Ada Gobetti, a noted Italian translator, educator, politician, and women’s rights activist, received the Silver Medal for Military Valor for her participation in the Italian Resistance, or Resistenza, the fight to liberate Italy from German occupation during the final years of World War II.1 An ardent antifascist, she engaged actively in the principal noncommunist antifascist movement, called Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty, or GL) in the 1930s, and figured among the founders of its political heir, the Partito d’Azione (Action Party or Pd’A) in 1942.
Ada Gobetti’s Diario partigiano is both diary and memoir. From the entry of the Germans into Turin on September 10, 1943, to the beginning of the insurrection of Turin on April 25, 1945—a little over twenty months—Ada recorded an almost daily account of events, reactions, sentiments, and personalities. She took notes in a cryptic English that only she could understand as a measure designed to keep the Germans and Fascists from reading the diary should it be discovered, and in order not to compromise her family and other partisans.2 Thus a translation of the Diario from Italian to English brings us around full circle to the original language of her notes.3
In keeping a diary during the Resistenza, Ada continued a pattern she developed early in her life of writing down impressions of everyday events and recording important milestones. It was the Italian senator and philosopher Benedetto Croce, a longtime friend and mentor and foremost signatory of the Manifesto of the Antifascist Intellectuals in 1925, who encouraged Ada to convert into a book her notes chronicling her experiences as a partisan. Isolated in Naples and unable to correspond with her for the entire period of the German occupation, Croce wanted to read a firsthand account of the Resistenza in northern Italy. She began drafting her partisan memoirs in 1947, Italo Calvino recalled in his foreword to the original edition, “when her impressions were still warm and vivid,” so that they could be “read by her old friend.”4 After the final diary entry, Ada added several pages where she reflected on the insurrection. These were written on April 28, 1949, the fourth anniversary of the liberation of Turin. In a letter to Croce in September 1950, Ada promised to copy her partisan memoirs for him, and was grateful that he wanted to read them because his opinion would be “valuable and enlightening.”5 She sent them over the course of the next year, and received Croce’s very favorable impression in December 1951:
I believe that your text is of great importance to the history of what happened in Piedmont, of all the efforts, events, and anxieties that made up the actions of the partisans. This part of the story does not have adequate treatment in the accounts of battles or military facts...it is fortunate when someone who narrates her own role can write pages like you have written, beautiful for their depth of sentiment and for the rare ability you have to rise above yourself and reach a heroic state of mind....Therefore you can be happy with the work you have accomplished.6
Croce then suggested how to present her work so that it would be accessible to her readers.
The Diario partigiano is exceptional both as a distinctive historical document and as a first-rate piece of literature. From a political and military point of view, the Diario provides firsthand knowledge of how the partisans in the Piedmont region fought, what obstacles they encountered, and who joined the struggle against the Nazis and the Fascists.7 Often their success depended on the cooperation of everyday people, such as the concierge, landlord, or shopkeeper. Individuals with special skills in printing, typography, or engineering became essential to the dissemination of printed information or the transmitting of radio-telegraphic messages using International Morse Code.8 Young people, most of whom had known nothing but fascism for their entire lives, played an essential role, not only through acts of sabotage but also by running errands between partisan groups and recruiting other young people to join the cause. The mountainous terrain and long winters of the Alpine regions where they fought and the ever-present threat of reprisals by German occupiers and their fascist partners exacerbated problems with organization among the various partisan groups.9 So arduous was their fight that key military events—Italy’s declaration of war on Germany, the fall of Rome, and the Allied landings on D-Day—appear in the diary as remote and almost unrelated events.
Ada Gobetti captures the anxieties and frustrations of everyday individuals and important leaders as they pursued their struggle against the Nazis and the Fascists. She writes of the heartbreak of mothers who lost their sons or watched them set out on dangerous missions of sabotage, relating it to her own worries about her son, Paolo, a young man by then and a very active partisan. She relates humorous incidents of longtime antifascists, eager to express noble sentiments but unsure of how to translate them into action. She reflects on the relationship between antifascist thought of the 1920s, in particular the ideas of her late husband Piero Gobetti, who published openly against fascism, and the armed struggle in which she and her family were participating. Beautiful descriptions of nature, often in stark contrast to the death and destruction around her, help to place the reader inside her story.
Although the Resistenza represented a culmination of more than twenty years of antifascist activity for Ada Gobetti, it also brought the beginning of an awareness of the specific talents, needs, and rights of Italian women, more than a hundred thousand of whom participated in the Resistenza.10 This realization led her to organize other Italian women against the German occupiers and the fascist oppressors, found an underground women’s newspaper, and solidify her views regarding women as a political force. Ada traces her personal coming of age with respect to women’s issues and writes about how she was able to involve other women in the effort. She would work with women through two principal organizations. One, the Gruppi di difesa della donna e per l’assistenza ai combattenti per la libertà, or Gddd, begun in late 1943, claimed to unite women of all the antifascist parties in the struggle for liberation. The other, the Movimento femminile ‘Giustizia e Libertà,’ or Mfgl, came about through efforts of Ada Gobetti and others in the Action Party in 1944. Unlike the fascist women’s organizations, which were conceived of by Mussolini and his men and operated under strict state surveillance and regulation, the Gddd and the Mfgl were founded, organized, and directed by women. In the case of the Gddd, moreover, local groups sprang up more or less spontaneously throughout northern Italy after November 1943. The women who participated braved extreme danger, worked despite hunger and cold, and constantly had to be aware of the possibility of arrest, torture, or execution at the hands of the German occupiers or their fascist collaborators.11 The Diario partigiano tells their story.
