Peace and war

A Chill in the Air

An Italian War Diary 1939-1940  

Iris Origo 

Pushkin Press

192 pages; Rs 399

History has relegated Benito Mussolini to the role of the junior partner in the Axis coalition of World War II, a caricature dictator whose Fascist creed Adolf Hitler moulded and expanded into a sinister dogma and who bailed his inept armies out in North Africa and Greece. One consequence of this received imagery has been that we have far fewer books on the Italian dictator or accounts of life under his 22-year-rule — nearly twice as long as Hitler’s — written or translated in English than we have on the German dictator and his Reich. This posthumous publication of Iris Origo’s pre-wartime diary, A Chill in the Air, goes some way towards compensating for that deficiency. 

Origo, who died in 1988, is best known for The Merchant of Prato, a recreation of the daily life of a 14th century Florentine merchant banker that became a popular and academic classic. Her better-known wartime account is the best-selling War in Val d’Orcia, which she described as her “little diary”. Published in 1947, it is a gripping account of how she and her husband turned their Tuscan estate into a refuge for partisans and Jews.

A Chill in the Air is less action packed but more thoughtful. It covers just two years, 1939 and 1940, and captures the politics and the atmospherics from the plazas to the palazzos — from the steely-eyed nationalism, to the hope and despair — as Europe lurches inexorably to war. There are no heroic Marchesas here. On the contrary, this journal was kept to steady herself as her adopted country as the world around her.

Unlike Primo Levi, who’s peerless quasi-autobiographical short story collection The Periodic Table presented glimpses of life in Italy for an ordinary Jewish family in Mussolini, Origo writes from the vantage point of a woman rooted in the exceptionally well connected upper classes, whose social and intellectual worlds overlapped with that of the political establishment. 

Her father came from immensely wealthy American family with interests in shipping, railroads and sugar and her mother was the daughter of an Anglo-Irish peer. Her father died when Origo was seven but left her a substantial legacy. In accordance with his wishes that his daughter be free of “national feeling”, she was brought up in Italy — no small irony given the trajectory of that country’s politics in the inter-war years. She had married into an Italian noble family and together with her husband, Antonio Origo, bought a near barren estate in southern Tuscany. 

Like many European upper class families, the Origos supported Mussolini initially, not least because he offered “strong” leadership amidst the post-war political chaos and his regime gave landholders large subsidies. That admiration faded to disillusionment as the movement coagulated into a crude, anti-Semitic dictatorship.

The diary begins not when Hitler marches into Poland but in March, when Origo encounters members of the Squadristi, Mussolini’s Blackshirt paramilitary organisation, on their way to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their founding. Elite members of the original squads of 1919, her description of these middle-aged businessmen would be familiar to those who follow contemporary Indian politics:  “stoutish, with their black shirts bulging at the waist; their boots, too, have an air of being too tight for them” inhabiting a “wholly masculine world” and fervently anticipating Il Capo’s impending speech. 

Origo’s diaries presents a kaleidoscope of opinions across the social and political spectrum — including what the English press has to say. The polarised nature of the political discourse is stark. After one of Mussolini’s speeches relayed by loudspeaker on a Florentine street, she writes, “Ï was struck by the guarded, colourless expression on most of the men’s faces — and the undisguised anxiety in the women’s.” Yet, she writes, many educated Italians are convinced that “nothing except violence will induce the democracies to concede a redistribution of raw materials and of colonies”.

For ordinary folk, especially farm workers on her estate, the real fear was the prospect of sending their sons to war again. Origo writes about the hopeful rumours doing the rounds: That England and France would come to an agreement to stay out. The American ambassador, who is also her godfather, is certain war will be avoided that summer because Germany was not ready and the Italians did not intend to fight if they could help it. 

Two entries illustrate the range of her observations. One is of a meeting between the American ambassador with the King of Italy to convey a peace plan from President Roosevelt. He is directed to a remote fishing lodge and comes upon “ä very small shabby man in a brown overcoat who is standing in the drizzle quite alone”. This is Victor Emmanuel III, who helped Mussolini come to power. 

The last entry, on November 23, 1940, describes a dinner with two young Poles, a brother and a sister, newly arrived from Warsaw, who recount their harrowing story. In the middle of the carnage, they assure her, Poles retained their defiance. “Äfter the German occupation, the Germans plastered the walls (those which were still standing) with posters representing a tiny and ignominious figure of Chamberlain looking with shame on the ruins of Warsaw and the inscription: ‘Poland, this is what England has done to you!’ But next morning, on each one of the posters, the world England has been deleted and replaced by ‘Hitler’!”