A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #19-25 - Marussia Bakunin (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Mirella Armiero "A Rebel Thought. Maria Bakunin, the Lady of Naples" - 
Solferino Editore (Milan, 2025, 176 pages, EUR16.50) ---- The 
fascinating human and political story, the complex and rich life of 
Marussia Bakunin, a free and rebellious woman and scholar who preceded 
her time, is dedicated to the beautiful, engaging, participatory and 
passionate biographical reconstruction of the Neapolitan journalist 
Mirella Armiero, author of the volume "A Rebel Thought. Maria Bakunin, 
the Lady of Naples" ---- Maria - known as Marussia - Bakunin was born on 
February 2, 1873 in Krasnojarsk, a freezing city in Siberia, but she 
lived the rest of her life in the "country of the sun". Naples is the 
city that in 1865, after the extraordinary escape from the Siberian 
prison, was chosen by his father, the anarchist agitator and thinker 
Michele Bakunin, for the sun, for the revolution, for the people and 
above all for the coffee; here he will be one of the major inspirers of 
the Circolo and of the weekly «Libertà e Giustizia» published from 17 
August to 24 December 1867.

Marussia's sister, Sofia, is the mother of Renato Caccioppoli, the 
anti-fascist and communist mathematician who in 1938, challenging a 
squad of Nazi soldiers, sings and plays La Marseillaise; his aunt 
manages to save him from the fascist prison. According to some research 
and discoveries, rather than Michele Bakunin, with his brother and 
sister, Maria is the daughter of Carlo Gambuzzi, a Neapolitan anarchist 
lawyer and friend of her father, who after Bakunin's death in 1876, will 
marry the young widow Antonia and educate his three children. Already in 
1930 Marussia will forcefully and angrily defend her father's memory 
from the mud and allusions of an aristocratic Russian writer about the 
"white wedding", about the extramarital love of the heroic mother, who 
had followed her father in his escape and exile. In Paris he meets the 
publisher Gallimard and the author, and they agree to eliminate the 
gossip. The agreement will not be respected because "publishers are 
merchants who try to earn money and, in order to sell a few more copies, 
they would be capable of selling their parents and children". 
Nevertheless, in Europe and throughout the world, the myth and memory of 
Bakunin will continue to fuel the irrepressible desire and the struggle 
of humanity for the conquest - through social revolution - of freedom, 
equality, human dignity denied to people by bullies and tyrants.

Throughout her life, the "professor" will be more than proud and honored 
by the surname Bakunin: in a letter to the Austrian scholar Max Nettlau, 
to whom she continuously sends letters and documents regarding her 
father's life, she recalls that it was spent on the European 
revolutionary barricades for the weak, the poor and the unfortunate of 
the whole world, for freedom and human dignity.

Marussia is the first woman in Italy to enroll in the Faculty of 
Chemistry at the University of Naples and to graduate in 1895. Then she 
will be assigned the chair and will also be the first woman in Italy to 
teach Chemistry until her retirement, at 75 years of age. Among his 
students, who do not forget his severity but will always respect him, 
there is - as his wife, the writer Pia Zanolli, told me - also the young 
Calabrian anarchist Bruno Misefari. When necessary he encourages his 
students in their studies and many future researchers and important 
scientists will be trained at his school.1718

On June 11, 1896 - despite 26 years of difference - she marries her 
professor, Agostino Ogliarolo, a Sicilian scientist and future rector.

Her career will also have other records. In 1906 she deals with the 
eruption of Vesuvius. From 1910 to 1930 in the Salerno area, in the 
Picentini Mountains, which he reaches on foot or on the back of a mule, 
he discovers and analyzes the schists, dark sedimentary rocks rich in 
organic matter that produce ichthyol, an ointment that for its 
antiseptic and anti-inflammatory properties is used in medicine and 
dermatology. The ichthyol production factory, built in 1912 on the 
advice of Marussia by two local entrepreneurs, will provide work for 
many people, including many women. Downstream from the mine he even 
built a school for the children of the miners of Giffoni Valle Piana 
(Salerno), where Marussia lives, a guest of the engineer Giuseppe 
Pistilli. Today the "magnificent family home" belongs to the professor 
and scholar Vittorio Dini, to whose great courtesy and hospitality I owe 
the honor of having visited it years ago, accompanied by the great 
emotion of walking on the same floor walked by the "daughter of 
Bakunin", whose writings, thoughts and life I know and admire. In 
addition to the surviving walls of the school, following the mule track 
of the Picentini mountains, you find the large circular tank buried by 
vegetation, in which the material to extract the ichthyol was heated, 
and you come across the shed of the powder magazine, where the sticks of 
dynamite to split the mountain were made.
The museum-laboratory where Marussia worked is looked after by Virgilio 
De Mattia, who has known the place since he was a child: his father, a 
mine worker, tied him to the saddle of the mule, and took him with him. 
Virgilio knows every secret of those rocks and from some, with his bare 
hands - enchanted - he separates the various layers while the 
characteristic smell of ichthyol can be felt in the air. When he breaks 
a stone and glimpses the trace of a leaf or a fossil he rightly states: 
"When I climb up here, I can spend hours reading a stone...".

On September 12, 1943, Nazi troops set fire to his home and to the two 
hundred thousand volumes of the University Library, which he strenuously 
defends in front of the Nazi officer who threatens to burn it because 
someone has shot from the window. Marussia's resistance is in vain and 
many precious volumes are engulfed in flames and incinerated.

She died in Naples on April 17, 1960. It was Easter Sunday. Many people 
- professors, students, friends, commoners - followed her coffin, 
covered with white flowers and red carnations, the color of the 
revolution dreamed and preached by her father and herself for the 
conquest of freedom, which - as she wrote to Max Nettlau - «is the most 
beautiful thing that exists on this earth», testifying to a loyalty to 
the anarchist ideal that she never abandoned and that had characterized 
her father's life.

Giuseppe Galzerano18

https://umanitanova.org/marussia-bakunin/
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