The Italy of His Youth - His Homes in Desio and Asso - Boyhood Adventures
It was in the eleventh year of the pontificate of Pius IX (the longest pontificate in Papal history thirty-two years) that an Italian bambino first saw the sunlight in the sleepy little town of Desio in Lombardy. Eighteen hundred fifty-seven was to prove a fateful year in Italian history.
Austrian tyranny, after the revolutionary debacle of 1848, clutched Italy in its relentless grip. The hated Radetsky, Governor-General of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, was ruling with an iron hand. The Restoration of 1849, following upon the heroic struggles of Garibaldi and Manin, had brought in its wake all the old abuses. An iniquitous tax of one hundred twenty million lire (approximately twenty-five million dollars) a year was levied upon the unfortunate inhabitants of the province. The child’s father, Francesco Ratti, must have borne his share of this intolerable burden. He knew, also, how the near-by town of Brescia had been taxed to pay for the very cannon that had bombarded its homes. Only three years before Achille’s birth martial law had been proclaimed, the press gagged and women were flogged before the Castello of Milan.
The futile efforts of the revolutionaries had cooled the hot temper of the Italian patriots. The calmer counsels of the level-headed Cavour were supplanting the republican dreams of the irreconcilable Mazzini. The new watch-word became “Italy and Victor Emmanuel!” Garibaldi gave his allegiance to the National Party, composed of various groups of patriots, the year Achille Ratti was born. Daniele Manin signed the Society’s Manifesto the same year and died after his famous dedication of faith to Piedmont: “Convinced that before everything Italy must be free, the republican party says to the House of Savoy, ‘Make Italy and I am with you If not, not.'” This declaration brought thousands of converts to the new standard and gave the reins of leadership to Cavour whose passion to Make Italy or die was no less fierce than was that of the now abandoned Mazzini.
It was into the midst of these exciting history-making events that the child, Achille Ratti, was born. In the peaceful serenity of the little hamlet, surrounded by the affectionate devotion of simple Italian parents (who was it who said that if children could have their pre-natal desire they would choose Italian parents?) with the far-off Alps gleaming white against the blue sky, the little boy must have often heard the stirring tale of the long struggle to throw off the alien yoke of Austria. But the parents were godly folk and loyal to their Papa Pio. And Pius IX had left the path on which he so bravely started the path of liberalism and reform for the conservative path of Papal security.
The high hopes of the Italians in their handsome benevolent Pope seemed justified, when barely a month after his accession he granted an amnesty to the political prisoners languishing in Gregory’s dungeons. The enthusiasm of Rome was boundless. The cry “Viva Pio Nono and death to the Austrians!” was heard in every piazza. A fresh wave of religious feeling swept over the countrysides. His alarmed cry “They want to make a Napoleon out of me who am only a poor priest!” reflected his embarrassment at becoming the object of hero worship. Even as late as January, 1847, he granted a decree removing the censorship of the press which resulted in the publication of the Contemporaneo, the weekly journal of the democratic party of Rome and the Felsineo of Bologna. But, as so often happens, it was the extremists who so terrified the Pope who had created a consultative Council of State and a Ministry of a more liberal type as to halt him on the course he was pursuing and finally to turn him back. A burly giant of a man, Angelo Brunetti, with a flair for oratory, pressed upon the Pope when he was driving along the Corso with the cry Santo Padre, fidatevi nel Popolo, demanding a civic guard for protection against the centurian outrages. Although Pius granted the guard, it was that arch bête-noire of Italy and Europe, Metternich, who, fearing a reforming Papacy, determined to teach Pius a lesson. Troops were dispatched to the Papal city of Ferrara. Though Pius resented the invasion as Pope and as an Italian, though he continued timidly to negotiate for a Customs Union with Tuscany and Piedmont, which seemed to forecast a Federation of Italian States under Pope and King, and to restore the “primacy of Europe” to Italy, though the Council of State did meet in Rome in November comprising among its members the names of famous Risorgimento leaders, yet Pius’ speech in addressing the assembly was the first step backward from the popular path.
