A Bold and Dangerous Family Read online

  Amelia was the last of eight children, three of whom had died in infancy. Her mother, Emilia, was forty-two when she was born, already worn out and ailing from her repeated pregnancies and the blood-letting that followed. Her father, Giacomo Pincherle, was a businessman, and had added the name Moravia as a gesture to the uncle who had adopted him when his own parents died young. The marriage was considered a mésalliance by her family: she very beautiful, he heavily marked by smallpox caught during their engagement. When he recovered, he offered to break it off, but she refused, though appalled by his scarred face and the loss of his thick, fair hair, saying that it was her duty now to marry him. By the time Amelia was a small girl the Pincherle business had ceased to prosper. One of Amelia’s first conscious memories was of being asked by one of their two maids, Giovanna, whom they had decided must go in order to save money, to intervene on her behalf. Giovanna was in tears. Amelia went to find her parents, but when she confronted them, their faces were forbidding, and she dared not speak. ‘I felt as if I had failed in my duty,’ she wrote later. ‘I should have fought for her, but I wasn’t brave enough.’ Courage and duty: two messages learnt early.

  Elena, the eldest Pincherle daughter, was twenty in 1870 and had already moved to Turin to marry. So little did Amelia know about this sister that when Elena came to Venice to visit them, she thought she was a stranger and addressed her as ‘Signora’. Next came Gabriele, later to be Amelia’s closest brother, a young man with deep-set eyes and narrow shoulders who was a law student at Padua university. Nearest to her in age was Carlo, seven years her senior, but he had friends with whom he wished to spend his time and, when obliged to take her with him, dragged her through the maze of crooked waterways and alleys at a terrifying pace.

  The sister Amelia loved was Anna, thirteen when she was born, more mother to her than stern and worn Emilia, whose disapproval caused her constant misery. Anna, laughing and affectionate, was the centre of her life. She sat the little girl on her knee and read to her, and when Amelia had done her lessons, played to her on the piano, Mozart’s Turkish March or Boccherini’s Minuet, which made Amelia think of dancers, elegant and stately. Anna had a friend, as ugly as she herself was pretty, but of great charm and character. When the two girls sat whispering in the shuttered salotto, Amelia hid under the eighteenth-century console with its Sèvres tea set and listened.

  The Pincherles were Jewish, descendants of the Sephardic families driven from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. By the nineteenth century, Venice’s Jews had long since knocked down the walls of their ghetto. Liberated in 1797 by Napoleon, who at the same time ordered the removal of every winged lion in the city, they had fared better than Jews elsewhere in Italy, even after Venice and its hinterland had been ceded to the Austrian Empire. Venetian-Jewish girls were educated, bookish; their parents owned property and worked for the city council. The Pincherles were no more than passingly religious, but they were mindful of the moral precepts of their faith; and they were patriots.

  The popular unrest which had swept Europe twenty years before reached Venice in March 1848, when a lawyer called Daniele Manin led the Venetians in an uprising that expelled the Austrians from their city. A second Republic was set up. Among the men appointed to the provisional government was Leone Pincherle, Giacomo’s uncle; Giacomo himself, newly married, fought with the Guardia Nazionale of Venice. The Austrians besieged the city, subjecting it to violent bombardments. Emilia was about to give birth to her first child. When the baby, a girl, arrived, she sent her with a wet-nurse to the Giudecca, and had herself rowed over by gondola each evening. But the baby did not thrive. The little girl was dead by the time the city, starving and full of cholera, capitulated to the Austrians on 23 August 1849. Among the men forced to flee was Leone Pincherle, who, with Manin, made his way to Paris. The events left the family with a profound hatred of the Austrians, but with great enthusiasm for the Risorgimento, the social and political movement of resurgence or rebirth, which would ultimately turn Italy into a single country.

