Family Stories

Part 2

the Reading Room at the British Museum (britishmuseum.org)

My mother had never told me about her family’s past, and when from time to time I inquired, she used to say Mandelli was a name of German origin, as in mandl, almond. In the late 1970s, I got a pass to the British Museum reading room, the old round one, now out of service and open to tourists. It was an extraordinary place, a sort of circular opera house without a stage, filled with an expectant hubbub, as if waiting for the music to start. I loved to go there just to soak up the spirit.

One day I decided to look up the name Mandelli in the card catalog and found an 800-page book written by a Mandelli in the 1870s, apparently to solicit a state pension from the Italian monarchy. The author treads a fine line between assuring his reader of the family’s former greatness and drawing attention to its present need, all the while without explaining how they went from one to the other.

Mandelli arms from the Stemmario Trivulziano 14th C

I had the book photocopied and brought it to my mother in Milan. She did not seem surprised. I’m not sure she read any of it. From that day on, however, she felt free to talk about her family, and I intermittently researched it. Here are a few salient tales I have collected—some factual, some semi-legendary.

The origin story of the Mandellis, which may be pure myth devised to eke out an extra 200 years of ancestry, was that two brothers, Tazio and Roba, had helped Otto I invade Lombardy by storming a recalcitrant island fortress on Lago d’Orta. For this, they had, in 962, been granted a demesne, together with the right to mint money. The story may be false, but the place (Maccagno) and the mint were real. I have a ring set with a tiny copper quattrino coin bearing the likeness of a jowly 17th-century Mandelli, looking like a city slicker with his hair greased back.

The Milan Mandellis made a name for themselves as trusted condottieri of the Visconti family, and several became high-level administrators in medieval and Renaissance Italy. One of them, called Robaconte (literally Bob-the-Count), became podestà, i.e. governor, of Florence. In those days, city-states would hire their top officials from other cities, to avoid local conflicts of interest. To my delight, he gets what may be a favorable mention (or maybe ironic) in the Divina Commedia.

Come a man destra per salir al monte 
dove siede la chiesa che soggioga 
la ben guidata sopra Rubaconte 
si rompe del montar l’ardita foga 
per le scalee che si fero ad etade 
ch’era sicuro e’l quaderno e la doga
          —Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, canto XII 

The Mandellis made themselves useful and married well, ending up as big shots in the Sforza court. They were given land and possessions near Piacenza and prospered there. My mother belonged to that branch of the family, the Mandelli di Caorso. Oddly, even though she had never in her life used the full name, while in her seventies she added the di Caorso when applying for an identity card and was gently reminded by the town hall official that such landed titles had been abolished in 1946.

The last of the Piacenza Mandellis was a Bernardino who lived in a huge palace, now the Piacenza branch of the Banca d’Italia, surrounded by valuable paintings. He “never married,” which is to say he was gay, and was treated so shabbily by his family for it that, when he died in 1824, he gave every last penny of his vast fortune, including the palace and its contents, to local charities. This cataclysm was still bitterly discussed by his descendants over a century later, described as treason.

An unidentified great-aunt of mine lived in a stately pile on Lago Maggiore but was broke. In her sixties and of frail appearance, she entered an agreement with some rich Milanesi who agreed to pay her a regal monthly allowance until she died, in exchange for ownership of her home, fully expecting she would not keep them waiting. She lived another thirty years high on the hog, sending them weather is lovely postcards from all the Grand Hotels in Europe.

My uncle Antonio Mandelli who, at five years old, was on the fateful ship Garibaldi, was nominally heir to his father’s title. He was a proper New World man who found all that stuff absurd. The only Mandelli for whom he had respect and fondness was Camillo Mandelli, a distant cousin from a branch of the family in Calco, near Milan. Camillo was a violin maker who had moved to Argentina, and a couple of his violins are on display at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires.

My mother told me that, just after the war, her Milan relatives offered to send her the jewels that her grandmother had left her, apparently a sizable collection. The jewels duly came, in beautiful black boxes from great makers. Appraisal revealed them to be worthless copies. Her relatives had kept the originals. My mother had also inherited a fortune in Italian treasury bonds. When her relatives saw inflation coming after 1929, they moved all their money to Switzerland, but left my mother’s part in Italy. By the time she got there in 1947, the inheritance was worth nothing.

In Milan, she met her formidable aunt who offered her own appraisal: “You’re ugly, but with a name like yours you can marry whomever you like.” In the event, she married my father, of a family half Waldensian and half Jewish, about whom more anon.