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I began researching the figure of Aldo Togliatti quite by chance one afternoon when I was interested in the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and what had been and is the lineage of Marshal Tito.
The connection might seem merely pretextual, but as can be seen from reading this book, it is not at all.
Aldo Togliatti, whom everyone, however, called Aldino or Aldolino, was the only son of Palmiro Togliatti, 'the Best', and Rita Montagnana.
His personal story for long stretches intertwines with 'History', that with a capital H. After all, his father, Palmiro Togliatti, is one of the most important figures in the history of our country and one of the most important personalities and leaders in the history of world communism. The secretary of the largest Communist Party in the West. Before him, only Stalin, Mao, Tito... Then there is Togliatti, which since 1964, a week after his death, is also the name of a city in Russia on the Volga River. Simply called 'Togliatti although here in Italy for some strange reason we all continue to call it 'Togliattigrad'.
1964, as said, is also the year of Palmiro Togliatti's death.
Togliatti died in Yalta, Russia, on August 21, 1964. On August 25 in Rome, a million people attended his funeral. In the second row (in the front row was the woman who had become his companion since 1948, Nilde Iotti, and his adopted daughter Marisa Malagoli Togliatti, who over the years became, ironically enough, an important personality in the world of psychiatry) were his wife Rita Montagnana and Aldo.
This is and will remain Aldo's last public appearance.
After that day, Aldo will be virtually forgotten until the early 1990s when the interest of a reporter from 'La Gazzetta di Modena' 'discovers' him - literally - hospitalized at Villa Igea clinic in Modena and publishes everything in the newspapers, arousing for a short period a certain morbid attention towards him.
Aldo Togliatti has been hospitalized there since September 1980 (in the meantime in 1979 the mother also died, who had been his point of reference throughout all those years).
Villa Igea is a private clinic and a psychiatric hospital: Aldo will remain there for thirty-one years. Until the day of his death in 2011 at the age of 86. Leading a solitary and silent existence. For those long years, they will all simply call him, 'Mr. Aldo'. Everyone knows who he is, but no one will ever mention that last name, nor will Aldo ever mention his father's name, whom he affectionately calls 'the old man', on those rare occasions when he exchanges a few words with Onelio Pini, a retired metalworker and PCI militant, to whom the party has delegated, so to speak, the task of 'watching over' Aldo, bringing him books and newspapers to read, crossword puzzles, and cigarettes.
But who was Aldo Togliatti really and how did he end up in a psychiatric hospital?
We are talking about a story that was somehow deliberately forgotten or that would have been forgotten anyway because this is somehow the sad fate of people who are alone or feel alone and Aldo Togliatti felt profoundly alone.
He ends up at Villa Igea at the 'end' of a deeply troubled existence, nine years before the end of that Soviet Union in which he lived for many years during his youth and whose dissolution, when told about it, he cannot believe and from where, once the war was over, he perhaps would never have wanted to leave.
He will return there in subsequent years, in the Soviet Union or in any case beyond the curtain, to undergo specialized psychiatric treatments when what was initially defined as strangeness or mere shyness begins to be considered as something more: an actual mental disorder.
Clearly, over the years, this whole affair will be differently used to attack 'the Best' even on a personal level (as if the affair of choosing to live with Nilde Iotti were not enough, an issue that will clearly also be at the center of an important and heated internal party debate). For this reason, Massimo Caprara, his personal secretary for twenty years, will also define him as 'the worst of all', considering Palmiro Togliatti's culpability central in the problematic and difficult existential affairs of his son.
Here, before continuing to talk about Aldo, perhaps a very brief parenthesis should be made (certainly insufficient given the greatness of the figure) about Palmiro Togliatti. The greatest leader in the history of the Italian Communist Party and by reflection the greatest leader of communism in the West.
Palmiro Togliatti was the only leader probably comparable for 'cult', even in terms of a certain iconographic aspect, to the greatest leaders of the communist countries or in any case those under the direct influence of the USSR. To which he was always deeply linked and faithful. Just as he was always deeply loyal and faithful to Stalin. So much so that his most difficult moment on a strictly political level will probably be the 'turn' of Khrushchev. From this point of view, we can only imagine his great difficulty in facing that particular historical moment and as far as his own ideology is concerned, the line to dictate to the party and consequently praise his political skills in managing and conveying the message in indicating the 'new way' to the Italian comrades.
But also for all these reasons, Palmiro Togliatti is generally remembered with less 'affection' than other great figures of the Italian Communist Party. Comparisons with Gramsci, the other giant of the Italian Communist Party and a great intellectual figure who remains a point of reference even today for many, for most are practically zero; the memory of Berlinguer is much more 'alive' and not just for a temporal issue but probably also because the two figures (it must be said that Togliatti still regarded Berlinguer as his 'dauphin') were and are perceived in a radically different manner. The figure of Palmiro Togliatti appears to everyone as too pronounced. It is a figure too great and too heavy to measure against and after all, it is today also distant in time: Palmiro Togliatti belongs to history, to a world that has not existed for over half a century and that page of history as if everyone or many, even on the left, have wanted to erase it, perhaps afflicted by what might be feelings of guilt, perhaps because they are indeed incapable of fitting things within their context and historicizing them, giving them value for what they were at that moment. And then imagine, if for everyone it is somehow difficult to trace a judgment on Togliatti, how hard that could be for his son. Palmiro Togliatti was the greatest, 'the Best', but him? Who was Aldo Togliatti?
