”’Virgilia d’Andrea”’ ([[February 11]], [[1888]] – [[May 11]], [[1932]]) was an [[Italian]] anarchist poet noted for her inspiring oratory skills and organizing abilities; talents which ultimately lead to her exile of fascist Italy.
[[Image: dossier7dandrea.jpg|frame|Virgilia d’Andrea]]
==Childhood==
Virgilia d’Andrea was born in the Abruzzi town of Sulmona (Italy) in 1888 and raised in Firenze. At an early age she became an orphan and was taken to a Catholic college when she was six years old. She was to stay there until she got her teacher’s degree. By all accounts, she was a woman who had been “raised in pain.” Her mother died when she was a child, and as a teenager she and her brother witnessed the murder of their father at the hands of his second wife’s lover. Her early orphan status resulted in her enrollment at a Catholic college when she was six years old. She was to stay there until she got her teacher’s degree.
==School==
During this period of her life in college her critical thinking and vivid intelligence were constantly at odds with the formal and strongly religious environment of the school. Rather than adapting herself to the environment, she began to develop a rebellious spirit against the Catholic institution as well as many other rigid social orders dominant in that time. Despite the rigidity of her life in school, she never outwardly rebelled. Instead, she immersed herself in literature and developed a great passion for poetry, which was to remain with her to the end of her life.
As a teacher she met [[Armando Borghi]] and from then on she dedicated her life to anarchism. For her anarchism is not a dogma and neither is it a utopia. Or, to be specific, if there is an anarchist utopia, there is also an anarchist reality, and it is this anarchist reality that she was most concerned with communicating. She held that there is a reality found in the aspirations of the human spirit, which is a constant struggle with the environment and convention for self determination and the realisation of freedom. She found it in the writings Homer, Aeschylus, in the mythological Prometheus who, as the son of Justice, lit the spark of thinking in man and put the great hope of liberation in his heart; and who, to assert himself, gave up the beatitude of divine life and rebelled against Jupiter. She found it in Euripides, Shakespeare, Cervantes, etc. a reality passing like a red thread through the works of many writers, painters, artists and litterati.
== Political Life==
After years of work as an elementary schoolteacher, Virgilia became an organizer for the Italian socialist party and was soon assigned the task of establishing a women’s section. Dubbed the “maestrina del popolo,” Virgilia’s sense of economic, political, and social injustice was sharpened by the widespread suffering she witnessed in Italy. While teaching and organizing, she became deeply influenced by the anarchist movement that was spreading throughout the peninsula, whose leaders considered her to be “an indomitable fighter,” dedicated to spreading the gospel of proletarian revolution.
Virgilia’s skill as an orator and writer gained recognition during World War I, and by the 1920s the prefect of Bologna expressed his fear at her ability to handle and manipulate any circumstance, to impress and agitate “the masses” with ease. In 1922 she published her first book of poems, titled Tormento. Italy’s fascist police seized and banned all copies, charging her prose with the ability to disrupt public order and incite class hatred. Although she continued to publish her writing throughout the period, she devoted the majority of her time to activism, believing that organizing workers was critical to concrete social change. In her own words, anarchism meant “freedom and justice . . . the abolition of suffering, of hate, of superstition; the abolition of man’s oppression of man.”
==Exile==
Even after her opposition to fascism had forced her to leave Italy, she was not defeated, but Then she went to America where, in 1932, on the 11th of May, she died in New York, aged forty-three.
After several years of organizing nationwide workers’ uprisings in Italy, Virgilia left to escape the continual surveillance and threats of the fascist government. She continued the struggle in Germany, Holland and France, where she lived from 1923 to 1928. Eventually she joined her campanion, famed-anarchist writer Armando Borghi, in the United States.
As a noted organizer and renowned “campagna poetessa,” Virgilia was invited to speak throughout the United States. From city to city, as far west as California, she spoke before thousands of Italian workers. She told of the metal workers who took over their factories in Italy, of her own imprisonment during the strike, and of the escalating campaign of violence and physical intimidation throughout the country.13 She spoke out against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, her comrades in the movement. She called on workers to oppose Italian nationalism and imperialism, “attentarono colle conquiste coloniali, alla indipendenza dei popoli di colore” (based as it was in colonial conquest and the subjugation of peoples of color), and argued instead for a “cittadino del mondo, figlio del padre Sole e della madre Terra” (citizen of the world, children of father Sun and mother Earth). She spent her life in exile organizing and speaking on behalf of international working-class solidarity in order, as she said, to “feel useful to someone.” She did so while suffering continual illness from the cancer that was consuming her body, the dark premonitions that plagued her, and periodic blackouts.
==Legacy==
When she died in 1933, Italian-American workers remembered that “every time she spoke, she left behind seeded ground.” She was, in their words, a “profuga ribelle” (refugee rebel), a woman who had devoted her life to assisting Italian workers with her energy and creativity.
Almost 30 years after Italian anarcho-syndicalist-feminist women took up their pens and took to the streets and in the same year Virgilia passed away, 60,000 garment workers in New York City, the majority of whom were Italian-American women, walked off their jobs in one of the largest strikes of the Depression era. The Italian women dressmakers who orchestrated the strike, such as Angela Bambace, Tina Catania, Antonetta Lazzaro, Tina Gaeta, Margaret di Maggio, Lucia Romualdi, and Albina Delfino, followed in a long tradition of Italian women’s workplace militancy.
==Bibliography==
Her literary output is slender; it consists of: “Tormento,” a volume of poetry published in 1922 in Italy; “L’Ora di Marmaldo,” a collection of prose published in France in 1928; and “Torce nella Notte,” a collection of articles and treatises published in New York a few days before her death. There are also a lot of papers she gave, mainly in America, and a few unpublished articles, but as far as I know, none of her writings have been translated into English.
==Sources==
[http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/library/DonneSovversive.htm Guglielmo, Jennifer “The History of Italian-American Women’s Radicalism”]
[http://www.libcom.org/history/articles/1890-1932-virgilia-dAndrea/index.php Libcom: Virgilia d’Andrea]
Guglielmo, Jennifer. Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=1695
Ventresca Robert A., and Franca Iacovetta, “Virgilia D’Andrea: The Politics of Protest and
the Poetry of Exile.” In Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World. Eds. Donna Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.
