Lessons for Our Times from Mussolini's Son-in-Law, Galeazzo Ciano

The diaries of Benito Mussolini's son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano are, indeed, remarkable, as Bill posted after he read them 7 years ago.

They are worth revisiting at this time and, in fact, a new edition is due out in March.  Although we generally avoid politics in this blog, the parallels with Trump are glaringly obvious.  And the parallels extend to the relationship.  This is a cautionary tale for another son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Ciano went from an art and drama critic who was critical of Fascism to Il Duce's foreign minister, which seems like a stretch.  The diaries don't clue us in to his "conversion," but start only after Ciano has married Mussolini's daughter, Edda, converted to Fascism whole-heartedly, and become, at age 33, the Italian government's Minister for Foreign Affairs.

Covering 1939-1943, these are diaries of a government official, perhaps the closest advisor to Mussolini in these years when Italy went to war against the Allies as part of the Axis with, primarily, Germany and with Japan.

Ciano's almost daily observations show us how a charismatic leader whose ego is his defining motivation can lead into war an apparently unwilling nation, whose people he often despises and castigates.  In the end, Ciano decides, it's Mussolini's ego, in reaction to foreign press reports, that drives him into the arms of Hitler.  Mussolini is a man of leadership skills and talent, according to Ciano, but he listens to those who prop up his views, berates the press and the Church, and cares mainly about his own prestige.

As Minister for Foreign Affairs for 7 years, Ciano had an intimate view of Il Duce, and he wrote regularly about the Italian Fascist leader's views and moods.

As the diary begins, the Italians clearly have their own design on empire.  They see Albania, for example, simply as one of their provinces, and when they take it, international reaction is almost nonexistent, Ciano notes - "the inertia of democracies."  Both men want a new "Roman Mediterranean Empire," but both hope to achieve it without war.

The Italian people don't want a pact with Germany, a country with whom they share few values, but it is Il Duce, not the majority of the people, who decides, says Ciano early on in his diary.

While Mussolini seems to agree with Ciano in 1939 that war is not desirable, the Duce "says that honor compels him to march with Germany.  Finally he states that he wants his part of the booty in Croatia and Dalmatia."  So it's ego and loot that's important here.

While Ciano sees himself as trying to speak truth to power with Mussolini, he laments "I have been completely abandoned by the large group of men who are concerned with telling the Duce only those things that please him.  To tell the truth is the least of their cares."

Ciano also views the Duce as focusing his attention "mostly on matters of form; there is hell to pay...if an officer doesn't know how to lift his legs in the Roman step....Does he fear the truth so much that he is unwilling to listen?"

In late 1939, Mussolini becomes "more and more restless.  He feels that he is out of this great struggle and in one way or another he would like to find a way to fit into it....He was quite pleased with an English article which said that the Italian people might fight at the side of Germany for reasons of honor.  This is also his point of view, and even when there are a thousand voices to the contrary, a single anonymous voice saying that he is right is sufficient, and he will cling to it and overlook, indeed deny, the others."

What concerns Mussolini most, as Ciano quotes him, is this:  "It is not possible that of all people I should become the laughingstock of Europe.  I have to stand for one humiliation after another."

Mussolini becomes more fascinated with Hitler as Hitler achieves military successes.  And that success, writes Ciano, "has had a favorable echo among the Italian people who, as Mussolini says, 'is a whore who prefers the winning mate.'"

Mussolini is also a believer in his own charisma:  He has written Hitler, "The feeling of the Italian people is unanimously against the Allies."  Ciano responds, "Where does he get this information? Is he really sure of what he writes, or is it not true that, conscious of his personal influence, he is thinking of the opportune moment for modifying the national mood at his whim."

Ciano argues against war because he distrusts the Germans, thinking they are playing the Italians, and he knows the Italians do not have the armaments and training for this war, though the sycophants around Mussolini tell him otherwise - "the clownish politicians, who have become exaggeratedly pro-German."

Ciano cannot stop Mussolini at this point:  "it is not that he wants to obtain this or that; what he wants is war, and, even if he were to obtain by peaceful means double what he claims, he would refuse." On May 29, 1940, Ciano notes, "Rarely have I seen Mussolini so happy.  He has realized his dream: that of becoming the military leader of the country at war."  Ciano adds:  "I am sad, very sad.  The adventure begins.  May God help Italy!"

