As you wrote in the book, this is not a “cradle to grave” biography, but one focused on an extraordinary period of time. Was the tipping point for this project the discovery of the OSS Report?
Well, about one or two years before, there was an opportunity to do a documentary and my aunt Cristina, Emilio’s widow, was very open to do [it]. She said to me and to Terry, ‘I’m so worried about this time of war because we don’t know….’ In fact, we knew so little about it because everywhere in Italy, just after the war, nobody talked about the war. [The country] was plunged into looking ahead and for Italy, it was a shameful piece of history. And so we said, ‘Look, don’t worry, we will do the research on the war. We take it upon us. It’s our responsibility.’ And so she said, ‘Fine.’ Then the documentary for many reasons did not go on and we had already started the research and so we continued because what we had already found was so interesting and so revealing.
Tell me a little bit about the report.
We started researching even further and it was almost by coincidence—but with my uncle, everything is almost by chance and coincidence—we came across this report from the OSS in the CIA. There were hundreds of declassified files; in this case nothing was in chronology and there were boxes and boxes at random of all that the OSS had investigated. These boxes are something like a labyrinth of information…I mean, and then suddenly we came across his name and that opened a whole world. I started reading and I started grieving also because he became like an example of the suffering of so many people.
And I said, ‘But how come we really had no idea?’ We had an idea, a very superficial idea. My father would say something, but we didn’t have the details and this was by his own hand, his own writing. And so that made us understand that there was something really important that we should…. Also because of the diversity of personality, how the same man who went through this whole thing, then suddenly he started creating all these fashions and these colors and all that. And it’s rather amazing, these two, that in the same person, in the same brain, in the same personality, these two facets that actually are many more faceted. And I’m sure that many people are like that. It’s just that they don’t know it. Or also they’re not faced with circumstances that make them emerge this […] We are what we face and sometimes we face things that are so beyond us and we have to be at the level of what we have faced.
Your uncle wrote his thesis about fascism while at Reed College. Can you talk about his political stance?
Here we have to talk about the aristocracy; now the aristocracy all over Italy automatically followed the king. I mean, we all had relatives that were in the court. Once there was the March on Rome, the king chose Mussolini and nominated him prime minister. So automatically the aristocracy followed. And in fact, those young people in the aristocracy who were against Mussolini were very few. My uncle when he went to school, my father, all the signs in the school, everything in the curriculum was decided by the fascist minister of education, for instance. So there was very little discussion. And my grandfather was just appalled when suddenly he realized that his two boys had to fight on the side of the Germans. And we write, he couldn’t even go to the station and say goodbye to them, to die for the Germans in a war that frankly, very few believed in.