War in Val d'Orcia Read online

  IRIS ORIGO (1902–1988) was a biographer and writer born in Britain to an aristocrat mother and a wealthy American father. She lived in Italy and devoted much of her life to the improvement of the Tuscan estate at La Foce that she purchased with her husband, Antonio Origo, in the 1920s. Their son, Gianni, died of meningitis in 1933, after which she embarked on a writing career, publishing a successful biography, Leopardi: A Study in Solitude. Traveling in London in the 1930s, she befriended Virginia Woolf and became romantically involved with L. H. Myers (author of he Root and the Flower, available as an NYRB Classic). During World War II, she gave birth to two daughters, Benedetta and Donata, and, together with Antonio, sheltered refugee children and assisted many escaped Allied prisoners of war and partisans in defiance of Italy’s Fascist regime and Nazi occupation forces. Her memoirs of life in Italy in the war period are collected in two volumes, A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939–1940 (first published in 2017) and War in Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943–1944 (first published in 1947). In 1976, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She died at La Foce.

  VIRGINIA NICHOLSON is the author of five books, including Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900–1939 and, most recently, Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes: The Story of Women in the 1950s.

  WAR IN VAL D’ORCIA

  An Italian War Diary, 1943–1944

  IRIS ORIGO

  Introduction by

  VIRGINIA NICHOLSON

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 2017 by the Estate of Iris Origo

  Introduction copyright © 2017 by Virginia Nicholson

  All rights reserved.

  First published in 1947.

  The publisher is grateful to the Estate of Iris Origo for the provision of all photographs.

  Cover image: Alfredo Camisa, Sappada, 1960; © Alfredo Camisa, Archivio Fotografico Alfredo Camisa

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  A catalog record for this book is available from The Library of Congress.

  ISBN 978-1-68137-265-5

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  WAR IN VAL D’ORCIA

  Preface

  1943

  1944

  To Antonio

  who shared it all

  Introduction

  Imagine an Italian summer, and one image may come to mind. It is of a road snaking up a golden hillside, flanked by pairs of black-green cypresses—the ancient vertical trees that punctuate Tuscany’s silver olive groves like exclamation marks. That same hill can be seen in the backgrounds of medieval Sienese masterpieces like those of Simone Martini and Giovanni di Paolo: a dreamlike wilderness landscape in which haloed saints and tiny robed figures climb upwards, seeking redemption.

  At the age of nineteen my passing familiarity with the iconography of the cypress avenue hadn’t prepared me for the experience of seeing the tangible reality, and though I have been back many times since, its beauty remains as surprising and heart-stopping as on the first occasion. It was 1974. My parents took me to visit a new friend, Dame Iris Origo, in her remote villa in southern Tuscany, La Foce. The road that took us to Iris’s house climbs through dense woods, giving no indication of the valley beyond. We pulled up in the shade of a cluster of majestic cypresses, beyond which steps led to the door of the villa itself. La Foce is a farm house writ large. It is domestic in scale, not grandiose, with the simple architectural decoration of the locality: terracotta roof tiles, ochre stucco and pink brick. But the house looks out onto a landscape of myth. The Val d’Orcia falls away steeply below the villa’s formal gardens, its view resolved and magnificently dominated by Monte Amiata, the extinct volcano whose surging, rugged slopes soar almost due west of La Foce. Here and there the undulating farmland and sparse olive plantations give way to the local phenomenon of the crete senesi: lunar, fissured, uncultivated (and today, protected) areas of sedimentary clay soil betraying a landscape that until relatively recently was a desolate wilderness. And as you scan the vast bowl of the valley, golden with wheat stubble and grey with clay, the eye rests inevitably on a nearer slope: that small conical green hill, a geometry of curves and verticals, crowned with a little red-roofed farm house.

