Daniela Vitagliano
Aix-Marseille University.
This paper approaches the liberation of occupied Italy from the perspective of Southern Italy in order to examine it as a historical act that generated new tensions, contradictions, and asymmetries of power. At the moment of liberation, the South was marked by profound social and economic inequalities. On the basis of previously unpublishedarchival documents by Rita Majerotti, a militant deeply rooted in the South and attentive to the “Southern Question,” we show how liberation emerges not as a linear movement toward freedom but as an ambiguous and conflict-laden process.
A communist and antifascist activist, Rita Majerotti served as head of the Bari section of the Italian Communist Party, spent the years of the Resistance in Rome, and lived in Palermo during the immediate postwar period. Despite her political engagement, she has been largely forgotten and long marginalized in the collective memory of the Party and in Italian political historiography more broadly (Pieroni Bortolotti 1978). Thus far, scholarship on Majerotti has focused primarily on biographical reconstruction, without offering a sustained analysis of her political thought or journalistic practice.
Among the manuscripts examined1 – drafts of public lectures and preparatory materials for articles published in both local and national newspapers – Majerotti urges the Allies to remember that the Italian people, “healthy andintelligent, even here in the Mezzogiorno,” had long been kept in subjugation by the agrarian bourgeoisie, which systematically exploited agricultural workers and perpetuated structural deprivation.
The originality of Majerotti’s perspective lies in her ability to weave together, within a single political discourse,the principles of women’s emancipation, the Southern Question, and a sustained concern for workers’ rights. Through her words, this study seeks to contribute to a reassessment of traditional historiography by foregrounding a perspective from the margins – marginal geographically, politically, and historiographically. The dominant narrative of the liberation of occupied Italy is thus revisited, renewed, and critically challenged.
Daniela Vitagliano is a Temporary research and teaching assistant at Aix-Marseille University. She holds a PhD in Contemporary Italian Literature. She completed two postdoctoral fellowships at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and at Université Côte d’Azur.