Aldo grows up between France, Paris, and Russia between the two world wars with parents who, because of fascism, had to leave Italy and are engaged both in maintaining political ties with the motherland and because, in the meantime, the civil war in Spain has broken out.
From 1934 Aldo lives in Russia steadily until the end of the war. First at the Hotel Lux with his parents. From 1936-1937 he is in Ivanovo, two hundred ninety kilometers northeast of Moscow, at the 'First International Children's Home Elena Stasova'.
Ivanovo is a special boarding school: it educates the children of revolutionaries from around the world.
There are Aldo Togliatti and Gino Longo (who will become PCI secretary right after Togliatti). There's Zarko, Tito's son, who will later die on the front during the developments of World War II. There are Mao's children: Mao Anying, the most serious, the most prepared, the most studious, and the most communist of all; Mao Anqinq, who is the complete opposite of his brother, plays chess for hours, walks around with a balalaika slung over his shoulder, and does upside-down yoga in the garden.
According to the reconstructions of the events, Aldo during those years is a boy like all the others. He may be a bit more reserved but exhibits no particular sign or concern.
His problems begin after his return to Italy in the aftermath of the war.
A return that Aldo, who in the end had never lived in Italy, will never get over and that will be something painful that will lead him to close in on himself more and more.
Aldo returns to Rome but then moves to Turin, where the Montagnana, his mother's family, live. He enrolls at the Polytechnic but soon decides (against his father's wishes) to drop out of his studies and university and begins working at Sip (Piedmont Hydroelectric Company) and stays there for two years. Then he quits.
At this point, psychiatry enters the scene and Aldo's personal story appears more and more as that of a young man somehow crushed by the greatness of his father's figure (without considering Uncle Mario and his mother who are nevertheless in the Constituent, Nilde Iotti also) and who cannot find his place in the world.
The same Palmiro Togliatti will admit several times in public of his inability to understand that son who is so intelligent but at the same time so 'strange'.
The story of Aldo's vicissitudes is told in bits and pieces, direct testimonies, newspaper snippets, accounts of men close to Togliatti like Gino Longo or Luciano Barca, the Montagnana, and the people who lived and worked at Villa Igea in the same years that 'Mr. Aldo' lived there.
In between and until 1964 is the history of the PCI, the separation of the parents, the attack on Togliatti, and Italy on the brink of civil war, Khrushchev.
According to the reconstruction of this beautiful book by Massimo Cirri, which I attempted to summarize as much as possible because the author truly delves deeply into the issues and tries to define every situation and protagonist of the events, there are no 'culprits' as Massimo Caprara would later say. How could there be, after all. Why.
It is significant that the writing is neither a biographer's nor a historian's but a psychologist's and journalist's and that as such aims to truly 'understand' Aldo, beyond any ideological aspect.
And we, too, as readers, want to understand, and at the same time, we can do nothing but feel a strong empathy towards him, a deep tenderness, and a respect that in itself prevents us from even asking whether he was crazy or had become so, or if instead, deep down, we are all mad and as such somehow all alone, and sometimes we cannot only find others to be with but not even ourselves.
The greatness of his father's figure, we imagine, was an added source of suffering. A kind of embarrassment. 'The shadow of my father twice my own,' writes Francesco De Gregori in one of his most famous songs.
On one side, the love, the boundless esteem towards him; on the other first the long feeling of abandonment and then that deep and unjustified sense of inadequacy. Which then metaphorically appears as the sense of inadequacy of man in the face of the greatness and indefiniteness of history.
After all these lines, it would not be right to talk about myself, but for reasons different yet so close and so far in time and space, I feel I have much in common with the man Aldo or call him (if you please) affectionately Aldino as did all those who loved him.
Moreover, I am sure I am not the only one to feel this strong empathy, so overwhelming as to seem and at the same time become almost a form of unease.
And then I believe the most appropriate thing is to close this page in the same way Massimo Cirri concludes his book and it does not matter if the 'end' is revealed because, in the end, this story has no beginning and no real end and in the repetitiveness of things who knows if even seemingly larger and ideologically based issues might then be argued.
Meanwhile, there is a note. It is found by a war correspondent on the eastern front. A certain Vasilij Grossman. It is the letter of a young soldier who died: 'I miss you so much. Please. Come to visit me. I would love to see you. Even if only for an hour. I write these lines and meanwhile feel like crying. Dad, please, come here.'
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