Alma Dolens

Teresita Pasini (née dei Bonfatti, 1869 – 1948), better known by her pseudonym Alma Dolens, was a prominent Italian pacifist, suffragist, and journalist. "Alma Dolens" is a combination of the Latin alma meaning "soul" or "heart" with the Latin participle dolens meaning "pained" or "grieving"; the name can thus be translated as "sorrowful heart" or "heavy heart", and is thought to refer to her feelings surrounding militarism and war.

Personal life Alma Dolens was born into a wealthy Umbrian family in 1876. Her family was well known within the Italian unification movement, where they supported Giuseppe Garibaldi. Alma Dolens married a lawyer from Milan, who was supportive of her work. She turned her attentions elsewhere, writing about living conditions for the lower class in Italian cities. At a peace conference in Budapest in 1913, Dolens met and befriended Rosika Schwimmer, another pacifist and suffragist. Throughout the war, she performed relief work for families who had been driven out of their homes by the war within Austria-Hungary. After the end of the Italo-Turkish War, she traveled through Belgium to lecture. Seeing the destruction from the war reaffirmed her beliefs in pacifism, and she said in one of her lectures "the enemy is not at the border; it is all around us: it is poverty, tuberculosis, unemployment. The cure for these diseases is the end of formidable and costly weaponry." She insisted the countries should be required by law to arbitrate during war.

After the Second World War, Dolens went to live in the home of a socialist friend, Gilberto Gilioli and his wife Myrthe Ripamonti, where she died in 1948.