Two Women of Ragusa Enter Italy's National Memory of Women

The rice fields of the Vercellese are where one of the two women came to know hardship, working as a mondina. She was not born in Sicily. Neither was the other, who arrived in Ragusa at seventeen and who had been a very young staffetta of the Resistance. The Ragusa Oggi account headlined "Non erano nate a Ragusa, ma diventò la loro vita" sets the two facts side by side and does not say how, or whether, they connect; its text, like the other three accounts consulted, is cut off before the end.

Both names — Itria Camera Sbezzi and Rina Lugli — were selected among the 300 protagonists of the first edition of "L'Italia delle Donne", a project promoted by the Dipartimento per le Pari Opportunità of the Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri. The project is described as an initiative conceived to rediscover and bring to light female figures who, in Italy's different territories, have contributed to the country's cultural, social and civil development. The Corriere di Ragusa frames the outcome as an entry into the "patrimonio nazionale della memoria femminile".

The institutional path behind the selection began, according to the Corriere di Ragusa, with research work by the Consulta Femminile and was developed through the Comune di Ragusa. The Consulta Femminile of the Comune di Ragusa and the municipal administration express "viva soddisfazione" at the result. The same paper describes the two as "due straordinarie figure femminili del territorio" — a characterisation attached to the recognition itself rather than offered as independent assessment.

What the excerpts do not settle is considerable. The Ragusa Oggi account breaks off at the phrase "fece della battaglia per i diritti dei lavo…", leaving the nature of that struggle — its subject, its timing, its outcome — unstated. Which woman held which biography is likewise not fixed in the available text, which refers only to "una" and "l'altra". Nor is it established who formally put the names forward, or what the fuller biographies contain.

What survives is spare: a mondina in the rice fields of the Vercellese, a seventeen-year-old newly arrived in a city that was not hers. The project has placed both inside a national memory of women. For Ragusa, in the words of that headline, the city became their life.