Nuorese Cultural DistrictGraziella Sechi (Nuoro, 1901) was an intellectual, anti-fascist, feminist and supporter of Sardinian autonomy.
Graziella Sechi Giacobbe
Description
She shared her political commitment and fight against fascism with her friends Mariangela Maccioni and Marianna Bussalai. Together, these three intellectuals, antifascists, feminists and supporters of Sardinian autonomy formed the ‘Sardinian Feminist Triad’.
With her husband, the supporter of Sardinian autonomy Dino Giacobbe, she had four children: Giannetto, Simonetta, Caterina and Maria.
On 17 April 1937, Sechi was arrested with her friend Mariangela Maccioni, the former accused of sending a letter to the latter in which she expressed solidarity with a young man from Orgosolo who had been killed while fighting against the Francoists in Spain.
On 2 September 1937, her husband Dino secretly left Italy for Spain, where the civil war was turning into a terrifying battle between Nazi-fascism and democracy, and then on to the United States in search of asylum.
It was increasingly difficult to get in contact with her husband, and in 1944 Graziella ventured with her daughter Maria to Cagliari in hopes of finding an American soldier who could help her contact her husband.
Sechi challenged not just the power of a dictatorship but also the traditional vision of a society that would have preferred to see her by the hearth rather than as an antifascist activist.