Olivia Rossetti Agresti
Encyclopedia
Olivia Rossetti Agresti (September 30, 1875 – November 6, 1960) was a British activist, author, editor, and interpreter
Interpreting
Language interpretation is the facilitating of oral or sign-language communication, either simultaneously or consecutively, between users of different languages...

. A member of one of England's most prominent artistic and literary families, her unconventional political trajectory began with anarchism
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...

, continued with the League of Nations
League of Nations
The League of Nations was an intergovernmental organization founded as a result of the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War. It was the first permanent international organization whose principal mission was to maintain world peace...

, and ended with Italian fascism
Italian Fascism
Italian Fascism also known as Fascism with a capital "F" refers to the original fascist ideology in Italy. This ideology is associated with the National Fascist Party which under Benito Mussolini ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 until 1943, the Republican Fascist Party which ruled the Italian...

. Her involvement with the latter led to an important correspondence and friendship with Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

, who mentions her twice in his Cantos
The Cantos
The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered...

.

Anarchism

Olivia Rossetti Agresti was born in London to William Michael Rossetti
William Michael Rossetti
William Michael Rossetti was an English writer and critic.-Biography:Born in London, he was a son of immigrant Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti, and the brother of Maria Francesca Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti.He was one of the seven founder members of the...

, one of the seven founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti...

 and the editor of its literary magazine The Germ
The Germ (periodical)
The Germ was a periodical established by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to disseminate their ideas. It was not a success, only existing for four issues between January and April 1850....

. A granddaughter of Gabriele Rossetti
Gabriele Rossetti
Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti was an Italian poet and scholar who emigrated to England.Born in Vasto in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the original family of his ancestors was Della Guardia...

 and Ford Madox Brown
Ford Madox Brown
Ford Madox Brown was an English painter of moral and historical subjects, notable for his distinctively graphic and often Hogarthian version of the Pre-Raphaelite style. Arguably, his most notable painting was Work...

, she was hence a niece of Maria Francesca Rossetti
Maria Francesca Rossetti
Maria Francesca Rossetti was an English author. She was the sister of artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti as well as William Michael Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti, who dedicated her poem Goblin Market to Maria...

, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...

 and Christina Rossetti
Christina Rossetti
Christina Georgina Rossetti was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems...

, as well as a first cousin of Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature...

.

While still in their girlhood, Olivia and her sister, the future Helen Rossetti Angeli (1879-1969), began publishing an anarchist journal, The Torch, in the basement of their family home. Despite their youth, this effort became the nucleus of a prominent anarchist salon which included Peter Kropotkin
Peter Kropotkin
Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was a Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, economist, geographer, author and one of the world's foremost anarcho-communists. Kropotkin advocated a communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations between...

 and Sergei Kravchinski
Sergei Kravchinski
Sergey Mikhaylovich Stepnyak-Kravchinsky , known in the 19th century London revolutionary circles as Stepniak or Sergius Stepniak, was the Russian who killed the chief of that country's secret police with a dagger in the streets of St. Petersburg in 1878.-Early life:Stepniak was the son of an...

, and their publishing coups included the pamphlet Why I Am an Anarchist by George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...

. Years later, using the pseudonym "Isabel Meredith", Olivia and Helen published A Girl Among the Anarchists, a somewhat fictionalized memoir of their days as precocious child revolutionaries. These adventures were also chronicled by their cousin Ford Madox Ford in his 1931 memoir Return to Yesterday.

A more permanent consequence of this political activity was Olivia's marriage in 1897 to the Italian anarchist and journalist Antonio Agresti (1866-1926), which led to her emigration from England to Italy. Olivia was to remain there for the rest of her life and she eventually became an Italian citizen. During her first years in Italy she continued with literary activities related to her political activism, including a biography of the Italian painter and revolutionary Giovanni Costa
Giovanni Costa
Giovanni Costa , known as Nino, was an Italian landscape painter and revolutionary.-Biography:Costa was born in Rome...

.

Internationalism

The second phase in Agresti's career began in 1904, when she met the American agricultural reformer David Lubin
David Lubin
David Lubin was a merchant and agriculturalist. He was pivotal in founding the International Institute of Agriculture in 1908, in Rome.-Biography:...

. A former department store and mail order magnate from Sacramento
Sacramento, California
Sacramento is the capital city of the U.S. state of California and the county seat of Sacramento County. It is located at the confluence of the Sacramento River and the American River in the northern portion of California's expansive Central Valley. With a population of 466,488 at the 2010 census,...

, Lubin was in Rome seeking a state sponsor for his idea of an international clearinghouse for agricultural statistics. Unable to speak Italian, Lubin hired Agresti as his interpreter and thus began a close collaboration between the two which continued until Lubin's death.

With Agresti's assistance, Lubin's efforts in Italy made history. After gaining the unexpected support of Italy's king Victor Emmanuel III
Victor Emmanuel III of Italy
Victor Emmanuel III was a member of the House of Savoy and King of Italy . In addition, he claimed the crowns of Ethiopia and Albania and claimed the titles Emperor of Ethiopia and King of Albania , which were unrecognised by the Great Powers...

, Lubin's vision became a reality with the 1905 founding of the International Institute of Agriculture
International Institute of Agriculture
The International Institute of Agriculture was founded in Rome in 1905 by the King of Italy with the intent of creating a clearinghouse for collection of agricultural statistics. It was created primarily due to the efforts of David Lubin. In 1930, the IIA published the first world census of...

