All Rome Trembled

The Strange Affair of Wilma Montesi

Melton S. Davis

• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781787209831
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

THE WILMA MONTESORI SCANDALThe nude body on the beach exploded Italy's "Scandal of the Century." Among the participants was a seemingly placid family group, with the beautiful young victim in its midst; suave Marchese from the South; his raven-haired mistress, one of Italy's newly emancipated girl-women of the North; a jazz pianist, son of one of the nation's rulers; his inamorata, a famous, still-lovely film star; a disillusioned, disoriented existentialist; her lover, a wild-eyed, drug-taking painter; maneuvering politicos of the Centre; an eager young editor who thought an exposé would set things right; the dynamic head of the nation's security forces, who had too many friends; the fat chief of Rome's police, who had too few; the smart Communist lawyer who was suddenly splattered with the mud he had hurled; the mountainous detective, ruthless in his investigations, breasting diversionary waves as he pushed towards terrible conclusions; and the carefree nephew of the ex-King of Italy…"Sensational"—New York Herald Tribune

XIX. The Revelations

“O Dio! Che avviene?” Act 2.

(“Oh God! What is coming now?”)

RARELY in Italy’s history had the whole of the people waited for justice as they had in the Montesi case. It wasn’t that they wanted vengeance or would be satisfied to see someone serve a sentence. But after so many confused and obviously false leads they were fed up. They wanted real proof, incontrovertible facts and actual names. As one Italian said: “We want to find out what is the conclusion and the moral. Nobody stays in a theater for over two years and then goes out knowing no more than when they came in.”

All through the early months of 1955 the case was still in the investigative phase, going through a series of steps confusingly labeled preliminary, final and supplementary. In March some of the experts’ reports were put at the disposition of defense attorneys who in turn filed the testimony of their experts. The steadily growing files of the case were then turned over to the Attorney General, who gave them back to Sepe with further instructions; either (1) if grounds for legitimate suspicion existed, send the accused up for trial, or (2) accept the defense theses and dismiss the charges for lack of evidence.

In the Spring, Amintore Fanfani as Secretary of the Demo-Christian Party, had finished reshaping its administrative structure. At a national council meeting in Trieste in November 1954, without naming Scelba, he had said that the summer and autumn political storms had been a very severe test for Christian Democracy. He was referring, he said, to the death of De Gasperi, the collapse of EDC, the Montesi case, the incidents in Parliament and new floods in the South. Possibly the secretariat and he himself had been spending too much time over reorganization, forgetting political policy, and he would now turn his attention to that. He was in a good position to do so since he had been building up his Iniziativa Democratica and enlisting support from other currents in the party. Among them was a new group called Concentrazione which attracted men from both Right and Left. One of the leaders was Giuseppe Pella, who had pointedly dropped Scelba from his Cabinet when he was Prime Minister and who, during the Montesi case, had said what was needed was “a more acute moral sense than we have had evidence of recently” He might have noted that the opposition was still using the Montesi-case characters as an issue. The Communists put out a poster attacking the government for denying the vote to a poor woman who had been fined ten lire years ago for hanging out her washing in a forbidden place, while Ugo Montagna’s name had not been struck from the electoral lists even though his dirty wash had been exposed in public. The right-wing MSI party had a poster accusing the Demo-Christians of being the party of scandals and showing pictures of Giuliano, Pisciotta and Capocotta.

Another current within the party was Base, centered around Ezio Vanoni, government financial expert who had proposed equalizing the differences between North and South, and substantially raising living standards by 1964. His plan was based on stimulating the propulsive factors of the economy with state funds much like the WPA of Rooseveltian days or the Plan Monnet in France. It was a carefully worked-out blueprint envisioning the doubling of gross investment with increased food production, housing and exports which would lead to four million new jobs. One of the charges against Scelba was that he had done little or nothing to put the plan into action. The issue was further forced when, at a press conference in February, President of the Assembly Giovanni Gronchi accused the Cabinet of putting obstacles in the way of parliamentary work. He pointed out that some projects had been held up for months, and the discussion of reform bills and activation of the Constitution, particularly the setting-up of the Supreme Court, had been postponed many times.

