The Italian Wife (47 page)

Her father had removed the bullet, watched with care by Isabella, and he’d stitched up the wound, accompanied by comments like ‘It’s only a scratch’ and ‘You’ll be heaving pigs around again in no time’.

‘Papa, he’s a photographer.’

‘
Was
a photographer,’ Roberto corrected. ‘What good is a photographer with no camera?’

She remembered the smashed pieces of his beloved Graflex and the confetti of photographs littering his darkroom floor. The police had taken his Leica from him when he was under arrest.

‘You can start again. A new camera.’

He rose to his feet and lightly kissed her lips. ‘We can both start again.’

She smiled at him but a sharp knock at the door startled them all. A stab of fear made her reach for Roberto for a second, before she broke free and walked quickly to answer it. She swung the door open, knowing the dark uniforms would be on the other side.

‘Hello, stranger, where have you been keeping yourself?’

It was Francesca, her white-blonde hair gleaming like snow in the sunlight.

Isabella laughed with relief. ‘I’ve been in Rome, looking at stone.’

‘You and your stones! Here, I’ve brought you breakfast. You haven’t been into the shop for a few days.’

She handed over a napkin wrapped around warm spicy rolls and Isabella kissed her on both cheeks.

‘Thank you, Francesca. Come on in for coffee.’

‘No, I can’t now. More baking to do. But this evening I’ll come round and you can tell me what you’ve been doing.’

Isabella smiled. ‘Any news?’

Francesca’s pale blue eyes opened wide. ‘Haven’t you heard?’

‘No. What is it?’

‘The chief of carabinieri was killed in a fight with Communists up in the mountains yesterday.’

Isabella didn’t blink. She recalled the kick of the rifle on Roberto’s shoulder and the weight of its barrel in her hand. The figure in its dark blue uniform slumping to the ground.

‘But, listen,’ Francesca waved her arms through the air, ‘the big news is that Mussolini has had Chairman Grassi arrested. He has been transported to Rome for failing to find who was responsible for the aeroplane crash at the rally.’

‘What?’

‘It’s true.’ Francesca grinned. ‘That bastard is having a taste of his own medicine.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘And I must get back to my oven.’ She blew a kiss to Isabella and hurried away through the courtyard.

Isabella turned to look at Roberto and at her father, not quite able to believe what she’d just heard.

‘They’ve gone.’ The words reverberated quietly in the room. ‘Sepe and Grassi have gone.’

‘That is wonderful news,’ her father exclaimed, and his tall figure seemed to uncurl, as if a heavy weight had lifted from his shoulders. ‘Isabella,’ he was packing his instruments away in his medical bag after cleaning and sterilising them, ‘I might leave Bellina too.’

‘No, Papa.’ Isabella put a hand on his bag as if that small action could hold him. ‘Stay here with us.’

He shook his head in a tired gesture. ‘I’ve never liked this town, you know that. It’s too stark and modern for me.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘I want to go back to the old Italy, to the beautiful places I knew before. I’m thinking of returning to Milan. I can continue to help the rebels there.’

‘Papa, I’ll miss you. But if that’s what you want…’

‘It is. I only stayed here to watch over you, my daughter.’ He smiled broadly at Roberto. ‘But now you have someone else to do that. And you have Rosa. What will you do with her?’

‘Adopt her, of course. She won’t be going back to the convent.’

A sound from the doorway of the room drew Isabella’s attention and she looked round to see Rosa standing there in her loose smock. Her eyes were fixed on Isabella’s face.

‘I thought you were asleep on my bed, Rosa.’

‘I heard a knock.’

‘It’s all right, it was just a friend. She brought good news. Both Chairman Grassi and Colonnello Sepe have left Bellina for ever.’

A small moan escaped Rosa’s pale lips and she ran across the room to Isabella. Isabella crouched down and encircled the child in her arms, holding her trembling body close. ‘What is it, Rosa?’

‘I don’t ever want to go back there, but I’m frightened for Carmela.’

‘Your friend at the convent?’

Rosa nodded. ‘She’s all on her own now.’

Isabella realised at that moment how great were the complexities that this child was bringing into her life, but she stroked her young cheek reassuringly. ‘I don’t know what the connection was between Chairman Grassi and the Reverend Mother, but now that he has gone her position is weakened. In future she will have to be more careful how she treats her pupils at the convent. Anyway, I will keep a watch on Carmela and we will invite her to visit us as often as you like.’ She ruffled the cropped curls. ‘If that’s what you want?’

Rosa didn’t speak for a long moment. Her dark eyes shone and she nodded again. ‘Mamma was right,’ she said solemnly. ‘You are a good person.’

When Rosa finally fell asleep once more, Isabella walked with Roberto through the town in the amber light of early morning, heading for her architectural office. Back in the Piazza del Popolo, where it all began, she paused, gazing at the fine buildings around her. At last she could see a real future for Bellina. She was aware of Roberto standing close behind her and she leaned against him, feeling the strength of him at her back.

‘We could leave too,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Start again elsewhere, if that’s what you want.’

‘No, Roberto, this is where I want to be. Right here. With you and Rosa. I love this town and I love my work in it. There’s so much more I want to do here in Bellina, and there are the five other new towns that have yet to be built on the Agro Pontino. She stretched a hand out in front of her. ‘It is waiting for us to create the future we want.’

Roberto wrapped an arm around her. ‘We don’t know who will replace Grassi and Sepe, but let’s believe that whoever it is, they will have the good of the town at heart. I’ll order a new Graflex camera for myself,’ he added and she could hear the enthusiasm in his voice, ‘and continue to record the growth of the town in pictures. But this time it won’t be for Grassi. It will be so that in the future when everything has changed, people will be able to look at them and know what it was like here. How we built a town for them.’

