Beatrice lived in a war zone. Though once all Italy had been at war with the Allies, now there were two governments. One was officially at war with the Germans, but diehard Italian fascists were still at war with the Allies, and the partisans were at war with the fascists. Firenze, Beatrice’s beloved city, was occupied by Germans and administered by fascists. Civilians tried to live around the Germans. But the local fascist officials, at last in their element, used their power to take revenge on their enemies and to silence all opposition. There were food shortages, arrests in the night, buildings no one wanted to pass because the cries of tortured prisoners reached the street, and occasional machine-gun fire or the sound of a distant explosion. One day a brace of Blackshirts arrived at Beatrice’s school and pulled a number of girls from her class, marching them off they knew not where. The teacher explained that the girls were foreigners and didn’t belong in the city. “But Rachele and Giuditta were born here,” one of Beatrice’s classmates complained. Later her mother told her the poor girls were Jews and would doubtless be sent to die in Germany.
All this frightened Beatrice; how could it not? But there was another war that consumed her attention, and that was her never-ending battle with her mother. In the lofty, graceful rooms of the palazzo, Maria Salviati Bartolo waged a battle on two fronts. She had married late—she was thirty when Beatrice was born—and her husband, Oreste Bartolo, had died in a flu epidemic when his daughter was only three. Maria was strong-minded and determined to control her diminished family. Her struggle to dominate her daughter was a skirmish compared to the protracted, full-out campaign she waged against her brother Marco. This was a war of equals, to the death.
Marco modeled his conduct on that of his hero, Benito Mussolini, and he demanded from his family everything that the Duce required of his followers: fear, respect, adulation, and affection. The patriarch, Giacomo, had died some years earlier from complications following an accident he’d suffered while inspecting a threshing machine near Villa Chiara. Maria maintained that it was a blessing their father had passed on, as the disgraceful behavior of his son would have shamed him and driven him to despair. Marco had full rein of the family, as he had seen to it that his older brother, Sandro, was declared incompetent and locked away from his patrimony. Marco ruled his female kingdom, his mother and his three sisters, with callous indifference. His friends were thugs who were allowed to treat the palazzo as a fascist club. His mother told herself that it was the influence of base acquaintances that made her son so ruthless and discourteous, but Maria observed that in his gang, his fascio, Marco was clearly the dominant member. He bore down on the women at every meal on the subject of the sacred patria, the rightful place of Italy in the world, the spoils of war that would fall to them once the Allies were defeated and the Duce and Adolf Hitler sat down at the table in Berlin and parceled out the world.
When Mussolini was arrested and the Germans came pouring into the Piazza della Signoria on their powerful motorcycles, followed by a stream of trucks, machine guns at the ready, and finally two lumbering tanks, all jolting to a halt under the sullen gaze of Jupiter, Marco breathed a sigh of relief. The Americans would be stopped before they got to Rome, and he would be in line for promotion in his fascist squad. He was in thrall to the Gestapo and joked with them on the street in his halting German about the laziness and faithlessness of the Italians, as if he were not one of them.
The Americans were in Naples, and then for a long time they were stalled at the Cassino line. Maria stalked the halls of the palazzo, wringing her hands. When would they come? Every day more young men, and some old, slipped away into the hills, where it was said they hoarded arms, sniped at Germans, and lived like wild beasts. It wasn’t safe to leave the city, especially for the likes of Marco.
Maria’s friend Alice Bosco had a radio and could listen to British reports, but it was hard to know what to believe. The newspapers, it was understood, hadn’t printed anything but propaganda, carefully controlled by the Duce, for twenty years. School let out, the summer dragged on; the heat made a furnace of the narrow streets, and people leaned out from their upstairs windows at night, trying to catch a breath of air. The city was a tinderbox, and the match could be heard pulling up a line of phosphorous sparks against the strike plate, slowly, so slowly; the suspense was agony. The Allies were in Anzio, marching distance from Rome, but they couldn’t break the German line.
Beatrice was in love. He was a brooding, mercurial, emaciated boy of seventeen, and he hated the fascists, the antifascists, the Germans, the partisans, the whole lot. In fact, in his view the Italians were getting what they deserved, and he wanted none of it. When the war was over and the Italians were defeated, defeated, defeated, he would escape; he would walk, if he had to, over the Brenner Pass into Switzerland and after that on to Paris, if Paris was still standing. But for now he had time to meet Beatrice before supper and walk along the Arno, across the Ponte Vecchio, and up to the Boboli Gardens, where it was cooler and they could clutch each other in the shade of the ancient oaks on the Viottolone. She came home to her furious mother with bitten lips, disheveled hair, and no appetite at all for the chickpea soup and dry bread that was as ubiquitous as the heat.
One night she arrived late and slipped into her place next to her aunt Celestia, willing herself to be invisible. The conversation around the table was tense, and the soup tasted of tears. The Germans had picked up Alfonso, the cook’s husband, as he was strolling after dark in the Oltrarno, which, as Marco pointed out, everyone knew was thick with partisans. What was Alfonso up to there—where was he coming from? Was he part of some radical cell, sniping at the police from alleys?
“His brother lives there,” Maria replied flatly. She had endured a long, weepy encounter with the cook. “He went to bring him bread.”
“Exactly,” said Marco. “A loaf with a pistol baked inside. They stop at nothing.”
“Where did they take him?” Beatrice asked, laying her spoon on the plate beneath the bowl.
Maria and Marco exchanged looks charged with animus. The maiden sisters, Celestia and Valeria, had not spoken a word, both wide-eyed over their bowls.
“The house in Via Bologna,” Maria said coldly.
Valeria nodded. “They call it Villa Triste,” she said.
Marco slurped in three spoonfuls of soup, his eyes still locked with his sister’s. He dropped the spoon in the bowl and reached for the flatbread, which he tore apart angrily. He stuffed a corner in his mouth and chewed for several moments, working his jaws until they popped. When he had swallowed he reached for his wineglass. “I’ll go over after supper,” he said. “And see what I can do for him.”
And to Beatrice’s astonishment, her mother nodded, lowering her eyes to the napkin spread across her thighs. “Thank you,” she said.
* * *
As the days grew longer and hotter, everyone followed the daily account of the slow retreat of the Germans before the steady advance of the Allies. It was no longer would they come, but when. Marco and his friends faced the ruin of their prospects. No one doubted that when the Allies arrived and the partisans came down from the hills to join them, they would show no mercy to their fascist counterparts. Many of them had been waiting for twenty years to take revenge. The Allies were in Orvieto and then in Terni. All through July, with curfews and arrests, the Germans struggled to control the restive citizens of Firenze. One dark night on an angry street of Oltrarno, they sparked a riot by shooting a four-year-old boy as he ran for the door of his parents’ house. After that antifascist snipers were without fear, firing pistols from balconies and darting out from street corners, taking revenge for dead or tortured relatives, for betrayals and lies, and most of all for making their country what everyone knew they now must be, the losers in a worldwide battle for the future of Europe.