Marisa Musu

Marisa Musu (18 April 1925 – 3 November 2002) was an Italian anti-fascist resistance fighter, journalist and political activist.

Biography

Early life Musu was born in to a prominent anti-fascist family. Her parents Domenico Musu and Bastianina Martini, natives of Sassari, were among founders of the Action Party.

In 1942, at the age of sixteen, she was a student at the Liceo ginnasio statale Terenzio Mamiani. Through Lucio Lombardo Radice, Marisa joined the clandestine organization of the Italian Communist Party at the same time as her fellow student Adele Maria Jemolo, Lombardo Radice's future wife. She enrolled in the Faculty of Physics at the University of Rome.

Anti-fascist partisan Quickly, she became active in the ranks of the anti-fascists and joined the Patriotic Action Groups (GAP), under the name of Rosa. At eighteen, she was the youngest partisan in the organization.

She participated in various battles against the German occupiers. Most notably on March 23 Rosa participated in the attack on the German Bozen police battalion in Via Rasella, covering the Capponi group.

Musu was captured by the police on April 7, together with Pasquale Balsamo and Ernesto Borghesi; fortunately the commissioners Antonio Colasurdo and De Longis, who were in connection with the CLN, make them pass for a gang of common robbers, causing them to be locked up in the Regina Coeli prison. She is sentenced to death by the Nazi war court as a common criminal. GAP member Guglielmo Blasi betrayed the prisoners and exposed the members, but before he revealed that she belonged to the GAP, Musu, pretending to be ill, had herself transferred to the Santo Spirito Hospital in Sassia, from where, at the end of May, she managed to escape. She eventually came out of hiding with the liberation of Rome.