The first edition of the Diario partigiano by Ada Gobetti Marchesini Prospero was published in Turin, Italy, by Giulio Einaudi editore, in 1956. It won the Premio Prato, an annual prize for a work inspired by the Resistenza, that year. I based my translation on the 1996 edition, the text of which is identical to the original 1956 edition.
The Einaudi family name has a prominent place in the history of antifascism in Italy. Luigi Einaudi, father of Giulio and his brother Mario, was professor of economics at the University of Turin from 1900 to 1943. Piero Gobetti, Ada’s first husband and a courageous antifascist journalist who wrote openly against Mussolini from the outset, was among his pupils. A fervent opponent of Mussolini’s fascist regime, Luigi Einaudi edited the Rivista di Storia Economica (Review of Economic History), one of the many journals suppressed by the Fascists. He fled to Switzerland in 1943 and returned after the end of World War II. Luigi Einaudi served as the first president of the Republic of Italy from 1948 to 1955.
Giulio Einaudi founded his publishing house in 1933. Its symbol, the ostrich, came from that of the journal La Cultura, of which he was the last editor before the journal was suppressed by Mussolini’s fascist regime in 1935. An ardent antifascist and believer in the preservation of Italian culture, Giulio Einaudi collaborated with the Turinese group of the Giustizia e Libertà movement. On May 15, 1935, he was arrested along with the prominent antifascist thinkers and intellectuals Massimo Mila, Leone Ginzburg, Vittorio Foa, Franco Antonicelli, Norberto Bobbio, Cesare Pavese, Carlo Levi, and Luigi Salvatorelli. He was imprisoned and then sent into confino (internal exile) but later was able to bring the works of these individuals to light, along with those of the founder of the Italian Communist Party Antonio Gramsci, writers Natalia Ginzburg and Italo Calvino, and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi. Giulio Einaudi editore also published Piero Gobetti’s complete works.
Mario Einaudi came to the United States in 1933 in protest against fascist rule in Italy, and he continued his antifascist activities from the United States during World War II. He joined the Cornell University faculty in 1945 and later became Goldwin Smith Professor of Government. In 1961 he founded the Center for International Studies, which was renamed the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies in 1991. The Einaudi Center houses the Cornell Institute for European Studies, where I have been a visiting scholar for the past several years, thanks to the efforts of Susan Tarrow and Sydney Van Morgan and their belief in my research on Ada Gobetti. The Institute for European Studies maintains its connections with Turin through the Cornell in Turin program.
I hope that this translation of Ada Gobetti’s Diario partigiano will contribute to the history of antifascism in Italy so important not only to Ada and Piero Gobetti but to the Einaudi family as well.