This book, A Bold and Dangerous Family, is a must read for everyone who loves Italy and especially Florence. Not because it encapsulates all the beauty, civility and cultural splendour, its superficial exquisiteness, but because it shows in merciless detail the hideous underbelly of that fair city.
Not least also, because it looks from the outside as though Italy is en route somewhere along the same trajectory today. This biography of the Rosselli family is a warning from history.
Caroline Moorehead has the ability to bring to life in detail all the machinations of the political turbulence that led to the dictatorship and tyranny of Benito Mussolini, the ideas behind the fasci, and then its terrible and terrifying consequences. But all this is refracted through the lives of anti-fascists, most particularly Carlo and Nello Rosselli and their immediate circle.
Brought up largely by their mother, Amelia, there were three brothers: Aldo, Carlo and Nello. Aldo was killed in the First World War, Carlo was the reactionary, the visionary who saw far into the future what fascism would bring to Italy, including war in Europe and Nello was the historian, who used Italian history as a way of showing where Mussolini was taking Italy; in fact his parallels were so transparent that he was persuaded to tone down his writings.
Ms Moorehead draw us deeply into the family Rosselli and their devotion to the cause of anti-fascism which in the end destroyed them. They were regarded as heroes after the end of the Second World War, their bodies exhumed from Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris and brought back to be buried in Florence in a cemetery in Trespiano.
Attempts to bring to justice the men that killed them were futile, though the names were known. Many of the perpetrators of the scheming and execution of their killings, not least Mussolini and Ciano (his son-in-law) were already dead.
For another absorbing book by Caroline Moorehead see my post November 7th 2014 – Au revoir les enfants
deborahjs 