Vol. 12, no. 1 (2020)

The sun forced its way into the reading room; the drapes did not soften the invasion of its rays enough. The reading rooms, the library, like other large halls, were on the ground floor; they opened onto a spacious and well-tended garden flooded with light. In a more secluded and shadier spot, between two great palms and flowering beds, lay the sculpture Al partigiano caduto (To the Fallen Partisan) by the artist Marino Mazzacurati.

The Institute of Communist Studies, this was its real name, is called the Frattocchie after the locality where it now stands. A school of political literacy for workers and peasants (as well as a training school for party officials and administrators), it was conceived and decided upon by the leadership of the PCI in October 1944. The Perugian Armando Fedeli[1] was charged with drawing up a plan of political education and putting it into effect. Fedeli was then appointed the school’s first director, and it came fully into operation at the beginning of 1945. The courses were first held in Rome, in Via Guidubaldo Del Monte, and took the name of the Soviet ideologue A. Zhdanov (1896–1948), the man chiefly responsible for Soviet cultural policy and one of Stalin’s likely successors.

After a fairly short time the central school moved to Frattocchie, a place near Albano Laziale. In the meantime it had been given the name ‘Istituto Togliatti’ (against the wishes of the secretary himself).

Here the Communist Party had received, as a donation, a vast and secluded tract of land that included several buildings and a villa. In 1950 the PCI decided to renovate and enlarge the complex with new buildings and facilities, so as to give life to a new and modern school for the party’s cadres and officials.

After extensive and important works lasting some three years, it was inaugurated on 9 January 1955 and came into service at once under the name “Institute of Communist Studies”. Yet if this presented itself from the outset as the flagship, that was because throughout the country there existed, and was expanding, a network, a system of differentiated and purpose-built political education: the women’s schools, the Centrale in Milan, the Marabini in Bologna, the Istituto Novella in Rome, Grieco in Bari, Sereni in Cascina and the Istituto Curiel at Faggeto Lario. The recently built premises had been rationally designed for the function they were to serve: a self-sufficient study centre with every necessary service, fit even for long and manifold courses. Beside these vast buildings, but set apart by hedges, trees and a separate entrance, stood a late-nineteenth-century villa. Only later did I learn that it was used to house the members of the PCI leadership, both when they stayed there while engaged with the courses or for periods of rest, and to receive and host the leaders of foreign parties, so much so that it was nicknamed Villa Togliatti.

I had been at the institute about a week; the spring of that 1961 was lush and gave promise of a long summer to be lived to the full. The complex stood a very short distance from the place known as Osteria delle Frattocchie, right where the steep climb up to Albano Laziale begins. You entered by turning off to the left and going up another little rise that ended at a gate.

Getting inside the area occupied by the Institute was not easy. There were two filters that regulated entry. The first, a masonry hut for a Public Security officer who checked everyone wishing to enter the Frattocchie. The second, the final approval that came from internal security, with the opening of one of the two blind metal gates, the large one for vehicles, the small one for those on foot. The procedure applied to the course-goers as well.

Sometimes journalists came, foreigners among them, to learn more about this ‘campus’ of the Italian communists, and their verdicts were always favourable, if not admiring.

I was in the institute’s library, engaged in a piece of research that I was to present that afternoon to the study group. All was silence.

Behind me I heard a light footstep, no more than the stir of air made by someone passing close by, certainly heading for the way out of the reading room.

I looked up, as if by a conditioned reflex, and saw her from behind: thin, slender, almost frail, dressed all in white. When she reached the door she turned; her tousled, very blonde bob fell across her eyes, almost hiding them; she looked at me for a moment that seemed to me very long, she had large, dark eyes, then she disappeared behind the door that gave onto the corridor.

Among the other provisions for its smooth running, the institute also enforced a strict separation of men and women (separation in the courses and in the rooms, the women’s on the first floor, the men’s on the second). Those in charge of the courses had dwelt a little on the inconveniences that might arise from it. Sometimes, instead of inconveniences, what arose were children, which they held was not a good calling card for an Institute of Communist Studies; matters of morality, in short.

In the days that followed I saw her again and she spoke to me; I was happy of it. We spoke on other occasions too, it was not easy, because the only moments that coincided were those of meals and, so to speak, of free time, bound nonetheless by set hours and by rotas laid down by those in charge of the Institute.

Her name was M. She was the daughter of a PCI deputy, or of a senior official of the Communist Party, from Piedmont, I think; I do not remember well. I gathered that she was there more by her father’s will, he probably regarded it as a duty towards the party, than out of any spontaneous passion of her own.

