‘Italian history made its presence felt’: degli Espinosa and the Kingdom of Italy

Agostino degli Espinosa’s ‘long voyage’ was literal as well as figurative. After the announcement of Italy’s armistice with the Allies, he undertook the dangerous journey from Rome to Bari to reach the king and Badoglio and to enlist in the fight for Italian liberation, crossing German lines at significant personal peril in ‘a gesture of silent loyalty to a principle of honour’, as he subsequently detailed in the serially published diary ‘La marcia segreta’ (Reference degli Espinosa1945b, 131). For degli Espinosa, this was above all an act of loyalty to the monarchy, and indeed Il Regno del Sud is introduced explicitly as an expression of that same loyalty, with the intention of encouraging Italians to vote against the republic in the 2 June 1946 referendum (Reference degli Espinosa1946a, xii, 446). To this end, the book offers a stirring defence of the king and the provisional Italian government, marshalling historical evidence to argue that the decision to relocate the capital from Rome to Allied-occupied territory saved the state and preserved the nation. While critics of the king’s expedition south contemptuously considered ‘the “flight to Pescara” … the main indictment against the monarchy’, as De Felice (Reference De Felice1995, 39) puts it, degli Espinosa (Reference degli Espinosa1946a, 29) defended the decision not only as prudent but also as emancipatory, expressing his belief that ‘the “flight to Pescara” saved Italy and the Anglo-American efforts’. Only this supposed flight, he argued, could have aligned the Italian state with the Allies, legitimising their landing – and, subsequently, their occupation of the country – as a liberation and a necessary step in the restoration of a lawful Italian state authority. For the same reason, he argued, the voyage to Allied-controlled territory served to expose the Germans as illegitimate invaders, since this judgement was freely decreed by the king and Badoglio, who ‘represented and guaranteed the continuity of the Italian state’ (1946a, 11). As recounted in Il Regno del Sud, then, theirs was not an act of self-preservation, as their critics would assert, but instead a heroic gesture to preserve and protect the Italian state.

The struggle for state preservation, for institutional continuity in the face of chaos, provides the central narrative of degli Espinosa’s history, which recounts how those responsible for maintaining the social order confronted the confusion of combat and administered, amidst the wilderness of war-torn Italy, a makeshift government able to persevere while they pursued national liberation and reunification. The book’s emplotment, Hayden White’s (Reference White1987, 24) term for the historian’s effort to impose narrative order on the events of the past, thus conveys suggestive ideological connotations. White (Reference White1978, 106) alerts us to how narrative histories, with their trajectories of rise and fall, their orientations to goals and attendant obstacles, their fortuitous or ill-fated resolutions, are fundamentally literary: ‘[A] given set of events, arranged more or less chronologically but encoded so as to appear as phases of a process with a discernible beginning, middle, and end, may be emplotted as a Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, Epic, or what have you.’ Taking some advantage of the leeway allowed by White’s inclusive phrasing, I would propose that Agostino degli Espinosa’s history belongs to a narrative genre not enumerated among the standard four. Il Regno del Sud, I claim, can be categorised as a ‘Robinsonade’. Like Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, degli Espinosa’s 1946 history recounts the arduous but ultimately triumphant efforts of an exile to establish dominion over an inhospitable territory.Footnote ² Marooned in their makeshift southern capital, the king and Badoglio must conserve the rudiments of the Italian state, in degli Espinosa’s account, just as Crusoe, on his island, must conserve the rudiments of bourgeois civilisation, fostering the conditions that will facilitate an eventual return home.