The well-meaning Pope stood torn between conflicting counsels; for Charles Albert, under popular pressure, had granted a “Statute” to Piedmont, Ferdinand of Naples had sworn to a constitution, and Leopold of Tuscany had followed suit. It remained only for the Pope to grant the same privilege to the Papal states. He was powerless to ignore the popular demand, and unwilling to compromise his sacred office by granting full powers to a Parliament. When news came that Louis Philippe had fallen, it became certain that Pius IX could delay no longer. The constitutional decree appeared in 1848 and at once it was clear that the claims of the people to self-government and the claims of the Successor of Peter could not be reconciled.
News came to Italy that Vienna had finally risen with the fall of the hated Metternich. This was followed by a council of war in Piedmont. Result: Radetsky’s army was defeated in Milan by an unarmed mob. Italy rose to arms and seemed on the point of fulfilling her dreams of freedom as Manin turned out the Austrian garrison in Venice with the loss of a single life!
But the foreign powers, including England, delayed the outcome by endless negotiations with Charles Albert and all was lost by the delay. Radetsky used the precious interval to recoup his forces. Then appeared the Pope’s famous Allocution in which he declared that war with Austria was abhorrent to him and that he embraced all princes and peoples in an equal paternal love. Radetsky defeated the Piedmontese and Charles Albert retreated to Milan.
It would be interesting to know how the simple religious people of Lombardy received the news of the Austrian return. Despair and perplexity must have filled the hearts of those loyal folk whose allegiance to the Papacy was a habit and a duty, but who saw their country once more a prey to their alien enemies.
It was in 1857, also, the year of Achille Ratti’s birth, that Pius made a tour through his Papal domains; and in Bologna, in bitterness of spirit, bewailed to his former minister against Piedmont “where religion is persecuted and the Church is spared no outrage.”
The following year more disrepute was created by Piedmont. Napoleon III called the state “the harborer of assassins” after the attempt on his life by an exile from the Papal states. Felice Orsini, a follower of Mazzini, had thrown a bomb at the Emperor’s carriage. Despite this outrage, only three months after Orsini’s execution, Napoleon conferred with Cavour and promised him one hundred thousand soldiers, who marched into Piedmont and once again swept the Lombardy plain clean of the hated Austrians.
In spite of the opposition of England, under a conservative ministry, to a war with Austria, Cavour appealed over her head to the Italian youth who answered his secret summons and rushed into Piedmont to join the King’s forces, while Garibaldi organized a corps of three thousand volunteers. England demanded the simultaneous disarmament of all three powers, and Napoleon III advised acquiescence; but the canny Cavour held Napoleon to his plighted word. So France declared war on Austria which was just what Cavour had anticipated and worked to achieve. In six weeks Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel rode in triumph through the streets of Milan. The great city of Lombardy was at last free!
What a thrill must have stirred the towns of the plains, rid, after so many vicissitudes, of the despised Austrian oppressor! Surely the Ratti family in the little neighboring town must have shared in the general rejoicing as if a fresh gust of wind from the Alps had cleansed the air of the miasma of oppression. The father must have gone to his labors with a lighter heart; and his good wife, Teresa, must have rejoiced for her infant son whose future for a freer, happier youth loomed promising and radiant.
But Louis Napoleon became alarmed at the national uprising. He had wanted an Italy of federated states but not a united Italy. Secretly he met with Franz Josef and signed away the fruits of his victory. Victor Emmanuel bowed to necessity, but Cavour resigned the ministry in disgust and went into retirement for six months.
Meanwhile in England the Whigs had come into power; and under the leadership of Lord John Russell and Gladstone demanded that Italy be allowed to work out her own destiny. This declaration of England changed the European picture, and Napoleon III in 1860 abandoned the Federal solution, but at a price. “Re Galantuomo” made the sacrifice of Savoy and of Nice, the birthplace of Garibaldi, with a heavy heart, but the renewed alliance with France kept Austria at bay.