One passion she did have, and it was Paris; she told me she often went there. This passion was plainly bound up with the currents of existentialism, with the thought of the French philosopher and writer Jean Paul Sartre, then a figure of reference in literature, culture and politics.

She told me she did not care for the company of the other girls on the course, and it showed: they struck her as conformist in their tastes and their conduct. Privately I thought she held the same view of the male universe represented there, of which I was, more or less worthily, a part.

All this, instead of irritating and wounding me, intrigued and fascinated me, the more so for being said by a girl; I sensed a way of thinking that I did not know but that certainly aroused my curiosity.

One evening, as we were drifting out of the dining hall, she came over and told me that, if I wished, we could see each other later in her room. So it was for a few evenings; then the women’s course ended and she left.

I saw her only once more, in Turin, for the Italia 61 events. The centenary of Italian unity was being celebrated, and the PCI had put a great deal into it. It gave me pleasure to see her again, to talk and walk together. But with a little sadness I thought there was nothing to celebrate.

At the institute the study groups met in dedicated rooms; the common sessions took place in the main hall, which was amply sized and furnished with a platform for speakers and rapporteurs.

Behind the platform loomed a painting by Renato Guttuso: the Battaglia di Ponte dell’Ammiraglio. A great canvas (oil on canvas, 500×300 cm) that recounted, in full realist style, the clash between Garibaldi’s men and the Bourbon army, bent on barring the passage of Garibaldi’s troops (which would have meant the certain conquest of Palermo). The picture was an explosion of red that dominated the scene: red the flags, red the shirts of the Garibaldini.

It was in this hall that the leaders of the PCI, with that painting behind them, gave their lectures and talks on some of the themes covered by the course.

The various subjects underlying the study (political economy, the history of the workers’ movement, the theses of the PCI, and so on) were handled by teachers who oversaw the running of each course, introducing it, recommending books to read and providing handouts they had prepared themselves.

They would then set some of us to report on a topic, which was afterwards discussed by all, so that individual work and study interwove with the collective. The teachers, I later learned, drew up a brief assessment of each participant at the end of the course. These reports and evaluations were, in due course, handed to the cadre commission of the PCI leadership.

This study kept us busy practically the whole day long. The routine broke only when some member of the Communist Party’s national leadership or secretariat came to speak on specific aspects of the party’s political line. Several came, and at times some would stay on with us, so that the discussion carried on more informally and perhaps, for that very reason, more interestingly.

I recall with pleasure the talk and debate with Giorgio Amendola, who placed at the heart of his address the need for the unity of the workers and of their political and trade-union representatives, the true basis for creating a political alternative in the country. Superb: the most political, the most concrete of all those I heard at the Frattocchie that summer. Amendola radiated warmth, with that faint, far-off Neapolitan accent. His phrases, very far from rhetoric, made his political thought immediately clear.

On Sundays we were free of the institute’s obligations. Most of the pupils preferred to seize the chance to go off and visit Rome, alone or in small groups. That was no aim of mine; I had been to Rome many times over. Only on the first outing of my stay at the Frattocchie did I spend the afternoon on a visit, of a vaguely archaeological and sentimental flavour, to a Roman borgata.

Another Sunday afternoon, with a friend from Reggio Emilia, I decided to take a stroll along a lakeside a few minutes from Albano.

We preferred to go to Lake Albano on the Marino side, partly for the little beaches, small jetties and dance halls there; there we spent some days trying, clumsily, to get acquainted with the girls, to the sound of N. Fidenco’s ‘Legata a un granello di sabbia’.

We were walking beside a small jetty and a scrawny little beach. The place was almost deserted. From the road down to the lakeshore came the muffled roar of an engine; a Fiat 1100 pulled up a few metres from the water’s edge.

The car’s doors opened all at once and out came three or four lads, whose age barely reached eighteen or twenty, who, shouting and shoving one another, made for the shore, meanwhile stripping off their few garments to hurl themselves into the water. There they went on shoving and wrestling with one another, yelling at the top of their voices.

We watched them and looked at each other in amazement; meanwhile, out of the car (its doors still all open) climbed the man, between thirty-five and forty, who had been at the wheel. Not very tall, slim, of sturdy and athletic build, with dark, short hair. On his gaunt, ascetic-looking face he wore large sunglasses. He had on jeans and a light, short-sleeved shirt.