  When, in 1859, a new war between Austria and Piedmont broke out, many Venetians joined Giuseppe Garibaldi and his thousand volunteers, who landed in Sicily and conquered the Bourbon-ruled Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. On 17 March 1861 – nine years before Amelia’s birth – the Kingdom of Italy, freed at last from foreign domination, long dreamt about by Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Cavour, Mazzini and many others, was formally proclaimed. It included Parma, Modena, most of Lombardy, Tuscany, most of the Papal States and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, with a Piedmontese capital in Turin and a Piedmontese king. But it did not yet include Venice, which joined the new kingdom only in 1866. True unity came in 1870, the year of Amelia’s birth. Italy was thereafter a single country, with many different languages, one of them Latin, many laws, many taxation systems and many currencies – in Piedmont the lira, in Naples the ducati, in the Papal States the scudi. So convoluted were the regulations that it was said that travellers descending the river Po had to cross twenty-two customs barriers and pay taxes at each one.

  Among the Pincherles, Jewishness and la patria were both spoken of with reverence, but of these two religions, la patria was the one that counted. One day, opening a cupboard in her parents’ bedroom, Amelia caught sight of something small and hard and grey. It was, her father told her, his most precious object: a piece of petrified bread saved from the days of the siege of Venice. In the same cupboard there was a torn and faded flag, which was suspended from the balcony on anniversaries, while in the dining room hung scenes of patriotic acts.

  It was a lonely childhood. When Amelia was nine, her much loved sister Anna left to get married and moved to Bologna. This, Amelia wrote later in her memoirs, was ‘a catastrophe, a black stone in my existence’; watching the betrothed pair from her hiding place under the table in the salotto, she regarded the tall young man with the huge black whiskers as a thief. With Anna gone and only Amelia and Carlo still at home, the house, kept shuttered and dark for much of the time, was silent and still except for the winter days when winds from the open sea howled and the candles flickered and went out. There was no electricity and no central heating, and the only stove that was kept permanently lit was in the room in which her parents sat. The winter of 1880 was the coldest on record; month after month rain fell. Amelia’s feet never seemed to feel warm.

  Spartan physically and obedient morally, she and Carlo were expected to follow the new Jaeger gymnastics recently introduced from Germany, which excluded all forms of weakness. Her nights were full of terrors and in the dark the heavy oak furniture took on menacing shapes. In the huge sombre rooms, with their high ceilings, she felt herself to be an echo. Her mother was unbending towards her fears; Teresa, the remaining maid, was indifferent. The Pincherles had trouble adjusting to the hard times that had hit them; in their long, dark clothes they seemed to belong to an earlier, more formal age.

  Alone so much, Amelia lived a rich imaginary inner life. She turned the chairs in the salotto upside down and pretended that they were gondolas, rowing across a marble lagoon. She formed a desire to make others happy, since she could not be happy herself, and revelled in the bitter pleasure of their happiness. Excessive altruism became her mask, colouring much of her childhood and adolescence, and leaving her with a taste of shame and duplicity.

  But she had a cat, wary as were all Venetian cats of the numerous rats that infested the city, and she was not totally without friends to play with. Amelia went on walks with her younger cousin Augusto Levi along the lagoon to the Veneta Marina, near the station, where old steam engines and carriages were left to rust, perfect for hiding and make-believe journeys. The Levis were the Venetian-Jewish aristocracy. Augusto’s mother, Zia Nina, was a fierce woman, her face permanently clouded with anger, her lips clenched together, ruling over her mild, bearded husband and her ten children as if she were a general in command of an army.

  What Amelia enjoyed least were the long walks to the public gardens – where an elep
hant was to be found – with a cousin of her mother’s, Emma Grassini, a tall, fair-haired martinet who lectured Amelia and her own four children along the way, her conversation unremittingly erudite and bossy. Her children were obliged to speak a different language every day, and neighbours learnt to tell the days of the week simply by listening to them talk. Amelia, who spoke only the Venetian dialect, felt, as she wrote later, nuda, exposed, inadequate. Of Emma’s children, the one closest in age to Amelia was the clever and fanciful Lina, who wanted to be a boy and called herself Colombo. The two girls became friends. Lina had a much younger sister, Margherita, already pretty and forceful, who would later, as Margherita Sarfatti, become a popular journalist and Mussolini’s mistress. Though there was no respite from instruction at the Grassinis’, where even charades were used as occasions in which to impart more knowledge, Amelia loved the noise and the constant chatter and she dreaded returning to the muffled silence of her own home.

