In 1978, ten years after the death of anti-fascist activist Ada Gobetti, Italy’s Ministry of Defence awarded her the Silver Medal for Military Valour. This award, offered to only a handful of Italian women, was given to Gobetti for her participation in the Resistance. Jomarie Alano argues that Gobetti, who combined intellectual resistance with grassroots organising, represents a clear case of female resistance against Fascism that historians have long overlooked. Alano’s biography of Gobetti contributes to a growing scholarship that challenges the idea that women’s participation in the Resistenza consisted solely of assisting male partisans, rather than working towards altering women’s perceptions of their rights to emancipation and their perceptions of gender. Alano also establishes non-violent intellectual engagement as a central force that goes well beyond armed struggle to oppose Fascism, and suggests that Giobetti’s model of non-violent resistance has the potential to inform present-day non-violent revolts against neo-fascism. Her political activism included writing articles in journals and newspapers, meeting in homes to discuss human rights violations, directing partisan activities in the Susa valley, and writing a series of children’s books that challenged fascist beliefs.
Alano draws on Gobetti’s archive to provide several illustrations of the principles that guided Gobetti’s pursuit for individual freedom as the brutality of Fascism took increasing control over the lives of residents and citizens in Italy. Belonging to feminist groups was outlawed, except, as Alano notes, those created by Fascists or the Catholic Church. Given that keeping an anti-fascist diary during the German occupation meant the death penalty if you were caught, the very act of recording became an act of political revolt. Gobetti wrote her entries in a cryptic English that only she could understand. It was not until after the war – in 1956 – that she translated the diary for publication.
A study of Gobetti’s intellectual history raises substantive issues about the question of resistance. How unified were the anti-fascists? How active were women in the Resistance, and to what extent did they bring initiatives to the partisan struggle that were specific to emancipating women in Italian society? And to what degree did Mussolini actually have popular support?
To read A Life of Resistance is to enter the world not only of Gobetti, but of her young husband, the journalist and anti-fascist critic Piero Gobetti; of her mentor Benedetto Croce; and of members of the militant movement Giustizia e Libertà, as well as to learn of her capacious oeuvre of book projects, articles for journals such as Educazione Democratica, and translations of the works of Eugene O’Neill, Charles Dickens, James Boswell, Thomas Harding, and Croce, to name only a few.
The political and the personal are inextricably intertwined in this biography. Alano details both the intellectual energy that ignited the relationship between Ada and Piero and the ensuing tragedy of their activism. The political journals Piero founded, Rivoluzione Liberale and Il Baretti, outraged Mussolini and provoked him to order the prefect Agostino D’Adamo to issue a cease and desist order in 1925. Beaten repeatedly by squadristi and forced to close the publishing house, Piero, in consultation with Ada, went into exile in France to continue publishing anti-fascist materials. Soon after arriving in Paris, he contracted bronchitis and died. He was twenty-five. Ada was left with their infant Paolo and Piero’s legacy: one grounded in what has been described as a ‘revolutionary liberalism’, an inclusive ethic of liberation that struggled against hierarchical systems and identified with the factory councils of Gobetti’s native Turin.
Between September 1943 and Italy’s liberation in April 1945, Ada Gobetti organised a network of safe houses in Turin for anti-fascists, including Primo Levi’s sister, Anna Maria Levi. The Partito d’Azione, (Action Party) operated out of her home at the now-famous 6 Via Fabro, where she and her comrades defended parliamentary democracy through writing, literature, and conversation.
While Alano’s polychromatic technique lends this book a pastiche quality (the book includes a large ensemble of historical figures engaged in a range of political organisations), through a remarkable feat of research, she establishes a strong narrative thread that gives the biography coherence and momentum. The book begins in 1902, the year of Gobetti’s birth, and proceeds chronologically through the First and Second World Wars and postwar politics, with a focus on Gobetti’s work as deputy mayor of Turin, her dedication to educating youth, and ending with an analysis of her legacy of resistance. Alano brings together a range of sources, including interviews with those who knew her, studies of primary source materials and Gobetti’s diary and letters, to illustrate how Gobetti used intellectual and creative activity to bring, as Croce advised, historical and literary works to an Italian people rapidly closing its mind to literature from abroad, given Mussolini’s nationalistic views (p. 75).
As the first female deputy mayor of Turin after the war, Gobetti continued to study the spectres of fascism still present in policies, legislation and the Italian consciousness that might lead to another dictatorship. She analysed the characteristics of the Italian family structure, and raised concerns about ‘patriarchal authority, fear, lack of communication, and inhibition of the kind of freedom that would help a child grow into a responsible individual rather than become a pawn of another dictator’ (p. 202). Gobetti was critical of the compliant practices in Italian schools, including an emphasis on Catholicism for all children, a curriculum built on rote memorisation and an absence of creative expression and critical thought. The civic education that Gobetti and her collaborators created, engaged in and sustained during the Resistenza was, to Gobetti’s mind, fading from consciousness. ‘Ada hoped’, observes Alano, ‘for a pedagogy that promoted active reconstruction and social renewal. She sought to create a child with the civil and moral upbringing that would make that child capable of transforming the world’ (p. 202). Gobetti’s legacy, eloquently rendered by Alano, offers contemporary educators pedagogical insights unfortunately still necessary during these critical times.