He was making his way slowly towards the shore, a little pensive, his hands half thrust into the pockets of his jeans, heedless of what the group of young men was doing.

We watched him with curiosity: what was this man doing with that gang of Roman young toughs?

When the distance between us and him had shrunk I recognised him at once, beyond all reasonable doubt. Too many times had I seen his unmistakable face in the newspapers and read articles that spoke of him, of his trials and the irregularity of his life, but also of his books and his poems.

Several years earlier, perhaps in ’56, I had read his first novel, Ragazzi di vita, while, because of an operation, I lay a patient in a hospital in Perugia.

That Perugia from which came a great friend of his, the poet Sandro Penna, with whom, he told us afterwards, on learning that I was Perugian, he loved to take long night walks along Rome’s Tiber embankments.

We drew near, greeted him and, with some diffidence, asked him to confirm it: he was Pier Paolo Pasolini. At once, and of its own accord, a dialogue sprang up. He inquired about our being in that place and summed up for us the opinion he held of the Communist Party. He described it as the most honest and clean party in a country deeply corrupt and headed for decay. Hence his adherence to the policy of the PCI (which had expelled him years before for ‘political and moral unworthiness’, a formula that, in my brief experience inside the PCI, I would hear resound more than once).

He spoke to us of his experience as editor of the ‘Dialogo con i lettori’ (Dialogue with Readers) column in Vie Nuove, a popular Communist Party magazine that had been pressed upon him and then entrusted to him on the proposal of Antonello Trombadori, the PCI politician most influential on questions of art and culture.

He was very pleased with this undertaking, he said, because it put him in communication with the country’s deepest moods and with the aspirations and feelings of the younger generations, about whom he cared enormously.

His voice sounded, to all appearances, frail and mottled, with harsh, high notes, at times hesitant and subdued. And yet it was a voice that rang friendly to you, even when you did not agree with what it was saying.

I met him twice or three times more, some years later, always in Rome, where he was then living with his mother. Then again when he was shooting ‘12 dicembre’, a film about and for Lotta Continua.

The last meeting was in Perugia: he had come to play a game of football, a great passion of his. It was shortly before his death, which came on 2 November 1975 at Ostia, where he was surely butchered by more than one person. A sixteen-year-old took full responsibility for it, though he could not manage to be altogether convincing.

[1] Armando Fedeli (Perugia, 28 January 1898 – 10 October 1965), a worker, persecuted for his politics, a militiaman in Spain, freed after the fall of Fascism in 1943, was one of the chief organisers of the Resistance in Umbria and was elected a deputy to the Constituent Assembly. Another Umbrian leader, too, directed these first party schools. Carlo Farini (Ferrara, 27 February 1895 – Rome, 30 January 1974) was persecuted for his politics, enlisted in the International Brigades in Spain, and was interned in a concentration camp in France. After the Liberation, a PCI leader in Terni and a member of the Constituent Assembly, elected in Umbria.

***

A note concerning the painting by Renato Guttuso that dominated the main hall.

Even if at times memory lets itself be overwhelmed by vague and hazy recollections and fancies, thereby undermining the truth of events, we must nonetheless trust it until proof to the contrary, so as not to deny ourselves the future as well and consign ourselves once and for all to oblivion.

This is what I was thinking as I came back to Guttuso’s painting, set so scenically in the main hall of the Frattocchie. But behind this picture there lay hidden, and still lies hidden, a kind of comedy of errors, fed by those who talk of it and those who write of it (and they are many, to the point of becoming, unwittingly, a parody).

It is disarming to think that information is made with hearsay (they say that… I read it somewhere…), repeating, agreeing, restating, reiterating and reaffirming a piece of news, an initial fact that no one has verified! What arrives in this way (severed from any context in which the fact or the assertion is set) settles into the memory of each of us, and sometimes they call it ‘perception’.

A girl, to an interviewer asking whether she knew who Aldo Moro was, answered candidly, ‘one of the Red Brigades’. That girl was not stupid; she had a sharp look about her and was at university. When the Red Brigades kidnapped and murdered Moro she had not been born; at the time of the interview she must have been twenty or a little more, and so removed from those events by at least forty years.

This example (and many others could be given) shows the result of what has been said so far, and it concerns not the single individual but whole generations.

