This New Book Reveals the Daredevil Lives of Four Italian Women Who Stood Up to Hitler and Mussolini
By delivering newspapers, munitions and secret messages to resistance groups, among many other incredible tasks, the brave fighters strove for a freer world
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Anita Malavasi’s first delivery was salt. In the fall of 1943, she brought a packet of it into the mountains outside the city of Reggio Emilia, in northern Italy, to supply a growing group of soldiers lacking food staples. These fighters were the anti-fascist Resistance—men who’d deserted the armies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and were preparing to fight for freedom.
Though Mussolini had been voted out of power that July, Italy was still firmly under German control, and Nazis were killing or deporting any dissident they came upon. Once 22-year-old Malavasi was comfortable sneaking salt past German checkpoints on her bicycle, she started ferrying illicit publications to the mountains, as well as clothes and food. She wore low-cut, fitted dresses and flirted to disarm Axis officers. She smuggled guns by strapping them to her body, beneath her clothes. One day, she biked through a checkpoint with two heavy bags hanging from her handlebars—each containing concealed bombs.
Malavasi’s earlier involvement in the Italian Resistance—helping Axis soldiers desert their posts—had been motivated only by “humanitarian principles,” she said: “As a woman, you saved another woman’s son.” But as a clandestine courier, Malavasi came to see her efforts as “something conscious,” part of a loftier goal—an Italy free of fascism.
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Malavasi, whose story is little known outside Reggio Emilia, is one of four brave heroines featured in historian Suzanne Cope’s new book, Women of War: The Italian Assassins, Spies and Couriers Who Fought the Nazis. Cope zooms in on the lives of Malavasi and three other Italian women who contributed significantly to Italy’s resistance against fascism. There’s Bianca Guidetti Serra, who dodged bullets while delivering newspapers to anti-fascists in the Alps. Carla Capponi, who bombed German vehicles outside Rome’s opera house and got away with shooting a German colonel on a busy street. And Teresa Mattei, who delivered secret messages for the Resistance and later wrote Italy’s Constitution.
While these women were essential to the Italian Resistance, they also found new frontiers of personal freedom, as their responsibilities exposed them to possibilities of gender equality they’d never known. As Malavasi said after the war, “I didn’t want to listen to my brothers or father telling me what to do.” The Italian people had thrown off fascism, and she had broken free of convention: “I did not intend to rebuild it.”
Women of War: The Italian Assassins, Spies, and Couriers Who Fought the Nazis
The gripping, true, and untold history of the Italian anti-fascist resistance during World War II, told through the stories of four spectacularly courageous women fighters
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This article is a selection from the April/May 2025 issue of Smithsonian magazine
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