  She was terrified of their thin-lipped neighbour from downstairs, another Levi relation, always dressed in black, and her small ugly husband in his tight-fitting suit and beret who forced her to answer in Latin when he gave her a chocolate. But once a year the Levis’ Florentine relations, the Orvietos, came to stay and then Amelia would be sent down, in a starched white pinafore, to play with their young sons, Angiolo and Adolfo, and though they teased her, and she felt ashamed of her uncouth Venetian dialect, she saw in their warmth and wildness something deeply enticing.

  Every Wednesday, women friends of Emilia’s gathered for tea, the only social event of the week, when Teresa would polish the brass handles until they glowed, and the dust covers were removed from the pale-blue silk furnishings. Then there were weekly visits from a forester who looked after the family’s woods outside the city. A child of largely tree-less Venice, Amelia loved to hear him talk about the different species and the birds which nested in them. But she was much distressed when he brought her a chaffinch, blinded in order to make it sing more sweetly.

  In the autumn of 1881, when Amelia was eleven, the first vaporetto, the Regina Margherita, was launched on the Grand Canal. Standing on the balcony with her father, Amelia watched as the large unfamiliar boat rounded the bend by the Rialto, with smoke rising from its funnel. Loud whistles scattered the gondolas in its path. Her immediate feeling, she wrote later, was one of delight: at last a sign of real life on ‘those dead waters’.

  Though D. H. Lawrence would call Venice ‘abhorrent, green, slippery’ and Ruskin railed against the ‘canals choked with human dung’, the city was still, as Amelia grew up, the high point of the European tour. Despite the decay, despite the depredations of the Austrians as they pulled out, tearing up parquet flooring to make boxes for their loot, despite Napoleon’s own frenzied plunder, Venice itself remained magnificent, a place of frescoed churches and public buildings full of masterpieces of the Venetian Renaissance. The launch of the first vaporetto had been timed for the Geographical Congress of 1882. The king and queen of the new Italy, along with invited European nobility, arrived to find silk carpets and flags hanging from the balconies along the Grand Canal, a pageant, a regatta, gondoliers in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century costumes, and a procession of decorated boats, in one of which the crew were dressed as polar bears, while a walrus lay crouched in the bows and on the stern was a pyramid of ice. That night, the Piazza San Marco was illuminated by myriad tiny lamps, whose flames seemed to waver in a great sheet of living fire.

  Venice remained a city of music, where Vivaldi was born, Monteverdi was for many years maestro di cappella of St Mark’s, and where Wagner worked on Tristan and Isolde. Venetians enjoyed their feast days, their processions, their clergy robed in vestments, and there was no city in Italy so in love with customs, the rituals of food, the separate identities of its different quarters. Nor a city so superstitious: ants, said the Venetians, were harbingers of death, oleanders were deeply unlucky and centipedes the bearers of good fortune.

  A regular line had recently been started from the United States to Italy, and Venice made a terminus for the Indian mail steamers. The many new visitors were advised to spend five days in Venice – fifteen in Naples, thirty in Rome – to sit drinking in Florian’s and to visit Murano to watch the glassmakers. In the summer months, tourists took the steamer to the Lido, where Byron had once galloped his horses along the beach, and where bathing establishments, restaurants and concert rooms now opened. Venice, observed Browning, was ‘gaily international, though somewhat provincial’.

  Foreigners, however, played very little part in Amelia’s closeted life. For her, Venice was a place of sea and sky, the water constantly changing to different shades of green and grey, pure and silvery under the moon, while beyond lay the lagoon, which the low spring tides transformed into a meadow of long pale sea-green grass. In winter the storms turned the courtyards into lakes, soaking basements and the stores of wood for the stoves. And what she carried away with her when, in her fifteenth year, her father suddenly died and she and Emilia moved to Rome, was a memory of her watery childhood, along with a strong sense of discipline, integrity and justice, a conviction that one had to distribute what one had not out of charity but as a duty, and that fortitude was not a matter of choice – all beliefs handed down to her by her intensely moral parents. Years later she would feel grateful for the strength they gave her.