But let us set out again from Guttuso. Enrico Crispolti retraces his artistic life in a beautiful monographic volume, Leggere Guttuso (Arnoldo Mondadori editore, 1987). This is how the critic’s commentary on the Battaglia di Ponte dell’Ammiraglio begins: “The very great canvas dedicated to an episode well known and alive in popular memory and imagination, but in reality of no great military weight, which in any case cleared Garibaldi’s path to Palermo once and for all. Guttuso began to study it in the second half of 1950… settling its composition conclusively in the very first days of 1951, to produce the definitive painted version over the second half and the first months of 1952. And he exhibited it in the summer in his own room, a strong confirmation of his ‘social realism’, at the Venice Biennale.” Some further details of the painting are then given: oil on canvas, 521×321 cm, at the lower right the signature “Guttuso Roma ’51-52”.

So the Battaglia di Ponte dell’Ammiraglio placed at the Frattocchie is a later version, a replica, a variant, of the one painted by Renato Guttuso in the early 1950s and exhibited at the Venice Biennale of 1952. That first version shows Luigi Longo, Giancarlo Pajetta and other leaders of the Communist Party and of the Resistance in the guise of the heroic Garibaldino fighters; Guttuso’s face is double, or rather split in two: that of a dead carter and that of a Garibaldino with drawn sword. Present too is Elio Vittorini, “Vittorini se n’è ghiuto, e soli ci ha lasciato!…”, in Bourbon uniform, as he is struck by a Garibaldino sword.

Indeed, in the version Guttuso painted for the 1955 inauguration of the Institute of Communist Studies, the faces of the communist leaders are gone, nor is there the Sicilian cart at whose base Guttuso lay (an unwitting victim of the ferocious clash); but by way of compensation there appear red flags beside the Italian tricolour.

In this way many details had been altered, implying a change in the interpretation of that event on Guttuso’s part (and not his alone); now that realist-style painting sought to suggest a new party, national-popular, yet not closed and sectarian.

This second version of 1955 is the one set behind the platform in the main hall of the Institute of Communist Studies at the Frattocchie.

The painting shown at the 1952 Biennale is now at the Uffizi Gallery, while the other, which visually enriched the main hall of the Frattocchie, can be seen at the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome (together with Al Partigiano caduto by the sculptor Mazzacurati).

So far all is clear. What is not clear is how it has been possible to create confusions, some of them amusing and ironic, about these two paintings and their attribution and location.

Let us begin with the blog ‘Isola natura’, where a profile of the painter and his works is traced. Beneath the image of one painting is the exact caption ‘Renato Guttuso: La Battaglia di Ponte dell’Ammiraglio 1951/52. Oil on canvas, 321 × 521 cm, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi’.

It would all be in its place, but a little further on one reads: “The painting was given by Guttuso to the PCI and was placed in the meeting hall of the party school at the Frattocchie (in the area of the Castelli Romani). In the 1990s, after the dissolution of the PCI and the closure of Frattocchie, the painting was sold to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, where it is currently to be found.”

Obviously the picture bought at auction by the Uffizi Gallery is the one of 1952, which never belonged to the PCI. Its first owner was Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, as documented also by the catalogues of a travelling exhibition of Guttuso’s paintings in several capitals of the Eastern bloc: referring to the picture Battaglia di Ponte dell’Ammiraglio, the ownership was made explicit, Feltrinelli’s, precisely. It was ceded to a businessman from Brescia and then, in 2004, went to auction and was bought, for 750,000 euros, by the Uffizi Gallery. The other picture had been donated to the PCI for the Institute of Communist Studies based at the Frattocchie and now, as we have already said, is at the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome.

Let us pass to an article from “Il Foglio”, by Francesco Cundari, of 16 September 2008, entitled ‘Andavamo alle Frattocchie’. The occasion is the news that the PD is organising sessions of political training on request and by enrolment. The three-day lessons will be held at Castiglione del Lago, Cortona, Camucia and Montepulciano.

Here we are not interested in the overall content of the article, but in this gem, with which it describes the painting: “[…] there loomed at the far end of the main hall, ‘La battaglia di Ponte Ammiraglio’, with Luigi Longo and Giancarlo Pajetta portrayed in the heroic garb of the Garibaldini, with Guttuso himself as a wounded carter, and with Elio Vittorini in Bourbon uniform. It was no accident that the picture was painted in those 1950s that opened, for the PCI, with the sensational departure from the party of the director of Il Politecnico, greeted in Rinascita by Togliatti with the famous article: ‘Vittorini se n’è ghiuto e soli ci ha lasciato’.” Obviously this description is of the painting now at the Uffizi and never gone to the Frattocchie!

