For his debut novel Pierfrancesco De Robertis, journalist from Arezzo, former director of «La Nazione» and political commentator also for this newspaper, chose the love story between Anna Kuliscioff and Filippo Turati, two fundamental figures for the Italian Socialist Party, which they founded together in 1892. A “modern”, free and profound story, in that final part of the nineteenth century which, after the Risorgimento struggles, lived in Italy, amid socialist ferment and revolutionary anxieties, his dream of change.
Not telling means forgetting and «A socialist love. The novel by Anna Kuliscioff and Filippo Turati” (Neri Pozza) is a book which, with a skilful balance between documentary research (the dense and intense correspondence between Anna and Filippo) and narrative fiction, entrusts the reader with an important piece of Italian history, also retracing the tragic steps of Mussolini’s seizure of power, between general immobility and inability to fight on the part of the socialists divided by internal conflicts. This is precisely the charm of the voices of the two characters, evoked by De Robertis: they give us back truths that it is dangerous to erase in a time like today’s of dangerous revisionism and indifference.
It is February 1884 when a young woman with a little girl knocks on the door of a boarding house in Naples. She travels alone, which at the time leads to mistrust, but Anna Kuliscioff, born in Crimea in 1854 (?) to a wealthy Jewish family, certainly does not allow herself to be overcome by prejudices. She wants to graduate in medicine in Italy, she comes from Switzerland where she was in exile having already lived many lives as a revolutionary, including active politics, arrests and trials together with her partner Andrea Costa (who approached socialism thanks to Anna) father of Andreina-“Ninetta”. An agreement with the one who would become the first socialist deputy in the history of Italy, exhilarating for the battles faced together but destined to end due to Anna’s determination who “seeks life in love, not rest”.
Love that he will find in Filippo Turati, Milanese lawyer, from a bourgeois family, future deputy, committed to reforms for the rights and emancipation of the proletariat. Meanwhile, Anna, who graduated in medicine in Pavia, begins to practice as a gynecologist: she becomes the “doctor of the poor”. Together, as “free spouses”, they will carry on many battles despite being different: Anna’s revolutionary fury against the bourgeois “torpor” of Philip, often confronted by her with its contradictions, is very well described. But the points of contact between them, emotional and political, are much stronger than the “disagreement”, and this is a strength and charm of the story. Their house in Portici Galleria in Milan, with their two separate but close names on the plaque (a pride for Anna), also home to the editorial office of their magazine «Critica sociale», is a point of reference for intellectuals and socialists; from there Anna, with other feminists who deal with workers, constantly carries forward her commitment to women’s liberation, also through initiatives such as her strong intervention in 1890 with the report «Man’s Monopoly».
But her main battle is aimed at winning the vote for women (“the vote is the defense of work and work has no sex”), a topic on which Anna and Filippo disagree: she dreams of a society “in which when you are born – she writes to Turati – there are no established roles, for man and woman, for the rich and the poor”, Filippo, on the other hand, thinks that the time is not ripe.
The years pass, and in the post-war period, also due to the fear of civil war or the Bolshevik revolution, Italy hands itself over to the strong man, the one who proclaims in front of everyone that “he could make this deaf and gray hall of Parliament a bivouac of mobs, barricade Parliament…”. The sense of loss and emptiness becomes great. Anna died in 1925, a year before the very fascist laws eliminated the last freedoms. In 1926, with the help of Sandro Pertini, Ferruccio Parri and Carlo Rosselli, Filippo took refuge in France where he died in Paris in 1932. But from 1948 his ashes were placed next to those of Anna Kuliscioff at the Monumental Cemetery in Milan. Their story remains, and it is a novel of freedom.