Nello Rosselli

Origins and early life

Nello Rosselli was born in Rome on 29 November 1900, a year after his brother Carlo, into the same two Jewish families — the Rossellis of Livorno and the Pincherles of Venice — and, like his brother, was a Jew by birth, raised in a secular home whose religion was the Italy of Mazzini; he was the cousin of the novelist Alberto Moravia, and this fiche records his ancestry as the family itself lived it, Italian first, Jewish second, and Jewish without denial.

Work and career

Where Carlo was the man of action, Nello was the scholar: a pupil of Gaetano Salvemini at Florence, he became one of the finest historians of his generation, whose Mazzini e Bakunin of 1927 traced the birth of the Italian workers' movement in the quarrel between the republican and the anarchist, and whose Carlo Pisacane nel Risorgimento of 1932 rescued the socialist patriot of 1857 from oblivion. He refused the fascist oath in spirit if not in form, was arrested in 1927 and sent to internal exile on Ustica for his part in his brother's underground work, and lived under police surveillance, writing, teaching privately and preparing a history of Italy's foreign policy that he did not live to finish.

In June 1937 he travelled to Normandy to visit Carlo, who was taking the waters at Bagnoles-de-l'Orne after his return from Spain; on 9 June the two brothers were ambushed on a country road and stabbed to death by assassins of the Cagoule, the French fascist league, paid and directed by Mussolini's secret service. He was thirty-six. Their mother Amelia survived them, and their names became, for the Italian Resistance, the names of its martyrs.