Fanfani thought the moment had come for change; he demanded “clarification”—which in Italian political language meant anything from a restatement of program to a complete change of government. Scelba, however, secured a reprieve until after his scheduled March visit to the United States. On his return he found the minor parties restless. The Social Democrats said that he had not respected the economic and social program on which they had agreed. The Republicans charged “slow and insufficient government action” and they, too, threatened to withdraw their support. Scelba again held up action, saying there was no time for discussion because presidential elections were to be held at the end of April when Italy’s two houses of Parliament would decide on the new President who would hold office for the next seven years. Scelba, seeing a chance to regain some support, allied himself with Fanfani in supporting Cesare Merzagora, a newspaper publisher and banker, who was presiding officer of the Senate. However, when, for the third time, senators and deputies had marched up one by one and deposited their votes, it became apparent that it would be difficult to elect the official Demo-Christian candidate, who had received only 228 votes. Leading with 308 votes was the left-wing candidate Ferruccio Parri, a Resistance leader. In successive balloting, the strength of Giovanni Gronchi became apparent. When Parri decided to withdraw, hurried backstage politicking showed up a rank-and-file revolt among the Christian Democrats, led by ex-Premier Pella and his Concentrazione group. By the time the last ballot was to be taken, the Left, too, had thrown its support to Gronchi, joined by a considerable number of Christian Democrats. When Merzagora withdrew, Giovanni Gronchi, on April 29th, was elected President of Italy by a landslide of 658 votes.

Gronchi’s election came as a surprise to just about everybody. A former trade-unionist and then a successful businessman from Pisa, he had a Catholic background and was supposedly closely allied with the Jesuits. Sixty-seven years old, his regular features and square jaw gave the impression of dignity and reserve, of intelligence and determination. He made no secret of his leftist leanings which, however, had always been along Christian lines. It was recalled that just after the 1948 elections, in an interview with the Rome correspondent of the American Broadcasting Company, Gronchi had said: “Italy is a meeting point between East and West and has an autonomous foreign policy. It will collaborate sincerely with America while making every effort to attract Russia to European collaboration.”

In Washington the State Department, misreading the signs completely, started to slow down U.S. aid to Italy. The entire Italian press reacted angrily. The Right called it “mortifying American intervention to save the Scelba ministry.” Aid was hastily resumed, and even Scelba tried to disassociate himself publicly as best he could from such “unfortunate interference.”

Gronchi’s inaugural address on May 11th, given added emphasis by the new medium of television, profoundly impressed the people of Italy. He said things that no political leader in Italy who was not a Communist had put into words for years, that there could be real progress only with the participation of the workers, who “had been led by universal suffrage to the portals of government without being allowed into the seat of policy making.” The government should be the “guardian of the rights of all, of freedom and equality before the law. Living conditions and work opportunities must be bettered at the expense of concentrations of wealth and monopolies.” He then quoted the Pope in what seemed like a direct reference to the Montesi case:

“No law or institutional reform can be of benefit if the common man lives in fear of oppression…if he realizes that everything in his daily life depends on having influential friends…and if he suspects that behind the façade of the state are hidden the manipulations of a powerfully organized group.”

The new President warned that the Constitution had to be not only enforced but implemented, that regional autonomy, the Constitutional Court, the Judicial Council and other institutions called for by the Constitution “which had hitherto been comfortably left on paper,” had to be brought into being. From all over the country came instant reactions; discussion filled the bars and cafés as well as the clubs of the privileged. The editor of Corriere della Sera said that, more than a message, the speech was a real governmental program and that it responded to a widespread desire for change. There was surprise in some circles at its leftist content and at its obvious criticism of his party. Communists and Socialists, who felt they had helped to bring about Gronchi’s election, took his words as an expression of solidarity. But then the Social Catholics in the DC party cut the ground from under the Left by making the President’s message the fundamental element of their program.

Instead of settling quietly into office as the two previous Presidents had done, Gronchi immediately made it clear that he proposed carrying his program to the people and started on a series of trips to the various cities of the Republic. The people’s approval was demonstrated in no uncertain fashion during Gronchi’s stay in Sicily. Crowds assembled all along the route of the presidential train for three days, and in town after town the people shouted, “This President is our own!” Newspapermen who accompanied the President said they had never seen anything like it, and that it seemed an end of separatism and the beginning of full and unconditional participation of Sicily and the South in the life of the nation.