And now Ferdinand II, tyrant of the two Sicilies, the “King Bomba,” the “Re Lazzarone,” as the Neapolitans contemptuously called him, died at last and another fresh gust of freedom blew from the Mediterranean across the toe and football of Italy. The indefatigable Garibaldi with his famous “thousand” flung themselves against the soldiers of Ferdinand’s stupid son, Francis. Under the protection of two British gun-boats they landed at Marsala, defeating a vastly superior force of Neapolitans, marched on to Palermo and in less than two weeks their courage and bluff forced the Neapolitan commander to beg an armistice just as Garibaldi’s last cartridge was fired. Twenty thousand Neapolitan soldiers left Sicily never to return. Francis hastily proclaimed a constitution and begged an alliance with Piedmont. But too late! The subjects of his father had reason to know what a scrap of paper a constitution could be!
King Victor Emmanuel resorted to a ruse which clinched Garibaldi’s victory. Out of deference to Napoleon he sent an autographed letter by messenger commanding the General halt at the Straits of Messina, but the messenger carried another secret missive, also autographed by the King, bidding Garibaldi this once to disregard his sovereign’s commands. Francis fled to Gaeta while Garibaldi and his Red Shirts marched straight on to Naples, entering the city amidst the wildest demonstrations of enthusiasm. (A plebiscite was held the next year and the Neapolitans voted one million three hundred thousand to ten thousand for “Italy, one and indivisible, with Victor Emmanuel as constitutional King.” Sicily’s vote was even more overwhelmingly in favor of this objective.)
Meanwhile the King’s Bersaglieri marched through Umbria and the Marches, successfully defeating the Crusaders (an army recruited in the Papal states and made up of soldiers of every Catholic state in Europe).
The King and Garibaldi met at the little town of Teano. Russia, Prussia, France and Austria damned the work of these two men who had consummated Italy’s freedom, but Lord John Russell heartened the Italian patriots with the message “Her Majesty’s government see no sufficient reason for the severe censure of Austria, France, Prussia and Russia of the acts of the Sardinian King. Her Majesty’s government will turn their eyes rather to the gratifying prospect of a people building up the edifice of their liberties and consolidating the work of their independence.”
In 1864 Pope Pius IX gave out his Syllabus of Errors, denying the new and widely heralded idea that a secular state has supreme power and authority over all matters within its boundaries and that each state has a moral obligation to proclaim religious liberty. He condemned free thinkers and agnostics who would destroy the Church; indifferent Christians who would take away the Church’s official privileges and limit her status to a private association; the advocates of religious neutrality who would establish lay marriage and lay schools; those who would nationalize the clergy; opponents of the temporal power of the Papacy, and so forth.
In 1869-1870 the Pope called the Vatican Council, the first to be held since Trent, three centuries earlier. The doctrine of Papal Infallibility was subscribed to by the vast majority of the eight hundred prelates present, who undoubtedly did not believe they were creating a new doctrine, but felt that they were merely interpreting what had all along been upheld by the Church and had been practiced for centuries. It was not the doctrine, per se, that created opposition by a minority of the bishops, but rather its effect upon the world and its timeliness. For though Protestants denounced it as an affront and a blasphemous assumption, and historians wrote many learned works to show how very fallible some popes had been, the doctrine never meant that a pope cannot sin; but that, in his official pronouncements, when he speaks ex cathedra in the discharge of his episcopal decisions regarding matters of faith and morals, he is given divine assistance by Christ’s promise to Peter and is then possessed of that infallibility which the Redeemer gave His Church.
Closely following the hasty adjournment of the Vatican Council, Rome was seized by the victorious troops of the Italian army who made a breach through the wall at Porta Pia, and with the white flag of Papal surrender the temporal power of the Pope was destroyed for sixty years. Henceforth the streets of Rome saw their stately Pontiff no more. Pius IX became a voluntary prisoner of the Vatican.