The site pressreader.com publishes an article from the Corriere Fiorentino of 12 March 2017 by Franco Camarlinghi: it speaks of the Frattocchie school and cites the painting in the main hall, where the leaders of the PCI are depicted among the Garibaldini, and, so that there be no doubt, it publishes the painting to crown the article. It is the one that is at the Uffizi, never having been at the Frattocchie.

And now Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, from 16/03 to 22/07 2018, the exhibition ‘Nascita di una nazione. Tra Guttuso, Fontana e Schifano’. Guttuso’s work is the Battaglia di ponte dell’Ammiraglio that was at the Institute of Communist Studies.

Artspecialday, presenting the exhibition, writes: “the first work that greets the visitor is La Battaglia di ponte dell’Ammiraglio by Renato Guttuso”. Without much explanation, it puts up the image of the one on show at the Uffizi Gallery.

WWF conference, 27–28 June 2014, ‘Conosciamo il fiume Oreto e la sua valle. Il ponte dell’Ammiraglio’. The history of the bridge is told, starting from 1131, the year of its construction, down to the present, accompanied by images from the various historical periods: engravings, prints, drawings, photographs and, finally, the painting Battaglia di ponte dell’Ammiraglio by Renato Guttuso. There is even the date 1951/52, a pity that the image reproduced is the one from the Frattocchie.

Then there are the great visionaries. Fulvio Ichestre, for example, in his blog, places beneath the reproduction of the painting now at the Uffizi Gallery this caption: ‘Guttuso, Battaglia di ponte dell’Ammiraglio, which for six months I saw every morning at the PCI School of Frattocchie’.

On the site 150anni.it the history of the Expedition of the Thousand is told, and among the many images accompanying it Guttuso’s painting could not be missing. Here is the caption: ‘R. Guttuso, La battaglia di ponte dell’Ammiraglio, 1952, oil on canvas, Gallery of Modern Art, Rome’. No, that painting is at the Uffizi.

Then in dozens of cases there is confusion, or wrong information is at hand as to the date of attribution of the two paintings or the size of the canvases, and it is a dizzying mingling of dates and measurements… But it does not end here:

La Repubblica of 20 April 2016, in its supplement ‘il venerdì’, publishes an article by Giuliano Malatesta with the promising title ‘Classi politiche: ritornano le scuole di partito’. This is how the article begins: “At kilometre 22 of the Via Appia the sign that used to warn you to turn left, close to the nineteenth-century villa of Frattocchie, no longer exists. Just as there is no longer any trace of the famous table football at which the comrades used to challenge one another during breaks in the lessons, which took place in the austere main hall of the villa, where there loomed, stern, La battaglia dell’ammiraglio, the painting by Renato Guttuso that portrayed Luigi Longo and Giancarlo Pajetta in the guise of heroic Garibaldini and poor Elio Vittorini, guilty of having quarrelled with il Migliore, in Bourbon uniform.”

By now we are used to it and we know that the description refers to the Guttuso painting now the property of the Uffizi, and not to the one once placed in the main hall of the Frattocchie; even the title that has been given to the painting alludes, amusingly, to a naval battle.

On 5 February 2018, on “Otto e mezzo”, a television programme, there is a discussion of the formation of ruling classes by the political parties. Then comes Paolo Pagliaro’s segment, a video with an accompanying comment: it starts from an appraisal of the Frattocchie, rightly, as an example to follow and one to which everyone refers, but which remains an unrepeatable example, not least because the times have changed and the mass parties are no more. What the parties try to do today is some sparse ‘convention’, but for the rest the ‘formation of a new ruling class’ is light years away. Then, both at the beginning and to close, as if to identify the content of the video with an icon, an image appears on the screen: it is the Battaglia di Ponte dell’Ammiraglio. The one from the Frattocchie? Not at all, it is the one of 1952, now on show at the Uffizi Gallery. And so on…

Aldo Peverini has written articles and essays on advertising and communication, both commercial and political, including an inquiry and study into the state of advertising in Umbria, later published. For some thirty years he has worked in the field of communication and advertising, both commercial and institutional and political, founding communication agencies or working as a consultant. He recently edited the volume Quando la politica era passione, a chronicle of the 1970s in Umbria, recounted, commented upon and with an ample photographic apparatus. He is the author of the text and the screenplay of Storia di Perugia a fumetti, first published in 1980, of which the third edition is now going to press, in a new editorial format. Storia di Perugia received joint first prize for the youth section at the first edition of the Regional Literary Prize promoted by Umbria Libri in the 2018 edition.