Book Presentation
Week of the Italian Language
Partisan DiaryA Woman’s Life in the Italian Resistance
BY Ada Gobetti and Translated and edited by Jomarie Alano
First account available in English of an Italian woman’s participation in the Italian Resistance (Resistenza) that covers the entire period between September 1943 and April 1945.
Ada Gobetti’s Partisan Diary is both diary and memoir.
From the German entry into Turin on 10 September 1943 to the liberation of the city on 28 April 1945, Gobetti recorded an almost daily account of events, sentiments, and personalities. Italian senator and philosopher Benedetto Croce encouraged Ada to convert her notes into a book.
Published by Giulio Einaudi editore in 1956, it won the Premio Prato, an annual prize for a work inspired by the Italian Resistance (Resistenza). From a political and military point of view, Partisan Diary provides firsthand knowledge of how the partisans in Piedmont fought, what obstacles they encountered, and who joined
the struggle against the Nazis and the Fascists. The mountainous terrain and long winters of the Alpine regions (the site of many of their battles) and the ever-present threat of reprisals by German occupiers and their fascist partners exacerbated problems of organization among the various partisan groups. 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 incidents.
Ada Gobetti writes of the heartbreak of mothers who lost their sons or watched them leave on dangerous missions of sabotage, relating
it to worries about her own son Paolo. She reflects on the relationship between anti-fascist thought of the 1920s, in particular
the ideas of her husband, Piero Gobetti, and the Resistenza in which she and her son were participating. While the Resistenza represented a culmination of more than twenty years of anti-fascist activity for Ada, it also helped illuminate the exceptional talents, needs, and rights of Italian women, more than one hundred
thousand of whom participated.
Jomarie ALANO is a Visiting Scholar at Cornell University’s Institute for European Studies. She has taught courses on Modern Italian History, Italy and the Jews, Women, War, and Resistance, and Modern European History at Colgate University, Cornell University, Tufts University, and Wells College. Her publications include “Armed With a Yellow Mimosa: Women’s Defense and Assistance Groups in Italy, 1943-1945” about the anti-fascist women of the Gruppi di difesa della donna (Journal of Contemporary History, October 2003); “Patron Saints and Paesani: A History of Italian Immigrants to Auburn, New York, 1900-1940” (Italian Americana, Summer 2004); “The Triumph of the Bouffons: La Serva Padrona at the Paris Opéra, 1752-1754” (The French Review, October 2005), and “Anti-fascism for children: Ada Gobetti’s story of Sebastiano the rooster” (Modern Italy, February 2012). In May 2012, she was invited to speak about Ada Gobetti’s “life of resistance” at a conference in Turin, Italy: Giellismo e azionismo: Cantieri aperti. A member of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and the Società italiana delle storiche, she has recently completed a biography of Ada Gobetti entitled A Life of Resistance: Ada Prospero Marchesini Gobetti, 1902-1968.
Stanislao G. PUGLIESE is professor of modern European history and the Queensboro Unico Distinguished Professor of Italian and Italian American Studies at Hofstra University.
Dr. Pugliese is a former research fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Oxford University, Harvard University and the inaugural Italian Scientists and Scholars of North America Foundation fellow at the Istituto Campano per la Storia della Resistenza in Naples. For the 2014-15 academic year, he will be a visiting scholar at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, at NYU. In 2005, the Association of Italian American Educators named him College Professor of the Year.
A specialist on modern Italy, the anti-fascist Resistance and Italian Jews, Dr. Pugliese is the author, editor or translator of a dozen books on Italian and Italian American history. His first book, Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile (Harvard University Press, 1999) has been translated into Italian, Russian and Romanian.
His essays on Italian and Italian-American history and culture regularly appear in academic and popular journals, and he is the editor of the Italian and Italian American Studies series published by Palgrave Macmillan. Since 1996, Professor Pugliese has directed the Italian American Lecture Series at Hofstra University.