  Iris Cutting, daughter of wealthy American and Anglo-Irish parents, was born in England in 1902, and brought up near Florence. She first came to the Val d’Orcia in 1923. ‘It is quite the most beautiful and the wildest bit of country I have ever seen …’ she wrote to a friend at the time. She was then newly engaged to the handsome, charismatic man who soon after became her husband, Marchese Antonio Origo. Together, they purchased the villa and its estate of fifty-seven dilapidated farms in 3,500 hectares of the poorest, most arid part of southern Tuscany, where the way of life had barely changed since the Middle Ages, and set about their life’s work of modernising its agriculture and investing in its infrastructure: roads, irrigation, health and education for the peasant families. Alongside this extraordinary project, Iris and Antonio set out to renovate the villa, its garden, and the surrounding landscape. That perfect cypress-lined avenue was created under their direction.

  The elderly widowed lady who I first met in 1974 seemed to me unmistakably dignified, restrained and aristocratic; conservatively dressed, not beautiful, but with an air of extreme elegance and distinction. I was in awe of her. Lunch was brought in to the frescoed dining room by an obliging manservant who wore white gloves to serve us. He did his mistress’s bidding silently and unquestioningly. Later we repaired for coffee to her study, walled with leather-bound but obviously well-loved volumes.

  And so I came to know Iris: a little bit, for she was not the most knowable of women. She had an hauteur which commanded respect, as did her cool and cultured manners. For a number of years she and my father corresponded, in letters which gave pleasure to both sides since they thirsted for intellectual stimulus and informed argument. Iris was a scholar, who had written on Byron and Leopardi.* She numbered Virginia Woolf, Bernard Berenson and Edith Wharton among her friends. An underlying shyness and lack of confidence could make Iris seem distant, but her friends loved her for her fundamental warmth and readiness to listen. She was also more than willing to talk about horticulture and the customs of Italian bandits, or advise on scenic routes through Lazio. Her speech was memorable for its slight lisp and surprisingly guttural roll of the ‘r’. Perhaps the closest we came to intimacy was the occasion, a year or so later, when I visited her in a beautiful house she owned on the Italian Riviera, and she asked me to massage sun-cream onto her back.

  Iris Origo died in 1988, her legacy guaranteed by the Tuscan valley which she helped to reanimate. There, for those still alive to remember them, the names of the Marchese and his ‘English wife’ are still held in admiration and respect. Thanks to them, prosperity has come to the Val d’Orcia. Today, the derelict farms have swimming pools, a summer music festival flourishes, and in winter you can ski on Monte Amiata. The grandchildren of the Origos’ peasantry manufacture and export top-quality wines and olive oils, and the image of the cypress avenue has been adopted as the tourist logo of the area. How many of the visitors who admire La Foce’s wonderful gardens, or enjoy the charm of the bustling old hilltop towns—Montepulciano, Pienza, Cetona—can imagine the ruins and human misery from which such prosperity ha
s emerged? This book tells that story, and a new edition of it is surely timely, for it is a narrative of dispossession and evacuation, of refugees, of purposeless conflict and political failure, of looting, rape and destruction. Here, in the microcosm of an Italian valley, human beings mercilessly bombed and shot each other. Civilians starved, sickened—or, abandoning all that they loved, fled for their lives. And, at a small cross-roads where the chestnut woods give way to sloping olive groves, Iris Origo worked tirelessly to harbour, heal, share what she had, and give succour to a stream of exhausted fugitives caught between colliding armies.

  Early in the Second World War, Mussolini’s Fascist government allied with Germany. Iris’s diary, War in Val d’Orcia, begins in January 1943. At this time she had one small daughter, Benedetta, born in August 1940, and was awaiting the birth of a third child (the Origos’ much-loved son, Gianni, had tragically died from meningitis in 1933 aged seven). In late 1942 the Allied victory over the Germans in North Africa had allowed them to turn their attention to chasing the enemy out of Italy, starting at the toe, while simultaneously harassing German strongholds like Genoa and Turin in the north with ferocious bombing raids. When the diary opens, Fascism in Italy is already becoming a spent and discredited force. Mussolini himself, ill and incapable, is barely even functioning as dictator.

