The Firpo Twins’ Family Squabbles within UTET’s Grand History
Nota bene: This article is the English translation of the review originally published in Italian on this same blog in August 2024. All quotations in Italian from the book have been translated into English. For comparison with the original version, see: https://www.cantierestoricofilologico.it/2024/08/ma-che-bella-famigliola.html
Above all, it is a sort of Zibaldone, in which broad digressions on the history of UTET—a great cultural heritage of this country, sadly and notoriously dissipated—from its founding by Giovanni Pomba in 1791 to the management of Carlo Verde, identified with the company’s period of greatest splendour, and beyond, through its subsequent slow decline under the presidency of Gianni Merlini to the final collapse, complete with detailed analyses of balance sheets, market strategies, and sales networks—alternate with curious anecdotes, sometimes but not always amusing, and detailed accounts of family history, often lurid and dispiriting.
The two Authors significantly define themselves as “fatherless daddy's boys” (p. 162), that “Uncle Daddy” being “zio Verde,” who, though merely a relative by marriage (“husband of a sister of our maternal grandmother,” p. 3), contributed with great benevolence to their upkeep and education (“he helped, protected, and spoiled us with particular affection”; again p. 162) far more than their absent father Luigi Firpo, who separated in fact from his first wife Lucia Merlini shortly after the twins’ birth (although the family continued for some time to live in two adjoining apartments). Firpo, for his part, is said both to have respected and feared “zio Verde” and, on the other hand, to have not infrequently tried to “cheat” him (p. 122).
The twins stigmatise the privileges and comforts of their youth while simultaneously showing contempt for their father’s humble origins and family. An illustrative case is their treatment of the paternal grandparents: Oreste Firpo, a modest hat seller known as “poor Oreste” (p. 113), absent from his son’s wedding and intolerant, as noted in a 14 August 1939 letter from Gioele Solari (Firpo’s university mentor) to Norberto Bobbio (cf. p. 113), of “studying and working without earning money,” disappearing soon thereafter; and Angiola Ramella, described dismissively as “a woman to say the least disturbed” (p. 112) and even, when near death, an “ignoble old woman” (p. 135).
Better to pass over in silence the merciless narration of the agony of this poor woman, assisted in her final days by Luigi Firpo’s second wife, Laura Salvetti—herself not spared from the twins’ criticisms for her claim to be his “moral and intellectual heir” (p. 134) and also because “after his passing, that woman would occasionally appear in our lives for practical reasons” (p. 135)—just as Vincenzo Ramella, the paternal uncle of Firpo senior, is not spared, dismissed as a coarse parvenu (cf. p. 114).
In truth, this poor woman, of humble social origins, abandoned by her husband Oreste and deeply attached to her only son Gigi, into whose education and social advancement she had poured all her modest savings and all of herself—despite the scornful treatment reserved for her by the Authors—may even at times appear rather sympathetic to the reader. Or, at the very least, one might feel some empathy for her, given all she must surely have endured in a difficult life. Yet the Firpo twins reproach her sharply for things that appear, at worst, “folkloristic,” such as her habit of referring to the descendants of the Pomba family as “Col branco ‘d nòbil” ("that bunch of nobles", p. 112), beginning with her daughter-in-law Lucia Merlini—who in turn referred to her husband’s working-class relatives as “gli stronzi” ("the assholes", p. 115)—or for occasionally, during the Christmas holidays, insisting on taking her two (by their own admission) thoroughly spoiled and thoroughly embarrassed grandsons “to the Cottolengo with the task of dragging a cardboard box containing 100 single-serving panettoncini to be distributed until exhausted in a ward of unhappy, disabled, sick children” (p. 121).
Naturally, the harshest treatment among the figures evoked in the book is reserved for Luigi Firpo himself. The authors highlight his opportunism (even the decision to court and then marry the twins’ mother, scion of such a family, is judged opportunistic), his contradictions, and his “moral schizophrenia” (p. 128), demolishing him as well on the intellectual and scholarly plane:
he never knew how to write a real book, an important book, not even on Tommaso Campanella, to whom he dedicated a myriad of fundamental studies (…) But to write a real book, a book made of historical and historiographical problems, would have forced him to leave the reassuring terrain of erudition and philology, in which he was a master, and of the exquisite pen of which he was a self-satisfied prestidigitator, in order to move instead onto that of original reflection (…) Which, however, was not in his nature (…) (pp. 128–129)
Firpo senior, being “undoubtedly very intelligent, but also too opportunistic to have any set of values in which to believe, too self-satisfied to think he had any obligation to consistency, too incapable of detecting any contradiction in always and only pursuing his own interest to have in his soul any ethical sensibility” (p. 133), is also portrayed as a decidedly envious and rancorous figure, as well as cruel towards his first wife—constantly mistreating her morally and even, on at least one occasion, physically (p. 111)—and indifferent towards his children. Moreover, he is said to have remained secretly nostalgic for Fascism and to have been covertly antisemitic.
