Emilio e Joyce Lussu
Emilio Lussu
Emilio Lussu was born in Armungia on 4 December 1890 and spent his childhood years there. After high school and classical high school, he studied law at the University of Cagliari, where he graduated on 29 April 1915. Immediately called to arms, he took part in the Great War as an officer of the “Sassari” Brigade , fighting on the Carso, on the Asiago Plateau, on the Bainsizza and on the Piave. He soon began to doubt the meaning of the war, but continued to fight with great courage for a strenuous coherence with respect to the initial interventionist choice and a deep responsibility towards his soldiers. A highly decorated officer (two silver medals and two bronze medals for Military Valor), after the end of the conflict he returned to Sardinia. on September 14, 1919, preceded by the stories of Sardinian veterans about his exploits.
A leader of the ex-combatants' movement, on 15 April 1921 he was among the founders of the Partito Sardo d'Azione , with which he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in the political elections of 15 May. During this period, Lussu became one of the greatest witnesses to the rise of fascism in Italy and Sardinia, taking an increasingly clear and radical line of opposition. Re-elected to the Chamber in 1924 despite the climate marked by violence and intimidation, on 31 October 1926 he was attacked in his home in Cagliari in Piazza Martiri, choosing not to flee and fatally shooting one of his attackers. After thirteen months spent in prison, in October 1927 he was acquitted in the preliminary investigation for self-defense but immediately sentenced by the regime to five years of deportation to Lipari . On 27 July 1929 he managed to escape with Carlo Rosselli and Francesco Fausto Nitti, first reaching Tunisia and finally France. In Paris, together with Carlo Rosselli, Alberto Tarchiani and other anti-fascists gathered around Gaetano Salvemini, he was among the founders of the Giustizia e Libertà movement, in which he was active throughout his exile. In 1933, he met Joyce Salvadori for the first time in Geneva , who would become his wife and share with him the experience of the clandestine fight against Nazism during the years of the Second World War.
In the 1930s, he wrote and published his main works in Paris: La Catena (1930), March on Rome and its Surroundings (1933), Theory of Insurrection (1936) and A Year on the Plateau (1938). The works that achieved considerable editorial success were above all the March on Rome , an extraordinary autobiographical testimony to the country's progressive moral and political collapse in the face of fascism, and A Year on the Plateau , an authentic masterpiece of international literature on the Great War. In 1939, returning in his memory to his origins in Sardinia, he wrote The Devil's Boar , a tale of hunting and magic set in the countryside of Armungia.
After the fall of Mussolini, Lussu returned to Italy, settling in Rome and taking part in the Resistance as a leader of the Partito d'Azione. In 1945, after the Liberation, he was Minister of Post-War Assistance in the Parri government and Minister for Relations with the Consulta in the first De Gasperi government. In 1946 he was elected to the Constituent Assembly, joining the commission of 75, charged with writing the draft of the Republican Constitution . Senator by right in the first parliament of the Italian Republic, he was re-elected to the Senate in 1953, 1958 and 1963, serving first in the PSI and finally in the PSIUP. His period as a socialist parliamentarian was full of interventions inside and outside the chamber, from the defense of the democratic and anti-fascist republic to the battles for the redemption of Sardinia, with which he would always remain in contact and which he would deal with until the end. He died in Rome on March 5, 1975.
Joyce Lussu
Joyce Lussu was born in Florence on May 8, 1912, to a family of Anglo-Marche origins. Daughter of Guglielmo Salvadori and Giacinta Galletti, she experienced exile already in 1924, when her father was attacked by Florentine squadristi and decided to leave Italy to take refuge in Switzerland.
After graduating from high school as a private student in the Marche region, she studied philosophy at the University of Heidelberg and witnessed the rapid rise of Nazism, deciding to leave Germany. Active in clandestine work to support the Giustizia e Libertà movement, in 1932 she went to Ponza to visit her brother Max, confined to the island for his anti-fascist activities. Here she received the task of leaving for France in search of Emilio Lussu and personally delivering to him a set of secret documents. Their first meeting in Geneva in the spring of 1933 was recalled in the pages of Portrait , her extraordinary autobiography published in 1988. In 1938 Joyce and Emilio Lussu were together in Paris where she studied at the Sorbonne and where they lived until the German occupation of France in June 1940.
With the escape from the French capital, the period of the clandestine fight against Nazi-fascism began, within the climate of the Second World War. In Marseille, in 1941, Joyce specialized in the production of false identity documents to facilitate the escape from France of many wanted anti-fascists. After moving to Lisbon and London, Joyce and Emilio Lussu were the only exponents of Italian anti-fascism to return to occupied France, to resume their commitment to the fight against Nazi-fascism. In Fronti e frontiere , a work written and published in 1945, she was the first to recall this experience in an autobiographical form.
Shortly after the fall of fascism and her return to Italy, Joyce Lussu was charged by the National Liberation Committee with attempting to cross the war front and establish contact with the Badoglio government and the Allies in the south of the country. Her actions in the Resistance as a partisan fighter earned her the decoration with the silver medal for Military Valor , awarded during a solemn ceremony in Cagliari in 1961. In 1944 she arrived in Sardinia for the first time, beginning her travels to discover the island, denouncing its conditions of poverty and underdevelopment in numerous articles. For several years she was a director of the Unione Donne Italiane , pursuing her commitment to women's emancipation . From the end of the 1950s she was an Italian delegate for Bertrand Russell's World Peace Movement, supporting the cause of the liberation movements of African peoples, fighting for independence from European colonialism . This is how she met and translated, around the world, poets such as Nazim Hikmet, Agostino Neto, José Craveirinha and Ho-Chi-Minh. Among her main works are Tradurre Poesia (1967), Padre Padrone Padreterno (1976), L'olivastro e l'innesto ( The Olive Tree and the Grafting ) (1982), Inventario delle cose certe (Inventary of Certain Things ) (1988). Co-founder and president for ten years of the Sardinian Institute for the History of Resistance and Autonomy , she remained in contact with Sardinia and Armungia until her death in Rome on 4 November 1988.