  Iris knew that she was running a risk by keeping a diary, but the drive to record overcame scruples for her safety. As she explains in her preface, she took pains to hide it, even, as the hostilities worsened, burying it in tin boxes in the garden along with her jewellery. We are the beneficiaries, since the extraordinary value of reading a diary of historic events is, of course, the immediacy of the form, unburdened as it is with the freight of memory.

  So we share in Iris’s uncertainty, impatience and fluctuating emotions as the opportunity to make peace with the Allies is bungled, in July 1943, by Italy’s King Victor Emanuel III and his Marshall Pietro Badoglio, whose craven incompetence shamefully condemned the Italian people to a further year of hostilities and an appalling toll in casualties. We witness her despair as she watches her adopted country in turmoil, with Mussolini’s German-controlled puppet government commanding the loyalty of brutal fascist militias from Rome northwards—challenged only by ill-equipped, rogue groups of partisans, as fragmented in their local loyalties as in their macro-politics. German punishment of these breakaways was generally savage. Iris, herself neither Italian, English nor American, testifies with pained, humanitarian stoicism to the tearing apart of a community and a nation. We relive her anguish as the Allied armies inch ever closer to nearby Chiusi and Chianciano, battling up the peninsula. Will their arrival bring an end to suffering, or the extremity of danger? And how will the Origos protect the children under their care?

  As wealthy and well-connected landowners, Iris and Antonio were in a position to give aid as far as they could. Though in the pre-war period the La Foce estate had undeniably benefitted from Mussolini’s land reforms, Antonio Origo’s sympathy for the Fascist cause was short-lived. Allied prisoners of war, held in the nearby Castelluccio just one kilometre from La Foce, were the first beneficiaries of the Origos’ assistance.

  Iris’s own depiction of Antonio is strangely incomplete. It is as if she asks us to accept both the certainty, and the privacy, of their close bond. In these pages, her husband typifies the benevolent hands-on landowner, ever firm and practical, intervening on behalf of his tenants and others in need. The man himself remains in the shadows, while Iris occupies the spotlight, as La Foce’s doer and dynamo. However, it helps us to understand her better if we appreciate that actually, in their wartime partnership, he was chief, she was lieutenant. A more rounded portrait of Antonio Origo, supplied by his daughter Benedetta, puts flesh on the bones:

  He was the leader, the decision-maker, the person everyone trusted, and the one to whom they turned for help and advice. He had a very commanding personality, a great sense of humour, and spoke perfect English, French, and German. He was the pillar around which the whole area, not only La Foce, revolved.

  Iris, more reflective than her husband, appears nevertheless as a woman of action. At the earliest opportunity—having heard about the organised evacuation of British children from threatened cities to the safety of the country soon after the 1939 declaration of war—Iris became determined to offer a refuge at La Foce to children from Genoa and Turin. Using all her best connections and influence, she sliced through the red tape that stood between her and this goal, and by February 1943 was rewarded with the arrival of twenty-three small, grubby, frightened waifs aged between one and ten, who were then cared for by her and a school teacher known as La Tata, along with the indomitable Schwester Marie (Benedetta’s nanny), for the duration. Iris was a proto-feminist who had no truck with men who stood in the way of her aims. Her eldest granddaughter remembers affectionately: ‘My grandmother always got exactly what she wanted.’

  As an author, Iris Origo will not satisfy readers who seek demonstrativeness and extravagant description. She writes with the greater gift of literary temperance. In this diary, less is more. For example, two short sentences in her diary entry for June 9th, 1943, note the birth of her second daughter, Donata, in a Rome clinic. Her own pains, she briefly records, were accompanied by the sounds, from the next room, of a young airman whose leg had been amputated, groaning for morphia. In another entry Iris reflects on the atmosphere of uncertainty and insecurity prevailing in war-ravaged Italy, wondering what kind of world lies in store for the next generation. Communications from abroad are locked down, and she tells us—almost as an aside—that ‘after four months of silence and anxiety’ she has finally received the news, smuggled across the border from Switzerland, of her mother’s death.