Ada Prospero was born in Turin on July 23, 1902, the child of immigrants from Switzerland and Bosnia. Her parents, Giacomo Prospero and Olimpia Biacchi, owned a store that sold some of the finest fruits and vegetables in the city of Turin, and is said to have supplied the Queen Mother. She attended a prestigious and demanding classical liceo (secondary school), unusual for a girl of her time. At the age of eleven, she was already learning four languages, Italian, Latin, Greek, and French, and studying piano and voice. Seventeen-year-old Piero Gobetti, who lived in the same apartment building, invited sixteen-year-old Ada Prospero to work with him on a student periodical, Energie Nove (New Energies), that would “consist of the arts, literature, philosophy, social questions, etc.,” and whose editorial staff would comprise young people exclusively.12 He asked for her collaboration on the journal. Ada agreed not only to work with Piero on Energie Nove but also to study together. Intellectual companionship blossomed quickly into romance. On October 30, 1918, only six weeks after their correspondence began, Ada Prospero and Piero Gobetti became engaged. The period of their courtship closely paralleled the rise to power of Benito Mussolini.
During her eight-year relationship with Piero, Ada witnessed firsthand the brutality of the Fascists and watched the increasing control of the fascist state over the lives of its citizens. When Mussolini seized control of the Italian government with the March on Rome of October 1922, Piero wasted no time in publishing openly his opposition to Mussolini. After their marriage in January 1923, Ada and Piero spent their honeymoon traveling extensively in Italy, meeting important political figures, and visiting Benedetto Croce at his home in Naples. No sooner had they returned to Turin than fascist thugs arrived in February to arrest Piero along with his father and the typographer who printed Piero’s antifascist journal, La Rivoluzione Liberale (The Liberal Revolution), under the pretext of “belonging to subversive groups who plot against the state.”13 The correspondence and list of subscribers for the journal were confiscated. Ada described this first visit by the fascist police: “They persisted in looking for the invisible ink in my only bottle of cologne water, and they took away as ‘subversive works’ The Republic of Plato and The Anarchy of Vittorio Alfieri by Colosso.”14 After his release, Piero began a publishing house that over the next two years would become a voice of militant antifascism. When Piero called for the dismissal of Mussolini after socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti was assassinated on June 10, 1924, a squadron of Fascists appeared at their doorstep and beat Piero so severely that he suffered a permanent heart lesion.
Piero continued to protest openly and courageously against the fascist regime. His wife accompanied him as they fled from place to place in Italy and abroad. She watched her young husband’s health deteriorate as the Fascists continued to pursue him. Despite these problems, Ada continued her schooling, earning her degree in philosophy from the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Turin in June 1925, writing a thesis on Anglo-American pragmatism under Professor Annibale Pastore. An edict of November 1925 ordered Piero to cease all editorial activity. Around the same time, he suffered a heart attack. One month later, their son, Paolo, was born. Piero decided to go into exile in Paris, where a number of other antifascist intellectuals had already fled, and continue to publish from there. Ada was to join him after he found a place for them to live. Shortly after his arrival in Paris, however, Piero contracted bronchitis. He died on February 16, 1926, leaving Ada and their infant son alone. He was not quite twenty-five years old.
After Piero’s death, Ada taught English in several private schools, acquired a solid reputation as a translator, and raised Paolo by herself. It was during this time that she developed a deep friendship with Benedetto Croce and his family. Such a friendship provided her with a prominent intellectual figure to guide her scholarly development and a second family with which to share summer vacations in Meana in the Susa Valley west of Turin.
In June 1937, Ada married Ettore Marchesini, brother of her longtime friends Maria, Ada, and Nella and an engineer working in Turin. Cesare Alvazzi, a friend of Paolo’s and a partisan in the Resistenza, admired Ettore for his willingness to be a “nonprotagonist,” remaining in the background, but supporting Ada unreservedly while she became more and more active as a public figure. He remembered Ettore for his strength of character, intelligence, and unassuming manner.15
During the 1930s, Ada engaged in an eclectic variety of resistance activities. She translated important works from English into Italian not only as a means to earn a living but also to bring important historical and literary works to an Italian people rapidly closing its mind to literature from abroad. Her translation of Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher’s A History of Europe was censored by the fascist Ministry of Popular Culture in 1939 because of its severe criticisms of Adolf Hitler.16 She wrote an antifascist children’s book entitled Storia del gallo Sebastiano: ovverosia il tredicesimo uovo (The story of Sebastiano the rooster, otherwise known as the thirteenth egg) which was published in 1940.17 She also pursued more traditional clandestine activities during this time, namely providing a place for antifascist colleagues to meet, keeping communication lines open among other antifascist individuals, producing and distributing leaflets attacking Mussolini’s regime, contacting Italian antifascists living in France, and participating in the underground Giustizia e Libertà movement in Turin.
From June 10, 1940, when crowds gathered in the Piazza Venezia in Rome to hear Mussolini’s declaration that Italy would enter World War II on the side of Germany, to the fall of Mussolini on July 24–25, 1943, Ada continued her activities in Giustizia e Libertà and helped to found the Action Party in 1942. Her principal academic project during this time was a manuscript on Alexander Pope, the eighteenth-century rationalist poet and satirist.18 After the fall of Mussolini, Ada and many of her antifascist colleagues began the transition from clandestine activities to open resistance against the Nazis and the Fascists.
On September 9, the day after the announcement of the armistice between the Badoglio government and the Allies, Germany sent additional forces across the Italian border and occupied all of northern and central Italy, including Rome and extending almost as far south as Naples. German forces amounted to eighteen divisions by the beginning of October. Mussolini, rescued from imprisonment by German paratroopers on September 12, set up a puppet government on September 23 that was officially named the Italian Social Republic, but called the Republic of Salò after the town on Lake Garda in the north where the former leader sought refuge. On October 13, Badoglio’s government declared war on Germany. In the meantime, leaders from the antifascist parties, including the Communist, Socialist, Christian Democratic, Liberal, and Action parties, banded together in Rome under the moderate socialist Ivanoe Bonomi to form the Comitato di liberazione nazionale (Committee of National Liberation, or Cln) and united in opposition to the Badoglio government and Mussolini’s Republic of Salò. Each of these three governments—Badoglio’s “legitimate government,” Mussolini’s Republic of Salò, and the Cln—claimed to be the true government of Italy. Although the British and the Americans recognized the Badoglio government, they also set up administrative units in areas they conquered and eventually established the Allied Control Commission (ACC) in November 1943 to administer military units and deal with Italian officials. Following the lead of the Cln, similar liberation committees sprang up in other cities, most importantly the Committee of National Liberation of Northern Italy (Clnai) in Milan in September 1943. The Cln of Turin often depended on information provided by Ada and her colleagues.
After their first meeting with fellow antifascists in Turin in September 1943, Ada, her second husband, Ettore Marchesini, and her son, Paolo Gobetti, accepted an assignment to work in the Susa Valley. Others would go to the nearby Pellice or Cuneese Valleys. Ada’s home in Meana would serve as a refuge for partisans until the end of the war. Her landlord, Mario Cordola, offered his friendship and cooperation, making it possible for her to use the home as a haven for those who fought the Nazis and the Fascists throughout the Resistenza. Ada’s activities in the Susa Valley ran the gamut from official duties to everyday tasks. One duty was to make contacts with local people and enlist them in the cause, which she called “taking the pulse” of the local men and women to see if they would work with them. For example, she helped to establish Teta’s store in Susa, owned by villager Celestina Roglio, as a reference point for partisans and as a place to hide weapons. With her language skills, she acted as an interpreter between English officers and partisan commanders. She found places to deposit clandestine newspapers. She investigated arrests. She wrote of posting Cln flyers in Meana to warn young men born in 1925 not to present themselves for the draft. Sometimes Ada acted as a liaison between leaders of the various partisan formations. Her position of responsibility is evident in the personal contacts she had with important military leaders, known by their underground names as Braccini, Duccio, Lieutenant Ferrero, Laghi, Longo, Marcellin, and Valle, who had the greatest respect for her.19
At other times, Ada performed the simple task of making meals of polenta, castagne (chestnuts), and potatoes for her family and other partisans, many of whom would spend the night at her home in Meana. Ettore, ever supportive of Ada’s endeavors, also contributed immensely to their clandestine activities. Using his expertise as an engineer, he devised radio-telegraphic links for communications and constructed the equipment to make false identification cards. Among his many feats as a partisan, Paolo engaged in acts of sabotage, searched for and hid weapons, and joined the formations in the Pellice Valley for a time. He also took advantage of the Nazi roundups to get local residents of Meana to become active in the Resistenza. As Massimo Mila observed, the “principal singularity of the events that are narrated in this book is in the maintaining of a bizarre and very tight familial nucleus, in the midst of events that make this little family of intellectuals—mother, son, and step-father—into a den of terrorists—or as they said then—of bandits.”20
Ada acted as a liaison between Turin and the GL formations in the Susa Valley and in other places in the Piedmont region, holding the titles of “Inspectress of the GL Military Command” and “Political Commissary of the Fourth Alpine Division.”21 Despite the danger, throughout the German occupation many individuals who opposed the Nazis and the Fascists used Ada’s home at 6 Via Fabro in Turin as a safe haven, a place to eat and sleep, and a meeting place for groups of resisters. Journalist E. G. Vichos described how Ada directed courier and information services out of her home in Turin: “Allied parachutists, saboteurs, informers spread amongst the ranks of the enemy, and Allied ex-prisoners who wanted to join the partisans, all knew about the ‘house of miracles’ where they knew they could find maps, munitions, explosives, information, comfort, and whatever else they needed to conduct the unrestrained attack without a headquarters.”22 Frequently, Ada herself brought orders from the partisan commands in the city to the leaders of the various brigades in the mountains. She went back and forth between Turin and Meana several times a week, on the train, on her bicycle, and even on foot. She also continued to teach, which most likely served as a ruse for her antifascist activities. The friendship and loyalty of Espedita Martinoli, the concierge at her home in Turin, was essential for Ada’s resistance activities in the city. The loyal employee would warn Ada of impending roundups and divert Fascists or Germans seeking to search the house.
On New Year’s Eve 1944, Ada left for France with a group of seven other partisans. They would climb across the Alps through the Passo dell’Orso and carry important documents to the French and Allied commands in Grenoble, which had been liberated a few months before. They also hoped to establish a permanent communications link with the Allies. When Ada returned from France at the end of February 1945, she had to face new complexities that had arisen with respect to the partisans in the Susa Valley because the Allies were pressuring them to form a single command. She continued to work incessantly until the partisans liberated Turin on April 28.
After the war ended, Ada’s experience as a resister developed into a constructive political and social activism. Alessandro Galante Garrone, a Piedmontese magistrate and historian who was in the Resistenza with Ada, remembered how she worked incessantly without holding back, even sacrificing her health, because of her dedication to the many civil battles of the postwar period.23 In her capacity as vice mayor of Turin, the first woman to hold such a position in Italy, Ada labored diligently to effect positive reforms in the schools and fought openly for the rights of women and children in Italian society. She was a leading figure in the Unione donne italiane (Union of Italian Women or Udi) in Italy and a founder of the multinational Federazione democratica internazionale delle donne (the Women’s International Democratic Federation or Fdif). She witnessed the birth of the Italian Republic, officially proclaimed on June 18, 1946, after the first election where women could vote, and worked to integrate women into the decision-making process of the country. Ada became deeply involved in the international women’s rights movement, traveling to Paris, Berlin, and China as a representative from Italy. She also wrote extensively on child rearing and devoted much of the remainder of her life to pedagogical activities to promote a “democratic education” for both children and parents. Through her children’s stories, books and articles for parents, and ideas for school reform, Ada would mold a new generation. Perhaps this generation of children—the first in nearly twenty-five years not to be schooled under fascism—along with their parents could finally break the legacy of fascism.
Ada’s diary was one of her most important legacies. By recording her memories as they happened and publishing them in her Diario partigiano, she changed what we know about the Resistenza and the German occupation of Italy. It is easy to romanticize the Resistenza, recalling tales of partisans in the hills carrying out acts of sabotage and women hiding documents from the Germans under maternity clothes. Certainly Italians who wished to forget their support of Mussolini have mythologized their level of involvement in the Resistenza. Moreover, some Italians turned antifascist only after the German occupation that began in September 1943. Of the “true” antifascists, many idealized pre-fascist Italy, exaggerated its level of democracy, and simply hoped for a return to the prewar status quo. But like Piero Gobetti, Ada believed fascism had its roots in pre-1922 liberalism. Many Fascists equated the defeat of fascism with the defeat of the Italian nation.24 In contrast, Ada and many of her antifascist colleagues believed that defeating fascism was a first step in the creation of a new Italian national identity. Yet despite her idealistic observations about solidarity and unity, she knew Italy had to break completely from its pre-fascist past in order to create a more democratic society. She believed that the Resistenza would be a model for the creation of a new Italian state.
Though Ada wrote frequently in the Diario about the beauty of the human solidarity that existed during the period of the Resistenza, where priests worked alongside Communists for freedom from the Nazis and the Fascists, a closer analysis of her experiences demonstrates that the antifascist movement was by no means unified. During the partisan war, Ada used her significant skills in conflict resolution for everything from settling petty differences to mitigating serious disagreements in ideology. Cooperation among the antifascist parties during the Resistenza disguised the differences in their political ideologies that became evident again after the war. Action Party leader Leo Valiani held that the Liberals and the Christian Democrats wanted to restore the parliamentary government of pre-fascist Italy, while the Communists, Socialists, and Actionists wanted to establish a republic that reflected a new political system.25 From the time Alcide De Gasperi left office in 1953 to Ada’s death on March 14, 1968, Italy changed prime ministers eleven times, testifying to the turmoil plaguing the government of Italy.26 Left-wing demonstrations in the 1960s and student militancy, such as that which erupted in Turin at the close of 1967, reminded former activists of the Resistenza that most of their goals for postwar Italy had not been realized.27 Although she continued to believe in the values of the Resistenza until she died, Ada Gobetti recognized in the student protests of 1967–68 glaring evidence that the Resistenza had not yet created a postwar Italy that reflected political and social regeneration.28
Seeing Ada Gobetti as a mother during the Resistenza, one of many mothers whose teenage sons had joined the partisans, illustrates the depth to which she would sacrifice for a future of freedom and democracy. Motherhood provided the connecting thread between the antifascist struggle of the 1920s that she experienced with Piero Gobetti, the battle of the Resistenza that she shared with her son Paolo, and the postwar Italy that she wanted to create, where young people like Paolo would be able to make their own choices and pursue their dreams without encumbrance. The mother-son relationship between Ada and Paolo, who toiled side by side during the Resistenza, contrasted completely with the fascist conception of mothers as servants of the state. Moreover, motherhood became a mechanism for her to teach other mothers, through her example, to turn their grief into activism for the public good. The maternal feelings that she expressed did not merely reflect her personal hurt and anguish. In her desire to attract women to become active participants in the struggle for liberty during the Resistenza and beyond, she used motherhood as a common ground on which to build a society and a lasting peace. Motherhood, with its absence of political, class, or religious connotations and its universal appeal, became a valuable tool toward acceptance of her ideas by other women. The solidarity with other mothers that she felt during the Resistenza became a personification of the human solidarity she believed would be the basis for a democratic society in the future. In her capacity as a mother, Ada created a bond with other mothers. She understood the fears that mothers faced. Although she insisted that she was not a pacifist, she used motherhood to demonstrate the negative impact of war on family and society. She gave new meaning to the concept of maternity, which contrasted greatly with the fascist view.29
Though at first Ada thought men and women who participated in the Resistenza had the same goals, she grew to realize that women had something of their own to offer the partisan struggle. Moreover, their fight had broader implications. Italian women fought for the liberation of their country from the Nazis and the Fascists, but many also sought the liberation of women in Italian society. Although some women became involved through male members of their families, others followed the lead of women like Ada and entered the public sphere of their own accord. Through her leadership role in women’s organizations during the Resistenza, she learned that women represented a strong political force for change. She believed women’s role in the Resistenza would encourage political involvement to better Italian society after the war.
In her effort to ensure a proper place for women who had participated in the Resistenza, Ada Gobetti had to wage a battle against the way the Resistenza was being remembered by politicians who sought only to glorify the past for personal or party agendas and historians who reconstructed the Resistenza without crediting women for their extraordinary contribution. Italian women did not simply participate in a movement made up primarily of men who carried arms; nor did they only engage in activities that supported those of the men. Despite the cultural and political obstacles to Italian women participating in the public sphere, these women played an active role in the Resistenza, creating their own form of resistance and affecting the military and political nature of the Resistenza by their very participation.30
With the publication of the Diario partigiano, Ada Gobetti shared her own experiences in the Resistenza and in so doing also illuminated the actions of countless other participants. Her autobiographical account is not necessarily representative of other Italian women’s experiences during the 1943–1945 period, however, which depended on factors such as degree of political involvement, party affiliation, and geographic location in the South (which was occupied by the Allies) or in the North (which fell under German occupation).31 The antifascist music critic and historian Massimo Mila said the Diario carried people back to the “first reasons” for their political struggle and to the realism that was “the beauty of the Italian Resistance,” during a period when “workers and bourgeois, intellectuals and farmers, set about on an undertaking that was unusual for all of them...without...changing themselves, without becoming adventurers and misfits, but remaining...workers, farmers, writers, clerks, professionals, and businessmen, even if they learned to become perfect partisans.”32 Others who fought in the Resistenza with Ada noted in the Diario the absence of hatred or cruelty toward the enemy and a deep sense of compassion for all those affected by war.33 The Diario shows that resistance went far beyond armed resistance. Moreover, it describes the actions of ordinary people who met, organized, and worked together despite their often vastly different political ideologies.34
The Diario also described antifascists who did not work in solidarity, but exhibited skepticism and distrust, which Ada tried to mitigate. Resistenza leader Giorgio Agosti admitted that he began reading the Diario with some diffidence, thinking it would be the same as other partisan stories, replete with technical information and political discussions. Surprisingly, he found beautiful descriptions of life that continued and the optimism that he always associated with Ada.35 After reading the Diario, Ada Della Torre, who was a staffetta (courier) in the Resistenza and worked closely with Ada, wrote to her friend of the importance of writing so that they did not forget the positive experience of the Resistenza and of her hope that others would do the same.36
The changing political climate in Italy between the end of the war in 1945 and the publication of the Diario in 1956 may have influenced what Ada Gobetti chose to include in the Diario. Of the five parties that had formed the Cln during the Resistenza only the Christian Democratic, Communist, and Socialist Parties played a significant role in Italian politics after 1946. By the beginning of 1946, support for the Action Party, Ada’s party, had waned considerably. In the municipal elections held in Turin on November 10, 1946, no representative of the nearly defunct Action Party was elected to the eighty-member Turin City Council. After Christian Democrat Alcide De Gasperi formed his third government in January 1947, he set out to exclude the Communists and their socialist allies from his coalition government. In support of De Gasperi’s action, on May 31, 1947, the Constituent Assembly confirmed the end of the antifascist coalition.37 With the demise of the Action Party, Ada had remained independent for almost ten years. Though she was idealistic, Ada was also very practical. It would have been totally unrealistic of her, as a woman in a male-dominated society, to think she could somehow rejuvenate such a party. Without the Action Party as a viable option, the Communist Party seemed closest to Ada Gobetti’s radical ideas regarding women’s rights and social reform. She joined the Communist Party at the beginning of 1956 and made one simple statement about her decision: “One cannot remain a spectator all one’s life; one must know how to choose, and assume one’s own responsibilities.”38 Paolo Spriano, the partisan who went to France with Ada in the winter of 1945 who later became a historian of the Italian Communist Party, called her choice one that was “meditated on for a long time”; it was “the fruit of that ideological bent that had animated her entire life as a militant antifascist and her sympathy for the popular classes.”39 In the Diario, she demonstrated admiration both for her Action Party colleagues and for many Communists, and praised the organizational abilities of the Communists in particular.
The Diario also does not tell us much about Ada Gobetti’s intimate feelings, except when they involve Paolo. She rarely expresses concern for her own life; her fears are confined to worries about Paolo. Sometimes her anguish over Paolo may appear excessive, but she came to the Resistenza with an unusual life-changing event in her past. She lost her husband when she was only twenty-three, an age when most people do not consider death a reality. Though eighteen-year-old Paolo seems fearless, Ada knows that she can lose him also. She never mentions that in June 1944 Field-Marshall Kesselring commanded that “the fight against the partisans...be carried out with all means at (their) disposal and with utmost severity” or that the German commander ordered that “every act of violence committed by partisans” be “punished immediately.” At the end of July 1944, Kesselring issued more detailed orders against the partisans and civilians who helped them. He told his soldiers to shoot civilians who supplied partisans with food, shelter, or military information (spying), activities that many women pursued. Civilians would also be shot if they hid or transported ammunition, or if they failed to report immediately to the German authorities weapons or ammunition concealed by others. Moreover, Kesselring commanded that, where partisan bands operated in large numbers, hostages (preferably relatives of partisans or able-bodied sympathizers) were to be taken first from the population of the district in which they appeared. If soldiers were fired at from any locality, the village would be burned to the ground. Finally, all civilians captured in battles with partisans and in the course of the reprisals would be sent to collecting centers for transfer to the Reich as laborers. Ada Gobetti was “guilty” of every one of these violations, as were many other women.
Another gap in her autobiographical account is that she does not present any overt opinions about the Holocaust in the Diario, except to express some concern for Jewish individuals who were helping the cause of the Resistenza. No Italian Jews were deported to Auschwitz or similar camps under Mussolini, but this situation changed after the German occupation, when more than 6,800 Jews in Italy were deported and gassed.40 Yet Ada never mentions that her close friends Lisetta Giua and Vittorio Foa, frequent visitors to her home in Turin, were Jewish. Moreover, Alberto Salmoni, who accompanied Paolo on his first trip to France and joined Ada and the group of seven other partisans who went to France at the end of 1944, was Jewish as well. Though Ada admits that she did not hear of Auschwitz until she was in Grenoble in early 1945, she does allude at times to the danger Jews faced. Yet she never expresses any fear of reprisal for her close association with several Italian Jews.
When Ada accepted the Premio Prato for the Diario partigiano, she stated that the Resistenza was not a historical cycle that was concluded, but represented a permanent obligation.41 Journalist Alda Radaelli once asked her what she thought about all the celebrations that were taking place on the anniversary of the Resistenza. She replied:
It seems to me that they are wrapping it up with a beautiful label to send it to the museum. Why cut it out as a single and unrepeatable moment, speak of it as a point of arrival instead of a point of departure? Its validity lies in the fact that conformity could not survive: new situations imposed new solutions, and this is what we must make young people understand. If we knew how to analyze that period with its contrasts, limits, and mistakes, we would give them the possibility of a choice, and we would not see them sink lifelessly into a loss of will power nor wander hopelessly in search of something solid, nor fold up in morose and gangster-like forms. They will find the same moral imperative that we had: like every stage of man has a maturity of its own, so every epoch of history has its own duty for young people, that can be expressed in forms and modes that are completely different, but that will always have the same creative and innovative impulse.42
Ada Gobetti never wanted to use the Resistenza to assuage national guilt. She held Italians responsible for fascism. Despite her nostalgic longing for the solidarity she experienced during the Resistenza, she advocated an in-depth analysis of its strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures. I hope that this translation of the Diario partigiano will help to enrich our understanding of the Italian experience, and that of Italian women in particular, during the Resistenza.
1. Historians have long debated the meaning of the Resistenza. Claudio Pavone’s masterpiece, recently translated into English, analyzes the Resistenza as a civil war, a class war, and a patriotic war. Claudio Pavone, Una guerra civile: Saggio storico sulla moralità nella Resistenza (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991).
2. The term “partisan,” often used interchangeably with “patriot,” has a variety of meanings. The Allied Control Commission defined patriots as “persons in the ranks of genuine bands who have carried out arms against the enemy, engaged in sabotage or secured important military information for the benefit of the Allied war effort.” New York Times, 22 July 1944, 4:4, as quoted in Charles F. Delzell, Mussolini’s Enemies: The Italian Anti-Fascist Resistance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 410 and n. 72. In Ada’s diary, however, the partisans were not working for the Allies, but rather to oust the Germans and the Fascists. Some partisans had been active in the antifascist underground for many years; others joined the cause after the German invasion. Some were armed; others “fought” with nonviolent means.
3. Ada Gobetti Marchesini Prospero, Diario partigiano (1956; reprint, with an introduction by Goffredo Fofi, a foreword by Italo Calvino, and a postscript by Bianca Guidetti Serra, Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, s.p.a., 1996). The 1956 edition is stamped “Saggi 202” on the page following the title page, and has three pages introducing the diary, simply signed “L’Editore.” Fofi’s introduction to the 1996 edition is followed by three pages entitled “Nota,” signed by Italo Calvino and dated 1956. Calvino died in 1985; his comments in the 1996 edition are a reproduction of those signed “L’Editore” in the 1956 edition. There was also an edition aimed at a juvenile audience and meticulously edited by Goffredo Fofi. Ada Marchesini Gobetti and Goffredo Fofi, Diario partigiano (Turin: Einaudi, 1972.)
