Sabatino Enrico "Nello" Rosselli (29 November 1900 – 9 June 1937) was an Italian socialist leader and historian who was murdered, alongside his brother Carlo Rosselli, by fascists in France on orders of Benito Mussolini. His wife Maria Todesco, their four children (Silvia, Paola, Aldo, and Alberto), and his mother Amelia Pincherle Rosselli survived him.
Family
Rosselli was born on 29 June 1900 in
Rome to a prominent Jewish family. His parents were Giuseppe Emanuele "Joe" Rosselli (1867–1911) and Amelia Pincherle (1870–1954), who was the paternal aunt to writer
Alberto Moravia. Nello was the youngest of three sons, the others being Aldo Sabatino (1895–1916) who died in World War I, and Carlo Alberto (1899–1937).
Political career and murder
Nello was a member of the reformist Unitary Socialist Party (PSU) of Giacomo Matteotti,
Claudio Treves, and
Filippo Turati, which had split from the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). After the rise of
Italian fascism, he fled to France with his brother, and became active there in
anti-fascist and socialist politics, helping to found the group Giustizia e Libertà and aiding the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, as well as carrying out propaganda missions within Italy. In June 1937, Nello went to visit his brother Carlo at the French resort town of Bagnoles-de-l'Orne, in
Orne. On 9 June, the two were killed by a group of
cagoulards, militants of
La Cagoule, a
French fascist group. Archival documents later implicated Mussolini's regime in authorizing the murder.
[Peter Isaac Rose (2005). The Dispossessed: An Anatomy Of Exile. University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 138–139. ] The two brothers were buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in
Paris; in 1951, the family moved them to Italy into the Monumental Cemetery of Trespiano, a
frazione of
Florence.
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