When this historic event occurred, the boy, Achille Ratti, was thirteen years old, and was already attracting the favorable attention of the good parish priest who taught him and who saw in his young charge a lad of unusual promise and goodly timber for the Church.
Born within sight of the Italian Alps, Achille Ratti’s earliest boyhood memories were inevitably tinged and his activities directed by their distant snow-crowned peaks. They beckoned to his imagination with an irresistible appeal. Later, they challenged his hardy spirit to essay those perilous heights whose pinnacles seemed to the reflective lad like Nature’s cathedral spires, lifting their arms aloft and pointing their giant fingers to their Maker.
Unacquainted with the sports of a later day with their organized games emphasizing health en masse and developing the competitive instincts, Achille, like other Italian boys of his time, found pleasure in his own self-directed recreation. With a chosen companion or two, or quite alone, the youthful Lombard, with characteristic determination and prudence, hardened his growing limbs on the foothills near Desio; or during the delightful summer months at Uncle Damiano’s modest home in the neighboring village of Asso, he roamed at will over the countryside or dreamed of future climbs from the vantage point of the picturesque little village on the jutting brow of Bellagio where Lago di Como reflects the hills in her heavenly mirror, blue as the Virgin’s mantle.
His face tanned, his chest expanded, and his legs firm and flexible, the growing youth tasted the delectable fruits of victory on each excursion where a new view opened before his eager eyes. Undoubtedly his whole future life was deeply influenced by this enviable experience of his boyhood days. His mind became self- reliant and observant and his naturally quiet nature found a deep inner satisfaction in each new discovery.
So the environment of Achille Ratti proved suitable and richly satisfying for the normal healthful development of his unique personality. Doubtless a Roman lad of his own day would have surpassed him in quick flashes of repartee, and a Neapolitan gamin in temperamental abandon; but in steady solid achievement, the Lombardy lad seems in retrospect destined by Providence for the mighty tasks that as yet lay hidden in the womb of time.
Thoughtless writers have called Achille Ratti’s early environment “drab,” and so it might have been to an unimaginative youth; but however placid the boy’s mature might appear outwardly, his eyes under the broad brow could kindle with a quick inner response that has never left them.
The ancestral home of the Ratti was Rogeno, a little sprawling town on the foothills of the upper Brianza, midway between Como and Lecco, overlooking Pian d’Erba and Lake Pusiano. It is one of those numerous picturesque villages covered with coral and tawny-colored villas, and crowned with umbrella pines and cypresses. At its foot is spread a carpet of green meadows all the way to the foothills of the Alps. In direct line the first Ratti mentioned in the register is Gerolamo, whose first child was born in 1616. For many years the family members are designated as contadini; later, with the development of the silk industry in the region, they are registered as textile workers.
They were a hardy, long-lived folk. Manzoni, a famous son of the region, has written a novel a in which he has immortalized the people he knew. He pictures them as pious, hard-working and simple; a type characteristic of the Lombardy farmers into which the Ratti were born. As the family prospered, some of its members felt a civic pride in their town and enlarged the parish church. The cemetery was beautified. One of the finest day-nurseries for miles around was founded by a Ratti.
Francesco Ratti, Achille’s father, had several temporary residences, due to the fluctuations in the silk trade in which he was actively interested as manager and later as part-owner. He had married Teresa Galli of Soronno and was made manager of the Conti Brothers silk-mill at Pusiano. Here he continued for ten years. We next find him at Carugate in the Riva factory, then at Pinerolo in Piedmont. At the time of his death in 1881 he was living with his growing family at Pertusella, employed in the Gadda silk-mill of which he was part-owner.
