Velia was born in Pisa (according to some sources in Rome, from where the family moved at the end of the 19th century) on January 12, 1890; at the registry office she is registered as Velia Italia Cherubina Maria, the last of the Titta children, the first of whom, Ettore (1875-1956), had an elementary education and could then, from the age of 15, continue his studies at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory. The other siblings – Ruffo Cafiero (1877-1953), Fosca (1879-1957), Nella (1884-1954) and Settima (1886-1972) – seemed destined for manual labor and modest social conditions. In his memoirs, Brother Ruffo introduces himself to readers by reminding them that he did not undertake any studies because only over the years, thanks to the success he achieved with his extraordinary singing talent, would he become educated, albeit self-taught.

Of his father Orestes, a valiant blacksmith and director of ironworking workshops in Florence and then Rome (photos 3.1.1, 3.1.2), it is known that he was strong-willed and strong-willed, with traits of violent roughness, and that he cultivated anarchist and socialist sympathies. His relations with his wife Amabile, a very pious woman of Spanish descent, were difficult and controversial until, in 1900, Orestes left the family to live with another woman.

The trauma of abandonment marked existence in little Velia, who was destined to also lose her mother in 1904, at the age of 14.

The growing success of Ruffo, who under the stage name Titta Ruffo soon became the most celebrated and acclaimed bass-baritone of the time, in demand and acclaimed in opera houses all over the world, ensured the family’s well-being and enabled Velia, for whom her older brother would be like a loving father, to cultivate her studies and to graduate with distinction from the Scuola Normale Femminile in Pisa in 1910.

From a very young age Velia manifested a distinct and autonomous personality, turned to the great spiritual themes of her time deepened through her readings of Italian and foreign authors, of which ample trace is found in her early literary work, as well as in her correspondence with Giacomo and with her sister-in-law Lea Fontata, Ruffo’s wife.

She is a voracious, curious, polyglot reader: in addition to French, the indispensable baggage of the well-bred maiden of the time, she knows English, which she enjoys italianizing (ho forghettato, ti kisso) in her correspondence with Giacomo, her Giacki.

He is just 18 years old (3.1.3, 3.1.4, 3.1.5) When he gives to the presses the poems collected in First Songs (3.1.6) followed by È l’alba (3.1.7), two publications both released in Pisa in 1908. These are mainly poems of occasion, dedicated to family affections (3.1.8, 3.1.9) and accompanied by landscape descriptions and autobiographical confessions. The compositions are in closed structures of the Romantic tradition and strong Pascolian echoes, with suggestions of D’Annunzio. There is no lack, in those early but already happy rehearsals, of the resurfacing of Carduccian memories as well.

In later years he would leave poetry for prose. Meanwhile, after graduation he lives mostly in Rome with his brother Ruffo and sister-in-law Lea, in Pietro Mascagni’s beautiful villa at 21 Via Po – later destroyed to make way for new buildings – that the family rents. In the meantime, Ruffo is having the villa with garden built at Monti Parioli that will soon house the entire family.

The young woman’s relations with her brother and sister-in-law are intense and affectionate. Ruffo and Lea will name their first-born daughter Velia. They also often spend vacations together, including those in the summer of 1912 at Abetone, in the Pistoia Apennines, where the meeting with Giacomo will take place. Velia, on the other hand, is particularly close to her grandchildren (Velia and Titta Ruffo Jr. who will become her father’s biographer) and takes care of them when her parents are on long tours around the world. In those years (3.1.10, 3.1.11, 3.1.12, 3.1.13) Velia continues to cultivate her cultural interests and is often in Milan where the sisters, thanks in part to their newly acquired social position, frequent the best society and meet prominent figures. Nella marries the brilliant “Corriere della Sera” journalist Casimiro Wronowski; Fosca and Settima marry two wealthy brothers of Bohemian nationality, the entrepreneurs Emerich (Emerico) and Guglielmo (Mino) Steiner.

Velia is a writer and entrusts her feelings to writing. In the summer of 1912 she writes diaristic pages entitled Vigils of Boscolungo, which will never see print, of whose existence we know from letters to Giacomo the following autumn. The title is revealing of an event destined to change Velia’s life no less than Giacomo’s. In fact, their meeting takes place precisely in Boscolungo, near Abetone, in the middle of that summer: she is 22, he is 27 (photos 3.2.1, 3.2.2) and love is born immediately, even though they are aware of their different backgrounds and life paths, which will nevertheless be destined to be inextricably intertwined.