It was obvious that Gronchi’s speeches and actions represented the still-unexpressed ideals of the average man. Although Italy was not a presidential republic and Gronchi lacked the powers of Eisenhower, he started to give the office new significance. He held discreet luncheons for parliamentary leaders, he talked to newly named government officials, he addressed Italian ambassadors called back to Rome for consultation, he summoned Cabinet ministers to discuss their actions—all this without losing contact with the people. Every day he received almost one thousand letters from farmers and clerks and unemployed workers who told him of their worries and their joys. Many sent him announcements of their weddings, of the birth of their children, just as if he were an old friend of the family.

He won friends in other sectors, too, seeing to it that to his official receptions came writers, artists and men of culture, almost as if it were once again the Renaissance. He would mix with them, asking Carlo Levi when his book on Russia would be coming out, Malaparte how his new film was getting on. He spoke to writers like Silone, Palazzeschi, Piovene, Baldini, Berto and Soldati, discussing with them their works.

But there was not complete agreement with the new President’s view of his functions. Here he was, interpreting his election as the beginning of a new political course while still in office were legislators elected two years earlier. Above all, the horizons opened by Gronchi made it appear that the maneuvering of Scelba was no longer enough. When in the Sicilian regional elections on June 5th, the Demo-Christians came through with a resounding victory, it was attributed to two things: the hopes raised by Gronchi, who, after all, was a Demo-Christian; and the superb organizational work done by Fanfani. The latter took the occasion to say that the government needed a strong new course and a general stepping-up of the legislative program. When this found echoes, he laid down the law: “There is doubt whether our party can continue with the present arrangement.” The morning of June 21st, Fanfani finally told Scelba that the DC Executive Committee had “regretfully” decided to withdraw its support from him. The next day Mario Scelba gave President Gronchi his resignation, bringing to an end a regime which had been full of promise in its early stages. He had been brought down, said Scelba, not by parliamentary vote but by intrigues and personal rivalries in his own party.

It was clear that the Social Catholics were now running the Demo-Christian party, which was imbued with a new spirit. Corriere della Sera attributed this to Padre Messineo, the editor-in-chief of the Jesuit Civiltà Cattolica. One of the results of his efforts was a kind of collaboration between the secretariat and the “Concentration” current. The unanimous election of Attilio Piccioni as head of the Parliamentary group also represented a desire for concord and a drawing-together of the party.

Elected to replace Scelba was sixty-four-year-old Antonio Segni, a founder of the Catholic People’s party, a Partisan leader and a Sardinian lawyer, best known for his work as De Gasperi’s Minister of Agriculture; it was he who had devised and pushed through the land-reform program. He even saw to the cutting-up of his own land in Sardinia under the provisions of the bill.

Segni was a definite change from the robust Scelba. The Sardinian, the first ever to become Premier of Italy, was scholarly, witty, adroit, completely devoid of rhetoric. Thin, pale, white-haired, he gave an impression of fragility which was deceptive. In an unostentatious review of his program, he said that the Government’s main policies would remain unchanged but that he would push through long-delayed legislation, introduce measures against monopolies, improve the economic lot of teachers and other state employees, and step up the land reform program. He would also try to alleviate unemployment and crack down on income-tax evaders. The democratic coalition would be preserved, the minor parties either entering his cabinet or supporting it. The opposition had little to complain about in this program; so much so that Segni said in a tension-easing statement: “Everyone is too good-natured. If things go on at this rate, I’ll have to make a speech for the opposition.” On July 18th, Segni received the Chamber’s approval and started getting some of the Scelba proposals off the ground. Within a matter of days, he had succeeded in getting Parliament to pass a compromise bill on tenant-farming contracts that had been postponed for years.

