 | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
|
Auro Roselli (1921 in Pescara - May 12, 2013) was an Italian resistant, journalist, photographer, writer and inventor. [1]
Roselli grew up in a working-class district of Turin. His father, Gherardo Roselli, was a sculptor, and his mother was a homemaker. From his father and his teacher of Humanities, Gaudenzio Manfredi, he learned to question authority under Fascism. This landed him briefly in jail at age thirteen, his first political imprisonment.
Growing up, he became attracted to the English language, Anglo-American culture, and the international and liberal democratic vision they provided. A brief attendance at the University of Turin in the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures was interrupted in 1940 by a military draft into the cadet officers' course of the Alpini troops. There he was arrested on suspicion of having conspired against Fascism with some other students arrested in Turin [2]
Roselli was tried in the Tribunale Speciale per la Difesa dello Stato in Rome, and sentenced to two and a half years in the penitentiary of Forte Urbano, in the Emilia region. [3] He was liberated after the fall of the Mussolini government, in the brief interregnum and political amnesty under General Badoglio. On September 8, 1943, the Italian army collapsed and Nazi forces occupied Italy.
Roselli first joined a monarchist partisan formation in the Lanzo valley, west of Turin. Later, he worked with the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, guiding escaped Allied prisoners to neutral Switzerland. Caught with a group of them at the railway station of Novara, he managed to escape, and eventually made his way to Switzerland and the refugee camp of Tramelan. Among his encounters, there was Piero Chiara, later renowned as a writer, who was recruiting students for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor of the CIA.
Escaping from the work camp, he returned to Italy. The first village he came to was in the mountains of Lake Como. There, under the nom de guerre of Gigi, he founded a partisan formation with some local young men and Lombard students who refused to collaborate with the Nazi Occupation. Their activities consisted of raiding Fascist controlled barracks and warehouses, gathering and distributing information, and guiding fugitives from the Nazis to Switzerland.
His new formation was part of the Garibaldi Brigades, under Communist control. In disagreement with his command on both political ideology and military strategy, Roselli resigned his command and returned to Switzerland. There he joined Giustizia e Libertà, a formation supported and armed by the OSS. Upon hearing the news that the Resistance had gained control of Milan, Roselli and his new partisan comrades immediately returned to Italy.
During his partisan activity on Lake Como, Roselli had befriended some Milanese refugees, who after the war introduced him to the writer Elio Vittorini. Under Vittorini's sponsorship, Roselli entered journalism. In 1949 he was given his dream job: correspondent from New York for the leading weekly journal l'Europeo, under the direction of Arrigo Benedetti. He remained in New York until his visa expired in 1951.
Roselli then transferred to Montreal, working as a political commentator for the International Service of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Roselli finally returned to New York when his wife, illustrator and designer Luciana Amelotti Roselli, secured a residents' visa for the couple. After a period of free-lancing for a range of leading Italian journals including Il Mondo, a Rome-based political and cultural weekly, L'Espresso, a Milanese weekly, and as a photographer for Epoca, an Italian version of Life magazine, Roselli was recommended by his erstwhile employer Benedetti to Gaetano Baldacci, director of the newly founded Milanese daily, Il Giorno.
Roselli's career as a correspondent, photographer and editorialist at Il Giorno spanned over three decades from 1956 to 1989. [4] Responsible for the coverage of every aspect of the United States, from politics to culture, science, technology and life-style, he was a defining voice in Italy for such major events as the Cape Canaveral launchings, the Kennedy and King assassinations, Watergate, the Iranian hostage crisis, and the Reagan and Clinton years.
His role models in journalism were the television newscaster David Brinkley, and the columnist Walter Lippmann. When Roselli met the latter at a party in the 1970s, they discussed the difficulty of giving truly novel news, as opposed to simply expected information. From the master, he learned the maxim: "You can only tell people real news if your readers know half of it already".
On his retirement from Il Giorno, Roselli moved to Southern California with his second wife, actress Elise Hunt, and became a US citizen in 1994. He continues to write fiction and non-fiction books, plays and stories, but his main interest has shifted to inventions in ecology and aviation. He earned a solo piloting license in 1970. He holds two patents on concepts in solar-powered flight and a design for a paraflier.
Roselli was married to Luciana Amelotti Roselli, from Alessandria, Italy, from 1950 to their divorce in 1964. He has one daughter, Elisa, born in New York City in 1956. He married his second and current wife, Elise Hunt from Milton, Massachusetts, in 1969. His sister, Lucia Roselli (b. 1930) is also a writer
Throughout his career, Roselli has been an advocate of Anglo-American style liberal democracy, although always aware of its defects and limitations. His war years left him with experience of authoritarian regimes of several political colours, and their methods and jargon. He kept aloof from the strongly left-wing doctrines of the Italian intelligentsia of the post-war period, identifying more with the youth, liberation and peace movements in the USA of the 60s and 70s. In the critical Presidential election of 1968, for example, he strongly supported the dovish Democratic candidate, Eugene McCarthy, who was the first politician to promote an end to US involvement in Vietnam.