When France capitulates quickly, Ciano finds "Mussolini dissatisfied.  This sudden peace disquiets him. ...The war has been won by Hitler without any active military participation on the part of Italy, and it is Hitler who will have the last word. This, naturally, disturbs and saddens him."

Mussolini becomes more and more concerned with how Hitler views him, And the Duce thinks a long war might restore Italy's lost prestige.  "Oh, his eternal illusions...," writes Ciano.

As the war becomes a series of losses for Italy - in Egypt, Libya, Greece, and elsewhere - "News from all sectors is bad."  Ciano, along with the entire cabinet, is relieved of his post on February 5, 1943, and he is made Ambassador to the Holy See, an unimportant position.  Mussolini reassures him, "Your future is in my hands, and therefore you need not worry," Ciano quotes Mussolini.  "He has invited me to see him frequently....I like Mussolini, like him very much, and what I shall miss most will be my contact with him."

The diary then goes silent for almost 10 months, until December 23, 1943, its final entry.  Ciano is now writing from his prison cell in Verona.  He reiterates that he opposed the pact with Germany, but received unequivocal orders for that alliance.  It was, says Ciano, a decision "that has had such a sinister influence upon the future of the Italian people."  That decision to join with Germany in provoking and promoting war, he says, in hindsight, was "due entirely to the spiteful reaction of a dictator to the irresponsible and valueless utterances of foreign journalists."  Italy was treated by Germany "never like partners, but always as slaves....Only the base cowardice of Mussolini could, without reaction, tolerate this and pretend not to see it."

Ciano has concluded that Mussolini read reports in foreign papers that he was subservient to Hitler and to counter them, and to protect his prestige, he had to join the Axis.

The last words of the diary are these:  "I believe that an honest testimonial of the truth in this sad world may still be useful in bringing relief to the innocent and striking at those who are responsible." Galeazzo Ciano  December 23, 1943, Cell 27 of the Verona Jail."

Ciano, who took part in the ousting of Mussolini on July 25, 1943, was executed, on Mussolini's orders it appears, on January 11, 1944.  His wife, Edda, Mussolini's daughter, disguised herself and smuggled the diary out of Italy.

Dianne
PS - Although Bill read the diary 7 years ago, I read it just this year.  I believe there are reasons it continues to be reprinted from time to time, and, as I indicated at the top, right now.

Carl Ipsen's "Fumo: Italy's Love Affair with the Cigarette"

Filtered Nazionali.  We smoked
the real thing. 

Our introduction to Italian smoking habits came in the fall of 1962, when we were both students in Stanford University's study abroad program--this one in Florence.  We were pack-a-day smokers, too, and either unaware or unconcerned with the health effects of our habit; it was two years before the U.S. Surgeon General's report firmly linked smoking to lung cancer.  Marlboro was our brand of choice (it was first sold legally in Italy in 1954), but it was prohibitively expensive, and so we settled for Winstons ("taste good like a cigarette should") when we could get them, but mostly smoked Nazionali, a harsh, unfiltered smoke made with Italian dark tobacco.  At the time, Nazionali was the best-selling brand in Italy by far; despite the "boom" of the 1950s, most Italians could not afford to smoke anything else on a regular basis.  The boys described in the novels of Pier Paolo Pasolini were obsessed with cigarettes, but too poor--certainly much poorer than we Stanford students--to smoke anything but Nazionali.

Pietro Saporetti, "Emancipated Woman,"
1881.  Smoking among women
was rare at the time.  

Not wanting to get lung cancer, we quit cold turkey in 1969, and American smoking rates fell throughout the 1970s.  But Italians--as a group--did not quit.  One of the conclusions drawn by Carl Ipsen's Fumo, his new, engaging, and fascinating history of "Italy's love affair with the cigarette" (the subtitle) is that more Italian men gave up the habit in every decade after 1950 as they became more middle class and health conscious, but more Italian women smoked every decade after 1960 as they became more liberated and assertive. Overall Italian smoking rates did not decline until after 2000.

Then, in January, 2005, under the regime of Silvio Berlusconi and his anti-smoking health minister, Girolamo Sirchia, an extraordinary thing happened.  A smoking ban passed by the Italian parliament went into effect.  It was known as the Sirchia Law, and it was, by Italian standards, draconian: smoking was prohibited in all public  places and offices, but also in bars and restaurants and other shops, which were, of course, privately owned.

