Rita Zucca

Rita Luisa Zucca (; 1912–1998) was an Italian radio announcer who broadcast Axis propaganda to Allied troops in North Africa and Italy. She became known as one of the "Axis Sallys", along with Mildred Gillars, who broadcast from Berlin, Germany.

Early life Zucca's father, Louis, owned a very successful restaurant in New York's Midtown district in the 1930s and 1940s, called Zucca's Italian Garden. Located at 116-118-120 West 49th Street, the restaurant had its own promotional postcards which displayed a distinctly refined setting. Zucca spent her teenage years in a convent school in Florence and, as a young woman, had worked in the family business.

She returned to Italy in 1938, working as a typist and renouncing her U.S. citizenship three years later to save her family's property from expropriation by Mussolini's government.

Her broadcasts sometimes used intelligence provided by the German embassy in Rome in an attempt to confuse Allied troops. On July 8, 1943, the night before the invasion of Sicily, Zucca's broadcast told "the wonderful boys of the 504th Parachute Regiment" that "Col. Willis Mitchell's playboys the 61st Troop Carrier Group are going to carry you to certain death. We know where and when you are jumping and you will be wiped out."

A correspondent from the U.S. military magazine Stars and Stripes said that Zucca's well-known crossed-eye condition did nothing to detract from her attractiveness: "True, her left eye is inclined to wander — but that cooey, sexy voice really has something to back it up."

Later life Zucca was barred from returning to the United States and lived in relative obscurity in Italy until her death in 1998.