Rome, Closed City

Pina​ was shot dead on a street in Rome in the spring of 1944 on what would have been her wedding day. She was pregnant. Her fiancé, Francesco, arrested moments earlier after a German raid on apartment buildings east of the central railway station, was ordered into the back of a truck. Men were frequently rounded up during the German occupation of Rome, to be requisitioned as labour for the construction of the city’s defences – the Allied arrival at the gates of Rome was endlessly imminent through the winter and spring of 1944 – or packed off to work in Germany. More than 600,000 Italian soldiers and prisoners became internees of the Reich. Or they were shot: on 24 March 1944, 335 Romans were killed in a catacomb south of the city as a reprisal for the death of 33 German soldiers attacked by the resistance close to the Piazza Barberini. That mass execution is known as the Ardeatine massacre. Rome was finally liberated on 4 June.

Pina was killed as she ran after the truck containing Francesco. The murderer may have been a German or Italian soldier, or a member of the fascist militia, perhaps a police officer. The priest who was to officiate at the wedding cradled her head as she died. Francesco’s truck joined a convoy, which was ambushed by the resistance on the outskirts of Rome. He escaped and was reunited with his resistance comrades, only for them to be betrayed, tortured and killed. Francesco was the only survivor.

Teresa Gullace was also pregnant when she was shot dead on 3 March 1944. She had joined a furious demonstration against the imprisonment of many men, including her husband, at the barracks on the Viale Giulio Cesare in Prati, a quarter north of the Vatican. Laura Lombardo Radice, a central figure of the communist resistance and the leading light of this and several other protests during the occupation, said she saw Gullace rush towards her husband, who was standing on the other side of the railings. ‘She was only five metres away from me,’ Radice said. ‘I cannot swear whether the man who killed her was an SS motorcyclist or one of those imbecile, arrogant fascist militiamen … I saw the woman lying in the rubbish of the street – she died instantly. The confusion and uproar were dreadful.’

The second of these two stories appears in Raleigh Trevelyan’s Rome ’44 (1981), about the German occupation and the painful Allied advance. In his review of Trevelyan’s book, Norman Lewis, whose better-known Naples ’44 had been published three years before, described the campaign as ‘one of the most undistinguished in military history, a species of Blitzkrieg in reverse … Jealousy and suspicion divided the Allies and helped fight the Germans’ war for them.’ Trevelyan had fought in the campaign as a soldier, and afterwards interviewed officers from both sides as well as many Romans, for whom life had not been as simple as ‘them’ and ‘us’. ‘So often, in the battle for Rome,’ Lewis wrote, ‘insignificant and defenceless persons were singled out for partisan attack, and so often, as Raleigh Trevelyan makes clear, murder for personal motives wore a patriotic mask.’

The first story is from Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, released at the end of 1945. The movie begins with a version of the disclaimer that is now so common: ‘The characters in this film, even though they are inspired by the tragic and heroic chronicle of nine months of Nazi occupation, are imaginary. So, any relation to real episodes and people should be considered coincidental.’ Early viewers may have thought there was no coincidence at all. Rome, Open City was shot eighty years ago, before the war in northern Italy was even over, but it feels no less real now than it did in 1945.

Marjorie Scaretti, my great-aunt, lived in Rome for much of her life. She was in the Apennines after the armistice talks of July 1943 and returned to Rome on 20 October, two days after the remaining Jews of the Roman ghetto were sent by train to Auschwitz. Her husband, Enrico, was a banker, some of whose property and businesses were appropriated by Mussolini after he refused to join the Fascist Party. Aunt Marjorie kept a diary, and in its pages she writes about the furtive lives Romans led during the occupation: the ceaseless speculation about where the Allies were; whether the Nazis would destroy Rome by defending it from an Allied attack, turning it into another Stalingrad; at which prison or police station someone was being held and how to get them out – many arrests in the months of the occupation were entirely arbitrary. The irony of Rossellini’s title was that Rome was anything but open. Much of the quotidian detail of life under the occupation that appears in the film also appears in Aunt Marjorie’s diary. She wrote of ‘the hair’s-breadth escapes, the adventures, the amazing and often fantastic existence of thousands of fugitives, coupled with the fear, the secret anxiety, the danger and the want, the heroic, the ludicrous and the vile – all packed into the daily life of the harassed citizen’. Josette Bruccoleri, an interviewee in Trevelyan’s book, spoke of the same unease: ‘Everyone seemed to be in possession of some great secret which they did not dare reveal. People hardly spoke to each other and if they did it was only for a moment. I myself felt like a time bomb ready to explode, but like everybody else I did my best to look as innocent as possible.’