As proof of his rancorous and envious nature, when Franco Venturi published the first volume of Settecento riformatore, Luigi Firpo’s reaction, in the presence of his enthusiastic and then astonished son Massimo, is recounted as terse and grim:
When the first volume of the monumental Settecento riformatore came out, the young apprentice historian proudly showed his father the copy the author had given him, complete with a dedication, only to receive the unworthy comment: “That bastard has written another one!” (p. 131)
Equally scornful are the remarks of Firpo senior, left in a typescript dated 1969, preserved in his personal archive and retrieved by the twins, in remembering his friend the Anglicist Gabriele Baldini, second husband of the great writer Natalia Ginzburg, widow of the equally great Leone Ginzburg and mother of the eminent historian Carlo Ginzburg:
he married, God knows why, Natalia Ginzburg, a Jew, widow with three children, a writer of dubious exhibitionism, a woman of rare ugliness, laziness, and disorder. They had a retarded daughter who was the tragedy of his life for a complex of remorse, self-pity, and lacerating defeat. (p. 101)
The Authors, who define these words as “atrocious,” adding “that they are difficult to read for the vulgarity and the evident antisemitism they convey,” do not fail to add that in their view Luigi Firpo’s adherence to Fascism was something more than the “errors of youth common to many” (again p. 101), hinting that their father remained somewhat nostalgic for the regime. They recall his convinced adherence from his high school and university years, evidenced by constant participation in the Littoriali, his enthusiasm for the racial laws, and many youthful writings, alluding to his service as an officer in the army of the Italian Social Republic even in 1944, and commenting thus on his subsequent exit from Fascist militancy:
We do not know how, in the political disintegration caused by the Anglo-American military advance, he finally managed, like so many others, to lay down his uniform and hide somewhere, but the suspicion remains that this involved some unedifying episode, if once our mother, deliberately dropping some dishes on the floor, begged him not to tell us about it. (pp. 103–104)
If the overall image of Luigi Firpo emerges truly destroyed from this book, the portrait that Alessandro and Massimo Firpo paint of their mother, Lucia Merlini, is hardly more edifying.
who never had a lira in her pocket, partly because her husband or ex-husband gave her little or nothing, and partly because, whatever sum of money she might have at her disposal, even the kingdom of Siam or the mines of Golconda, she would squander it within twenty-four hours for the sheer pleasure of spending. (p. 155)
Lucia therefore depended entirely on the generous contributions of Carlo Verde, towards whom, like other relatives, “she was certainly suffocating” (p. 157). But despite this, zio Verde
gave with both hands and a full wallet, but not before unrolling before the petitioner of the moment a large bundle of bank receipts for the purchase of BOT and CCT that he kept in the drawer, saying at each turn: “See, I really don’t care at all,” and meanwhile unrolling, “don’t worry, what do you need?”, “as you can see, it makes no difference to me,” since “afterwards I’ll be neither poorer nor richer.” And he went on unrolling. (pp. 157–158)
A sad story, that of Lucia Merlini, despite the relative affluence in which she was able to live. Once the children were settled, as they themselves recount, she moved—around the age of fifty—to Rome and then to India, ageing “badly and quickly, tormented by anxieties, restlessness, neuroses, dependence on tobacco, medicines and barbiturates, which she consumed irresponsibly, to the point of having to be hospitalised from time to time in specialised clinics” (p. 156). The farewell the Firpo twins address to her, though conceding some tenderness, is at times truly pitiless:
Dear Mum, you were truly unstoppable in throwing money out of the window, whether you had little or a lot, ingenuously unstoppable, adorably unstoppable: we believe you were the only person in the world to have gone into debt to buy yourself two pairs of beautiful custom-made boots while asking us to break open the piggy bank because the refrigerator was broken and needed replacing, later explaining that those boots were so beautiful you couldn’t resist them. (p. 155)
Even worse, in the twins’ judgement, is the fate of her brothers—their maternal uncles. The whole thing amounts almost to a total demolition of the image of the Merlinis, the maternal family, which mirrors the destruction of Firpo senior and the entire paternal family.