Il Regno del Sud begins, tellingly, with a ship at sea – ‘On Friday, 10 September 1943, in the early afternoon, the Royal Cruiser Scipione l’Africano appeared on patrol in front of the port of Brindisi’ (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1946a, 1) – before announcing, with its landfall, the arrival of the king who, reaching southern shores, ‘set foot as sovereign on a land that the flag of the ancient Swabian castle, overlooking the sea, testified as free’ (7). If the ship’s hazardous voyage proved successful, however, the dangers by no means abated once it anchored in port, since its passengers disembarked in a land that, while free, was no longer recognisably Italian. Here, one may be tempted to recall an earlier southern voyage, that of Garibaldi and his Mille, who landed in Marsala in May 1860, and thus to associate degli Espinosa’s Robinsonade with the Southern Question that has often served to divide Italy. Yet Il Regno del Sud by no means identifies the Italian South with ‘the barbarous, the primitive, the violent, the irrational, the feminine, the African’, the stereotypes that have so often underwritten the invidious distinctions between southern and northern Italy (Dickie Reference Dickie1999, 1). Instead, degli Espinosa argues that, with Italian authority having withered away as a result of Fascism’s failures, the South had been unjustly deserted and thus needed to be reclaimed before legitimate rule could be restored throughout the country. The inhabitants of these southern territories, he reports, had abandoned ‘any political ideal … any concept of national society’ (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1946a, 14). ‘Italy, the will of the Italian people, honour, freedom were meaningless words in the world in which we had arrived’ (149). The Italian state had to be carefully cultivated, therefore, by developing the rudimentary tools of governance. The territory initially proved resistant to these efforts at organisation, however, and the functionaries tasked with imposing state authority struggled to overcome the entropy in which they were compelled to work. Yet through their intensive efforts they managed to create the connections and to establish the fledgling institutions that made possible a stable social order. For degli Espinosa, ‘in those gestures of stark humanity, Italian history made its presence felt’ (120). Imposing order on the chaos, the administration thus managed to safeguard not just the fundamentals of the Italian state but also the commitment to Italian national identity.

In this way, the narrative structure of the Robinsonade makes degli Espinosa’s history of Italy’s military defeat, armistice and acquiescence to Allied authority into a victorious account of heroic endurance, of hard-won survival, of resolute fidelity to civic ideals. While at the moment of the ship’s arrival in port in September 1943 ‘there was nothing but a defeated state’, argued degli Espinosa, by the time of the return to Rome ‘the Italian state had a solid and vital international legal status’, and, more importantly, ‘was certain of the best method to use to proceed along the long road back. Such knowledge was in fact the greatest gain obtained by the government of the Kingdom of the South’ (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1946a, 345). The voyage south, however fraught, thus revealed itself to have been edifying, insofar as it ensured the continuity of the state until the journey home could be undertaken. Indeed, degli Espinosa described the impending journey not so much as a return to but a renewal of civil society. Maintaining his dominion even in flight, the king, in degli Espinosa’s account, vouchsafed an Italian future in careful continuity with Italian history, proving his and his country’s allegiance to the occupying Allies while providing for his people an Italian identity – an Italian ideal – to which they could remain loyal.

‘Faithful to the dictates of my conscience’: degli Espinosa’s political metamorphoses

The word loyalty, fedeltà, and its cognates recur throughout degli Espinosa’s oeuvre. At the conclusion of Il Regno del Sud, for instance, he described how the continuity of the Italian state had resulted from having demonstrated the ‘efficient and faithful [fedele] collaboration that Italy could offer to British and American politics’ (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1946a, 342). This status marked a clear step forward from the country’s condition at the time of the armistice, when the Allies distrusted Italy, which degli Espinosa established by quoting a British critic who insisted that the Italians lacked ‘the virtuous loyalty [fedeltà] to their cause’ (45). Italy nonetheless managed to build trust, degli Espinosa argued, thanks to the efforts of Badoglio, whose ‘faithfulness [fedeltà] to a principle’ (55), ‘to his own conscience as a faithful [fedele] soldier’ (62), allowed him to convince the Allies of his and his nation’s merit. It was not just Badoglio, however, but the entire government in exile, and especially the king, who deserved credit for saving Italy: ‘[T]hey must have felt their conscience being purified in a renewed oath of allegiance [fedeltà] to the symbol … that unites them in the shared history of the Italy born of the Risorgimento’ (89). It hardly needs to be stated that degli Espinosa numbered himself among those who had sworn this oath, having declared himself ready to sacrifice his life in an attempt to join the king out of a sense of ‘silent loyalty [fedeltà]’, the phrase that identifies, in my analysis, the lifelong ethical and political ideal to which he aspired.

