Joyce Lussu
Joyce Lussu was born in Florence on May 8, 1912, from a family of Anglo-Marchigian origins. Daughter of Guglielmo Salvadori and Giacinta Galletti, she experienced exile as early as 1924, when her father was attacked by Florentine fascists and decided to leave Italy to take refuge in Switzerland.
After completing her classical studies as a private student in the Marches, she studied philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, deciding to leave Germany in the face of the rapid rise of Nazism. Active in the clandestine work supporting 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 traveling to France to search for Emilio Lussu and personally deliver to him a collection of secret documents. Her first meeting with the Sardist leader would be revisited in the pages of Portrait, an autobiographical work published in 1988.
In 1938 Joyce and Emilio Lussu are in Paris where she studies at the Sorbonne and where they live together until the German occupation of France in June 1940. With the escape from the French capital begins the period of clandestine struggle against Nazifascism within the tempest of the Second World War. In Fronti e frontiere, a work published in 1945, she was the first to recount this experience. The Lussu moved between Marseille, Lisbon and London, before returning to France and then Italy, immediately after Mussolini's fall, settling in Rome occupied by the Germans and taking part in the Resistance. Joyce is immediately tasked by the National Liberation Committee to attempt to cross the war front and make contact with the Badoglio government and the Allies in the south of the country. Her action as a fighting partisan in the Liberation struggle earned her the decoration with a silver medal for Military Valor, presented at a solemn ceremony in Cagliari in 1961.
In September 1944, two months after the birth of her son Giovanni, she arrives in Sardinia for the first time. She begins to travel, often on horseback, to get to know the island and denounces its conditions of poverty and underdevelopment with numerous articles. For several years she is a leader of the Union of Italian Women, carrying forward her commitment to female emancipation. From the late 1950s she is Italian delegate of Bertrand Russell's World Movement for Peace, supporting the cause of African peoples' liberation movements in their struggle for independence from European colonialism. This is how she meets and translates, traveling 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 (1982), Inventario delle cose certe (1988). Co-founder and president for ten years of the Sardinian Institute for the History of Resistance and Autonomy, she continued to return to Sardinia and to Armungia until her death, which occurred in Rome on November 4, 1998.