Barbara Meazzi
Université Côte d’Azur
The archive of Ada Prospero Gobetti Marchesini preserves, among other materials, the papers related to the writing of her book Camilla Ravera – Vita in carcere e al confine (Life in Prison and in Confinement/Internal Exile), published in 1969 thanks to her tenacity. The book is now almost completely forgotten, partly because it has never been republished since. Only a few scholars still refer to it (among them some young researchers, a matter of hope). However, it contains extraordinary pages by Camilla Ravera, who for several years – until her arrest in 1930 – came to occupy a central role in the organization of the clandestine Communist Party.
In Ada Prospero’s archive, the Camilla Ravera file contains the materials used for the volume: letters, interviews, and documents relating to Ravera’s account of the years of clandestine struggle, followed by imprisonment and internal exile. Some of these documents remain unpublished; the correspondence with Ada Prospero (the two women met in 1945) and the other materials both recount and flesh out what is known about Camilla Ravera’s life, her Resistance and her resilience in the 1960s.
My presentation, based on the Ravera collection in the Ada Prospero Gobetti Marchesini archive, seeks to restore Camilla Ravera’s voice: the voice of a courageous activist, who was a troublesome figure for the Communist party that had excluded and marginalized her, first in Ventotene (1939-1943) and then again in the aftermath of the Liberation, because of her opposition to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact.
Barbara Meazzi is Professor of Italian Studies at the Université Côte d’Azur (Nice), director of the Centre de la Méditerranée Moderne et Contemporaine, and co-director of Les Cahiers de la Méditerranée. She is co-editor of the collection “Arts Cultures Pouvoirs” at the Presses de l’Université Savoie Mont Blanc.