Well before the publication of Il Regno del Sud, however, degli Espinosa had already begun to question, if not yet entirely to reject, his loyalty to the king. In his September 1944 ‘Confessions of a Royalist’, he wondered whether the Second World War had not in fact exposed the king’s significant shortcomings. He feared that the spirit of the Italian people had been so badly violated – so many sacrifices had been made, so much suffering had been endured, so many lives had been lost – that it had tested and perhaps surpassed the powers of the monarch to embody the nation, to represent a unifying and ennobling ideal. Even so, degli Espinosa continued passionately to advocate for the monarchy until well past the 1946 referendum that transformed Italy into a republic. Espousing political loyalty even as he elucidated his apparent political transformation, degli Espinosa evinced a tension – perhaps a contradiction – that would become all the more palpable in the years that followed.

That this tension was central to his personal as well as his political identity is suggested by the memorable analogy that he elaborated at the conclusion of his confessions. Having been found wanting in Italy’s moment of need, he explained, the monarchy was like a beloved ancestral home that was no longer fit for purpose and had to be replaced.

This analogy proves particularly striking when read alongside the author’s recollections of his own ancestral home, which were published two years later. His family’s estate, he recalled, ‘was just an average house’, but it nevertheless played a crucial role in his ethical and sentimental education: ‘No teacher ever spoke to me about honour, civic duty, keeping one’s word, or controlling one’s noble sentiments with such a persuasive tone as that old house’ (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1946c, 3). With the house having been destroyed by a bomb during the Second World War, reducing it to ‘a pile of stones and mortar’, degli Espinosa worried about how his family’s future generations would learn the values on which his life was founded. ‘And who will remain faithful to himself if his lineage is nothing but stones and mortar’ (3)? It is difficult not to hear in this question doubts about his nation’s as well as his family’s values, fears about whether the national as well as the familial loyalty by which he claimed to live could survive in a world transformed by war. Yet it is also difficult not to notice that his own loyalties had shifted more than he cared to admit.

Agostino degli Espinosa’s claim to constancy invites comparison to the position staked out by many of his fellow Italian intellectuals after the war, of whom it is often argued that they professed to political transformations far greater and far quicker than the facts would warrant. As the Second World War waged on, much of the Italian intelligentsia abandoned Fascism for antifascism, renouncing long-professed loyalties to Mussolini’s regime and adopting an openly oppositional stance against the movement they had formerly supported. Yet these conversions were often so quick as to arouse scepticism, and a substantial and growing body of critical scholarship convincingly questions the intellectual turn away from Fascism, aspects of which are said to be insincere, opportunistic, fraudulent. A great many derogatory epithets have therefore attached themselves to those who suddenly switched their political allegiances in the midst of the war. They have been called ‘the redeemed’ (Serri Reference Serri2005), ‘the phantoms’ (Levis Sullam Reference Levis Sullam2021), ‘bad teachers’ (Forlenza Reference Forlenza1993), and their claims to conversion have been dismissed as mere prevarications, surreptitious attempts to ‘cover their tracks’ (Battista Reference Battista2007). Overwhelming evidence has established that many remained loyal to Fascism far longer than they would later claim, while others, despite having broken officially with Fascism, distanced themselves from the movement far less than they wished to suggest. The question of political loyalty thus proved exceedingly complex, or more accurately contradictory, after the Second World War.

Few if any Italian intellectuals evinced political loyalties more complex or contradictory than Agostino degli Espinosa’s. Throughout the ventennio he was among the most influential of Fascist economists, playing a leading role in the efforts to define and to promote Fascist theories of corporatism and autarchy, which he envisioned instituting throughout Europe after Fascism’s triumph, arguing that ‘from the victorious conclusion of the war, [autarchy] will undoubtedly derive greater power and the potential for broader implementation’ (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1941, 1). After Italy’s armistice with the Allies, he abandoned his earlier positions, arguing that it was necessary to ‘strictly prohibit any desire for autarchy’ (degli Espinosa [Reference degli Espinosa and Terra1947] Reference degli Espinosa and Terra2014, 227) in favour of the free-market liberalism he now advocated as a self-described ‘reactionary defender of capitalist interests’ (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1945c, 13). This position did not last, however, and by 1948, degli Espinosa publicly and vociferously rejected his postwar economic liberalism for communism, becoming an outspoken critic of what he now understood to be capitalism’s ‘inequality’ (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa and D’Alfonso1953, 147). The one-time Fascist corporatist, later a free-market capitalist, had become a committed Marxist (‘Gli intellettuali’ 1948, 3).