In addition to his daily articles for Il Giorno, Roselli has published a children's book, The Cats of the Eiffel Tower, with illustrations by Laurent de Brunhoff (NY: Delacorte, 1967). It was a story he made up for his little daughter Elisa on their long drives while holidaying in France.
His letters from prison during the war years form the core of a biographical work by his sister, Lucia Roselli: Mio Fratello Ando' in Galera (Edizioni L'Arciere Cuneo, 1990).
Roselli filmed a documentary about Italian Americans that was aired on RAI TV in 1961, and was the cinematographer for another documentary, Paese d'America (1959), on the same theme, made with film director Gian Luigi Polidoro, and shown at the Cannes festival.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |
Italo Calvino was an Italian writer and journalist. His best-known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).
The Italian Resistance consisted of all the Italian resistance groups who fought the occupying forces of Nazi Germany and the fascist collaborationists of the Italian Social Republic during the Second World War in Italy from 1943 to 1945. As a diverse anti-fascist and anti-nazist movement and organisation, the Resistenza opposed Nazi Germany and its Fascist puppet state regime, the Italian Social Republic, which the Germans created following the Nazi German invasion and military occupation of Italy by the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS from 8 September 1943 until 25 April 1945.
Ferruccio Parri was an Italian partisan and anti-fascist politician who served as the 29th Prime Minister of Italy, and the first to be appointed after the end of World War II. During the war, he was also known by his nom de guerreMaurizio.
Cesare Pavese was an Italian novelist, poet, short story writer, translator, literary critic, and essayist. He is often referred to as one of the most influential Italian writers of his time.
Elio Vittorini was an Italian writer and novelist. He was a contemporary of Cesare Pavese and an influential voice in the modernist school of novel writing. His best-known work, in English speaking countries, is the anti-fascist novel Conversations in Sicily, for which he was jailed when it was published in 1941. The first U.S. edition of the novel, published in 1949, included an introduction from Ernest Hemingway, whose style influenced Vittorini and that novel in particular.
l'Unità is an Italian newspaper, founded as the official newspaper of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1924. It was supportive of that party's successor parties, the Democratic Party of the Left, Democrats of the Left, and, from October 2007 until its closure in 2017, the Democratic Party.
Giuseppe "Beppe" Fenoglio was an Italian writer, partisan and translator from English. The works of Fenoglio have two main themes: the rural world of the Langhe, where he was born and raised, and the Italian resistance movement, both largely inspired by his own personal experiences in them; equally, the writer has two styles: the chronicle and the epos.
The Italian Civil War was a civil war in the Kingdom of Italy fought during the Italian campaign of World War II between Italian fascists and Italian partisans and, to a lesser extent, the Italian Co-belligerent Army.
Giovanni Arpino was an Italian writer and journalist.
Giorgio Valentino Bocca was an Italian essayist and journalist, also known for his participation in the World War II partisan movement.
Maurizio Arena was an Italian film actor. He appeared in more than 70 films between 1952 and 1978.
Prima Linea was an Italian Marxist–Leninist terrorist group, active in the country from the late 1970s until the early 1980s.
Carlo De Benedetti is an Italian industrialist, engineer, and publisher. He is both an Italian and naturalized Swiss citizen. He was awarded the Order of Merit for Labour by the Italian state in 1983, the Medaglia d'oro ai benemeriti della cultura e dell'arte and the Legion d'Honneur in 1987.
Simone Benedetti is an Italian professional footballer who plays as a centre back for Serie C Group C club Avellino.
Agostino Casali known as Tino was an Italian politician and partisan, President of National Association of Italian Partisans from 2006 to 2009.
The Brigate Garibaldi or Garibaldi Brigades were partisan units aligned with the Italian Communist Party active in the armed resistance against both German and Italian fascist forces during World War II.
The Brigate Osoppo-Friuli or Osoppo-Friuli Brigades were autonomous partisan formations founded in the headquarter of the Archbishop Seminary of Udine on 24 December 1943 by partisan volunteers of mixed ideologies, already active in Carnia and Friuli before the Badoglio Proclamation of 8 September. The partisans in this brigade adhered to various and often conflicting ideologies, including both secularism and Catholicism, as well as socialism and liberalism.
Carla Voltolina, later Carla Pertini, was a journalist, Italian partisan, and psychotherapist. She undertook investigations into prostitution in Italy and provided therapy at hospitals and addiction-treatment clinics across Italy.
The Corpo Volontari della Libertà was the unified command structure of the Italian Resistance during the Second World War, recognized both by the Allies and the "southern" Italian governments.
Piazzale Loreto massacre was a Nazi-Fascist massacre that took place in Italy, on 10 August 1944 in Piazzale Loreto, Milan, during the World War II.
