A Life of Resistance

This is a meticulously detailed and engaging account of the life of the extraordinary Italian woman of letters and action, Ada Prospero Marchesini Gobetti (1902–1968). In this book, Jomarie Alano takes us through Ada Gobetti’s life story, her work as a teacher, scholar, translator, author, partisan, politician and advocate of women’s rights, and her relationships with family and friends in Turin, including her anti-fascist husband, Piero Gobetti, who died in exile in Paris in 1926 following fascist beatings, leaving Ada to raise their six-week-old son alone, and the Italian liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce, who, with his family, embraced and nurtured Ada following her husband’s death. Like Eric Hobsbawm, Ada Gobetti lived through desperately ‘interesting times’: war, fascism, (civil) war, post-war reconstruction (and disillusion). Alano ties Gobetti’s personal life and story to the wider context of local, national and international events not as a colourful or explanatory backdrop but in order to acknowledge her role as a protagonist, in the long anti-fascist resistance centred in her home-city of Turin and in the rebuilding of Turinese—and national—life following the end of the fascist dictatorship. The inseparability of personal and political, home and work, public and private in Gobetti’s world-view and experiences emerges clearly from Alano’s research. Throughout, Ada Gobetti’s own thoughts and words—gleaned from her correspondence and writings and from the correspondence and writings of the many who wrote to, and about, her—take centre stage

Context (archaeology · Dictatorship · Human rights · Order (exchange · Personal life · Political science · Politics · Private life · Public life · Resistance (ecology · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · World War II · Classics · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law