Having undergone a road to Damascus moment, as he outlined in an April 1948 article in the communist daily L’Unità, degli Espinosa had come to believe that only communism could guarantee the ideals to which humanity should aspire. ‘Today we either choose or renounce the ethical value of life’, he declared (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1995b, 456). As a Fascist, he had argued that the nation constituted such an ethical ideal, and had for this reason advocated not only corporatism but also colonialism (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1938, 86–87). Promoting, on these same imperialist grounds, Fascist Italy’s alliance with Nazi Germany, he insisted not just on the necessity but also the ‘morality’ of the efforts to impose Italy’s national ideals on the international stage (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1941, 1). Just a few years later, now seeking to fight on behalf of Italy’s liberation from Fascism, he supported King Victor Emmanuel III, believing that monarchs serve as the embodiment of the nation and as such are the guarantors of the values and ideals for which the populace is prepared to sacrifice itself (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1995a, 447). Not long after the war, however, he rejected entirely any belief in national prestige and national duty, arguing that the nation had no destiny, no spiritual mission, no meaning (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1945d, 14). Now he insisted that Italy’s saving grace was to be found in the refusal of the Italian people to uphold abstract ideals of any kind: ‘[I]n that refusal I find Italy,’ he wrote (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1945f, 3). Indeed, he expressed his hope that Italians would refuse to sacrifice themselves for any cause, not only for Fascism but also for the communism promoted by many antifascist partisans (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1945e, 15–16). By Reference degli Espinosa1950, having become a communist himself, he rejected his former hope in an end to ideology and invested himself in the ideals of the Italian Communist Party. In less than a decade, he had been carried from corporatism to capitalism to communism; from Fascism’s nationalist ideals, to national ideals embodied in the monarch, to a liberal critique of national ideals as such, to Marxism as the transnational ideal to which all people should strive.

Yet degli Espinosa downplayed – indeed denied – the evident shifts in his political loyalties, portraying his repeated ideological metamorphoses as an expression of unchanging faith. Responding to his liberal critics, who accused him of betrayal as he abandoned their ranks and began to advocate communism, he argued that he was in fact steadfastly true to his principles: ‘I remain faithful to the dictates of my conscience, only following the party which, in my opinion, best serves it when I have to vote’ (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1948b). What might appear to be disloyalty, degli Espinosa thus insisted, was in fact the opposite. As in the case of his move away from monarchism, moreover, degli Espinosa illustrated his political position with a revealing personal analogy. ‘I became a communist,’ he reported, and a friend and former ally ‘insulted me as if he were a betrayed lover. I replied that joining a party is more like buying a useful object than a promise of love’ (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1948b). While he had previously compared the collapse of the monarchy to the destruction of his ancestral home, in the case of his move from liberalism to communism he rejected the comparison to marital infidelity. Politics, he maintained, was pragmatic, not romantic. One cannot help but notice, however, that his two postwar novels both take romantic infidelity as their subject, portraying domestic conflict and extramarital affairs against the resolutely political backdrop of postwar Italy. Indeed, I claim that the novels reveal profound and momentous political doubts and disloyalties that the histories conceal.

‘A strange conflict raging within me’: degli Espinosa’s novels as national allegories

While critics tend to adopt straightforwardly autobiographical interpretations of degli Espinosa’s two novels (Santarelli Reference Santarelli1973, xv–xvi), L’assente and Ognuno con la sua miseria, I believe that it is more productive to approach the texts as versions of what Fredric Jameson (Reference Jameson2019, 194) calls ‘national allegory’, interpreting the narrative development of their protagonists symptomatically, as personifications of the political situation in which they were imagined. Reading the two novels in this way exposes a stark and significant contrast between their portrayal of marital infidelity and degli Espinosa’s emphasis on loyalty as a personal and political virtue. I do not mean by this the banal accusation that with his novels the author confesses to a hypocritical failure in his private life to live up to his publicly declared values. I mean instead that his fiction divulges ideological conflicts and contradictions denied or disguised in his political writing. Put simply, my reading foregoes any speculation about degli Espinosa’s marital fidelity, focusing instead on the question of how his ideal of political fidelity fluctuated as a result of the upheavals of the Second World War and its aftermath. Il Regno del Sud recounts the Robinsonade of King Victor Emmanuel III, whose loyalty to the nation and to the Allied occupiers guaranteed the continuity of the Italian state. Likewise, degli Espinosa described his own political transformations as evidence of his loyalty to principle, his ethical continuity even on shifting ideological terrain. Yet L’assente and Ognuno con la sua miseria both reveal uncertainty, scepticism, even despair about the prospect that loyalties could survive the war and occupation intact. Interpreted allegorically, in fact, these two elegiac postwar novels disclose the tragic vision of an author unable to reconcile himself to his protean political loyalties, and of an Italy divided by competing and ultimately irreconcilable allegiances. It is as if degli Espinosa, incapable of accepting the hopeful resolution that he had envisioned in Il Regno del Sud, felt compelled to confront in his fiction the personal and political consequences of conflicts that challenged the historical narrative he himself had promoted.