Lewis writes that Neapolitans love food more than life itself, but in 1944 this was not only true of Neapolitans. Since there was so little of it, food was the most popular topic of conversation in Rome. People no longer fitted into their clothes because they had lost so much weight; many looked prematurely old. There were other oddities in the streets. Bicycles were banned, since they could too easily be deployed to attack German soldiers: a rider could hurl a home-made grenade before getting quickly away. Rather than be defeated by the injunction, Romans found ways to convert their bicycles into something else. ‘Many ingenious three-wheeled contraptions have appeared on the streets,’ Aunt Marjorie wrote, ‘or else trolleys made out of old prams or toy carts are attached behind. Enrico is considering the possibility of fixing a light box with a wheel on the side of his bicycle in order to be able to use it again to get to the office.’

Marjorie and Enrico lived in a ‘large and rambling palazzo of the 17th century’ looking out onto the Piazza Navona. It was ‘built like all the others of its kind’, she writes,

with no regard for either comfort or economy and therefore in days of war, impossible to run without inconvenience and fatigue. We have two small courtyards, a complicated labyrinth of corridors and staircases, small terraces and an uneven, moss and lichen-covered tiled roof. The postal address of our front door bears no relation to our back door. On the corner of our house there is a bus stop, with the patient groups of people waiting for transport just before curfew time.

Thousands of people went into hiding in Rome: political enemies, communists, Jews, former Allied prisoners of war released after the fall of Mussolini in July 1943. The Italian peninsula was full of men, typically in pairs, making their way south. Marjorie and Enrico hid people in their warren of a house, as did many of their friends. The threat of the death penalty was ignored – everyone seemed to be hiding someone. The commotion of getting off an overcrowded bus was the distraction that allowed people to vanish into a building without being noticed by nearby soldiers.

It can easily be understood how many and various were the fugitives who turned up in our house, and when once in it was practically impossible to turn them out. One elderly friend, a Jew, arrived for the night and stayed for five months without ever going out. We found it a useful rule that anyone could stay for as long as they liked but when they went out, they did not come back; for this reason I think we escaped detection.

Raids were common, so the fugitives didn’t wear shoes: if they had to race up to the roof to hide, no one would hear their hurried footsteps.

Some people played much larger roles in hiding and supporting people wanted by German soldiers and the fascist militia. One was Father Hugh O’Flaherty, a monsignor from Killarney (Ireland was neutral for the duration of the war). He was a ‘magnetic character’, Trevelyan wrote,

fanatically keen on golf, tall, a considerable joker, with a thick brogue and blue eyes behind round steel-rimmed spectacles – a Scarlet Pimpernel maybe … O’Flaherty lived in – of all places – the German College, between the old palace of the Inquisition and the Vatican. It was from here … that he plotted and planned, arranging disguises and false identity cards, finding accommodation for prisoners in Rome and supplying them with cash.

One of his jokes involved an escapee British general, Michael Gambier-Parry, who was renowned as a forger. O’Flaherty took him to Irish parties and introduced him to senior German officers as an Irish doctor. Gambier-Parry found safe lodgings with a group of nuns, the Blue Sisters.

Another figure who aided those who had to hide or escape was Prince Filippo Doria Pamphilj, who himself lived in hiding in Trastevere, from where he distributed funds to fugitives. Doria was known as the ‘underground governor’ of Rome – his exact role has never been fully explained, and since he never boasted about his work or even talked about it, maybe it never will be. He and his family were prominent and long-standing antifascists. In 1935, Mussolini demanded that Italians donate their gold wedding rings to help fund his war in Ethiopia; the Oro alla patria campaign promised steel wedding rings in return. News spread that Princess Doria would not be handing over her ring, so a fascist militia entered the palace, on the Corso in the centre of the city, and climbed the main staircase to be confronted by the princess herself, though since she was wearing a flowery apron they assumed she was the cook. She told them to leave, and they did.

