(Historical Fiction)
Plates and cups clashing amid the buzzing voices of men. Every few seconds the murmurs are drowned by the husky sound of the machine. Seconds later, the slender mouse tail flows smoothly to touch the small cups already waiting. The murmurs resurface only seconds short before the machine deafens the whole room again. A man pulls the door open to enter, and in half a second, another man flings the door to rush out. The strong toasty sweet aroma escapes into the morning air.
It was the scent of the time. A nation trying to rise from its knees by the lift of a strongman. The taste of the First World War had slowly dwindled from everybody’s mouth but had left an open wound waiting to be healed.
“But we will be a different nation,” from the top of the staircase one evening, seven year-old Sofia listened to her father’s conversation with her older brother, Alberto. “We will no longer be that war-torn nation of men with no jobs,” her father continued.
As she crossed the streets of the city one morning, Sofia can see that everyone is moving so swiftly. “Yes, Papa was right,” she tells herself, recalling that conversation she heard from the stairs when she was a child, twelve years ago, “We are a different nation now.”
"War was no longer seen as misery but an honor."
The modern Italian man is what makes the nation—he is not an individual, he is the nation, the nation is him. War was no longer seen as misery but an honor. It was a time of great hope and pride, the reviving of the glory of the Roman Empire. This is how Sofia would remember her youth in 1930s Rome.
Sofia’s grandfather used to spend every late afternoon in one of the cafes talking with other men, drinking espresso, reading the newspapers, and discussing politics. Now there are the coffee bars—like the one Sofia's father recently opened—that workers come to in the morning to take their dose of espresso before beginning a day’s work for the country. The new regime promoted espresso to the workers.
Sofia passed the coffee bars every morning on her way to teach. The men in the coffee bars, Sofia observed, stood against a counter—the bar—that separates them from the barista, holding their cups only for minutes before dashing off. Now at her father's new coffee bar, she could see things first hand.
“The new steam espresso machine makes coffee so fast like a speeding steam train, but just cool enough to immediately
drink,” her father once said, describing his new machine like a barista.
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| Advertising poster by Leonetto Cappiello,1922 (Wikimedia) |
“Barista? Barman!” Sofia’s grandfather said a-matter-of-factly from the comfort of his favorite arm chair.
“No, not barman, Nonno, barista!” Sofia tried to explain to her grandfather while chuckling from the floral-printed sofa next to him. “We use an Italian word now.”
Nonno replied with a rhetorical question to himself: “So II Duce invented the word barista to replace the English word barman? So it sounds Italian, and most importantly, not English!”
For II Duce—or better known to the world as Mussolini, founder of Italy’s National Fascist Party—the Italian espresso was the nation’s drink, that of a modern Italy. For the nation’s strongman, it was political as much as cultural.
“Quick, turn the radio on!” Alberto shouted, interrupting grandfather and granddaughter, as he ran across the living room to turn the button. Sofia’s father and mother followed into the room. Everyone sat silently around the radio in anticipation. In only a few seconds, but what felt longer for everyone in the room, the voice they were expecting was finally audible—the mystical voice of II Duce.
Calling to arms all men from 21 to 55 years old, Italy can mobilize 8,000,000 men, and adding young men of 18, 19, and 20 years more than 9,000,000 ….
While they were only hearing his voice they all can see clearly in their minds how Il Duce would turn the palms of his hands in the air and make a fist with both of them as he addressed the crowd, then raising them open, and curling them into fists again, to win the confidence of the people.
This shows how ridiculous are the polemics of certain circles beyond the Alps according to which the African war, the formation of two army corps in Libya and the participation of volunteers in the Spanish war have weakened us.
On the contrary, all that strengthened us …
Sofia’s father was not convinced nor impressed with what he had just heard although he supported Mussolini, at least in the beginning. Her grandfather was even less impressed, as he never shared the fascination of the people towards the fascist leader from day one. On the other side of the sofa, Alberto listened with his mouth slightly gaping open.
Her mother sat motionless. Her face, Sofia noticed, had turned so pale that it contrasted with the color of the flower prints on the sofa. Sofia knew, Mamma was thinking of Alberto.
"Mamma only bore two children, unable to fulfill her duty of reproducing
more children for the fascist regime."
Although her mother never said so, Sofia suspected that fascism had always made Mamma feel uneasy. Perhaps, Sofia thought, because Mamma only bore two children, unable to fulfill her duty of reproducing more children for the fascist regime.
Seconds later, II Duce raised his voice once again and the crowd cheered as if cast in a spell. As the voice of the nation’s leader continued to shake the airwaves, Sofia could sense the tension rising in the room. Sofia shoved the dangling brown curls away from her face, her cheeks suddenly felt too warm.
In reality, the empire Mussolini aspired to build did not, by far, have the military skills of the Romans. The honorable wars the Italian people were led to believe in resulted in nothing but grief and misery. Sofia would know—in 1944 she lost her fiancé to the war and her brother Alberto was still recovering.
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| Yalamber Limbu (Unsplash) |
Raising her brown eyebrows until they touched the dark curls on her wrinkled forehead, her right hand holding her waist, Sofia’s mother announced: “They caught II Duce as he was fleeing with that woman!”
That was all Mamma had to say.
Who would have thought that the strongman who vowed to lift Italy from the trenches and build a new Roman empire would be executed in humiliation as he was, by the people of his country? On April 28 1945, Mussolini was captured while trying to flee with his mistress. The man had left his wife of three decades and their children to escape and save himself.
For Sofia, who was walking through the rubble of the defeated city that day, it was all that was left to be remembered of the strongman who fell from grace.
The Italian espresso and the coffee bars that were a part of Mussolini’s fascist propaganda lived on to be Italy’s cultural identity, though quickly disassociated with the strongman.
Sources:
Mussolini’s speech quoted
from: http://bibliotecafascista.blogspot.com/2012/03/speech-in-senate-march-30-1938.html
Top photo: https://www.milancoffeefestival.com/Journal/September-2018/LA-STORIA-DELL-ESPRESSO?lang=en-GB
