Friday 8 March, 6pm.
Nome in codice: Renata. Storia di Paola Del Din, combattente della Resistenza e agente segreto (ed.UTET) by Alessandro Carlini.
Conversation between the author and Giuliana Pieri. Paola Del Din will join in live stream for a greeting.
On the occasion of The International Women’s Day ICI London presents Nome in codice: Renata (UTET) by Alessandro Carlini, a book about the life of Paola Del Din, italian partisan decorated with Medaglia D’oro al Valor Militare and agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the WWII.
The book retraces the events of the Friulian patriot –who turned 100 years old last 22nd of August and received birthday wishes from Italian and British authorities such as Presidente della Repubblica Sergio Mattarella, the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and His Majesty King Charles the Third-in the days of the struggle for liberation from Nazi-fascism.
Thanks to various interviews with the protagonist and documents from National Archives of London, published for the first time through the Freedom of Information Act, the book talks about the choice of Paola Del Din who, at the age of twenty, joined the Resistance in Udine together with her brother, second lieutenant of the Alpini, Renato Del Din. After his death, on the 25th of April 1944, during a partisan assault against the militia barracks in Tolmezzo, Paola Del Din chose to take up his legacy by accepting a very high-risk mission for the Osoppo Brigade: she had to cross occupied Italy to deliver top secret documents to the allies. The patriot succeeded in that feat and once she joined the British troops in Florence she was chosen to be trained as a paratrooper and secret agent, with the code name Renata, after his brother. She was then included in the Bigelow Mission and started working, as a first woman in Italy, with two other agents in the Friuli region in April 1945, playing a crucial role in the final offensive to liberate the north-east of the country.
Image courtesy of UTET
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Alessandro Carlini, journalist and writer, works for Agenzia Ansa, working as UK Correspondent for several years. He is the author of Partigiano in camicia nera (Chiarelettere 2017), a fictional biography of Uber Pulga, winner of Citta’ di Como Opera Prima and Premio Carver, and of the historical noir Gli sciacalli (Newton Compton 2021), proposed by Paolo Ruffili for the selection of Premio Strega 2021. “Nome in codice Renata” (UTET 2023) shortlisted for the Premio Fiuggi-Storia, is his most recent work.
Giuliana Pieri is Professor of Italian and Visual Art. She is Dean at School of Humanities and Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor at Royal Holloway University of London. She published numerous studies about visual culture, cultural history and popular literature of Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Her research interests are comparative and interdisciplinary, they focus on the intersection of the verbal and the visual and its pedagogical applications. In 2010 she co-curated the exhibition “Against Mussolini. Art and Fall of a Dictator” at Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London. In 2019 she also curated the exhibition “The Making of Modern Italy: Art and Design in the early 1960s” at Estorick Collection as part of the research project funded by AHRC Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020: Interart/Intermedia: www.interdisciplinaryitaly.org . After graduating in Literature at Universita’ di Padova, she moved to UK to continue her studies. She has a Master Degree in History and Theory of Art at University of Kent in Canterbury (1995) and PhDin History of Art at University of Oxford (1998); she started her career at University of Cardiff before moving to Italian Studies Dept at royal Halloway.