The Sirchia Law wasn't the first effort to regulate smoking.  In 1962, the parliament had banned all cigarette advertising; in 1975, a nationwide ban on smoking in certain public places (hospital corridors and school classrooms, for example) was instituted--neither was enforced.  In 1985, a ban on smoking in all public places and offices, including bars and restaurants, was introduced but not passed; at that time, some local jurisdictions acted to enforce the 1975 ban (as in Empoli) or enacted their own local bans (as in the leftist bastion of Bologna).

We arrived in Rome on our regular spring visit just months after the 2005 prohibition was implemented nationwide.  We were sure it would be ignored, that hardcore Italian smokers--and many fit that description--would not surrender their smoking privileges easily.  We were wrong.  The Rome courtyard ("cortile") of Montecitorio (home of the Chamber of Deputies; Italy's House of Representatives) was, Ipsen notes, renamed "cortile Sirchia."  One of the few protests took place at the Termini train station, where journalist Giordano Bruno and TV host Funari lit up in a bar.  They were arrested, taken to a police station, and fined.  The law brought new pleasures, too: Romans (and other Italians) love their restaurants and their cuisine, and the smoking ban allowed them to enjoy those spaces smoke-free and to "properly" taste their food.

What Ipsen describes as the "cigarette century" in Italy began in the late-19th century among elites and spread downward in the social structure during the Great War and after.  The brand Nazionali was introduced by the Italian tobacco monopoly--the Monopolio--in 1900.  Triestian novelist Italo Svevo
made the cigarette central to his 1923 novel Zeno's Conscience, whose protagonist, Zeno, became "Italy's most famous smoker." (Svevo is a novelist we prize highly; we went to Trieste to follow his walks, during which he smoked, but we did not.)

Smoking depicted as elitist and decadent, 1930

Unlike in Germany, where Hitler instituted an anti-smoking campaign, Mussolini's regime--he was a non-smoker and into the cult of the body---did not discourage smoking. Indeed, several Fascist brands were introduced in the interwar years: Eja, featuring the fascio littorio symbol; A.O.I., (the initials representing Italian East Africa); O.N.D. (initials representing Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro, a Fascist after-work association).  Ipsen notes n this period, as well into the late 1900s, the Italian state was profiting handsomely from its monopoly, while knowing Italians were dying from smoking.

Me ne frego brand, 1935

Italo Balbo's flights to Rio de Janeiro and Chicago were both commemorated with cigarettes.  The story goes that a new Egyptian tobacco cigarette called Me ne frego ("I don't give a damn") was handed out to Italian troops on their way to war in Ethiopia in 1935. By encouraging the cultivation of tobacco in the southern province of Puglia and the Italian colony of Libya, the Mussolini government also achieved "autarchy" (economic self sufficiency) in the cigarette business, as it wanted to do in all sectors.

The offer of a cigarette is an
invitation to "friendship." 1954.  Ipsen
comments that outdoorsy woman in the ad
promoting Eidelweiss cigarette seems
to be offering more than just friendship.

Women's smoking was minimal--yet controversial--until the 1970s; in 1965, only 8% of Italian women smoked.  A woman with a cigarette in her hand could mean almost anything, including liberation, emancipation, transgression, decadence, or modernity.  If her palm was up, the sexual innuendo was heightened.

A dominant Giovanna, cigarette in hand, bends the
weaker male to her will.  Ossessione (1943)

As late as the 1940s, a woman smoking in a film signified a healthy penchant for dominance--the femme fatale, a Lady MacBeth up to no good, as in Ossessione (1943). Even so, Eva, a cigarette for women, was introduced in 1924.

The startling rise in women smokers began in the 1970s and continued into the next decade, when some 28% of Italian women smoked.  Rates were high among educated women, too; they not only rejected Fascism's body fetish, but used smoking as a sign of gender equality and independence. According to Ipsen, Italian feminists smoked in large numbers.

Mina, 1964.

