Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

and Stalin as though it were also the era of Martin Luther? What went on in their minds? How did they, as distinct from the political movements which drew strength from their support, see the world? Why was so little attention paid to them, except by Italian thinkers such as the extraordinary Antonio Gramsci? Italy, it seemed, was full of their traces. Fascinated and moved, I tried to discover them by travelling along Mediterranean back roads for the next few years. Luckily some anthropologists were developing an interest in similar problems they encountered in their enquiries into the anti-colonial movements in Africa. Max Gluckman of Manchester, a man of great originality and a formidable academic chieftain who took his department every week to support Manchester United in the proper anthropological manner, arranged for me to give three lecture-seminars, in the course of which (also followed by his tribe) he gave me my first sight of Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch and decided I should expand my lectures into a book.

I recall my first visit to Sicily in 1953, where I was taken under the wing of Michele Sala, mayor and deputy of Piana degli Albanesi, a red stronghold since 1893 when the noble Dr Nicola Barbato had preached the gospel of socialism to the inhabitants of what was then Piana dei Greci from the rock in the remote mountain pass of Portella della Ginestra, still known as the Barbato Stone. (In his youth Michele Sala, born in the neighbourhood, had himself heard the good word from the apostle’s lips.)⁸ Rain or shine, war, peace or fascism, some Pianesi had never since then failed on the first of May to send a demonstration to this place. The occasion in 1947 when the bandit Giuliano massacred this May Day meeting has been wonderfully reconstructed in Francesco Rosi’s superb film Salvatore Giuliano. Shortly after this the Party had sent Sala to take charge of this complicated part of Sicily. He had the Sicilian sense of realism. In his youth he had signed up, among others, Giuseppe Berti, a leading communist in the Comintern era, and then a student in Palermo, because having carefully situated the socialist office strategically in an apartment facing the exit to a brothel, he could rely on meeting potential recruits ready for red propaganda in a relaxed mood. He had combined this with the hardnosed political experience of Brooklyn, where he spent twenty years of political emigration and learned enough English to show me the masses of masonry with which he was filling the outskirts of town (‘lotta guys need jobs’), as we criss-crossed it in his mayoral car, greeting citizens to the right and left (‘In this town I know who I gotta say hello to!’).

I was shown the cemetery, or rather the necropolis of the Matrangas, Schiros, Barbatos, Loyacanos and the rest of the Albanian Christian families who had emigrated to southern Italy and Sicily in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Every modern gravestone, large or small, had the photograph of the departed. Death, respected and unforgotten, was always present in Piana. I saw what was still taken for granted, the silent black-clad women sitting in the street, but always facing indoors. We were walking along one side of the piazza – the anti-communists and Mafiosi walked on the other side – when he stopped me for a moment. ‘Don’t tell anyone here you are English,’ he warned. ‘There are people here, they don’t like it if they see you with me. I tell them you are from Bologna.’ It was logical enough: even in Sicily they knew that Bologna was red, and it was therefore natural that one communist should visit another. There was only one flaw. We had been together all day audibly speaking English. Sala, who knew his people, dismissed this problem. ‘What do these guys know how they talk in Bologna?’ Indeed, ninety-odd years before, shortly after the unification of Italy, this had been literally true. In 1865 the first schoolmasters sent by the new kingdom to teach the Sicilian children Dante’s Italian language were taken for Englishmen. In this respect nothing fundamental changed in inland Sicily until national television programming. But even less backward parts of Italy still had something of the Third World about them. For the bulk of its inhabitants – even the bilingual ones who spoke it instead of Sicilian, Calabrian or Piedmontese – Italian consisted of two languages: the spoken daily language and the formal language still rooted in baroque usage, in which newspapers and books were written and official speeches were made. It remained a relic of the past even in its public respect for, and reliance on, intellectuals as such. I cannot think of another European country in which an unconcealed intellectual such as Bruno Trentin, child of a family of anti-fascist academic emigrants, would have been acceptable as the leader of a major industrial trade union, and later of the major national organization of labour unions.

