Umbra Professor Luca Gatti Publishes Second Book
Less than a year after successfully defending his doctoral dissertation, the Umbra Institute’s Professor Luca Gatti has published it as a book.
A Woman at the Center of the Anti-Fascist Struggle
The historiography of Italians who fought against fascism in Europe has been overwhelmingly about italiani, not italiane–in other words, about male partisans, rather than the women who also fought. Professor Luca Gatti is part of the new wave of historical research into the women who were an integral part of that political (and military) movement. Gatti had already written a historical novel, Trentasei, on Mario Angeloni, a Perugian who left Italy to fight with the Spanish Republicans in 1936.
His dissertation, though, was Angeloni’s partner, Giaele Angeloni, who left to help the Republicans as well and fled only when the army under Franco was at the gates of Barcelona. Gatti recounts her vicissitudes–flight to France, then becoming the manager of an orphanage for refugee Spanish children in Savoy, then exile in Mexico, where she started a section of an Italian antifascist organization.
A Series of Book Presentations
Gatti presented his books in the prestigious National Archives in Perugia, where one of the professors who introduced him as an intellettuale poliedrico (“a Renaissance man”) to the large crowd assembled. Gatti has been invited to present the book locally at the Feltrinelli bookstore and the national association of partisans, as well as Fondazione Fratelli Roselli (in Florence) and the Fondazione Pietro Nenni (in Rome). The Fondazione Nenni actually organized the publishing of the book given its significance for the new historiography of Italy’s anti-fascist struggle.
Gatti said that his next book will be a return to fiction to shake off all the archival dust accumulated during his years of research for his dissertation.