Another target, in this unusual and surprising book, whom the twins assail with a ferocity almost on a par with that reserved for their father, is in fact Gianni Merlini, successor to Carlo Verde at the helm of UTET, held up—perhaps not entirely unfairly—as the principal culprit in the decline and final collapse of this illustrious publishing house. A certain animosity is especially noticeable on the part of Massimo Firpo, as Gianni Merlini is identified as the indirect cause of his early and abrupt dismissal from the UTET editorial staff when he was a student barely in his twenties. The dismissal was communicated to the future professor of modern history directly by zio Verde himself, in decidedly peremptory tones:
“I’d be grateful if from tomorrow you no longer came into the office; you will, however, be paid your wages for the whole month; I have nothing else to say to you; you may go.” (p. 190)
Massimo Firpo perceived that decision from zio Verde as “a very hard blow, all the more so coming from him, loved like a father” (p. 190). Some years later, in the mid-1970s, zio Verde himself would reveal to the now young historian—by then “compensated” with “the gift of a fine apartment” (p. 191)—what had been the motives behind such an unexpected dismissal:
“Ah yes, now I remember, it was that idiot of your grandfather [Raffaele Merlini] who came to beg me to get rid of one of you, telling me that Gianni [Merlini] was afraid that you two bright lads might crush him.” (p. 191)
The criticisms of Gianni Merlini verge almost on total demonisation. His rise to the top coincided with the rapid decline of UTET, anticipated moreover by the profound social changes of the 1970s, when zio Verde was still firmly at the helm:
The whirlwind changes of those years, in short, seemed increasingly to render obsolete the solid cultural tradition expressed in the measured voice of UTET, whose clientele was ever less willing to believe that the purchase of an encyclopaedia, of great works of synthesis, of literary classics, could truly help to guarantee a better future for their children, or at least ennoble their own image. (p. 229)
In this entirely new context, Gianni Merlini, who, as heir designate according to “the family’s dynastic rules” (p. 241), took the reins of the company in 1981, after a stroke that year had put zio Verde definitively “out of action” (he would die in 1985 at the age of ninety), is judged “the least suitable person to set a new course” (p. 236). He is credited, in reference to the choice to reuse—essentially recycle—the entries from the Grande Dizionario Enciclopedico for the updated reissue of the Enciclopedia universale dell’arte, with the decidedly unflattering remark: “No one ever opens our works; and no one will notice” (p. 236).
Incapable and cynical in the Firpo twins’ merciless judgment—they also attribute to him the assertion: “there’s no difference between selling books and selling canned meat” (p. 249)—his greatest mistake, despite the shrewd decision to diversify UTET’s activities, is said to have been the ultimately unsustainable acquisition of Garzanti. Gianni Merlini, described as “an ambitious man without talent” (p. 257), is also reproached for excessive authoritarianism in running the company.
As the accounts worsened, the already difficult family relationships also exploded: in particular, Alessandro Firpo, in a sensational gesture, resigned from the position of commercial director of UTET. The Firpo twins managed to withdraw from the company’s capital, limiting the damage, in 1998—a year before the death of Gianni Merlini, who died aged seventy in 1999. The rest is a sad and well-known recent history: the last president of UTET among the descendants of the Pomba family was Cesare Merlini, appointed in 1999 after the death of his brother Gianni. In 2002 the debt-ridden UTET was acquired by De Agostini and subsequently dismantled. In 2020 UTET Grandi Opere—the most direct heir to the more than two-hundred-year-old tradition of the meritorious publishing activities of the Pombas and their descendants—ceased to exist, the Turin court having declared it bankrupt.
The Firpo twins note with bitterness, but also with ruthless truculence, how the sunset and dissolution of the family runs parallel to the decline of the publishing house with which the family itself identified. We will refrain from indulging in literary comparisons, but it seems almost like a parodic and farcical re-evocation of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez.
Returning again to the family squabbles, which take up so much space in this volume, overshadowing everything else, the other two brothers of the Authors’ mother—namely Cesare Merlini, already mentioned as the last president of UTET from the Pomba lineage, and Francesco Merlini—are treated “as badly” as Gianni Merlini.
Cesare, a university professor of nuclear engineering who resigned from academia in 1985 to devote himself full-time to politics (a follower of Altiero Spinelli, in 1976 he “inherited” from him—upon Spinelli’s election to Parliament—the directorship of the Istituto per gli affari internazionali), is extensively mocked for his penchant for self-promotion:
(p. 216) “What mattered to him in that world was to be there, to see and be seen, to recognise and be recognised, to induce others to believe he was important, and, ultimately, to believe it himself”; (p. 217) “Zio Verde had very little esteem for him, judged him to be of the same cloth as his father, and amused himself by making jokes, saying that when the two of them were together they could be spotted from afar and with the lights off, so great was the phosphorescent glow emitted by the phosphorus that nourished their brains.”
