Italy

Italy is both a destination in the lives of Rabo Karabekian and the setting where their private attachments become entangled with wartime spectacle and political power. Dan Gregory and Fred Jones go there with Marilee Kemp to make paintings of the Italian Army; Gregory and Jones are killed in Egypt, while Marilee becomes Countess Portomaggiore and eventually meets Rabo again in Florence. Rabo’s own postwar return is for a legal testimony concerning two paintings displaced during the war, making Italy a place where artistic work, memory, and the consequences of conflict meet.

Arrival and Political Spectacle

Before the United States entered the war, Gregory, Jones, and Marilee left for Italy to participate in Mussolini’s project. Gregory and Jones, already in their fifties, obtained permission from Mussolini to wear Italian infantry officers’ uniforms without insignia and paint the army in action. Their move was not simply an artistic excursion: in Marilee’s later account, the three Americans were welcomed as celebrities and presented as evidence of Italy’s supposed spiritual, physical, and economic transformation. Mussolini’s publicity elevated Marilee, in particular, from the dismissive social role she had occupied in the United States to a celebrated actress and a conspicuous figure at public appearances.

The public performance rearranged the group’s relationships. Marilee said that she learned Italian quickly and soon spoke it better than Gregory, who had studied it in New York; Jones never learned it. The press and social events treated her with the deference due a famous actress, and her prominence unsettled the two men, who were expected to follow her entrance as members of her entourage. Italy thus offered Marilee a new social identity even as the celebrity surrounding the trio served Mussolini’s propaganda purposes.

War and the Group’s Fate

Marilee went to Italy because she and Gregory were in love. Rabo states that plainly, setting the personal attachment beneath the later public story of the Americans’ participation in Mussolini’s experiment. Gregory and Jones were killed at Sidi Barrani in Egypt around December 7, 1940, almost a year before the United States entered the war. Rabo connects their deaths to the British victory there, in which a much smaller British force overwhelmed the Italians and captured tens of thousands of prisoners and hundreds of guns. He also names the weapons and vehicles used against them, a detail that links the two men’s interest in military hardware to the circumstances of their deaths.

Marilee remained in Italy and married Bruno, Count Portomaggiore, Mussolini’s minister of culture. Rabo later learned that the count had also led British Intelligence in Italy during the war, a fact Marilee herself did not discover until the war was nearly over. The marriage carried a legal limit on her inheritance: under the document she was required to sign, she could possess the count’s property for life but could neither sell it nor pass it to someone else; after her death it would go to his nearest male relative. The arrangement made her a countess without giving her unrestricted ownership of the estates.

The attack on Pearl Harbor changed Marilee’s sense of the future. Before it, she had declined the count’s proposal, thanking him for happiness she had not known before and saying that the proposal and its accompanying document had awakened her from what seemed like a dream. She wanted to return to the United States and confront who she was, although she had no home there. The following morning, as she anticipated going home, the emotional climate in Rome seemed to her dark and forbidding. Her account makes the choice to leave more complicated than a simple return: the prospect of homecoming arrived alongside the widening war and uncertainty about where she belonged.

Florence and Rabo’s Return

After the war, Rabo and Marilee reunited in Florence. Before the meeting, Rabo received a note at his hotel on expensive paper bearing a noble crest. Marilee invited him to visit, identified herself as the coal miner’s daughter who had become Countess Portomaggiore, and made clear that she was glad to see an Armenian. The note turns Italy from the place of Rabo’s earlier separation from Marilee into the setting for their renewed contact.

Rabo’s other postwar journey to Italy arose from his wartime work with an Army art-expert platoon. A registered letter invited him to Florence, expenses paid, to testify in a lawsuit over a Giotto and a Masaccio. American soldiers had taken the paintings from a German general in Paris; the works had been sent to Le Havre for cataloguing, crating, and storage. Italian prisoners of war, including men who had done such work in civilian life, crated them. One prisoner later managed to send both paintings to his wife in Rome, where they remained hidden except when shown to close friends. Their rightful owners then sued to recover them. Rabo’s testimony accounted for the paintings’ passage from Paris to Le Havre, and the trip brought him to Italy alone, amid the unsettled return of art displaced by war.

Objects and Remembered Places

Italy also reaches back into Rabo’s earlier memory through an object first encountered elsewhere. The Gorgon-head knocker from Gregory’s New York mansion disappeared when Gregory left for Italy; after the war, Rabo saw it again on the front door of Marilee’s palace in Florence. The knocker’s movement from Gregory’s home to Marilee’s palace traces the changing geography of their lives in a small, tangible form. Rabo later wonders whether it has moved again after Marilee and Edith die in the same week, leaving the object’s ultimate whereabouts uncertain.

The return to Florence is narrated from the vantage point of Rabo’s later life, and Italy’s history arrives through remembered conversations, a letter, wartime records, and objects that have traveled between houses and countries. Its significance is therefore not confined to the events that occurred on Italian soil: the country gathers the group’s political performance, its intimate relationships, wartime deaths elsewhere, the concealed identity of Marilee’s husband, and the postwar effort to establish how two paintings changed hands. Italy becomes a hinge between public narratives of national destiny and the more unsettled personal histories that those narratives cannot contain.