Photographic records of the time evoke carefree moments and group life in a tourist resort that was already very fashionable at the time, where Giacomo Puccini also owned a villa (3.2.3, 3.2.4, 3.2.5, 3.2.5.1, 3.2.6, 3.2.7, 3.2.8, 3.2.9).

In that August 1912 Giacomo, a great lover of the mountains, will continue his vacation in the Aosta Valley. However, the two young people began a dense correspondence that would give rise, in the 12 years that would see them indissolubly linked, to a substantial epistolary (more than two hundred letters from Velia to Giacomo and more than four hundred addressed by him to her have come down to us) of great emotional intensity and literary finesse. Personal vicissitudes and unfolding events, from the Great War to the advent of fascism, will cause the two to live together, in reality, very little time. Forced to distance themselves, however, they write to each other assiduously. Their letters are mostly intimate, personal in nature, but history and politics are always in the background and intertwined with their destiny.

As early as early September, Velia writes to the Dr. Giacomo (they will call each other “lei” for a year): “I will one day send her the fruit of all my passion minute by minute from the time she left Boscolungo until now […] there is in it everything I have felt and suffered for her, from the day I realized I loved him […] the most secret and intimate sensations that pass and live in me, and there is no thought, no throb in them that is not closely linked to her in such a way that just to see them beside me, than to touch them, I seem to caress her face, to kiss her forehead”.

And again, “…it is true yes that I can love entirely completely without any part of my soul being withdrawn from this love which I feel will be unique and profound, to which I will dedicate all the most beautiful and most passionate of my soul…” (from Milan, 9/13/1912).

As they begin a journey of mutual acquaintance that cements their love relationship, they also both become aware of how much separates them in terms of sensibilities, values, and worldview. Velia understands how strong the political passion of the man she loves is and how much this can affect their relationship. Thus she writes to Giacomo in July 1913: “I do not invite you to break everything that has formed your life so far […] I want you to have to feel in me all the comfort of what arrests and pulls down thickly in the life that everyone chooses […] a life of love alone, could never be enough for a man like you“.

As the dense correspondence continues, interspersed with a few brief meetings, the two mature the decision to marry. The wedding is celebrated in Rome on January 8, 1916, and the eve is somewhat turbulent; Velia would have wished for the religious rite, Giacomo evades. A breakup came close, but in the end she gave in, and in the night she wrote to her future husband, “No, no come, we will be happy anyway, you will continue your life, and I cannot on this day lie and tell you something that is not true or by hiding my heart. I will be religious just the same, we will love each other just the same, living united in any struggle […] Be assured, nothing could ever separate me from you”. So the wedding takes place in the Capitol (3.2.10, 3.2.11), and in the afternoon the newlyweds hold a reception at Villa Ruffo (3.2.12). The couple then leaves for a honeymoon trip to Florence (3.2.13): it will be brief due to the pressing political commitments of Giacomo, who is establishing himself as the socialist leader of his Polesine. In Fratta meanwhile, Matteotti’s house is being extensively renovated and re-furnished to accommodate the newlyweds (3.2.14). The war that ravages Europe and in which Italy has been engaged since May of the previous year seems far away. Giacomo is excused from military service both because he is the only son of a widowed mother (Matteo died in 1909, Silvio in 1910), and because he suffers from dropsy; in the summer of 1915 a very severe attack of tuberculosis caused him to fear for his life. However, because of his uncompromising anti-war commitment and his radical anti-militarism, in the summer of 1916 Giacomo was first denounced and then forcibly conscripted and sent to an artillery battalion in Sicily, in a sort of confinement that would last for three years. Velia soon joins him: she lives for long periods in a hotel in Messina, in a city still partly under reconstruction after the terrible earthquake of 1908 (3.2.15). The two see each other only on Sundays and yet those three years, in many ways difficult, will remain as one of the most serene periods they experienced together.

While in Sicily, Velia helps and supports Giacomo, who takes advantage of the forced departure from politics to resume his legal studies while in military service. The two also shared readings and exchanged views on cultural events of the time. They built, albeit limited to Sunday meetings, their own dimension as a couple. In the fall of 1917 Velia discovered that she was pregnant.

After a rather difficult pregnancy, assisted by the distinguished gynecologist Ernesto Pestalozza, Velia gives birth in Rome to her firstborn son Giancarlo. Emerico, Fosca’s husband, does not hesitate to call the newborn “so very very handsome” and “robust” (photos 3.3.1). It is May 19, 1918; the baby, affectionately nicknamed “Strombolicchio” during gestation, is named Gian Carlo Spinello Stefano, but he will soon be Chicco to relatives and friends. After all, the passion for nicknames and nicknames runs in the family: Giacomo and Velia are affectionately called Giaki and Chini to each other; the babies to come, Matteo and Isabella, will be Bughi and Cialda to everyone.

