Joyce Salvadori Lussu was born in Florence on 8th May 1912.
As the youngest of three, after her sister Gladys and brother Max, she grew up in the capital city of Tuscany and in close contact with her parents: Guglielmo Salvadori and Giacinta Galletti, anti-fascist intellectuals from Marche with English ancestry. She attended elementary school for a short time and her education largely took place at home, in a house «with more books than furniture.»
At the age of twelve, in 1924, she was forced to leave Italy with her family after the brutal beatings her father had suffered from the Florentine Blackshirts. The family settled in Switzerland, where Joyce and Max attended a school run by pacifist intellectuals. While working, Joyce enrolled as an independent student in the Philosophy faculty at Heidelberg University in Germany; however, in 1933, the rise of Nazism made it morally impossible for her to continue her studies. She returned to Switzerland to her parents and got in touch with the anti-fascist organization Giustizia e Libertà. While participating in clandestine activity she met Sardinian antifascist Emilio Lussu, a legendary First World War captain. After their first meeting in Geneva, they would only meet again in 1939. Between 1934 and 1939, Joyce lived in Africa. About those years she would only recount briefly, echoing African nature in her poems included in the collection Liriche, published with the patronage and review of Benedetto Croce. Some of these poems now appear in the collection Inventario delle cose certe. It is only through the recent research of historian Elisa Signori that we have been able to understand this period, so seldom described by Lussu.
Back in Europe, together with Emilio Lussu she moved to Paris, the capital in which Italian anti-fascism had gathered. With the German occupation of the city in June 1940, the anti-fascist resistance regrouped in southern France. In Marseille, Joyce and Emilio organised clandestine departures; Joyce learned to forge ID documents for those who had to leave Europe. This work took the couple to Portugal for a few months. Joyce studied Portuguese in Lisbon; thereafter, convened by the British War Office, they travelled together to England attempting to launch an insurrectional plan to free Italy from the yoke of dictatorship and the Nazi-Fascist alliance. She attended military training camps near London.
Joyce returned to Italy after 25 July 1943. The partisan resistance began following the armistice of 8 September: while Rome was under Nazi occupation, Joyce carried out a liaison mission for the CLN1 to the South. Her bravery was belatedly acknowledged in 1966 with the award of a Silver Medal. Her experiences with anti-fascism and partisan fighting can be read in her highly autobiographical works, Fronti e frontiere (1944), L'uomo che voleva nascere donna (1976), and Lotte, ricordi e altro (1992).
She became a mother in the summer of 1944. Giovanni Lussu was born in a liberated Rome, in the great excitement of postwar reconstruction. In September, Emilio took his wife and son to Armungia, the Sardinian village where he was born. Driven by a desire for firsthand knowledge, Joyce sought out the island and its inhabitants; she encountered the farmer-shepherds, many of whom had also fought as soldiers in the Sassari Brigade on the Asiago upland. She listened to their stories, and those of their women, forging a deep and enduring connection with Sardinia. In 1982, she published a short story collection dedicated to Sardinian culture: L'olivastro e l'innesto. In 1951, during the Popular Front years, she joined women workers from across the island in Cagliari for the First Congress of Differentiated Associations. In contrast, despite having been involved in the founding of the Italian Women's Union, she severed ties with the organization in 1953. She considered it as a subordinate electoral reservoir, desired by the left-wing parties which, in her opinion, should have worked harder on female integration and participation in politics.
In the following years she travelled around Europe following the World Peace Movement. In Stockholm she met the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet and became his friend and translator, making his poems known in Italy. Following her friendship and collaboration with Hikmet (in 1991 she wrote Il Turco in Italia ovvero l’italiana in Turchia), she went on to translate then-unknown poets she joined in Africa, Portugal, and the North and East of Europe, as well as in Kurdistan. In Tradurre Poesia (1967) Joyce explains how, by allowing words to travel with her, she also felt she was carrying on the values of the Resistance.
In Italy, she was swept up in the student unrest of '68, finding hope for a better future in the aspirations of the young generation. Between the 1970s and 1980s she wrote the essays Padre padrone padreterno (1976) and L'acqua del 2000 (1977). In collaboration with a group of Piceno scholars, she studied local history and co-wrote two volumes for schools on the history of Fermo. She dedicated her studies to the Sibyl, an ancient figure associated with the Sibillini Mountains, investigating the pre-Christian cultures of the region and the Barbagia diviners. In 1982, she wrote Il Libro Perogno.
In her old age, she met with students whom she referred to as her 'living future', using the stories of what she had seen and experienced as an opportunity to meditate on the present. In 1996 she told her story to writer Silvia Ballestra, who published their recorded conversations in Joyce L. Una vita contro.
Joyce died in Rome on 4th November 1998, aged 86, as rebellious in death as she had been in life, with a cigarette between her fingers instead of a rosary.
Translated by Alessia Tavaroli.
1 Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale (National Liberation Committee): political umbrella organization and the main representative of the Italian resistance movement fighting against the occupying forces of Nazi Germany.