Chapter 56
AS THE CAR CLIMBED, Marcello pointed out my window at a dirt road that ran between two gated pillars and disappeared. “That’s the entrance to the Villa Webber.”
On one of the pillars was a hand-painted sign that read VIETATO L’ACCESSO, and I looked to Marcello for a translation. “No trespassing,” he said.
“Ah.”
“You can’t see it from the road, but there’s this beautiful old abandoned house up there.”
Even the property was impressive. It had to have been a hundred acres, at least, and was surrounded by a crumbling stone wall that wound its way along the roadside. In the spots where the wall had failed, it hardly mattered. Dense outcroppings of prickly pear cacti served as a natural barrier.
“Webber doesn’t sound like a very Italian name for a villa,” I observed.
Marcello grinned. “It was built by a Brit.”
“Named Webber?”
“James Phillips Webber.” Marcello slowed to let a car, coming from the other direction, pass us on the narrow road. “Great-grandson of Frederick Philipse II, a Dutch slave trader who at one time owned half of New York.”
“How did Webber end up here?”
“He was in Australia, I think, and on his way home to London sometime in the 1830s, he shipwrecked off the coast of La Maddalena.”
“Let me guess. He liked it so much he decided to stay?”
“That’s how the story goes,” he said with a smile, “although who knows how much of it is true. Even Webber’s heirs have been dead for half a century.”
I watched as the crumbling stone wall slipped from view.
“At one time the house had a very impressive library. People came from all over to see it.”
“The books aren’t there anymore?” I asked.
Marcello shook his head. “No one knows what happened to them.”
The whole thing made me sad. I guess I was thinking about Lenny and the stuff that had mattered to him when he’d been growing up, and even right before he’d shipped off to Vietnam.
His baseball card collection, his comics, his transistor radio.
Right now all those things lived in his bedroom, which my parents hadn’t touched.
But one day, when my mom and dad were gone, it would fall to me to decide what to do with all of it.
Would the things Lenny loved mean anything to my children?
Their children? Their children’s children?
“I haven’t told you the best part,” said Marcello.
I glanced over at him.
“In the summer of 1943, after the Allies took Sicily, Mussolini was deposed and put under house arrest.”
Marcello seemed to be waiting for me to acknowledge that I understood this piece of recent history, so I said, “Okay, yeah.”
“He was brought here.”
“To La Maddalena?”
He laughed, waving in the direction of the villa. “To the Villa Webber.”
“Mussolini? Was at the Villa Webber?”
“Under house arrest.”
“Why?”
“Half the country wanted him dead. The other half wanted him sainted. He was a liability, so the Carabinieri decided they’d hide him on the most remote island in all of Italy.”
“Did it work?”
“For about three weeks.” Marcello laughed.
“One day il Duce is out on the patio at the Villa Webber, and a German plane flies so low overhead that he and the pilot wave to one another. It’s clear that a rescue attempt is imminent, so the Carabinieri move him to Gran Sasso, and of course, we all know what happens next. ”
I had no earthly idea what happened next.
But as was so often the case in my early twenties, I was mortified to admit it.
It’d be years before I figured out that Mussolini had been sprung from Gran Sasso, an Italian ski resort in the Alps, by German special forces and that Hitler installed him in Milan as the leader of a Nazi-backed puppet state called the Italian Social Republic.
That when the Allies arrived in Northern Italy and it became clear that the republic would fall, Mussolini and his mistress tried to flee only to be discovered in a convoy of German soldiers near the shores of Lake Como.
And that when they were executed two days later by Italian partisans, the Italian Communist Party claimed responsibility.
“Marcello,” I said, after a few minutes. “What happened to all the fascists? After the war?”
He laughed a little. “They’re all still here. They just put away their black shirts.”