L’assente, published in 1945, is the story of a prisoner of war who returns home hoping to rediscover the domestic peace that he left behind four years earlier, only to conclude that this hope is illusory. Both he and his family have changed too much to allow for any meaningful renewal of their life together. Unable to reconnect with his wife, to readapt to the rhythms of domestic life, or to reconcile himself with an identity transformed by the experience of war, he rejects the possibility of restoration, undone by ‘the time that divided us’: the years of separation that estranged him irreversibly from his family and his past self (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1945a, 110). Rather than admit the real reasons for the dissolution of his marriage, however, he accuses his wife of infidelity, coercing her to confess falsely to a non-existent affair. Yet he reacts with indifference to her perceived indiscretion, and it is his genuine apathy, rather than her invented affair, that marks the definitive break in their relationship. While a prisoner of war, the protagonist was tormented by ‘the problem of loyalty’, the thought that his wife would be unfaithful; upon his return, he scrutinises her for ‘the trace of an infidelity’, a sign that she has strayed (56). However, even as he finds her to be as devoted as ever, the same ‘faithful companion with whom he confidently journeyed through life’, he realises that his love for her has been lost, and as a result he cannot recommit to his marriage (54).

While a friend attempts to explain this difficult return with reference to the events of the war – ‘perhaps it wouldn’t have been like this if we hadn’t had these damn months of occupation’ – he rejects this externalised account, insisting on the internal and affective transformation that has alienated him from his loved ones and himself: ‘[M]y return is tormented by a strange conflict raging within me … a radical change’ (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1945a, 69). Just as it is not the war and occupation that have isolated him, he insists, so too it is not his wife’s alleged infidelity, as he attempts to convey to her at the novel’s conclusion:

Consigning their marital bonds to an irrecuperable past, he marks a definitive break not only with his wife but also with the man he once was. There can be no return, he declares: ‘[I]t’s not possible … you can’t begin the same life a second time’ (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1945a, 110–111). With these resonant words he abandons his former home, forsaking his family and setting off to lead a new life alone.

L’assente’s narrative of invented infidelity and unattainable reconciliation, I argue, represents a confession of despair that, despite the protestations of the protagonist, cannot be separated from the history of the Second World War and the Allied occupation. This novel of alleged infidelity, written by an author whose ethical and political ideal was fidelity, and whose influential history of the armistice with the Allies depicted a government legitimated by its loyalty, speaks to its postwar context in a significant but not entirely straightforward manner. L’assente, I argue, stages Italy’s ongoing national reconstruction and reconciliation, in allegorical guise, as a series of domestic conflicts. Il Regno del Sud concludes with an expression of hope for postwar Italy’s return to its historical foundations – ‘everything would be rediscovered’ – but also with some trepidation about the difficult task at hand: ‘[T]hose who returned, despite the joy of homecoming, could not help thinking that some things would be difficult to rediscover, because not only was Italy’s body deeply wounded, but so was its soul’ (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1946a, 349). Published just one year earlier, L’assente suggests that such fears were unfortunately well founded, that Italy had been radically and irrevocably transformed, that fidelity alone was not enough, that nothing could restore the bonds of the nation after Fascism, resistance and occupation.

