A Revolutionary Father

Garibaldi at Mentana, 1867

Much has been written about the conditions for women in Italy around the time when Nada was born. They could not vote, sign documents, own property, or do much of anything without the consent of their fathers, brothers, guardians, etc...

One of the most famous contemporary books on this phenomenon was Sibilla Aleramo's Una Donna. Aleramo, who managed to achieve a certain degree of notoriety in Italian literary and journalistic circles, spent much of her childhood in Civitanova Marche, a port town not terribly far from Morrovalle (and incidentally, the beach town where I decamped with my Italian family during my first trip to Italy).

Since there was no school in Civitanova Marche at the time, Aleramo was provided basic schooling at home and then put to work at the factory where her father was a line manager. After one of her father's workers forced himself on her when she was fifteen, her father sought justice by making the man marry his daughter.

This wasn't a remedy Aleramo's father had come up with on his own. It was a far more common practice than I care to think about. The practice was called "matrimonio riparatore" - or remedial marriage - and it allowed rapists to escape conviction if they married their victims to keep them from becoming "damaged goods."

Nada seemed to defy those odds, primarily - it seems to me - due to her father's political beliefs. Ugo Peretti, my great-great-grandfather, was a literal revolutionary. As a young man, he left a comfortable life with his well-to-do parents to join up with Giuseppe Garibaldi, the man responsible for the military campaign against the Papal States that ultimately resulted in the unification of Italy.

Ugo Peretti (1845 - 1913)

Ugo was a veteran of two wars with Garibaldi's army - one victory (at Bezzecca, in 1866) and one defeat (at Mentana, right outside the gates of Rome, in 1867). The second battle resulted in Ugo's capture and imprisonment at Castel Sant'Angelo, the famed fortress on the Tevere in the historic center of the Eternal City.

Because the Papal States were a political and military force led by the Pope, one of the central tenets of Garibaldi's struggle was anti-clericalism. That meant that Ugo, by virtue of having joined that movement, rejected many of the traditional beliefs inherited by Italian society from the Catholic Church.

This was a movement that also espoused the idea that a prosperous, unified Italy required educated Italians - and that explicitly included the women. Garibaldi's own wife, the Brazilian Anita Garibaldi, was one of his comrades in arms - a trait that Garibaldi celebrated openly.

Nada was, by any measurable standard for the era, just as educated and just as professionally successful as her physician older brother. While it was still rare for women to attend high school and get traditional university degrees, she enrolled in 1895 at the Istituto Superiore di Magistero Femminile in Rome - an elite, female-only institution attached to La Sapienza where women could earn advanced teaching degrees so they could aspire to teach other women to be teachers. She earned her magisterial diploma in Italian Language and Literature in 1898, and carried the prestigious title of Professoressa for the rest of her life.

None of this would have been possible without Ugo's consent, or a supportive posture toward ensuring his daughters were just as well-educated as his son.

At the ISMF, Nada was surrounded by students who came from the top 1% of Italian society, several of whom - I suspect - opened doors for her that she would have been unable to open for herself. She was also taught by an elite group of literary scholars, including the father of Verismo, Luigi Capuana - whose style she seems to have adopted in her early writing - and renowned modernist playwright Luigi Pirandello. These two men, a mentor / mentee duo, reshaped Italian literature precisely during the years when Nada was their student.

But how on earth did she get there? My grandmother always talked about her father being poor, and after his wife died in a carriage accident in 1885, Ugo seems to have gone off the proverbial cliff.

I was determined to find out.