The Tamesis
As you write in the book, this is not a “cradle to grave” biography, but one that focuses on an extraordinary period of time. Were the findings of the OSS report a turning point for the project?
Well, about a year or two ago, the opportunity came up to make a documentary, and my aunt Cristina, Emilio’s widow, was more than willing to do it [it]. She said to me and Terry, “I’m very worried about this war because we don’t know…” In fact, we knew very little about it because throughout Italy, in the immediate aftermath, no one was talking about the war. [The country] Trapped in looking to the future, this is a shameful history for Italy. So we said, ‘Listen, don’t worry, we’re going to study the war. We take it upon ourselves. This is our responsibility. So she said, “Okay.” And then, for a number of reasons, the documentary didn’t go forward, and we had already started researching it, so we went ahead with it because what we had found was so interesting and so illuminating.
Please tell me a little bit about that report.
We started looking into it further, and it was almost coincidence – but with my uncle it was almost all chance and coincidence – we saw this report from the CIA’s Office of Strategic Services. There are hundreds of declassified documents; in this case, nothing is in chronological order and everything the OSS investigated is random. The boxes were like a maze of information… I mean, then suddenly we saw his name and a whole world opened up. I began to read and I began to grieve because he became an example of suffering for so many people.
I said, “But how do we really not know?” We had an idea, a very superficial idea. My father would say something, but we don’t know the details, it was written in his own hand. This brings us to the point that there are some very important things we should do…. Also because of the diversity of personalities, the same person goes through this whole thing and then suddenly he starts creating all these fashions and these colors and so on. The amazing thing is that these two aspects, within the same person, the same brain, the same personality, there are actually more aspects to these two. I believe many people are like this. It’s just that they don’t know. Or they didn’t face the circumstances that would have allowed them to be in this situation. […] What we face is who we are and sometimes what we face is beyond us and we have to be at the level we face.
Your uncle wrote his thesis on fascism while at Reed College. Can you talk about his politics?
Here we have to talk about the nobility; now nobility all over Italy automatically follow the king. I mean, we all have relatives in court. After marching on Rome, the king chose Mussolini and appointed him prime minister. So the nobles naturally followed. In fact, there were very few young people in the nobility who opposed Mussolini. For example, when my uncle went to school, when my father went to school, all the signs in the school, everything in the curriculum were decided by the fascist minister of education. So there was little discussion. My grandfather was devastated when he suddenly realized that his two sons would have to fight alongside the Germans. We wrote that he could not even go to the station to say goodbye to them, to die for the Germans in a war that, frankly, few people believed.
