Rome

acceptance of risk. He had no middle-class background; he was wholeheartedly patriotic and genuinely male—there was nothing forced or mendacious about all those photos of Il Duce striking attitudes on top of tanks or showing his belligerent profile to the lens. The English might mock them; the Italians did not. Hollywood, in the genius of Charlie Chaplin, might set Jack Oakie to play him as “Benzino Napaloni” in The Great Dictator— but it was not a caricature that has ever played well in Italy.

He believed he had a medium’s relationship to his country, instinctive and infallible—and much of the time, at least, he was right. “I did not create Fascism. I drew it from the Italians’ unconscious minds. If that had not been so, they would not all have followed me for twenty years—I repeat, all of them.” This enabled Mussolini’s charismatic mix of presidential omniscience and theatrical posturing to work. To dismiss him as a buffoon, a swollen bullfrog on horseback, as Anglo-American propaganda constantly tried to, is seriously to underrate him. He understood the uses of the media, and grasped them extremely well, at least as well as Winston Churchill; he was particularly well aware of the potential of film as propaganda. In this respect, he was ahead of his time, and his career pointed ahead to such image managers as John Kennedy and George W. Bush—but most of all as the immensely rich and sexually flamboyant mediacrat who, through his control of national television, is still the dominant figure in Italian politics, Silvio Berlusconi.

¹ While opening an exhibition of the Novecento (twentieth-century) Italian Group, organized by his mistress, the freelance curator and art dealer Margherita Sarfatti.

² Compare Le Corbusier’s famous somewhat later characterization of a house as une machine a habiter.

³ Though there is some debate about the exact extent of his authorship and the names of his collaborators, if any, the content of the 1914 Manifesto of Futurist Architecture could not have existed without Sant’Elia.

⁴ Mussolini’s father had never allowed him to be baptized. Later, for the sake of good relations with the Church and his pious voters, he was; but he was never a believer.

⁵ No reference to the South American country. The name came from the Latin name of the diocese, Argentoratum. Fascist work on the site began in 1926.

⁶ I shall never forget how, forty years ago, I told a young Australian actress of my acquaintance about this Fascist practice. “Oh, darling,” she exclaimed, “the poor toad!”

12

Rome Recaptured

The capture of Rome, Italy’s capital, from Fascist hands was a long time in preparation. It could not be done by direct attack from the North. All previous assaults on Rome, dating back to the time of the Gauls, had come from there. But the German forces made that impossible. It was becoming clear, by 1943, that the burden of keeping the Allies out of Italy was going to fall, more and more, on the German rather than the Italian forces—and on the repulse, which ultimately proved impossible, of a sea-and-air invasion across the Mediterranean from North Africa.

Mussolini and Hitler, together, had committed Italy to full partnership with Germany in the world war. There is no doubt of the mutual fascination that existed between the two men. It had been in place, and strengthening, ever since Mussolini paid his state visit to Germany in 1937 and was confronted by the full strength of Nazi theatricals— no man as narcissistic as Il Duce was going to be unmoved by the sight of an avenue lined with likenesses of himself and of Roman emperors.

Yet there was no prospect that the partnership of Italy and Germany in a world war could be an equal one. The Italian economy could only support a tenth of Germany’s military expenditure (in 1938, $746 million, as against Germany’s $7.415 billion). Its production of war materiel was small compared with Germany’s, despite all the bluster Mussolini and his propagandists made about it. Italian immigration to the United States between 1918 and 1938 had been heavy, and the reduction of Italian manpower accordingly large—a problem which obviously could not be solved in the short term by any number of appeals to population growth. And the worst problem of all, from the Axis’s point of view, was the difficulty of getting ordinary Italians to hate Americans and the British. The Allies had fought the Italian army in North Africa in early 1943, and the results were not encouraging for Italy; by May 1943, according to John Keegan, the number of Italians who had become Allied prisoners in the African wars over Mussolini’s “empire” exceeded 350,000, more than the total garrison assigned to Africa at the beginning. The Allied victory in North Africa was now absolute and irreversible, and this meant that the whole Italian coast was faced, across an intervening sea, by hostile forces, deployed from Casablanca to Alexandria. What Churchill had memorably called “the soft underbelly of Europe” was now open to attack from sea and air as it had never been in previous history.

Moreover, the royal house of Italy, with most of its ruling aristocracy and officer class, was wavering in its loyalty to Il Duce. Hitler was well aware of this, and he felt, correctly, that “in Italy we can rely only on the Duce. There are strong fears that he may be got rid of or neutralized in some way.… Broad sectors of the civil service are hostile or negative toward us.… The broad masses are apathetic and lacking in leadership.” So they were, and they became more so after the unwelcome news of Operation Husky, the code name for the Allied landings in Sicily—the prelude to Operation Avalanche, a full assault on the Italian mainland. This was a crucial event for Italy’s ruling class. It persuaded them to change sides, without telling the Germans. The Italian troops facing the Allies crumbled, and Badoglio, their commander, had opened negotiations with the Allies, all the while declaring that, as prime minister—for Mussolini had now resigned his office—he was unshakably loyal to Hitler. After an uncomfortable meeting with King Victor Emmanuel, who had demanded his resignation, Mussolini was banished to an improvised succession of islands off Italy’s west coast, ending at a hotel atop the Gran Sasso peaks in the Apennines. From there, a few weeks later, he was “rescued” on Hitler’s orders by a formidable duel-scarred SS commando named Otto Skorzeny, who came winging in with a tiny Storch spotter plane, scooped up Il Duce, and flew him off to a reunion with Hitler, and refuge, of a sort, in the tiny town of Salo. Here, he was to reign briefly as head of a puppet regime, the Italian Social Republic. Such was the terminus of Il Duce’s political career.

The first stage of the Allies’ thrust into Italy was a success. The central target of the Allies’ enormous armada was the ancient port town of Gela—where, according to legend, the Attic playwright Aeschylus had been killed by a falling tortoise, dropped from the beak of an eagle. Much more than tortoises came hurtling down on Gela’s Axis defenders: waves of bombers, parachutist drops, and naval guns with which the three-pronged assault of Patton’s Seventh Army pressed home its attack, out of a limpidly clear July morning. It took the troops of Husky just thirty- eight days to win back ten thousand square miles of Sicily from the Axis, fighting with desperation uphill most of the way. By the end of it, half a million Germans were dead, and when the Allies reached Messina, the northeastern tip of Calypso’s blood-boltered island, the correspondent Alan Moorehead gazed over the narrow strait to the mainland and reflected, “One was hardly prepared for its nearness.… When one looked across at that other shore, the mainland of Europe, the vineyards and village houses were utterly quiet and all the coast seemed to be gripped in a sense of dread at what inevitably was going to happen.”

What happened, starting in early September 1943, was Avalanche, the Allies’ mass landing at Salerno. By now the Italian forces had caved in, and all the fighting devolved on the Germans, who held on with the grimmest determination—a determination matched only by that of the invading Allies.

After the hails of fire that had engulfed southern Italy during the Allied crossing from Sicily, after the bitter yard-by-yard struggle up the “boot” of Italy toward Rome, after the long and murderous transit through Salerno, the