Isabella looked eastward, her eyes drawn to the ancient mountains in the distance. They lay in purple shadow and watched patiently over the golden plain below.

Why I Chose To Write About The Pontine Marshes

The moment I heard about the extraordinary feat of the draining of Italy’s Pontine Marshes – the Agro Pontino – and the construction of the new towns in the 1930s, I knew I had found the perfect setting for my next book.

It was my husband who first drew my attention to this amazing project of Mussolini’s Fascist regime and I became fascinated by it. The scheme was driven by a risky combination of idealistic vision to create a brave new world and pragmatic political expediency to silence the unrest among the veterans of the Great War and give them employment. But it was the engineering expertise and the bottomless coffers that made it possible. I think it is debatable whether anything but a totalitarian state could have forced through such a vast project at the time. In 1933, at the peak of the work, 124,000 men were employed on it.

Of course I had to go and take a look at the flat expanse of the Agro Pontino as it is now – naturally checking out the delicious local Carmenere and limoncello at the same time! – and it was an enthralling research trip. The wide open plain covers an extended rectangle about thirty miles long and roughly twenty miles wide, bordered by the coastline of the Tyrrhenian Sea to the west and by the Lepini mountains to the east. It lies thirty miles SW of Rome, between the ancient towns of Cisterna in the north and Terracina in the south.

I started my research by reading all about the area and its history and quickly discovered what the problem was that caused the unhealthy swampland to form. Much of the land is below sea level and there is a quaternary dune that runs parallel to the coastline, preventing the mountain rivers from draining into the sea. So they pool and stagnate on the plain, and as a result these marshlands became an impenetrable forested malarial swamp. It was infested by dense black clouds of anopheles mosquitoes that had plagued this area for centuries. Even Nero and Napoleon and numerous Popes attempted to release the water by digging channels through the barrier dunes but no one succeeded.

Until Benito Mussolini.

His breathtaking ambition stormed through all obstacles.

How did he do it?

In 1930 the forest was cleared by a vast army of workmen, many of them veterans from the war. It’s hard to imagine the logistics of this. The amount of timber that had to be hauled. The fires that had to burn day and night to consume the branches and stumps in the black volcanic earth. It must at times have felt like a scene out of hell.

The workmen lived in camps behind barbed wire, poorly fed and poorly paid. Many hundreds of them, maybe thousands, died from malaria and in accidents, but no records were kept of this. The sick and the dead were removed, so that the Great Scheme could claim it was untainted by failure. The workers then constructed over 10,000 miles of canals and trenches, as well as the essential pumping stations to keep the water flowing into the sea.

Once stripped of vegetation and drained of water, the barren plain was dug and furrowed by hundreds of giant tractors until it was ready to be farmed. Small blue homesteads sprouted up for farmers across the plain and five new towns were built during the years 1932-1939. The first was called Littoria, later renamed Latina, which was followed by Sabaudia, Pontinia, Aprilia and Pomezia.

Mussolini knew the value of propaganda. He employed LUCE Films to make regular newsreels of the Pontine Marshes to be shown in cinemas throughout Italy to demonstrate the success and power of Fascism. He made frequent trips to the area to be photographed in macho poses – shirtless with a shovel in his hand or driving a tractor or threshing wheat at harvest time. He loved to present himself as a man of the people and a lover of the land. But there was never any mention in the propaganda films of his Blackshirts or his secret police who backed up every decision he made.

Afterwards

In 1940 Italy entered World War II as an ally of Germany. The Agro Pontino and its new towns would suffer for this when towards the end of 1943 American and British forces landed nearby to fight the German troops stationed at Anzio. Anzio lies on the edge of the Pontine plain and to gain access to the land a bombardment of the area was carried out by American forces. At the same time the Germans stopped the pumps and opened the dikes, flooding the marsh once again, causing devastation to the population and the agriculture. The Allies and the Germans found themselves fighting in a mosquito-infested bog.

The Battle of Anzio laid waste the area. Everything that Mussolini had accomplished was reversed. The towns were in ruins, the houses blown up, the marshes flooded, the canals filled in and the mosquitoes flourished. Malaria returned and the remaining population of the towns fled.

This struck me as immensely sad. It had been such an awesome achievement, but rescue came after the war ended in 1945. The major structures for water control were renovated, the Pontine plain was restored and the towns were rebuilt.

Now

I was anxious when I travelled to Latina, afraid that there would be nothing left to see of the grand buildings constructed in the 1930s. But what I saw on my research trip to the Agro Pontino warmed my heart. It is a green and flowering landscape. I saw flourishing towns and a wonderfully fertile plain where a wealth of fruit and grapes are cultivated. Particularly striking are the kiwi fruits. Mile after mile of tall graceful vines were fluttering in the warm breeze. They were introduced into Italy from New Zealand in the 1980s and Italy now produces 70% of the northern hemisphere’s kiwis. A high percentage of them are grown on the Pontine plain.

And the towns? The wonderful Modernist buildings that my fictional heroine, Isabella, helped to create. What about them?

Though many of them were flattened by the wartime bombardment, fortunately many of them did survive and form a magnificent reminder of an era that has long past. In Latina in particular there is still much to see.

The town of Bellina in my book is, I must emphasise, a fictional town, a creation of my imagination for the purposes of my story. There were in reality only five new towns constructed, not six as I state in my story, but Bellina is loosely based on the impressive centre of Latina (originally Littoria). Dramatic, grandiose and beautiful, the buildings and town plan of Latina are a blend of Modernist and Rationalist styles, and form a tribute to the vision of Mussolini’s great architects and to the people of Italy.

I would also like to point out to readers that the assassination attempt on Mussolini’s life in
The Italian Wife
is fictional.