Most of Italy was concerned with other things. As in every July, the country was knee-deep in festas. In Venice, couples danced to orchestras floating on barges going down the Grand Canal. In Rome’s popular Trastevere quarter, there was a series of singing contests, bicycle races, regattas on the Tiber and dances in the piazzas. People planned their vacations. The heat from Africa had already crossed the Mediterranean and was beginning to creep up from Sicily. Not far off was the heavy air which threatened soon to boil the asphalt, bake the city’s dust, to hold in suspension voices, lights, movement. Meanwhile Casablanca suffered an explosion of hatred; an anti-Communist riot terrorized Saigon; a second atomic submarine was launched in Connecticut; and the Big Four met in intensively advertised optimism in Geneva. The developments of the Montesi case were far from Italians’ minds.

Then on July 20, 1955, Raffaele Sepe in his position as Investigating Magistrate of Italy’s court of appeals, announced that he had finished his inquiries and interrogations. It had taken sixteen months, hundreds of interviews, days and nights of exhausting work, and now here were his findings for all of Italy to see. The four-hundred-page document, the Sentenza, pulled aside the curtain on all the mysterious comings and goings, gave answers to scores of suppositions and hypotheses, posed flat statements and scientific reports against rumors and gossip. It was so fascinating, this legal record, that one newspaper ran it in instalments like a popular novel. Paese Sera even made concessions to democracy in discussing it: a positive document that did the country honor, an answer to all those who threw doubt on the ability or honesty of certain departments of the Italian State. “Here is proof that our country can put itself in order and heal the wounds of twenty years of dictatorship with the means which it already possesses.” An Italian writer advised the public to read the Sentenza attentively:

“Don’t miss a comma; make yourself a plan of the hundreds of characters who have said or done something in it, and a map of the various places in which the thousand scenes of the drama have taken place. If you get confused, begin again at the start, and don’t lose confidence. It is absolutely necessary that you should form an opinion on the case. Because at the next purging, the questionnaire will have a new question: ‘Whose side were you on at the time of the Montesi affair?’”

Sepe spoke first of all of the difficulties he had encountered: the reticence of witnesses fearful of their safety or afraid of economic reprisals; the lack of co-operation on the part of the Montesi family; the actions of the press, who “although they did good work in making public opinion call out for the truth, confused the investigations by imaginary reconstructions and hasty interpretations.”

Within the body of the Sentenza, the first questions Sepe tackled, like a good reporter, were “when,” “where,” “how” and “why” Wilma Montesi had met her death—“who” was to come later. According to the first findings, on the basis of which the case had been shelved three times, she had died around 6 P.M. on April 9, 1953, at Ostia, where she had gone to bathe her feet. It looked like an accident although suicide was also possible. According to Sepe every one of these premises—time, place, and mode of death—was wrong.

He first went into the “when,” analyzing one by one the reasons which had been given in support of the thesis that she had died on the day of her disappearance. Mainly this was based on the first post-mortem examination which had been performed by Doctors Frache and Carella of Rome’s Institute of Legal Medicine, Sepe’s list of items that these doctors had overlooked was surprisingly long. It was no wonder that Dr. di Giorgio, who had examined the body on the beach, had, in April 1953, been snappish with reporters. Some sixth sense must have told him that his observations would be distorted or ignored. He had particularly noted the absence of putrefaction or any sign of long immersion in the water, and this was confirmed by those who had seen the body the day of its discovery; they had remarked the freshness of its appearance, and the first to come upon the scene even thought the girl asleep, giving her a light slap on the cheek to awaken her. But Drs. Frache and Carella had avoided comment on this and waited till a year later to advance the claim that the whitish color and “washerwoman” skin of the hands and feet proved the body had been in the water for two days.

Sepe said that it was rather strange that this was seen only by an assistant of the doctors, while neither Dr. di Giorgio nor any of the numerous persons who saw the body lying on the beach or at the morgue had even noticed it. Sepe went further, saying that the assistant “either purposely lied or expressed a biased and fallacious impression.” As far as Frache and Carella were concerned, S...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• PROLOGUE
• I. The South
• II. The North
• III. The City
• IV. The Family
• V. The Bohemians
• VI. The Center
• VII. The Church
• VIII. The Left
• IX. The Law
• X. The Courts
• XI. The Street
• XII. The Movies
• XIII. The Women
• XIV. The Monarchists
• XV. The Government
• XVI. The People
• XVII. The Orgies
• XVIII. The Literati
• XIX. The Revelations
• EPILOGUE
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER