Jomarie Alano - A Life of Resistance: Ada Prospero Marchesini Gobetti (1902-1968)

A Life of Resistance

By the time Turin was liberated in April 1945, writer, translator, teacher, and womens rights activist Ada Gobetti had been fighting fascism for almost twenty-five years. This biography frames her wartime activism in the Resistenza as a chapter in a lifetime of resistance. Gobetti participated in the underground Giustizia e Libert movement, and helped to found the Partito dAzione , a political party whose members asked her to represent them as vice mayor of Turin after the war. For Gobetti, the Resistenza also brought an awareness of the specific talents, needs, and rights of Italian women. This led her to organize other Italian women against German occupiers and Fascist oppressors, found an underground womens newspaper, and solidify her views regarding women as a political force. After 1945, resistance meant espousing a set of ideals exemplified by the best that came out of the Resistenza , ideals of grassroots democracy, womens rights, and democratic education for which Gobetti would fight for the rest of her life.

Jomarie Alano is a visiting scholar at Cornell Universitys Institute for European Studies. She is the translator and editor of Ada Gobettis Diario partigiano , published by Oxford University Press in 2014 as Partisan Diary: A Womans Life in the Italian Resistance .

For my mother

Franceschina Santilli Alano

I first learned about Ada Gobetti from Charles Delzells classic study of the Italian Antifascist Resistance. Her name appeared in a footnote to a short section on Piero Gobetti and the antifascist press, where Delzell credited Ada for carrying on her husbands ideals after his untimely death in 1926 through her activities as a translator, educator, and resistance activist. Delzells brief but poignant mention of Ada Gobetti and her connection with the early antifascist movement in Turin sparked my interest in this young Italian woman who did keep the torch lighted.

A conversation with French Resistance scholar Paula Schwartz of Middlebury College and a close reading of her article about redefining resistance led me to question the meaning of resistance in the Italian setting. Schwartz calls for a move away from restrictive notions of resistance. While Schwartz confines her analysis to the war years in France, I have chosen to expand this redefinition of resistance to include antifascist activities throughout Mussolinis reign and World War II, as well as efforts to keep the ideals of resistance alive during the postwar period. Ada Gobettis life story seemed an ideal case study for examining the complex phenomenon of resistance in Italy both before and after the official Resistance, or Resistenza , of 19431945. To this day, archivists, historians, and librarians work in institutes for the study of resistance located in all the major cities of Italy, collecting and publishing materials that serve as a testament to the importance of the question of resistance in understanding Italian history.

The archives of the Centro studi Piero Gobetti in Turin, Italy, founded in 1961 by Ada, her son Paolo Gobetti, her daughter-in-law Carla Nosenzo Gobetti, and several of Pieros friends, contain Adas papers. The Centro Gobetti is located at 6 Via Fabro, the former home of Ada and Piero Gobetti. Carla Gobetti, then president of the Centro Gobetti, gave me permission to conduct research in a room filled with materials taken from Adas home in Reaglie after she died, affectionately known by members of the staff as Adas room. At the time, the room was not open to the public, and the materials were not catalogued. There I found a wealth of primary source materials, including Adas school notebooks and compositions, issues of clandestine womens newspapers printed during the German occupation of Italy, charters of womens organizations formed during World War II, programs from international womens conventions held after the end of World War II where Ada represented Italy, boxes of newspaper clippings about Ada, reviews of Adas books, articles written by Ada for various newspapers and journals, drafts of speeches, letters written to Ada by schoolchildren who had read her childrens books, letters from women all over Italy thanking Ada for her advice on raising their children, and letters written to Adas family after her death. I returned to the Centro Gobetti in 2006 and again in 2008 to see the newly catalogued Fondo Ada Prospero Gobetti, now available to scholars for consultation, and to complete the missing links in my research. The archive contains 110 boxes organized into fourteen series. Biographical materials on Ada Gobetti reflect a clear emphasis on her postwar activities. The papers of Adas parents, Giacomo Prospero and Olimpia Biacchi, are included in the Fondo Ada Prospero Gobetti.

I also conducted research at the Istituto piemontese per la storia della Resistenza e della societ contemporanea Giorgio Agosti (Istoreto) in Turin, the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in Milan, and the Fondazione istituto Gramsci in Rome. In the United States, I found detailed information on Turin and Piedmont during the German occupation at the National Archives II in College Park, Maryland, which houses the Allied Control Commission records.

My understanding of Ada Gobetti was greatly enhanced by interviews with individuals who knew her well, many of whom were willing to talk with me on several different occasions. Carla Gobetti shared her personal memories of Ada, suggested many invaluable sources of published and unpublished information, and invited me to spend the afternoon with her in Adas former home in Reaglie on the outskirts of Turin. Ersilia Alessandrone Perona, the Italian scholar perhaps most knowledgeable regarding the early life of Ada and Piero Gobetti, gave me the background with which to understand the letters between Ada and Piero in the context of the 1920s. Bianca Guidetti Serra shared a scrapbook containing clippings about her work and that of other women in the Resistenza , and introduced me to the text of some of the laws passed under Mussolinis regime that discriminated directly against women. A distinguished Turinese attorney who worked with Ada during the Resistenza and later fought to improve womens rights in the workplace, Guidetti Serra, gave me an autographed copy of her two-volume work compiling testimonies of fifty-one working-class women who participated in the Resistenza . Frida Malan, who coedited with Ada the clandestine newspaper La Nuova Realt beginning in February 1945, shared her experiences as a partisan in the Resistenza . Carmela Levi discussed her clandestine activities during the Resistenza and her collaboration with Ada in helping young people after the war. Cesare Alvazzi drove me to Adas former home in Meana in the Susa Valley outside of Turin, where he had been among the many partisans who used this home as a base of operations. Luciano Boccalatte provided details of Turin under occupation. I also interviewed Italian senator and philosopher Benedetto Croces daughter, Lidia Croce Herling, at her fathers former home in Naples. She remembered summers with Ada in Meana. Finally, I spent a good deal of time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, visiting with Anna Foa Yona, whose brother Vittorio fought with Ada in the Resistenza . Originally from Turin, Anna discussed similarities and problems among the various antifascist groups in Turin during the 1930s. She also shared copies of first editions of the works of Primo Levi, the famous Turinese writer, who was her cousin.