Teresa Mattei (1921-2013)

Teresa Mattei was born in Quarto (Genoa) on February 1, 1921 and was the third of seven siblings in a middle-class Catholic family. Her father Ugo Mattei was a liberal supporter of the Mazzinian idea, a law graduate but an engineer by trade, who enlisted as a volunteer in World War I only to return from the front as a committed pacifist. Her mother Clara Friedmann herself was from an educated family in which both parents were university graduates and experts in languages (from her maternal grandmother Mattei inherited the name Teresita).

Although those were the years of the rise and affirmation of Fascism, the sons and daughters of the Mattei household grew up in a culturally open and lively family climate marked by free and nonconformist reasoning and political engagement.

After ups and downs and various moves, caused in part by Fascism’s abuse towards their father, the family moved in 1933 to Bagno a Ripoli, near Florence, to a place that, according to Ugo Mattei’s belief in an impending conflict in which Florence would be spared from bombing, would have been peaceful. However, in that town too Ugo Mattei, an active member of Giustizia e Libertà [Justice and Freedom, an antifascist clandestine organisation], was persecuted for his ideas opposed to the regime and subjected to preventive arrest during Mussolini’s visits to the city.

During the years of the regime, Teresa Mattei grew up in a strongly anti-fascist environment, thanks to the important intellectual contamination with the frequenters of Mattei’s home, but also to the precocious activities, shared with other members of the family: from boycotts – such as that of daubing a tombstone just before a parade organised by the fascist authorities against the sanctions given to Italy after the war of aggression in Ethiopia – to propaganda through the distribution of leaflets.

She enrolled in the philosophy course at the university and in 1940, upon the announcement of Italy’s participation in the world conflict, organised an anti-war demonstration together with other colleagues, comrades that were later also active in the Resistance. The men of the Mattei household were called to arms, and in particular her father served in one of the war production factories in Florence, where Teresa Mattei was able to break in and engage in anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi propaganda through the packing of leaflets together with war material, as well as sabotaging machinery together with other women.

Mattei shared many of the anti-Fascist and resistance choices, such as that of joining the Communist Party in 1942, with her brother Gianfranco: a chemist with a brilliant and precocious academic career, a close collaborator of Professor Giulio Natta (Nobel Prize in 1963) and a university professor at the age of twenty-four, he would leave research in favour of the liberation struggle. On July 25, 1943, when after years of wars, military defeats, loss of lives, bombings and discontent among the population, news came of the vote of no confidence of the Grand Council and the fall of Fascism with the arrest of Mussolini and the appointment of Pietro Badoglio as head of the new government of Italy, Teresa Mattei was invited by her brother Gianfranco himself to attend a large anti-fascist meeting in Milan.

With September 8th 1943 and the announcement of the signing of the armistice, wartime events precipitated and Italy became a direct battleground between two foreign armies and between two opposing sides of the Italian population. During the Nazi military occupation of Florence, Teresa Mattei, with the battle name “Chicchi”, became active and went into hiding within the Women’s Defence Groups (GDD), the Communist Youth Front and the Patriotic Action Groups (Gap). Like other women, she took part in various activities: propaganda, assistance and rescue and transportation of weapons, ammunition, documents and information as a courier girl. She would later recall, “The most important thing in our lives is to have chosen our side. It was in the Resistance that I learned that it was important for women to participate in political life as well as in the struggles. It was a great school for me: to have chosen the field at the time when we had to do everything to win and regain freedom… we understood that fear was our enemy”. And “In the partisan war I was a courier girl, carrying weapons, all those things that were dangerous for men […] I went more unnoticed than a man”. In order to function as a liaison between the Youth Front and the Communist Party, Mattei was put in contact with Bruno Sanguinetti, an intellectual and Communist militant in spite of himself being the son of a prominent industrialist who financed the PNF [Partito Nazionale Fascista, National Fascist Party], as well as her future husband after the war. Mattei participated in the Resistance without taking up arms: “I had a horror of weapons, I did not like war at all, I never shot for example. I used fountain pens, one of those black ones that were around then and holding one of them in my hand as if it was a gun, I managed to take away the takings of the State Railways of Florence, which were then channelled to Verona to finance the partisan war. Another time I managed to seize a batch of hams from a large farm to feed fellow partisans”.

