Intellectuals Displaced from Fascist Italy

Emigrant family members

• Camillo Berneri (Lodi 20 May 1897 – Barcellona 5 May 1937), father: Anarchist intellectual and militant, emigrated to France in 1926 because of Fascist persecution. He proposed an anti-dogmatic Anarchist thought and was a ferocious critic of the Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union. He was assassinated by Stalinists in Barcellona in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War.
• Giovanna Caleffi Berneri (Gualtieri, Reggio Emilia, 4 May 1897 - Genoa 14 March 1962), mother: teacher and editor of Anarchist publications, emigrated to France with her husband and daughters in 1926 as a result of the Fascist persecution. In Paris, she was involved in political activity and supported her family by running a grocery shop. She returned to Italy in 1941 as a prisoner and then was confined in Lacedonia (Avellino). After a year, she managed to escape and joined the Resistance. After the war, she continued her political activity.
  
• Maria Luisa Berneri Richards (Arezzo 1 March 1918 - London 13 April 1949), sister: she emigrated to France at the age of eight with her family and became a journalist and Anarchist activist. In 1931 she met Vero Recchioni (Vernon Richards), and they married in 1937. She never returned to Italy permanently and died prematurely in London.
• Adalgisa Fochi (Parma 31 July 1865 – Reggio Emilia 16 August 1957), grandmother: teacher and daughter of a Garibaldino. She was married to Stefano Berneri, but the couple eventually divorced, and Adalgisa kept her son Camillo with her. She emigrated to France in the second half of the 1920s, as she refused to swear the oath of loyalty to the King and the State. In Paris, she reunited with her son and her nieces, Maria Luisa and Giliana. After Camillo's death, she stayed in Paris. She returned to Italy after the war.