For centuries, Ventotene was a byword for confinement in Italy. The island lies two hours by ferry off of Lazio’s coast, a volcanic rock covering half a square mile. The emperor Augustus sent his wild, only daughter, Julia the Elder, into exile on the island in 2 BC. He is said to have remarked: ‘There are two wayward daughters that I have to put up with: the Roman commonwealth and Julia.’ Perceived by her peers to be a nymphomaniac, she spent five forlorn years on Punto Eolo, looking at the distant shadow of the mainland.
Julia’s fate gave later governments ideas. The Bourbons built a panopticon prison on the adjacent islet of Santo Stefano in the late 18th century. Then came the heyday of Ventotene’s dark history: Mussolini dispatched his critics to this confinement from the later 1920s until 1943. The most famous of these was the socialist Sandro Pertini, who had spent gaol-time with Antonio Gramsci and was from 1978 to 1985 Italy’s most beloved president. When Pertini was sent to Ventotene, he joined a wretched community that grew to 800 others. These were to include Albanian Zogists and Communists after Italy conquered the country in 1939, and Ethiopian intellectuals. Pertini aside, the most celebrated of the confined were Eugenio Colorni, Ernesto Rossi, and Altiero Spinelli. The last two, Rossi and Spinelli, former socialists, gave Ventotene eternal fame. In this prison university, they conceived The Ventotene Manifesto in 1941, at the height of the Second World War, writing it on cigarette papers. Then, thanks to Colorni’s wife Ursula Hirschmann – a German Jew, no less – it was spirited to the mainland and then to Switzerland for publication. The Ventotene Manifesto set out the principles for a federal Europe to stop future wars between nations. This idealistic tract was to be a cornerstone of the EU. Confinement had bred a vision for a new Europe.
Ventotene’s remarkable story does not quite end there. The prisoners were exiled to mainland villages after Mussolini was deposed in July 1943. In their place, 300 carabinieri and 80 German troops manned a radar station on the island’s highest point. From here, the radar directed Axis aircraft towards Allied shipping concentrating on Sicily and then the eventual landings on Italy. The Salerno landings on 9 September 1943, to the distant south of Ventotene, needed to be safeguarded from these menacing aircraft. Ventotene’s radar had to be captured. To effect this deed, a fast boat was sent with 30 paratroopers. Commanding this operation was a celebrated Hollywood film star, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, son of the silent film star Douglas Fairbanks, formerly married to Joan Crawford, and now a naval ‘beach jumper’.