By 1950, the year in which he published his second novel, Ognuno con la sua miseria, degli Espinosa’s appraisal of the national situation had declined still further. Finalist for the Viareggio Prize and winner of the Valdagno Prize for literature, Ognuno con la sua miseria tells the story of Ruggero d’Ursone, a decorated cavalry officer from a noble family who is left destitute after being dishonourably discharged from the military because he refused to abandon his oath to the king and swear allegiance to the newly formed Italian Social Republic. This was not a political decision, d’Ursone insists; it was only a matter of duty, of honour, of loyalty. ‘I find myself in this miserable situation because I wanted to remain faithful to an ideal principle’ (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1950, 151–152). Such fidelity feels increasingly out of place in the postwar context, however, as virtually all Italians, even those who formerly fought alongside d’Ursone, now question the cause for which they served. Bewildered by the new political context, embarrassed by unemployment and poverty, and desperate in his lonely desires, d’Ursone finds it increasingly difficult to uphold the ideals that previously guided his conduct. After a particularly humiliating breech, in fact,

Revealingly, d’Ursone’s recognition is occasioned by a personal rather than a political crisis.

Indeed, while the novel turns, in part, on his reflections regarding his role in military and civic affairs, much of the drama stems from private concerns, such as d’Ursone’s embarrassment at having to rely on the financial support of Emanuele, a man who formerly served under his command in the military, and his covetous relationship with Emanuele’s wife, Cristina, with whom he becomes obsessed for reasons that are as much vindictive as they are erotic. Even more acutely than in L’assente, Ognuno con la sua miseria combines a story of fidelity to the nation with infidelity in love. Here, the infidelities multiply: Cristina is having an affair, but not with d’Ursone; Emanuele is having an affair with Ludovica, who falls for d’Ursone; d’Ursone reveals Cristina’s affair to Emanuele, who misunderstands and believes he is referring to Ludovica; d’Ursone steals a ring from his Aunt Beatrice and sells it to Emanuele, who gives it to Ludovica, who gives it in turn to d’Ursone; Aunt Beatrice, whose love for d’Ursone is never entirely materteral, comes eventually to kiss him, only to be disillusioned when she discovers evidence of his affair, while nevertheless confusing which of the two women has been his lover and which he truly loves. It is remorse for having revealed Cristina’s infidelity, rather than regret for having maintained his own fidelity to the king, that sparks d’Ursone’s realisation that he has violated his code of honour. Yet the two ultimately prove inseparable, blurring the lines between the personal betrayal that inspires his dejection at the novel’s end and the political reversal that began his demise at its start. In an early chapter, he claims that things would have been better had he never made it home from the war, better if he had been killed in battle, rather than returning to the diminished status – and, he might be understood to suggest, to the diminished Italy – in which he now finds himself (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1950, 27). And, in fact, Ognuno con la sua miseria ends with the protagonist’s tragic death, possibly – although the text leaves this deliberately unclear – at his own hand, a fulfilment of the suicidal ideation that permeates the novel (396). With nowhere left to place his trust – no person, no institution, no nation worthy of his loyalty – he becomes desperate enough to take his own life.

Two years after the novel was published, Agostino degli Espinosa took his own life, succumbing to suicide in 1952 (Pellicani Reference Pellicani1952). He had spent his final years searching for an ideal to which to aspire, a code of honour to uphold, a ‘standard to which to remain faithful’ (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1945g, 3). Looking back on his past selves, he admitted, he was filled with ‘bitter sadness’ even as he sought not to ‘give in to the weight of regret’ (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1995b, 456). In the end, however, like the protagonists of his novels, he was left personally hopeless and ideologically homeless, unable any longer to maintain his faith in the shifting principles with which he had sought to govern his private and public conduct on the long voyage from Fascism to monarchism to liberalism to communism. Dedicating his fiction to the conflict between fidelity and betrayal, which plays out in the domestic sphere but always with explicit as well as implicit reference to the political context, Agostino degli Espinosa confronted the central conflicts of the war, the resistance, the occupation, and the postwar reconstruction in Italy. He did so, moreover, with greater doubt and greater anxiety than in his influential historical account of Il Regno del Sud, which projects a faith, a ‘silent loyalty’, that, as his fiction reveals, he struggled and ultimately failed to maintain.

Conclusion: degli Espinosa and Italy’s divided memory

In recent decades, revisionist historians have repeatedly argued that, in light of the king’s ‘betrayal’, Italians could not possibly maintain an undivided sense of national loyalty after 8 September 1943. That impossibility underlies what Ernesto Galli della Loggia calls ‘the death of the fatherland’: divided in half, separated by ‘the occupation of opposing armies’, Italians on both sides could believe that they had remained loyal and both could be derided as ‘traitors to their country’, with the result that ‘the idea of nation in Italy became the subject and theatre of a bitter dispute whose stakes were national legitimacy’ (Galli della Loggia Reference Galli della Loggia1996, 40).

