Last winter, then, I arranged an interview in Portofino with Giovanni Carbone, he too seventeen years old at the time, who had witnessed, from his small fishing boat, the arrest of the signora. Neither in Portofino, nor in Genua the authorities have kept any record of the mass arrests from late 1943 to the spring of 1945. The SS and their Italian underlings displayed, in that area, the usual ferocity; that day, in July, they had come to kidnap a widow, all by herself, unaware of any impending danger. Edy, her son, was not around. Amelia’s German shepherd was promptly shot, and thrown into the blue-green blissful waters underneath, not far from Giovanni and his uncle, fishing. This is not a scene that one easily erases from memory. The two elegant sailing boats pride of Rino – tireless member of the local Yacht Club – remained at bay: the smaller one ominously called Enigma. Their padrona was locked in the Castle above the delightful li!le harbor, the porticciolo where I was questioning Giovanni while, not far from us, the populist politician Grillo was commenting to an improvised crowd some of the latest Italian turmoil with his signature gestures and over-inflated talks. Who remembers Amelia? Or rather, how fast were her and many other not so dissimilar tragedies consigned to oblivion? Very soon, and very fast, it so seems, to cleanse the conscience of Europe. Even the memory of her husband’s monumental Dante – approved by the blessing of Mussolini on the very same day, November 10, 1938, of the anti-Semitic laws for “the defense of the race” – has not gone down much in history. The elegance, good taste, and decency of Amelia were too thin qualities to guarantee any lasting impact: too frail, too feminine. And then, at the same time, she had – no doubt – been a presence in the highest echelons of a distinguished society revering the regime, or rather, that was itself its cultural counterpart: publishers, artists, writers, journalists, the top architects of the modernist movement. And with constant ties with the clergy, with high-level bureaucrats and Party members. Despite the war and Rino’s death, Amelia had kept at least part of those channels open: for instance, she had asked the surviving architect of the duo, Lingeri, to oversee the restructuring of a hunting co!age in her country house near Milan.
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