Women's smoking was also supported by celebrity smoker/advocates, including Anna Magnani,
Sophia Loren, Silvia Pampanini, and the pop singer Mina, who in 1964--the year of the Surgeon General's report--celebrated smoking with a tune called "Fumo Blu" (Blue Smoke) ["Con me tu puoi/Fumare la tua pipa quando vuoi" - "With me you can smoke your pipe whenever you want"].

Smoking kills, but you can protect yourself 
with this filter, according to this ad.  

As we have seen, Italians were roughly 20 years behind Americans in accepting the health consequences of cigarette smoking and turning away from the habit.  The rush of women to smoking in the late 20th century accounts for part of the difference.  In addition, Italians were much more likely to believe that filtered cigarettes eliminated much, if not all, of the health risk.

Finally, Ipsen argues provocatively that Italians were "less risk averse" than Americans, steeped in a culture of "menefreghismo" ("I don't give a damn-ism").  They loved their lottery, drove their motorscooters without helmets, refused to wear seat belts and--here's the clincher--used the withdrawal method to prevent pregnancy.  "Withdrawal," writes Ipsen, "resembles a game of chance."  It's "risky, but with a margin of error that might or might not seem acceptable, it does work."  And so they smoked.

Carl Ipsen Fumo: Italy's Love Affair with the Cigarette was published this year by Stanford University Press.  It is widely available.

Bill

A postscript.  The appendix to Ipsen's book includes legal material he submitted in a case brought against a tobacco company by the family of an Italian man (who went on to live in Canada and the US) who died from smoking. Ipsen analyzed the Italian media's coverage of the risks of smoking for a law firm representing the tobacco company to support the defense that the man understood those risks. In a brief preface to the appendix Ipsen describes his as a "cautionary tale for other scholars attracted by the significant fees paid for work of this sort. I was told that the law firm received a summary judgment in its [its client's] favor in the case." Perhaps this book is partly Ipsen's effort at atonement, since in the book he concludes - in contrast to the material submitted to the law firm - that Italians were given much contradictory evidence about smoking and that the media promoted the notion that the link between smoking and lung disease was not clear and that filters or 'light' cigarettes could prevent any or much harm.  Dianne

Luigi Conconi, Ebbrezza ("Inebriation"), 1888.  Conconi also titled the painting "La vita libera" ("The free life" - Ipsen
suggests "libera" may have something of a "libertine" meaning here. 

Czeslaw Milosz, "Campo de' Fiori" (1943)

The Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz

A friend we toured with in Rome a couple of years ago sent us this poem, "Campo de' Fiori."  We were unfamiliar with the poet, Czeslaw Milosz, and with this poem, which is one of his better known pieces.  Milosz was born in Lithuania (1911) but lived in Poland and wrote poems and prose in Polish (the poem is translated). He spent World War II in Warsaw, then under a Nazi-imposed government.  Strongly anti-Communist, Milosz defected to the West in 1951 and became a U.S. citizen in 1970.  He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980.

As Milosz has explained, the poem was not written inside the Warsaw ghetto, but it was written in Warsaw in 1943, not long before the 1944 uprising against the Nazis and the subsequent deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to extermination camps.

In this poem, Milosz describes a moment in the history of the Campo de' Fiori in order to understand the horrific events in wartime Warsaw.  The heretic mathematician and astronomer Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Campo de' Fiori in 1600, the victim of the Catholic Church and a "mob" mentality, but in Milosz's poem it's as if the event barely happened: "Before the flames had died the taverns were full again," he writes. Something similar--something that reminds us of our inhumanity--he suggests, happened to Warsaw's Jews, who went to their deaths as "the crowds were laughing on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday."

 Bill

      Campo de' Fiori

                 By Czeslaw Milosz

                 Translated by Louis Iribarne

In Rome on the Campo de' Fiori

baskets of olives and lemons,

cobbles spattered with wine

and the wreckage of flowers.

Vendors cover the trestles

Statue of Giordano Bruno, Campo de' Fiori

with rose-pink fish;

armfuls of dark grapes

heaped on peach-down.

On this same square

they burned Giordano Bruno.

Henchmen kindled the pyre

close-pressed by the mob.

Before the flames had died                                

the taverns were full again,

baskets of olives and lemons

again on the vendors' shoulders.                          

I thought of the Campo de' Fiori

in Warsaw by the sky-carousel

one clear spring evening

to the strains of a carnival tune.

