Adele Bei, a life for freedom and a fair job

The Gramsci Institute of the Marche did well to support Mirko Sebastiani's biography dedicated to the figure of Adele Bei, Constituent Mother and, before that, protagonist of the Resistance in Rome.

Little known, overshadowed by the most famous mothers of our Republic (such as Nilde Iotti, Lina Merlin, Teresa Mattei) - if we can speak of notoriety for women who deserve much more than the attention paid to them by the voices of feminism, the ANPI and other political and civil groups - she had a life that is novel and does not end at key moments of our democracy.

Born in 1904 into a humble socialist family in Cantiano, in the Marche region, the third of eleven children, forced to leave school to ensure support at home by working as a farm labourer, Adele married Mario Ciufoli, a fellow countryman who joined the communist cause by disassociating himself from the PSI in 1921, at the age of 18. The two young anti-fascists are forced to go abroad, as they cannot live their militancy in a country mortified by Fascism: their two children, Angelina and Ferrero, are born in Belgium and Luxembourg, then move to Russia, as happens to many children of PCI members. She plays the flamingo, that is, the 'secret agent' who returns to Italy in disguise to transmit information to comrades and distribute propaganda material. One day in 1933, however, what was feared happened: she was betrayed by a spy, spotted and arrested by the fascist police.

She does not say a word about her comrades and their organisation, despite the insults, threats, beatings, and five months in an isolation cell at Mantellate, a women's prison in Rome. In front of the special court for the defence of the State, which tries to appeal to the guilt of her being a mother, she retorts scornfully: 'Don't worry about my children, they are in good hands, think rather of the millions of big and small who suffer the most inhuman punishments in Italy because of you. It is precisely for this reason, because I have their fate at heart, that I stand before you today'. Courageous and heavy words like the sentence she is given: eighteen years imprisonment. She will serve seven, then the sentence will be converted into confinement in Ventotene, where she meets the front line of the PCI, and not only. She met Sandro Pertini and above all Giuseppe Di Vittorio, she who cared about the conditions of Italian workers. Who fights for those who are exploited and victims of unfair contracts. Who believes in a welfare state attentive to the poorest and unfortunate, who do not have a job.

It is no coincidence that it is the CGIL that nominates her to the National Council, the body that precedes the Constituent Assembly, where she will be elected in the PCI. And still in the Communist Party, Adele Bei will be part of the parliamentarians of the next three legislatures, spending herself on the subject of work and her land.