Ada Grossi

The Italian voice of the 1937 Republican free Spain radio.
The Neapolitan Ada Grossi was the last Italian international brigadist to be left alive. He had shared the microphones of Unión Radio Barcelona and Radio Spagna Libera with Carlos Rosselli between 1936 and 1937, in the middle of the civil war.

Grossi died in Naples this past weekend at the age of 98. She was the daughter of lawyer and socialist leader Carmine Cesare Grossi and her family had to leave Naples pursued by Mussolini’s fascism. After a brief exile in Argentina, his entire family participated in the anti-fascist struggle in Spain.

Grossi’s job was to be the Italian female voice of radio during the contest, broadcaster in time of war of Unión Radio Barcelona, today Cadena SER, and Radio Spagna Libera for broadcasts from the Catalan capital and from Valencia for Italy. He coincided in Spain with the socialist leader Carlo Rosselli in transmissions that urged the 75 thousand fascist fighters that Mussolini sent in support of the traitor Franco to defect and, in addition, the Italians to start the anti-fascist resistance in their country.

The father and the Grossi brothers were arrested and deported to isolation camps in Italy. Ada Grossi spent the end of the civil war and the start of World War II in the concentration camps of southern France, first as a refugee and then, with her mother, as nurses. After decades of marriage to Spanish doctor Enrique Guzmán, Ada Grossi returned to Naples while widowing. Apparently, he never went back to the radio. The newspaper La Repubblica in Rome recalled his figure and titled: “The voice of the radio that denounced fascist crimes.”