Ambrogio Damiano Achille, the fourth child of Francesco and Teresa, was born at Desio, another of the silk industry towns in the district of Monza, on the edge of the Brianza which is a health resort, high and beautiful, for well-to-do Milanese. Desio boasts three buildings that dominate the scene and life of the little town – the large parish church with its fine cupola which stands on the piazza into which all the crooked streets converge, the splendid Villa Traversi, later bought by the Tittoni, and the large silk factory of the Gavazzi Brothers, an important center of the silk business of Lombardy.
Achille, as he came to be called, was ushered into life on the last day of May, eighty-one years ago. The next day he was baptized in the parish church. Although Desio’s pride in her now famous son is well justified, we have seen how the happy coincidence was due solely to the accidents of his father’s trade.
Desio is in the diocese of Milan and from the great city it receives its religious complexion; but it is also a self-sustaining little community, supplying its own wants within its own confines. Formerly a sheep-raising community, it had gradually turned to the successful growing of mulberries for the cultivation of silk-worms. Before Achille was born the pastoral village was being transformed into an industrial center, small but prosperous. The necessity of finding a market for their trade created a wider outlook among the inhabitants of what had been a sleepy little hamlet, bringing into the busy little town a new spirit of enterprise and expansion. Achille’s father was manager of the local factory, and while he never became affluent, the family did not know want and his position in the town was assured and respected. The father of five children was able to give all of his sons a good education, keeping three of them in schools of higher learning at the same time.
Achille was only ten years of age when he completed his studies under the guidance of the estimable parish priest, Don Giuseppe Volontieri, who for forty-three years gave elementary instruction in his own house to all the parish boys. The good priest had watched young Ratti with especial interest, for he was an exceptional teacher who knew by instinct which of his charges would bear fruit from the seed he had planted. And although Achille was the merest child when he left Don Giuseppe’s, he remembered the kind old man gratefully, and when the old priest died in 1884, his former pupil, Professor Ratti now, delivered the funeral oration in the public piazza of Desio before all the people and wrote the lines on his tombstone in the cemetery.
Leaving his former playmates, the boy was entered at San Pietro Martire to complete a secondary, or as we would say, a high school, course. All the teachers at San Pietro’s were clerics and his studies were the equivalent of what an endowed English school of the time offered; English, French, Latin and the sciencesthat is, mathematics and geology, etc. Mathematics he has always considered a relaxing pastime. While religious instruction was strictly ecclesiastical, it was only one branch of learning. As yet Achille had not definitely decided upon his future career, although his former teacher, Don Volontieri, the parish priest of Desio, and Don Damiano Ratti, his uncle of Asso, both had their secret hopes. But they prudently refrained from urging the Church’s claims, or from influencing his decision. In fact, Uncle Damiano later showed his nephew all the sacrifices and difficulties such a life entails when Achille finally made known his choice of a career to that worthy priest.
The youngsters of Italy mature much younger than English or American boys who seem to have a more prolonged childhood, and are, in comparison, far behind Italian youths of their own age in their accomplishments and achievements. Always self-contained and reserved, here at San Martire’s Achille became more studious and apart. His companions were few but congenial. All his life they have meant much more to him, and in after years have retained a stronger hold upon his affections, than is perhaps the case when they are more indiscriminately chosen.
Achille had hardly reached puberty when he came across a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost in Italian. The work teased and fascinated him and he spent countless hours over the thumb-worn pages this at an age when the book in the original scarcely attracts Anglo-Saxon youths. It was while he was puzzling over the volume that he had his first opportunity to take a trip into the heart of the Alps and satisfy a growing longing to really explore the majestic peaks.
En route his party came across another party, one of whose members was an English clergyman. The two groups got into conversation and for the first time in his life the boy, Achille, heard the language of Milton spoken by an Englishman. His active mind was tantalized as he listened wonderingly. On his return to Desio he had made a fixed resolve. He would master the English tongue. His mother, Teresa, watched her son bent over strange books with scowling brow, spending hours wrestling with curious-looking words and oblivious of physical discomfort, quite forgetting to eat. But, like Mary of old, she did not interfere, but pondered these things in her heart.