While the loyalty of the antifascist forces and those who fought alongside the Allies was granted legitimacy by the postwar state, the competing claims of the Fascists have received an increasingly sympathetic hearing in subsequent accounts. After all, as Pasquale Chessa (Reference Chessa2005, 6) emphasises, they, too, had fought for their country inspired by their loyalty, adhering to what they understood to be their duty as it was articulated in Fascist propaganda after the king and Badoglio’s flight south:

Fighting on behalf of one occupier and against another, the soldiers of the Italian Social Republic swore ‘to take up arms against the enemies of the … fatherland and to fight with loyalty and courage in the formation under German direction’ (Ganapini Reference Ganapini1999, 333). Little wonder, therefore, that the word fedeltà recurs throughout the testimony of those who swore this oath (Borghi Reference Borghi and Corni2007, 12; Parlato Reference Parlato2012, 15). Little wonder, too, that they echo Mussolini’s accusation against the king, whose 8 September 1943 armistice with the Allies he called ‘an unprecedented betrayal’ (Graziani Reference Graziani1986, 192). In short, they believed themselves to have remained loyal and they fought against those they believed to have betrayed the nation. From the perspective of the Kingdom of the South in Allied-occupied territory, however, they were themselves accused of betrayal by the provisional Italian government:

Loyalty, in short, was a characteristic prized by both of the competing camps in Italy’s civil war, and both camps accused their enemies of betrayal. Loyalty alone could not define Italy’s political divisions.

Agostino degli Espinosa long argued otherwise. In Il Regno del Sud, he made the case for the validity of the Italy of King Victor Emmanuel III and the illegitimacy of the Italy of Mussolini, insisting that the continuity of the state, embodied in the faithful figure of the monarch, made the Kingdom of Italy in Allied-occupied territory the true and only Italy. His carefully documented narrative, filled with first-hand testimony and enlivened with eye-witness accounts of important events, has shaped our understanding of this fraught moment in Italian history. Between the lines, however, it betrays some of the same doubts that revisionist critics of the official narrative continue to exploit. Agostino degli Espinosa did not share their conclusions, but he was troubled – and perhaps at times even convinced – by some of the challenges to his own. Those troubles come to the fore in his fiction, which gives voice to the apparent fear that the ‘silent loyalty’ which had led him to risk his life for the Italy of the king was not enough to restore the collapsed home, the shattered family, the divided nation that he encountered upon his return to Rome.

Yet degli Espinosa, despite his growing despair, never descended to the kinds of equivocations that characterise the revisionist histories. Even as he worried that something had been lost, even as he appears to have concluded that it could not be regained, he never conceded that the armistice with the Allies had marked ‘the death of the fatherland’. This was not because he denied the reality before him. This was not, in other words, because of any ‘truth hidden, denied, not to be written’, as the revisionists so often charge (Pansa Reference Pansa2006, 200). Instead, as he announced in the closing lines of Il Regno del Sud, degli Espinosa, despite his doubts, sought fervently to maintain faith not only in the history but also in the soul of the nation, ‘the spirit forged by all those men who … united to create the honest and honourable Kingdom of Italy’ (degli Espinosa Reference degli Espinosa1946a, 349). Nevertheless, his faith was badly shaken, a fact that emerges at the margins of his history and at the centre of his fiction. In his shaken faith, I have sought to show, degli Espinosa embodies the crises of the modern Italian state, in which, as John Foot (Reference Foot2009, 14) convincingly argues, ‘“mass loyalty” has never been achieved’. This situation makes degli Espinosa’s reverence for loyalty all the more poignant, and his struggle to preserve loyalty in the tumultuous months and years that followed the armistice with the Allies all the more emblematic of ‘Italy’s divided memory’ (Foot Reference Foot2009). What it does not do, however, is lend credence to the corrosive claims of the revisionists, who seek to exploit those divisions and to obfuscate Italian history. Despite – or, better still, because of – the conflicts and contradictions that his work confronts and ultimately fails to resolve, degli Espinosa points the way towards a more honest, a more enduring, a more faithful construction of Italian cultural memory.