  By Christmas 1943 bombs were dropping to east and west of Val d’Orcia, over Grosseto and Perugia. During that bitterly cold winter—with the snow-covered countryside scattered with partisan groups and starving refugees in extremis—La Foce was the only source of food, warmth and safety for many miles. Spies were everywhere too, and the Origos’ generosity made them vulnerable to denunciation and German retaliation. For months, Iris slept with a small suitcase beside her bed, ready to make for the woods if necessary. Of course they were not the only good Samaritans. Barely a farm in the district was without its hiding place for a partisan or a frightened teenager evading the conscription round-up.

  Stoicism and courage are so much in Iris’s nature, and emotional indulgence so foreign to her, that when she does succumb to her feelings the effect is all the more intense. That Christmas Day Iris and her family attended the local church service and, embattled as she must have felt, Iris nevertheless sensed a reawakening of human solidarity. Around her in the church she sees the congregation of peasants from their farms, and the refugee children, ‘rosy-cheeked and plump and excited’. Then there are the prisoners of war of many nationalities, and runaway partisans for whom they had provided shelter: ‘…all those who have found refuge here …’ As the Christmas ritual unfolds she feels bonded to all of them in an understanding ‘born of common trouble, anxieties and hopes such as I have never felt before.’ Above all, she is almost overcome, as the worshippers exchange familiar Christmas greetings, by an awareness of the charity and goodness of her neighbours. It is a rare moment in a chronicle marked more by its author’s self-control than by bare-all emotion.

  And yet Iris is unsparing in offering her readers her own keen and compassionate observations of the world around her, investing it at times with a startling immediacy. How wonderfully heartening to read of the reappearance of three British POWs at La Foce, come to get their boots resoled before heading south to join the Allied armies. Iris promptly provides Bert and the lads with Antonio’s old tennis shoes to keep them going, and drops off the worn-out army boots to be repaired—by none less than La Foce’s resident farm cobbler. And for me it was a delight to read how, a few days later, Iris took three year-old Benedetta up into the woods behind the villa to say g
oodbye to Bert’s party. Today, the Benedetta I know is a graceful and beautiful woman of patrician bearing, alight with humour and intelligence. In 1944 Iris’s little daughter touched a chord in the hearts of three Yorkshiremen far from home, by reciting ‘Humpty-Dumpty’ to them. ‘ “Nice to hear a kiddy speaking English out here,” says Bert.’

  And the battle for survival has other moments of humour, albeit with a bitter aftertaste. Despite her admiration for their good-heartedness, Iris is often impatient with the mulish superstition and naivety of the La Foce peasantry. With the army at their very doorsteps, they fail to hide their food and possessions from German looters. Her description of a wild chase across cornfields in pursuit of a thief bearing a stolen ham would be surreally comical, if it wasn’t for Iris’s indignation and sense of urgency as she musters help.

  But too often, the reader shares in Iris’s horror and helplessness as she describes the unimaginable monstrousness of war in pared-down detail. A young father in hiding is traced to his home, where the Germans threaten to take his young son instead if he does not report to the fascists; the man, concealed in the next room, overhears, gives himself up, and is shot. A nineteen-year-old boy is condemned to death for failure to present himself for military service; he prays all night in his cell, then faces the firing squad unbound and unafraid, reciting ‘Our Father’. And it is impossible not to be moved by her understated report of the funeral of a youthful partisan who succumbs to Spanish flu while under her care. The mother wails, and later, his battle-scarred comrades venture down from their mountain hideout to lay fresh flowers tenderly on his grave. Repeatedly, Iris’s diary pays homage to such acts of courage.

  In June 1944 the battle front reached La Foce, and the Origos had to decide what to do with their possessions, family, and the twenty-three refugee children who were no longer protected under their roof. Between the villa, and safety in Montepulciano, lay ten kilometres of dusty, twisting road, under constant bombardment by shells, mined and littered with corpses.