Indeed, the household seemed run without coercion or tyranny. For, although the father, Francesco, had with his compatriot Lombardians determined to ensure the perpetuity of their guilds by training their sons in their crafts there was always the exception of the priestly career. Signor Ratti was in his day singularly free from despotic control over his children. The parents seemed to rule with gentle firmness and Christian patience, unencumbered by any modern theories of the psychology of child training.
At last the youth’s hours of laborious effort were rewarded by his being able to read some of the simpler passages of Milton in the original.
This first excursion into the Alps also quickened his desire for further climbs. The urge to behold the marvels of nature from great heights, and the challenge to his growing manhood to overcome obstacles and tame the frowning pinnacles by sheer will and fortitude were at work within his adventurous spirit.
Later he tried to put into words the impressions he had experienced and the beauty he had beheld. But as yet the secrets of nature were too terrible. He was awe-struck and silent before the miracles of God.
But it was during the summer months with Uncle Damiano Ratti, the parish priest and provost of Asso, that he drank in that deep quietude of spirit that seems to have been his ultimate need. It was this good uncle who made his plastic mind responsive to the dignity of the beauty and order of the Church. This was no slavish submission on the boy’s part, but a perfectly natural acceptance of the law of obedience to the orthodox Faith. Here at Asso, gazing dreamily across the shimmering blue of Como, watching the sails of the orange fishing craft bellying in the breeze as they sought a more favored haven among the coves of the lake, his eyes travelled across the blue expanse. He saw the mountains looming in the distance beyond the opposite shore and felt their mystical spell.
For many consecutive summers he returned to Asso? finding in his uncle’s house a second home. Here his formative years were molded and his receptive spirit fed on the unparalleled beauty of his surroundings. This continuity of spiritual sustenance stamped the developing youth with deep quiet powers that in after years in the midst of a noisy world have set him apart as a tower of strength.
Achille was thirteen and still at San Martire’s when Rome was taken by the national troops and Pius IX went into self-imposed solitude in the Vatican. Yet he was old enough to realize what the imprisonment of the Supreme Pontiff meant to the religion he loved and practiced, and to the dignity and prestige of the Papacy. Lombardy and Piedmont were undergoing a small industrial revolution, a backwash of what England and Europe generally had been experiencing. The spiritual conflicts which always accompany vast economic and social changes were felt by the young students. The reflection of these changes in the religious realm created a spirit of intransigence; controversies bitter and heated strove for supremacy. Pius IX had been compelled to take a decisive stand against the tide of “modernism” and yet a progressive Catholicism could not be ignored. A spirit was in the air that no Papal pronouncement could retard.
For a hundred years the Papal power had been encroached upon. Now at last in 1870 it became a mere shadow of its former glory and prestige. The youth, Achille, had been grounded in strict Catholic doctrine by the pious priest of Asso. He had imbibed an unquestioning faith in the Spiritual Ruler in Rome. He believed with all his soul that the Supreme Pontiff must be independent of all earthly authority. But he was a patriotic Italian, loving his country as only an Italian can. The vital concern, the Roman Question, became overnight an absorbing interest to his young mind. He began the study of the history of the Papacy with a new keen zest. Contemporary church history became more than an academic interest – this at a time when the average American boy knows and cares less for anything more vital than baseball, and is quite incapable of applying his mind to the consideration of large impersonal concerns.
Was Ratti aware of the dangers to the Faith in the new spirit of intransigence? Did the motto Faith without Fear which he took when he was ordained, indicate a realization of the perilous path he himself must tread within the ranks of the clergy? Often he had listened to the excited young students debate the Roman Question. It was remembered afterward that he never participated in these debates, but merely listened with a far-off expression in his deep-set intent eyes. Doubtless he had not made up his mind on the ever-recurrent question; or if he had, it was formulating slowly, and he was not yet ready to commit himself until he was quite sure of his position.