In the meantime her brother Gianfranco, who had joined the Gap in Rome with the task, thanks to his scientific knowledge of organizing and improving the production of ordnance for the fight in the city, was arrested due to the denunciation of a spy and locked up in the detention and torture place of Via Tasso. Learning of the capture, the Mattei family tried the path of intercession of the Vatican authorities through the acquaintance of Cardinal Giovanbattista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, who on behalf of Pius XII sent a letter of supplication to the Nazi commander Herbert Kappler. The latter, according to reports by Brother Pancrazio Pfeiffer, who acted as intermediary on Montini’s behalf, tore up the letter without opening it and replied that “Lieutenant Priebke will make this terribly silent communist speak by physical and chemical means”. As a witness, Teresa Mattei would report this episode in the 1990s trials brought against Erich Priebke, which brought him the conviction for the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine more than fifty years later.

Gianfranco Mattei, out of fear of not resisting torture and of betraying himself, hanged himself with the belt of his pants in February 1944, after telling his comrades to place all the blame on him and writing a note to his family: “Dearest parents, due to very unfortunate circumstances for which one cannot blame only adverse fate, I am afraid that these will be my last words. You know what a bond of ardent affection binds me to you, the brothers and everyone. Be strong, knowing that I have been too. I hug you all”. The body was found following a long search only in August 1945.

Once the war was over, Mattei did not stop fighting, albeit in different forms: “I went from armed struggle to political commitment to build a different and democratic Italy, freer and more fair”. Since the creation of the Italian Women’s Union (UDI), she was its member and leader, fighting for the right to vote and the eligibility of women, engaging in the electoral campaign for the June 2nd 1946 vote, which established the Republic as an institutional form and elected the members of the Constituent Assembly to write the constitutional text. At the age of twenty-five, she was the youngest elected and one of twenty-one Constituent Mothers. She was appointed secretary of the presidency, participating enthusiastically in the work, dealing with men and women of different political forces and generations, and was later entrusted with the task of delivering the finished text of the Constitution to the provisional Italian President of the State Enrico De Nicola.

Always careful to assert the principle of substantive equality against all discrimination, she was committed to affirming and defending the rights of women and the weakest. In 1946 it was she who suggested to Luigi Longo (vicesecretary of the Communist Party at the time) that it would be more appropriate to choose the mimosa as the flower symbolising Women’s Day, equally beautiful and fragrant, although easier to find and more modest than others such as orchids. To convince Longo, Mattei invented the existence of an ancient Chinese legend that the mimosa represented the female figure.

In 1948 she refused to stand in political elections, partly to preserve her strong desire for autonomy of judgement over party decisions, partly because of disagreements she had directly with Palmiro Togliatti – Communist Party Leader – also concerning her private life. In 1955 she was disbarred from the Communist Party for her anti-Stalinist criticism.

In any case, Teresa Mattei carried on her social, cultural and civic commitment throughout her long life, in particular she promoted initiatives for peace, and with a focus on the younger generation, on the rights of children and girls, she dealt with education and alternative learning processes. With the idea that anti-fascism is a cardinal point with respect to which one always knows how to orient oneself, she participated in the years of protest between the 1960s and 1970s in Pisa, supporting the workers’ and students’ struggles and always defended the Constitution. Despite her advanced age, she went on the streets in 2001 for the demonstrations against the G8 meeting in Genoa, denouncing from the very beginning the very serious suspension of democratic rights.

When asked in one of her most important interviews what a woman who, like her, had lived (and suffered) so much, she replied, “that the human being can be perfectible, that it can move forward toward a path of truth, of justice, of freedom”.

Teresa Mattei died in 2013 in Lari (PI) at the age of ninety-two. Streets, squares, schools, books, and a play have been dedicated to her in the name of her struggles and commitment.