  Rome 1886

  In 1872, the year that Amelia was two, Rome had been made the capital of the new united Italy. King Victor Emmanuel II, a small, squat man with little grey eyes and thick legs, voracious for food and women, installed his court in the Quirinale. By the mid-1880s, when Amelia arrived, this city of fountains and gardens, green marble and pink travertine, of monasteries, convents and seminaries, was in a fever of construction. The ill-planned new buildings were causing more harm, noted the writer Augustus Hare, than all the invasions of Goths and Visigoths.

  As a capital city, however, Rome was curiously old-fashioned. There was no stock exchange, and very little industry, though Pius IX had installed electricity and been a generous patron of the arts. Teams of oxen pulling carts brought in fruit every day from the countryside. Rome was an immense farm, where cows and goats grazed, in the middle of a great plain of wheat. When the cardinals went walking on the Pincio, their black soutanes revealed flashes of scarlet stocking. In summer, mock sea battles were fought in the flooded Piazza Navona, where at Christmas shepherds descended from the Abruzzo to play their bagpipes.

  Amelia and her mother moved in with her brother Gabriele, now a respected jurist and working in the Ministry of Justice. Though the apartment in Via Nazionale had few rooms, these were grand, with high ceilings. The formal drawing room had Biedermeier furniture and Bokhara rugs on the polished parquet floors. Amelia settled into her new home and excelled at her studies. Italian had replaced Venetian as her main language. She had grown closer to Emilia, who had become softer and less judgemental. And Amelia was turning into a striking young woman, with thick hair piled high on her head, arresting blue eyes and a long thin nose. The soft white muslin dresses of the day suited her. In character she was strong, tenacious, shrewd, and she liked to be right; insecure and uncertain, she could appear inflexible. But she was also loving and anxious to please, intelligent and profoundly honest.

  Sometime in 1889, when she was nineteen, Amelia met Giuseppe Rosselli, a near neighbour in Via Nazionale. Joe, as he was known, was a natty dresser, sporting flowery cravats and a cane with a silver handle. He was broad-shouldered, with a soft full beard and straight black hair. To satisfy his father, he had taken a degree in law, but his real love was musicology. He sent Amelia snowdrops and violets, and a sheet of music written especially for her. She was delighted with his elegance and his enthusiasms. Soon he was writing: ‘I love you. I don’t know what else to say: I say it over and over again, to you, to myself, to your letters, to your hair, to your dear little face, to the songs on the piano, to the air, in my dreams, always . . .’

  Amelia
Pincherle at the time of her marriage

  The Rossellis too were Jews, equally cosmopolitan, polyglot and secular, Roman citizens who had moved to Livorno, with its large Sephardic Jewish community, in the early nineteenth century to escape the Pope’s anti-semitic laws and to extend their commercial activities. From Livorno’s free port, four Rosselli brothers – Sabatino, Pellegrino, Raffaelo and Angiolo – had set up banking and business links with London, where they had opened a money-changing office near Fenchurch Street. They traded and prospered on exports of oil, coffee, coral, ostrich feathers, fezzes, lace and embroidery.

  Joe was born in Livorno on 10 August 1867, the son of Sabatino Rosselli and his wife Henrietta Nathan, whose own mother, Sara or Sarina, was the matriarch of the Nathan family. The Rossellis and the Nathans were joined by a series of marriages between brothers and cousins. To his father, as a small boy, Joe wrote in English, letters often seeking forgiveness for misdemeanours. ‘My dear Papa, my mother says I have been a little better lately, will you write to me?’ and ‘Will you try to forget my faults?’ Joe did well in oral exams, especially in Greek and Italian literature, but said that all sciences were ‘odious’ to him.