Learning about Italy was different in another respect. After 1945 tourism without a bad conscience once again became possible, for art and fun, in a country that had so clamorously broken with its fascist past. I was lucky to have the best possible guides: Francis Haskell, who planned, and Enzo Crea, with his encyclopedic knowledge of all the arts, who revealed the remotest corners and the most celebrated treasures of Italy to his friends with equal enthusiasm. What is more, I rarely went to Italy alone, or, when I arrived there, I was rarely without Italian friends, After I married again, they included the friends of Marlene, who had lived in Rome for several years before we met. Moreover, I had the enormous advantage of introductions by a man whose name opened all doors on the Italian left and a good many others besides, Piero Sraffa. Long established in Cambridge in a wonderful set of rooms in Trinity, opposite the rooms of Maurice Dobb, with whom he was producing a monumental edition of the works of the economist David Ricardo, this small, courteous and grizzled man who avoided loquacity and wrote little, was known as an intellect of formidable critical power. His natural habitat was behind the scenes. Though he was taciturn about his political views, as about everything else, it was known that he had been a close friend of Antonio Gramsci and from 1926 until Gramsci’s death in 1937 the chief contact of the jailed communist leader with the outside world. He had been the conduit through which Gramsci’s prison writings were preserved after his death, with the help of another influential friend in banking. What was not known was the fact that without him Gramsci’s remarkable manuscripts could probably not have been written at all, for, after the arrest, Sraffa (from a well-to-do Turinese family) had immediately opened an unlimited account for the prisoner at a Milanese bookshop. He had been a trusted friend of the current leader of the Party, Togliatti, since their university days. It is said that he had considered returning to Italy after the war, but abandoned the idea after the result of the 1948 election, disastrous for the socialist– communist alliance.

As he knew everybody on the anti-fascist scene – after all, Turin had been the capital of both liberal and communist anti-fascism – Sraffa’s name made me immediately accepted among the Party’s intellectuals. In those days a foreign communist was automatically a member of the brotherhood, a ‘compagno’ addressed as ‘tu’ and not ‘lei’. Indeed the first name on Sraffa’s list I telephoned in Rome, the most senior communist historian at the time, Delio Cantimori, a slow-moving, stout expert on the heretics of the sixteenth century, who had a wicked wit and looked older than his age, immediately invited me to stay with him and his Marx-translating wife, Emma, in their apartment in Trastevere. From there, with his help, I made contact with the Rome-based anti-fascist intellectuals, at that time overwhelmingly communist or Party-sympathizing. One way or another, most of what I learned about Italy – landscape and art history apart – came to me via Italian communists or those Italians still close to them in the early 1950s. It was my luck that my friends among Italian left-wing intellectuals, and especially historians, combining practice with theory, often doubled as observant and analytical journalists.

However, almost anyone who travelled in the remoter rural parts of Italy in the 1950s found people ready to ask and answer questions from foreigners. This was, after all, still a country of oral communication, face to face. In places like Spezzano Albanese (Cosenza, Calabria) such few papers as reached the place still had to be read aloud to the illiterates in cafes, artisan workshops and the PCI ‘Sezione’. In 1955 the telephone had reached San Giovanni in Fiore, the home of the great medieval millennial theorist, Abbot Joachim of Flora, only a few months ago. Strangers, Italian or foreign, brought news – even to people who whether they liked it or not knew that new times were inevitably coming. ‘Things are changing,’ I was told more than once in 1955 Sicily. ‘Our customs are getting like those of the North, for instance women going out. In the end I expect we’ll be like the Northerners.’

At that time the PCI seemed the main gateway into these new times. It had a membership of about two million – about one quarter of the national electorate – which continued to rise with every election until at its peak in the later 1970s it more or less equalled – enthusiasts claimed it was about to pass – the 34 per cent of the party of permanent government, the Christian Democrats. Socially the PCI was a cross-section of Italian society as much as a class party, especially in its massive strongholds in north–central Italy: Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Umbria – regions of culture, prosperity, technological and business dynamism, and honest administration. Italian communism was not the whole of Italy, but a central and a wonderfully civilizing element of it. But, like nonconformity in Britain, it was and remained a minority.