, headquartered in Rome. The first modern international organization, it was hailed as a significant forerunner of world government
World government
World government is the notion of a single common political authority for all of humanity. Its modern conception is rooted in European history, particularly in the philosophy of ancient Greece, in the political formation of the Roman Empire, and in the subsequent struggle between secular authority,...

 by such luminaries as H. G. Wells
H. G. Wells
Herbert George Wells was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books and rules for war games...

 and Louis Brandeis
Louis Brandeis
Louis Dembitz Brandeis ; November 13, 1856 – October 5, 1941) was an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1916 to 1939.He was born in Louisville, Kentucky, to Jewish immigrant parents who raised him in a secular mode...

. Agresti includes samples of Lubin's correspondence with Wells and Brandeis in her 1922 biography David Lubin: A Study in Practical Idealism.

Following Lubin's death in 1919, Agresti waged a public campaign for close cooperation between the International Institute of Agriculture and the nascent League of Nations
League of Nations
The League of Nations was an intergovernmental organization founded as a result of the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War. It was the first permanent international organization whose principal mission was to maintain world peace...

, which soon employed her as a member of the staff to Italy's delegation. She continued as a staff interpreter for the League in Geneva from 1922 to 1930. Her last assignment as a professional interpreter occurred in 1945 when, at the personal request of Italy's prime minister, Alcide De Gasperi
Alcide De Gasperi
Alcide De Gasperi was an Italian statesman and politician and founder of the Christian Democratic Party. From 1945 to 1953 he was the prime minister of eight successive coalition governments. His eight-year rule remains a landmark of political longevity for a leader in modern Italian politics...

, she accompanied him to London for meetings of the Council of Foreign Ministers
Council of Foreign Ministers
Council of Foreign Ministers was an organisation agreed upon at the Potsdam Conference in 1945 and announced in the Potsdam Agreement.The Potsdam Agreement specified that the Council would be composed of the Foreign Ministers of the United Kingdom, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, China,...

. According to her unpublished memoirs, meetings at which Agresti interpreted included Ernest Bevin
Ernest Bevin
Ernest Bevin was a British trade union leader and Labour politician. He served as general secretary of the powerful Transport and General Workers' Union from 1922 to 1945, as Minister of Labour in the war-time coalition government, and as Foreign Secretary in the post-war Labour Government.-Early...

 and Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov was a Soviet politician and diplomat, an Old Bolshevik and a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s, when he rose to power as a protégé of Joseph Stalin, to 1957, when he was dismissed from the Presidium of the Central Committee by Nikita Khrushchev...

.

Fascism

By 1921 Agresti's early anarchist leanings, further leavened by years of exposure to Lubin's theories concerning cooperative
Cooperative
A cooperative is a business organization owned and operated by a group of individuals for their mutual benefit...

 organization of society, had transformed her into an enthusiastic supporter of corporatism
Corporatism
Corporatism, also known as corporativism, is a system of economic, political, or social organization that involves association of the people of society into corporate groups, such as agricultural, business, ethnic, labor, military, patronage, or scientific affiliations, on the basis of common...

 and, consequently, of Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....

's corporatist reorganization of the Italian economy. From 1921 to 1943 she edited the newsletter of the Associazione fra le Società per Azioni, a group then closely allied with the Fascists, and in 1938 co-authored the theoretical work The Organization of the Arts and Professions in the Fascist Guild State with the Fascist journalist Mario Missiroli.

In 1937, Agresti's editorship of economic journals brought her into professional contact with Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

, then residing in Italy and writing articles in Italian on economic topics. Thus began a long correspondence between the two which lasted until 1959, the year before Agresti's death. Interestingly, Agresti seems to have been unaware of Pound's fame as a poet, and Pound unaware of Agresti's family ties to Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...

 and Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature...

, two of the most important influences on his poetry, until years into the correspondence. Portions of this correspondence were edited and published in 1998 by the University of Illinois Press
University of Illinois Press
The University of Illinois Press , is a major American university press and part of the University of Illinois system. Founded in 1918, the press publishes some 120 new books each year, plus 33 scholarly journals, and several electronic projects...

.

Agresti became practically a member of Pound's extended family as the years progressed, and she and her two adopted Italian daughters were frequent guests at Schloss Brunnenburg
Schloss Brunnenburg
Brunnenburg is a castle in the province of South Tyrol, in northern Italy.- History :Originally built circa 1250, it was completely restored by Boris and Mary de Rachewiltz, who made it their home in the mid-20th century...

. She was active for years in the international campaign to free Pound from his involuntary incarceration in a mental asylum by the government of the United States, and Pound in turn tried to assist her, then suffering from an impecunious old age, by finding a publisher for her memoirs. Pound refers to Agresti twice in his Cantos
The Cantos
The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered...

.

Selected works

  • 1903. A Girl Among the Anarchists (co-authored with her sister Helen under the pseudonym "Isabel Meredith"). London: Duckworth Press.
  • 1904. Giovanni Costa: His Life, Work, and Times. London: Grant Richards.
  • 1920. "LEAGUE OF AGRICULTURE; How Institute David Lubin Founded Will Supplement Greater League of Nations", New York Times, May 23, Page XX16
  • 1922. David Lubin: A Study in Practical Idealism. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 2nd edition, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1941.
  • 1938. The Organization of the Arts and Professions in the Fascist Guild State (co-authored with Mario Missiroli). Rome: Laboremus

External links

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