during the Allied invasion, and the cast and crew were put up in poor accommodation. But there was a camaraderie on set and Isabella enjoyed it, in spite of everything. It was like an adventure, she wrote later to Peter. She began to feel, at last, her life was returning to something like normality.
Back in Rome, she was woken early one morning by the doorbell. Isabella stumbled sleepily downstairs. A policeman stood on the doorstep.
‘You are to come with me,’ he ordered.
‘But why?’ she asked.
‘You are being arrested.’
‘Me… what on earth for?’ she said, her heart thumping in her chest.
‘Isabella Bellucci, I am arresting you on the charge of being a collaborator.’
Thirty-Eight
Milan
April 1946
Livia arrived at the courtroom in Milan, dressed in a new cream linen suit. She wore small tortoiseshell glasses and carried a white stick. ‘Partially sighted’ was how her doctor had described her. She could still read, although her eyes wearied more quickly than she would have liked. Graduating from university the previous year, she had decided to go into journalism, and had recently been appointed as a court reporter for a newspaper in Florence. When the trial of a famous actress had come up, she had begged to be allowed to cover it. After all, this was going to be the trial of the year.
‘We had friends in common,’ she told the editor when making her pitch. ‘Good sources I can go to for background material – people who were intimately involved. I’ll do a good job, I promise.’
Impressed by her enthusiasm and her contacts, not least Vicenzo Lucchese, her editor agreed. Livia was thrilled. The opportunity to cover such a famous story was obviously part of its appeal. But Livia had to admit that she was fascinated to see ‘close up’ the woman who had falsely denounced her three years before.
The trial was presaged by lurid headlines in the national newspapers:
Isabella Bellucci arrested – accused of collaboration
Another blared:
Is Italy’s little sweetheart innocent or guilty?
It was a hot day in April when Livia took her place in the press gallery, alongside a cartoonist named Antonio who had been employed to make sketches of the proceedings.
‘Antonio,’ Livia whispered, ‘you must be my eyes. Tell me exactly what the witnesses look like, describe their expressions for me, all right?’
‘Of course,’ he said.
As the trial began, Isabella was brought into the courtroom, accompanied by muttering from the crowd in the observation gallery.
‘What does she look like?’ Livia asked. ‘I can see she’s wearing a dark suit of some kind; how is it cut?’
‘It’s very elegant,’ Antonio said. ‘She looks beautiful.’
‘That’s no help. Describe the suit. How is her hair done?’
‘It’s navy blue, very fitted, with a pearl choker. Her hair is brown and nicely done, shoulder-length, you know? For a woman who has been in prison for the last few weeks, she looks like a movie star.’
Isabella sat down next to her defence counsel, Arturo Orvieto. He had offered his services when she was first arrested, and in a state of shock and confusion, she had gratefully accepted. She glanced up towards the observation gallery, where Peter sat in his military uniform. He smiled at her and winked, as if to say, ‘It will be all right’.
First to speak was the prosecution counsel, who stood up and began theatrically to address the court.
‘The prosecution will show that the accused, Isabella Bellucci, in the years 1943 and 1944, did closely collaborate with the Italian Fascist Party and the occupying German Forces. In particular, she was the intimate of two enemies of the State: General Karl Wolff of the SS and Pietro Koch, the traitor, murderer and torturer who was sentenced to death last year in Rome. We will be producing witnesses of the utmost probity who will testify that she used her relationships with these men for a variety of nefarious purposes.
‘I first wish to establish with the court the evidence that Koch and Signorina Bellucci had a close personal relationship. I have here a letter which Koch asked his driver to hand-deliver to her, shortly before he fled from Rome up north. Fortunately the driver disobeyed orders, never delivered the letter and handed it over to the armies of liberation. It consists of nine closely handwritten pages.’
Isabella leant forward anxiously, as the prosecution lawyer dramatically waved the pages at the judges, and continued.
‘The letter is replete with passion, esteemed gentlemen. By my count, the words “I love you” occur not less than six times, and “I think constantly of you”