George Tioli
An Italian journalist and a great friend of George Orwell and his wife, who came into the Hotel Continental during the May fighting with his trousers drenched in blood. He had gone out to see what was happening, had stopped to bind up a wounded man on the pavement, and someone had playfully tossed a hand-grenade at him. His remark afterwards was that the Barcelona paving-stones ought to be numbered, to save trouble in building and demolishing barricades.
The book
At a glance
- An Italian journalist in Barcelona, and a friend of Orwell and his wife
- The lounge of the Hotel Continental, during the street fighting of May 1937
- By a hand-grenade thrown at him in the street, not seriously
- Chapter 10
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeGeorge Tioli was an Italian journalist living in Barcelona in 1937, and George Orwell describes him as a great friend of his own and his wife's. He gets one paragraph in the book, in the middle of the week that Orwell calls the May fighting.
That week began on 3 May 1937, when lorry-loads of armed police drove up to the telephone exchange in Barcelona and tried to seize it from the anarchist trade union workers who ran it. Barricades went up across the city and the parties that were all supposed to be on the same side of the Spanish Civil War spent several days shooting at one another. Orwell's wife was staying at the Hotel Continental, a hotel treated by everybody as neutral ground, and its lounge filled up with people who could not get out: government officials, Communist agents, wealthy Spanish families, wounded foreign volunteers, French lorry drivers whose load of oranges was stranded, and army officers who had decided to stay out of it. Orwell writes that at first, before the food ran short and the newspapers started stirring up hatred, there was a tendency to treat the whole thing as a joke.
Tioli walked into that lounge with his trousers drenched in blood. He had gone out to see what was happening and had stopped on the pavement to bandage a wounded man, and while he was doing it somebody threw a hand-grenade at him for fun. It did not wound him seriously. What Orwell remembers him saying afterwards is that the paving-stones of Barcelona ought to be numbered, since it would save a great deal of trouble in putting the barricades up and taking them down again.
How the book draws them
- Who he wasAn Italian journalist in Barcelona, and by Orwell's description a great friend of Orwell and his wife. The book gives him no age, no appearance and no account of what he was reporting on.
- The blood on his trousersHe came into the crowded hotel lounge with his trousers soaked in blood. Orwell does not say whose blood it was, and Tioli was not badly hurt.
- Stopping for a wounded manHe had gone out into the street to see the fighting for himself and stopped to bandage a man lying wounded on the pavement. That is when someone tossed a hand-grenade at him as a joke.
- Numbering the paving-stonesBarricades in Barcelona were built by prising up the paving-stones and stacking them. Tioli's suggestion was that the stones should be numbered, to save trouble the next time a barricade had to go up and come down.