers stole from Africa—carved from three hundred tons of Carrara marble, terminating in a four-sided pyramid. During the Allied occupation, when the Foro was turned into a U.S. Army Rest Center, Italian partisans tried to topple the monument, but their efforts were blocked by American forces.
The obelisk’s shaft, which thrusts upwards from the “piazza l. de bosis” into the sky of Rome, is inscribed in block capitals with the words:
“MUSSOLINI DUX.”
It is true that Il Duce succeeded in staking his claim to the ground of Rome. The city as we see it today was largely rebuilt in his image. But mastery of the sky, and with it the irreverent and indomitable spirit of the people of Rome, always eluded him.
For all his bluster, Mussolini was never able to possess the air.
Further Reading
Primary sources
Baedeker, Karl. Rome and Central Italy Handbook for Travellers. Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1930.
Bagnani, Gilbert. The Roman Campagna and Its Treasures. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.
Bagnani, Gilbert. Rome and the Papacy: An Essay on the Relations Between Church and State. London: Methuen & Co., 1929.
Cox McCormack, Nancy. “La Famiglia de Bosis and Other Memoirs,” 1953, unpublished memoir in Lauro de Bosis Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
Deakin, Richard. Flora of the Colosseum of Rome. London: Groombridge and Sons, 1873.
De Bosis, Lauro. The Golden Book of Italian Poetry. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1932.
De Bosis, Lauro. Icaro. London: Oxford University Press, 1933.
De Bosis, Lauro. Storia della mia morte. Florence: Passigli Editori, 2009.
De Bosis, Lillian Vernon. “Lilian [sic] Goes to Rome: A XIX Century Memoir,” translated by Arturo Vivante, Lauro de Bosis Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard, Cambridge, MA.
De Santillana, Giorgio. Lauro de Bosis, unpublished, undated memoir, Lauro de Bosis Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard, Cambridge, MA.
Ezekiel, Moses-Jakob. Memoirs from the Baths of Diocletian. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975.
Hare, Augustus J.C. Walks in Rome: Volume 1 (14th edition). London: George Allen, 1897.
Hare, Augustus J.C. Walks in Rome: Volume 2. London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1871.
Lewis, Sinclair. It Can’t Happen Here. New York: Signet, 2014.
Mowrer, Edgar Ansel. Immortal Italy. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1922.
Mowrer, Edgar Ansel. Triumph and Turmoil: A Personal History of Our Time. London: Allen & Unwin, 1970.
Mowrer, Lilian T. Journalist’s Wife. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1937.
Mussolini, Benito. My Diary, 1915–1917. Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2004.
Mussolini, Benito. Opera Omnia, 44 vols. Florence: La Fenice, 1951.
Origo, Iris. A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939–40. New York: New York Review Books, 2017.
Ovid. Metamorphoses V–VIII. (translated by D.E. Hill). Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1992.
Prezzolini, Giuseppe. L’Italiano inutile. Milan: Rusconi, 1983.
Salvemini, Gaetano. Scritti sul fascismo, volume II. Milan: Feltrinelli Editore, 1966.
Salvemini, Gaetano. Under the Axe of Fascism. London: Victor Gollancz, 1936.
Scrivener, Jane. Inside Rome with the Nazis. New York: Macmillan, 1945.
Seldes, George. Sawdust Caesar: The Untold History of Mussolini and Fascism. New York: AMS Press, 1978.
Seldes, George. Witness to the Century: Encounters with the Noted, the Notorious, and the Three SOBs. New York: Ballantine, 2011.
Seldes, George. You Can’t Print That! The Truth Behind the News 1918–1928. New York: Payson & Clarke, 1929.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Hoboken: Bibliobytes, 199–?.
Warren, Neilla, ed. The Letters of Ruth Draper: A Self-Portrait of a Great Actress. London, Hamish Hamilton, 1979.
Wilder, Thorton. The Cabala. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1987.
Wilder, Thornton. The Ides of March. Cutchoge, N.Y.: Buccaneer, 1976.
Secondary Sources
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Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. New York: W.W. Norton, 2015.
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