Rossana Banti fought to free Italy with laughter as well as weapons

[demmiblue]

She loved that coat. It was the only one she had, made of thick smooth Casentino cloth, which some said was the best in Italy. Second, it was bright vermilion, as red as could be, bound to get her noticed and appreciated as she walked down the street. Red was her colour in all kinds of ways. The short form of Rossana was “Rossa”, so that was her name among her friends. And her politics were red too, fiercely anti-fascist and of the left. Her approach wasn’t intellectual, since she preferred actual parties to the intense philosophical debates some of her friends had. But then she was only a schoolgirl. She knew quite enough to have joined a group of young Communist Partisans in Rome to undermine, and fight if they could, the German occupation and the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. All of them agreed it was the right thing and the only thing to do. Justice, solidarity, freedom! And joy.

She loved that coat. It was the only one she had, made of thick smooth Casentino cloth, which some said was the best in Italy. Second, it was bright vermilion, as red as could be, bound to get her noticed and appreciated as she walked down the street. Red was her colour in all kinds of ways. The short form of Rossana was “Rossa”, so that was her name among her friends. And her politics were red too, fiercely anti-fascist and of the left. Her approach wasn’t intellectual, since she preferred actual parties to the intense philosophical debates some of her friends had. But then she was only a schoolgirl. She knew quite enough to have joined a group of young Communist Partisans in Rome to undermine, and fight if they could, the German occupation and the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. All of them agreed it was the right thing and the only thing to do. Justice, solidarity, freedom! And joy.

That was where the red coat came in, on those chilly evenings in November and December 1942 when she cycled after school from Piazzale Clodio to Nomentura and then to Monte Sacro. She was part of a relay taking copies of L’Unità, the main Communist newspaper, now banned and underground, to a butcher who sent them on. No one would suspect her, she thought, a random girl on a bike in a nice eye-catching coat. But then, unhappily, someone did. The butcher was arrested and shot, and “the girl in the red coat” was now on the Gestapo’s watch list. At that point she had to go into hiding and put her coat away.

On other relay missions she took weapons, though not without a dose of terrors. One was by bus over rough roads, where with every jolt she had to cling tighter to an enormous suitcase and try to keep it flat. The situation wasn’t helped by her friend Maurizio, who was behaving as eager young men do once they are engaged. After one especially bad bump he shouted, “Rossa, mind those eggs!” Then they both burst out laughing. They were not engaged at all, just “doing the couple” to deflect suspicion, and the “eggs” she was carrying, more or less carefully, were nitroglycerine explosives. “Too many boyfriends” was something the Gestapo’s spies also noted down.

All her resistance work had a certain pattern to it. She tricked the enemy by appearing as a non-threatening, even silly young woman, because that was the role the fascist regime had long assigned to them. (How little imagination fascists had!) Women were fashion-plates, girlfriends, mothers, wives: ancillary to men. Most did not dream of taking part in politics or war, and she helped to add fire (sometimes too literally) to their rather helpless demonstrations when their men were taken away. Doing so made her a ragazza terribile, a terrible girl. But what did they expect from a general’s daughter? She was as fervent as he was that Italy should be free. And when in June 1944, nine months after the Armistice between Italy and the Allies, she volunteered to work for Britain’s Special Operations Executive (soe), he let her go almost as soon as she asked him, telling her only: “Do your duty...as best you can.”

https://www.economist.com/obituary/2021/11/27/rossana-banti-fought-to-free-italy-with-laughter-as-well-as-weapons