4. Italo Calvino, forward to Diario partigiano (1996), 13.
5. Ada Gobetti, Turin, to Benedetto Croce, 21 September 1950, in Mezzosecolo 7 (1987–1989): 218. The entire correspondence between Ada Gobetti and Benedetto Croce has been reprinted in Ada Gobetti and Benedetto Croce, “Carissima Ada, Gentilissimo Senatore: Carteggio, Ada Gobetti-Benedetto Croce, 1928–1952,” ed. Sergio Caprioglio, Mezzosecolo 7 (1987–1989): 46–227.
6. Benedetto Croce, Naples, to Ada Gobetti, 26 December 1951, Mezzosecolo 7: 222–223.
7. Ada Gobetti uses the term “Nazi-Fascist” in the Diario only rarely, perhaps because the term was so controversial. Claudio Pavone argues that “once the figure of the Fascist enemy was redefined alongside the figure of the German enemy, the unifying category of ‘Nazi-Fascist’ was not always sufficient to hold them together, even if it felt very accurate to most members of the Resistance and was not invalidated by the fact that the Fascist was the servant of the German; in fact, it was not a matter of an occasional servant, but of a servant morally and politically consonant with the master.” Pavone, Una guerra civile, 266.
8. The International Morse Code was an adaption of the Morse Telegraphic Code, which altered the digital pattern for various characters to make them clearer and easier to transmit over radio. These messages were often encrypted as well so that the enemy would not understand them.
9. By 1944, four principal bands of partisans existed in the Piedmont region: the Garibaldini (Communists); the Matteotti (Socialists); the Giustizia e Libertà, or GL (Actionists); and the Autonomi (Autonomous forces, but often staffed by Christian Democrats or Liberals).
10. Figures cannot be exact, given the clandestine nature of resistance in general and the fluidity with which some women moved between military and nonmilitary activities. Some sources indicate that more than 70,000 belonged to the Gruppi di difesa della donna and 35,000 were partisans or troops in the field. More detailed reports show that 4,723 women had responsibilities for political organization and propaganda; 4,633 were arrested, tortured, and tried; 2,750 were deported to Germany; 1,750 were wounded; 623 were executed or killed in combat; and 512 held the title of Commanding Officer or Battle Inspector. These figures were taken from Bianca Guidetti Serra, “Quello che scrivevano le donne della Resistenza sui loro giornali,” in 1945, II voto alle donne, ed. Laura Derossi (Milan: Franco Angeli, Consiglio Regionale del Piemonte, 1998), 102, who indicated that she obtained her numbers from the 1964 edition of Luigi Longo, Un popolo alla macchia and Camilla Ravera, “La donna nella lotta contro il fascismo e per la democrazia,” Il Congresso di Parigi, single issue edited by the Federazione democratica internazionale delle donne (March 1946), 13. At the special session of the Turin City Council held on 25 April 1995 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Turin, Council President Domenico Carpanini put the total figure of women who participated in the Resistenza at 120,000. Domenico Carpanini, 50º Anniversario della Liberazione (Turin: Città di Torino, 25 April 1995), 24. Perry R. Willson has estimated the number to be much higher, possibly reaching two million. See Perry R. Willson, “Saints and Heroines: re-writing the history of Italian women in the resistance,” in Tim Kirk and Anthony McElligott, eds., Opposing Fascism: Community, Authority and Resistance in Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1999), 180.
11. For an analysis of the women’s clandestine newspapers, see Bianca Guidetti Serra, “Quello che scrivevano le donne della resistenza sui loro giornali,” 102–134. For a study of the Gruppi di difesa della donna, see Jomarie Alano, “Armed with a Yellow Mimosa: Women’s Defense and Assistance Groups in Italy, 1943–1945,” Journal of Contemporary History, 2003, 38(4): 615–631.
12. Piero Gobetti, Turin, to Ada Prospero, 14 September 1918, in Ada and Piero Gobetti, Nella tua breve esistenza: Lettere 1918–1926, ed. Ersilia Alessandrone Perona (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1991), 5.
13. Paolo Gobetti, Pietro Polito, Marco Scavino, and Ivana Solavagione, eds., Racconto Interrotto: Piero Gobetti nel ricordo degli amici (Turin: Centro studi Piero Gobetti, 1992), 73.
14. Ada Marchesini Gobetti, “Come nacque la ‘Rivoluzione Liberale,’ Resistenza e Giustizia e Libertà (January 1968): 3.
15. Cesare Alvazzi, interview by author, Susa, Italy, 11 November 2001.
16. H. A. L. Fisher, A History of Europe (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1935). Ada Gobetti’s translation appeared in three volumes with the following citation: H. A. L. Fisher, “Storia antica e medievale,” Storia d’Europa, vol. 1, traduzione di Ada Prospero (Bari: Laterza, 1936), 438 pages. H. A. L. Fisher, “Rinascimento-Riforma-Illuminismo,” Storia d’Europa, vol. 2, traduzione italiana di Ada Prospero (Bari: Laterza, 1936), 398 pages. H. A. L. Fisher, “L’Esperimento liberale,” Storia d’Europa, vol. 3, traduzione italiana di Ada Prospero (Bari: Laterza, 1937), 488 pages.