Of Francesco Merlini, on the other hand—and this is puzzling—his homosexuality is almost stigmatised, said to have manifested itself in an unpleasant attraction towards his twin nephews, who were not much younger than he, having been born in 1940 while the Firpo twins were born in 1946:
in the full hormonal storm and physically very different from us still prepubescent children, he assumed rather disagreeable attitudes. The matter ended quickly, fortunately, because Francesco soon turned those which we later understood to be his barely concealed sexual tensions towards other, more satisfying shores—tensions which, among other things, led the grandparents not to put innocent boys in his room any longer. (p. 218)
Equally astonishing is the account of a later visit, in the mid-1970s, by one of the Firpo twins—by then an adult and father of a three-year-old girl—to Uncle Francesco, who in the meantime had moved his home to Montemagno di Calci, near Pisa, “in that strange house where the bathrooms had no doors to celebrate the freedom of bodies” (p. 220). The experience, decidedly disastrous, is told in tones somewhere between impressionistic and gruesome, which—no less than other passages in the book—leave the reader stupefied:
The day after his arrival, in fact, that ‘wretch’ (as Grandpa Nino perceptively and compassionately called him) had the brilliant idea of playing a prank by suddenly appearing dressed as a witch, with a long tunic, hooked and knobbly nose, pointed hat and broom, running and screaming wildly after the little girl, who was terrified. The father picked her up, comforted her, and left in great haste without even saying goodbye to that imbecile, more than happy that, until his death—after all contact with the family had been severed—he was cared for by a close friend, to whom we must be most grateful (…) A premature death, his, before which, however, he had time to squander in a few months the mountain of money foolishly handed over to him by his brothers after the death of the uncle who, with his usual wisdom, knowing his essential irresponsibility, had excluded him from the inheritance of the UTET shares. (p. 220)
It is worth recalling that Francesco Merlini was a writer and radical activist who, in concert with his friend Laura Fossetti—recently deceased (cf. Valerio Meatini, Addio a Laura Fossetti, traduttrice di Orazio, Il Tirreno, 12/12/2023)—was active, in difficult years, in defending the rights of homosexuals and in other no less important civil battles.
In conclusion, what more is there to “say,” after having already let the book “speak” so much? Much, if not everything, comments on itself. One can certainly agree with the judgment expressed by Pier Franco Quaglieni who, commenting on the freshly published book (Firpo, un mito diventato farsa, 09/10/2022), emphasised how Alessandro and Massimo Firpo “literally massacre their father with a series of bits of news and tittle-tattle that descend into family bickering and gossip,” noting:
It is better that a pious silence fall over Luigi Firpo, despite the somewhat ‘maramaldesco’ book published by Aragno, who, as a buccaneer publisher, never ceases to amaze. His scholarly work has long since been consigned to oblivion and that is the important aspect. The rest amounts to a somewhat cowardly outrage, just as the servile encomium of many years ago by many students, with d’Orsi at the head, the Gramscian par excellence, was a cowardly flattery. Let us be clear, however, that Firpo was certainly no Napoleon.
The “pious silence,” however, has not fallen at all, as Massimo Firpo shows no sign of wanting to let go, having recently returned to the subject in an interview with the telling title Amo la Storia grazie a Venturi e nonostante papà (La Repubblica – Torino, 01/04/2024). On the other hand, as Quaglieni has again noted (L’omosessualità di Sarpi alla Fondazione Firpo, 27/04/2023), none of this has had any impact on the activities of the Fondazione Luigi Firpo, active since 1989 and “linked to the name and the multifaceted scholarly activity of Luigi Firpo” (www.fondazionefirpo.it). The Family Firpo (including Alessandro and Massimo) is—perhaps it is redundant to say so—a founding member of the Foundation; Massimo Firpo was for a long time a scientific adviser, and various of his pupils have been grant recipients.
One final modest doubt—its answer to be left to posterity and to any future biographers: in their personal and professional lives, do the Authors—beginning with Massimo, who has retraced his father’s professional footsteps, practising the same profession as a university professor of history, and from whom, as an historian, one would expect greater balance in reconstructions and judgments—believe they have behaved, all things considered, so much better, mutatis mutandis, not to say than their much posthumously vilified father, but rather than their various equally posthumously vilified relatives, over whom they set themselves up as implacable judges, and that they have nothing, absolutely nothing, to reproach themselves for, starting from these very memoirs? Might it not be better that a pious silence fall also on this book and on them—especially on the historian?
Alessandro and Massimo Firpo, Lo "zio Verde", la Utet e altre storie di famiglia, Aragno, Torino 2022, pp. XV–302.
(Daniele Santarelli)
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