Velia is very much tried by childbirth, and in the fall she will also be affected, fortunately in a relatively mild form, by Spanish flu, the terrible pandemic that will claim millions of victims worldwide.

The end of the war and Giacomo’s final discharge usher in a new season that seems to promise a serenity as yet unknown. Confirming this newfound state of grace Velia returned to writing, and in 1919, the year in which her husband was elected to Parliament for the first time, she was busy writing the novel that would be her most significant literary work. It is titled L’idolatra (The Idolater) and will be published, the following year, in Milan by Treves, arousing some interest. It is the story of the unhappy love between Dani (Daniele) and Lela (Raffaella), the young protagonist without a family in whom it is not difficult to discern some autobiographical traits. After a forced separation, the two meet again and discover that they share a long unconfessed love, which young woman nevertheless renounces because of the feelings that still bind her to her environment. Dani will leave without her and Lela, “in despair, sees her life withering away in a desolation that soon leads to her death”. In recent times Dani becomes for the hapless protagonist an obsessive figure, perpetually at the center of her thoughts “like an idol,” hence the title. An intimate novel with sentimental overtones, with measured and elegant prose, The Idolater also restores, with a vein of painterly impressionism, glimpses of an evanescent and melancholy Pisa (3.3.2, 3.3.3).

The dream of a return to normality vague in the postwar period turns out to be an illusion. Giacomo soon accompanies parliamentary action with antifascist militancy, which he carries out in the towns of his constituency and in the squares of Rovigo and Ferrara. He is repeatedly threatened and attacked. On March 12, 1921, at Castel Guglielmo, he is seized, outraged and threatened with death by Polesine squadrists who banish him from his land. Velia, distraught, writes to him, “It is difficult for me to persuade myself that having arrived at this point no cowardice is allowed to you, even if it should cost your life”.

Shortly before, on February 17, 1921, his second son Gianmatteo, known as Matteo and to intimates Bughi, was born in Rome. The following year, on August 7th, the third child Isabella, known as Cialda, was born in Varazze (3.3.4, 3.3.5).

Meanwhile, political events kept Giacomo away from his family. Contributing to the detachment was the difficulty of finding a home in Rome: it was not until late 1922 that the Matteotti family moved into the handsome apartment at 40 Via Pisanelli, in the Flaminio district, from which the young PSU secretary would leave on the afternoon of June 10, 1924, to meet Fascist goons.

Velia and the children spent long periods of time in Liguria, recommended to Velia by Fosca, who regularly frequented the Riviera. Chini will stay in the summers between 1920 and ’22 in Varazze (3.3.6, 3.3.7, 3.3.8, 3.3.9, 3.3.10). Even there, however, the family is affected by fascist intimidation. In August 1922 Velia writes to Giacomo, distraught over her recent pregnancy and disheartened by the hostility of the environment, “I was counting on your help, as much to come away from here as for other things, but they came to the house to tell us that if you return, they won’t even guarantee families anymore. I don’t know anything else because outside I don’t go, they insult on the street as if we were the worst scorn people”. Anna Kuliscioff, a few weeks later, reported to Turati at least two attempts to “invade her house”. The following year the family would spend their last united summer in Abruzzo, in Roccaraso (3.3.11).

In May 1924 Velia is in Milan and from there she writes to Giacomo, with the transport of a mother and a bride: “Write me two lines, that you are all well and that you do not regret that I am away these days; kiss the little ones and give me news, a kiss to you just of love“. It is the last letter in their vibrant epistolary: a few weeks later Giacomo, at age 39, will die at the hands of the Fascists. The assassination consummated on June 10, 1924, changes the history of Italy and marks the end of a twelve-year communion of love. For Velia, the last, painful season of life opens (3.3.12, 3.3.13, 3.3.14, 3.3.15, 3.3.16, 3.3.17, 3.3.18, 3.3.19, 3.3.20, 3.3.21, 3.3.22).

A tragic period awaits her, beginning with the exhausting wait after the disappearance of her husband, which soon turned into a tragic certainty. This will be followed by the meeting with Mussolini, marked by lies; the trauma of the discovery of the corpse, on August 16 at the Macchia della Quartarella; the funeral on August 21 in Fratta Polesine; and the heartbreak of the farce trial in Chieti where, assisted by Menè Modigliani, she will renounce her right to be a civil party.