17. Margutte (Ada Prospero), Storia del gallo Sebastiano ovverosia il tredicesimo uovo (Milan: Garzanti, 1940). For an analysis of this children’s story, see Jomarie Alano, “Anti-Fascism for Children: Ada Gobetti’s Story of Sebastiano the Rooster,” Modern Italy (February 2012): 69–83.
18. Ada Prospero, Il poeta del razionalismo settecentesco: Alessandro Pope (Bari: Laterza, 1943). Pope wrote Essays on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (1712), Essays on Man (1733–1734) and Moral Essays (1731–1735). Pope is also the author of everyday sayings such as “To err is human, to forgive divine” and “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
19. Paolo Braccini was a university professor and representative of the Action Party in the first Piedmontese Military Command, headed by Giuseppe Perotti. Both men were condemned by the Special Tribunal, executed in Turin on 5 April 1944, and decorated with the gold medal for military valor. Duccio (Tancredi Galimberti) was regional commander of the GL formations in the Piedmont region. Killed by the Fascists on 3 December 1944, Galimberti was decorated with the gold medal for military valor. Lieutenant Ferrero (Vittorio Morone) commanded formations in the Susa Valley. Laghi (Giulio Bolaffi), an Italian Jew, commanded the entire IV Alpine GL Division. Longo (Germano Chiapusso) was commander of the GL forces in the Susa Valley. Maggiorino Marcellin, a former ski instructor, was commander of the Autonomous forces of the Chisone Valley. Valle (Egidio Liberti) was chief of staff of the GL Regional Military Command.
20. Massimo Mila, “Una famiglia di partigiani,” L’Unità (10 June 1956).
21. Bianca Guidetti Serra, “Idee, opere, incontri e stagioni di una donna ‘fatta di fuoco’,” Il Giornale dei Genitori (July–August 1988): 5.
22. E. G. Vichos, “Una donna d’Italia: Ada Gobetti Marchesini,” Pensiero e Azione, Ancona (15 January 1946).
23. Alessandro Galante Garrone, “Ada Gobetti: Il filo della rivolta,” l’Astrolabio (24 March 1968): 33.
24. Pavone, Una guerra civile, 169.
25. Charles F. Delzell, “The Italian Anti-Fascist Resistance in Retrospect: Three Decades of Historiography,” Journal of Modern History 47 (March 1975): 71.
26. Giuseppe Pella from August 1953 to January 1954, Amintore Fanfani from January 1954 to February 1954, Mario Scelba from February 1954 to July 1955, Antonio Segni from July 1955 to May 1957, Adone Zoli from May 1957 to June 1958, Amintore Fanfani from July 1958 to February 1959, Antonio Segni from February 1959 to March 1960, Fernando Tambroni from March 1960 to July 1960, Amintore Fanfani from July 1960 to June 1963, Giovanni Leone from June 1963 to December 1963, and Aldo Moro from December 1963 to June 1968. Denis Mack Smith, Modern Italy: A Political History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 499.
27. Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988 (London, Penguin Books, 1990), 71.
28. David Forgacs, “Fascism and Antifascism Reviewed: Generations, History, and Film in Italy after 1968,” in Helmut Peitsch, Charles Burdett, and Claire Gorrara, European Memories of the Second World War (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 187.
29. See Anna Rossi Doria, Diventare cittadine: il voto delle donne in Italia (Florence: Giunti, 1996), 53.
30. See Perry R. Willson, “Women, War and the Vote: Gender and Politics in Italy,” Women’s History Review 7, no. 4 (1998): 619; Anna Bravo and Anna Maria Bruzzone, In guerra senza armi: Storie di donne, 1940–1945 (Rome-Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1995); and Mirna Cicioni, “‘In order to be considered we must first have fought’: Women in the Italian Resistance,” in Never Give In: The Italian Resistance and Politics, ed. Alastair Davidson and Steve Wright (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 100.
31. Ersilia Alessandrone Perona, “Sincronia e diacronia nelle scritturi femminili della seconda guerra mondiale,” 122–124. Iris Origo also wrote a diary of her experiences in the Resistenza and published it under the title War in Val D’Orcia, 1943–1944 (London: J. Cape, 1951).
32. Mila, “Una famiglia di partigiani.”
33. Elvira Pajetta, review of Diario partigiano, in Fiaccola Ardente (June 1956).
34. Maria Tanini, “Nel Diario partigiano una puntigliosa difesa del ‘quotidiano’,” Il Giornale dei Genitori (July–August 1988): 43.
35. Giorgio Agosti, Dopo il tempo del furore: Diario 1946–1988, ed. Aldo Agosti (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 2005), 66–67.
36. Ada Della Torre Ortona, n.p., to Ada Gobetti, 18 September, n.d., Acspg, Fondo Ada Gobetti.
37. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 112.
38. Ada Gobetti, as quoted in Bianca Guidetti Serra, “Una donna, una persona,” Mezzosecolo 7: 376.
39. Paolo Spriano, “Una donna del secondo Risorgimento nazionale,” L’Unità (16 March 1968).
40. Susan Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 57, xxvi.
41. Luigi Balestrieri, “A ‘mamma’ Gobetti il Premio Prato 1956,” Patria Indipendente, 6 January 1957.
42. Alda Radaelli, “Un giorno a Reaglie,” Il Giornale dei Genitori (Summer 1968): 12.