The bright melody drowned

the salvos from the ghetto wall,

and couples were flying

high in the cloudless sky.

At times wind from the burning

would drift dark kites along

and riders on the carousel

caught petals in midair.

That same hot wind

blew open the skirts of the girls

and the crowds were laughing

on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

Someone will read as moral

that the people of Rome or Warsaw

haggle, laugh, make love

as they pass by the martyrs' pyres.



Someone else will read

of the passing of things human,                                    

of the oblivion

born before the flames have died.

But that day I thought only

of the loneliness of the dying,

of how, when Giordano

climbed to his burning

he could not find

in any human tongue

words for mankind,

mankind who live on.

Already they were back at their wine

or peddled their white starfish,

baskets of olives and lemons

they had shouldered to the fair,

and he already distanced

as if centuries had passed

while they paused just a moment

for his flying in the fire.

Those dying here, the lonely

forgotten by the world,

our tongue becomes for them

the language of an ancient planet.

Until, when all is legend

and many years have passed,

on a new Campo de' Fiori

rage will kindle at a poet's word.

Finding Rome, in Washington, D.C.: The Pension Building

Rome is in our thoughts even when we're not in the city.  And so RST was surprised, and pleased, to come across a reference to the architecture of the Eternal City while in Washington, D.C. over the holidays.

The surprise took the form of what is now the National Building Museum (created by Congress in 1980).  It once housed the U.S. Pension Bureau, established after the Civil War to dispense pensions to the veterans (and their widows) of Union soldiers who had fought in that conflict.

The entrance is on the other side, off F Street

It's monumental in scope.  With grounds at each end, it occupies much of a city block (between F and G and 4th and 5th NW).  When completed in 1887, it was the largest brick building in the world--and controversial, too, because brick was an unlikely material for a major government building in Washington.

The designer was Army Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs.  Fortunately for RST, Meigs was familiar with Rome buildings and classical architecture.

Palazzo Farnese

The three-level classical facade, and the variations within it, mimic Rome's Palazzo Farnese (1550s), as does the cornice, said by some to be a "direct copy"of Michelangelo's epic cornice for the Farnese (our memory is that the Farnese cornice has a much larger overhang). And the cornice adapts the Farnese acanthus leaves/fleur-de-lis to a military motif, with cannons and bursting bombs.

Exterior frieze, Pension Building

The exterior frieze (above) was, perhaps, most directly inspired by the Greek Parthenon, but is also reminiscent of the designs on Rome's Trajan's column--depicting another epic military campaign, that one in the far flung province of Dacia (now Romania).

The Italian Renaissance Revival theme is also carried out inside, in one of the most impressive rooms ever created.  The Corinthian columns that dominate the interior, also constructed in brick, are 8 feet in diameter, 25 feet in circumference and, at 75 feet in height, are still some of the world's tallest.

The brick columns, under construction, early 1880s

The Great Hall, still used by Presidents for inaugural balls, is roughly the size of a football field: 316 feet long, 116 feet wide, 159 feet high.  Here, Meigs' inspirations were two, and both Roman: the Baths of Diocletian (298-306) and the Renaissance-era Palazzo della Cancelleria, just off Campo de' Fiori.  Although they have (apparently) nothing to do with Rome, the building's stone stairways are interesting; they were designed with low risers to accommodate injured and handicapped war veterans.

There's a charge (about $10) to get into the Building Museum, the carpeted Great Hall and some other locations in the building can be appreciated for free.

Bill

F Street side, frieze above the first floor 

The arcades of the Pension Building resemble those
in the Palazzo della Cancelleria, above.

All Saints All the Time - Shopping in the Vatican Stores.

Enter here

There's something about the multiplicity in the shops across from St. Peter's that appeals to me.  I love the saints in some odd alphabetical order, above, with their traditional icons at hand.  Cristina, Chiara, Cecilia next to each other, then Benedetta and Catarina, followed by Agnese and Agata. Okay, not normal alphabetical order, but some kind of order.  The photos below provide some additional buon vistas (good viewing).  Dianne

Some prefer medallions.  These also are in alphabetical order, in bins.. 



Of course, Padre Pio always gets his own showing.

And then there are the general Roma souvenirs, even in the Vatican stores

An overall view of the store - in the Galleria S. Pietro, across from Bernini's colonnade.