The years, not many in truth, that Velia has ahead are marked by regret, darkened by loneliness, and often made all the more bitter by a climate of hostility and suspicion (3.3.23, 3.3.24, 3.3.25). Her already “secluded and torn” life becomes even more difficult with the “exceptional laws” of 1926. The entire family is subjected to very close surveillance: anyone who visits Velia is stopped and interrogated, her children are followed on the street by agents, all correspondence is monitored in fear that Matteotti’s widow is cultivating contacts with exponents of anti-fascism or contemplating expatriation. Police Chief Arturo Bocchini himself issued provisions to make “absolutely impossible any attempt at expatriation”. When, in 1931, after the disappearance of her mother-in-law Isabella, the Rosselli brothers renew their invitation to her to join them in Paris Velia is by then very prostrate. She is also in great financial difficulty after the fascist tenants of the family’s estate set fire to and devastated the property (3.3.26, 3.3.27, 3.3.28, 3.3.29, 3.3.30).

The climate of heavy conditioning is not only external: the Fascist regime infiltrates into the Matteotti household one of its informants, who enjoys Velia’s esteem: he is Domenico De Ritis, formerly Giacomo’s acquaintance, later passed into the service of the Ovra. Velia in those years, the eldest son notes, had by then “fallen into a deep state of prostration”, exacerbated by the worsening condition of her already precarious health.
Velia Titta widow Matteotti died at the age of 48, on June 5, 1938, in a Roman clinic where she had undergone delicate surgery. For the regime, she was still among the subversives, and strict police measures accompanied her even at the funeral, held in Fratta Polesine in a strictly private form: she was prevented from following the coffin, the church was cleared, and it was forbidden to pay homage to the body (3.3.31, 3.3.32).

Ruffo Cafiero Titta (known as Titta Ruffo) was born June 9, 1877, in Pisa; the family followed his father Oreste to Rome, where he was to head a large workshop that manufactured gates and balustrades (photos 3.4.1).

The teenage Ruffo learns blacksmithing and chiseling from his father, but frequent disagreements with him will drive the boy away from home; he will end up working in a workshop in Albano.

But it is his destiny to sing that he stumbles upon by chance, when his brother Ettore, a music student, invites him to attend a performance of Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome. Gemma Bellincioni, soprano, and Roberto Stagno, tenor, sing, artists who mark a watershed between the season of Romantic-inspired melodrama and the verismo season. For Ruffo it is a thunderbolt; on his way home he starts to intone, from memory, some of the pieces he has heard, stunning passersby.

He then decided to study singing and enrolled at age 18 at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome; in 1897 he moved to Milan, continuing to study singing with the Pisan maestro Lelio Casini. In 1898 impresario Rodolfo Bolcioni, who had heard Ruffo’s voice in Un ballo in maschera at the Alhambra Theater, wrote him for the role of Araldo in Lohenigrin, which was staged at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome; it was April 9, 1898. After his debut and early successes in Italian theaters, Titta treads the boards of major theaters around the world, continuously for 34 years, applauded and hailed for a voice and interpretative ability that have become legend in the world of opera (3.4.2, 3.4.3, 3 .4.4, 3.4.5, 3.4.6, 3.4.7).

Alongside theatrical performances Titta Ruffo never abandoned his recording activity: he began in 1905 by recording for Pathé and, immediately understanding the importance of the new technological medium, the following year he signed a rich contract to record a series of 78 rpm records, destined for great success, with Grammophone Company; a job that would engage him for years.

Titta Ruffo’s artistic life has unfolded almost uninterruptedly in the Americas since 1900; when news of the kidnapping of his brother-in-law Giacomo reached him in June 1924, he was in the Colombian capital Bogotá. The terrible event marks a drastic change in both Titta Ruffo’s life and career (3.4.8).

Since then he no longer wants to sing in Italy, but even across the border the regime exerts strong pressure in theaters ostracizing the artist. Away from the stage, he spent years in exile first in Paris and then in Nice. On Oct. 16, 1937, after publishing his autobiography La mia parabola (My Parable), he visits family in Rome; the Fascists withdraw his passport and take him to Regina Coeli prison as a subversive element. He is released after only three days because the news causes such a stir, especially in the foreign press, that the Fascist authorities are forced to release him; but his passport is not returned. He settled first in Bordighera and then in Florence where he resumed democratic political militancy after the war; he died on July 5, 1953. By his express will he rests at the Monumental Cemetery in Milan. In Rome Villa Titta Ruffo, one of the best eclectic architectural designs by engineer Giovanni Sleiter, built by Zeffiro Rossellini’s construction company, still towers at the top of the Monti Parioli (3.4.9, 3.4.10, 3.4.11, 3.4.12, 3.4.13, 3.4.14).

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