Three years later, Hitler arrived in Rome to meet Mussolini. He wanted to visit the Doria Pamphilj picture gallery, home to Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X. The authoritative gaze Velázquez gives the pope is deceptive. However omnipotent Innocent X was by title, he was ruled by his sister-in-law, Donna Olimpia Maidalchini Pamphilj. There’s a bust of her in the gallery. The way her widow’s veil falls from the back of her head makes her resemble a hooded cobra, ready to strike. Hitler never got to see the painting: the Dorias refused to allow him in.

In 1939, the prince wrote to his cousin King Victor Emmanuel III to warn him that Mussolini’s decision to go to war against Britain was a mistake. The king passed the letter on to Mussolini, who forced Doria to leave the city. He found his way back, however, and when the Germans arrived in September 1943 joined the thousands of others in hiding. On 10 June 1944, six days after the liberation, Doria became mayor of Rome and gave an address from the balcony of the Palazzo Senatorio on the Capitoline Hill. ‘Allow me to summarise my appeal for a spirit of civic and brotherly love, and for a sincere desire for mutual understanding and harmony of souls to which, I am sure, the memory of so many of our dead commits us, in two words addressed as a Roman to Romans: volemose bene!’ Like the word sprezzatura – and Prince Doria had that – volemose bene is not easily translated. ‘We must love one another’ gets us only part of the way there.

Luchino Visconti was in the resistance and worked alongside Doria. His film version of Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, released in 1963, is about the Sicilian Don Fabrizio Corbera, prince of Salina. There’s nothing to show that Visconti’s depiction of Prince Fabrizio and the Risorgimento of 1860 is related to his months with Prince Doria in Rome in 1944, but it’s hard not to think that one prince informs the other. Both men were archetypes of a crumbling social world; they were also both remarkable individuals. On meeting Doria in Rome, Harold Macmillan thought he’d met a medieval saint.

Shortly after the liberation, Enrico Scaretti was sent to Washington by the Italian government to describe the state of the economy to the Americans. ‘A Bell for Italy’ was the title he gave his report, after John Hersey’s 1944 novel set in war-torn Sicily, A Bell for Adano. He prefaced it with an epigraph from Lao Tzu: ‘True foundation cannot fail.’ Then:

Italy neither asks nor wants to live on the charitable generosity of the United States of America … We ask the Italian people to unite in their effort for the reconstruction of their country and the Allies for the moral and material help they can give. The moral help will cement a long friendship which human madness did not succeed in shaking with bodily war; the material one will repose on Italian economic possibilities and honesty of purpose. Is the bell ringing for the reconstruction of Italy?

Two years after Rome, Open City came out, Sergio Amidei, who had written the script with Federico Fellini and who was nominated for an Oscar, went to see it for a second time in a cinema in the suburbs of Rome:

On this second viewing the picture had a very strange emotional impact on me … I felt, as any other member of the audience, the fascination of a film that was new and strange to me. I was thrilled by it like any moviegoer. And I felt and reacted just as if I were one of the characters in the film … As I saw it the other night I also seemed to be seeing something new. I think that my friend Rossellini … and the other people who collaborated with him felt the same way. And it is, I think, because of the fact that we made Open City under the impression, the suggestion and the influence of what we had just lived through. More than that, we all had been the instrument of the will of an underground army that was anxious to write its page for the book of history.

The disclaimer at the beginning of Rome, Open City was only ever partly true.

In her entry for 14 June 1944 my great-aunt Marjorie wrote:

Let us hope we have touched bottom. We have no water, no light, gas, telephone nor post. To crown everything, Romans are suffering a bad attack of ‘liberation hangover’, either from active celebration or from general disillusion. So much has been promised and much quite mistakenly was expected. There were no tins of meat, no coffee. The ‘etto’ – 100 grams – of bread we still get is, however, white, and this is a source of wonder.

In August, the bodies of the 335 people shot dead four months earlier were exhumed from the Ardeatine caves. They included teachers, doctors, artists, students, shopkeepers; some had been political, some not. There was even a priest among the dead. Most had been killed simply to fill the quota required for revenge, but among the political prisoners were Colonel Giuseppe Montezemolo, whose teeth and nails had been extracted under torture, and General Simone Simoni. Vera Simoni identified her father by his dentures. ‘We could not recognise his face,’ she said (the SS had tortured him with a blowtorch). ‘We took the cords that bound his feet and hands.’ In January 1945, Rossellini began shooting Rome, Open City.