Rossana Banti
Partisan who risked her life with the SOE and preparing agents for missions behind enemy lines
ROSSANA BANTI, who has died aged 96, served with the Italian Resistance and then with the British Army as a member of the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War.
Born in Rome on January 8 1925, she was still a young teenager when she joined the Italian Resistance, acting as a courier, distributing anti-fascist pamphlets as well as smuggling explosives and weapons to partisans in Rome.
After Rossana’s lessons were over for the day, she would bring copies of the underground newspaper L’unità across Rome and hand them to a butcher. One day, the butcher was arrested, and she was told that the Gestapo were looking for a young girl with a distinctive red coat: it was the only coat she possessed, and she had to burn it.
On another occasion, travelling on a bus, she was carrying a suitcase packed with nitroglycerine explosives. With her was a young companion, and they were pretending to be an engaged couple.
She struggled to keep the suitcase balanced, but the vehicle’s jolts on the bumpy road terrified her. “Rossana, be careful!” her companion said. “We mustn’t break the eggs!”
Afterwards they “had a crazy laugh” about it, she recalled.
She joined GAP, the Patriotic Action Group, a Communist-led resistance organisation which infiltrated all the protest movements and demonstrations. Sometimes her friends were caught, tortured and shot.
In September 1943 an Armistice was signed between Italy and the Allies, but the Germans occupied the north of the country and fought a bitter rearguard action in rugged mountainous terrain which greatly favoured them.
In September 1944, Rossana Banti enlisted in the British Army with the FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) at Monopoli near Bari on the Adriatic coast. She had had an English nanny and already spoke the language well, but she was under-age and had to obtain permission from her father, Antonio.
She told him, frankly, that he would never know where she was, but he was strongly anti-fascist and gave his consent. She joined the SOE and was based at HQ Special Operations near Bari, where she was trained in parachuting and weaponry and became a wireless operator.
She manned radios, coding and decoding messages and transmitting them to SOE agents behind enemy lines: “They were parachuted into the north to help organise, equip and train the partisans,” she recalled. “We kept them supplied with weapons, food and clothing.”
She also helped to brief and prepare agents, some of them anti-fascist Italians and Yugoslavs, before they were dropped by parachute behind the German lines. “It was an incredible experience,” she said. “I was only 19, but I just followed my heart.
“They saw me as a sister, a mother, a girlfriend. Sometimes they cried. They had no idea where they were going or what they would find when they got there. I helped them strap on their parachutes and off they went.”
As the Germans stepped up their policy of savage reprisals for acts of sabotage, the agents depended for their existence on the dedication of the signals operators. As a member of an irregular force, she faced summary execution if she was caught.
In early 1945 Rossana married Giuliano Mattioli, an SOE agent known as Julian Matthew. A few days after their marriage he was sent on a mission to be dropped by parachute near Bergamo, behind enemy lines.
After the war, she became a successful producer with RAI, the Italian state broadcaster, and with the BBC. She lived in Knightsbridge in the 1960s and later moved to Pitigliano in Tuscany.
Loyal, brave and indomitably cheerful, as a younger woman she enjoyed riding, skiing and swimming. Latterly her mental faculties remained as sharp as ever and within two months of her death she was working on a dramatic adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Politically, her views were on the Left. She celebrated the date of Liberation every year and warned against the return of fascism.
In 2015, in a ceremony at the British Embassy in Rome, she received the War Medal 1939-45 for having served in the British Armed Forces during the war, the 1939-45 Star for operational service overseas, and the Italy Star.
Rossana Banti’s marriage came to an end, but amicably; she is survived by a son and a daughter.