AURO ROSELLI

ROSELLI--Auro. Italian Resistant, journalist, photographer, writer and inventor, died peacefully on May 12th in Scripps Memorial Hospital in Encinitas, California. He was 91 years old. During his 43-year career as an international correspondent based in New York City, Roselli front-paged all aspects of the United States for the Italian newspaper Il Giorno, from politics to culture, science, technology and life-style. He was born in Pescara in 1921. Inspired by his father Gherardo, a sculptor and dissident against Mussolini, and by a free-thinking teacher, Professor Manfredi, he learned from an early age to question authoritarian thinking of any kind. He looked to the Anglo-Saxon world for cultural inspiration and to liberal democracy for ideological orientation. Arrested for conspiracy against Fascism in 1941, he spent two and a half years as a political prisoner. He was liberated after the fall of Mussolini and began his partisan activities in September 1943, when the Nazis occupied Italy. Under the nom de guerre of Gigi, he founded a group in the mountains around Lake Como, whose activities consisted of raiding Fascist controlled barracks and arms warehouses, distributing information, and guiding fugitives to Switzerland. His career as a journalist began after the Liberation. In 1956 he joined the newly founded Milanese daily Il Giorno. He retired from journalism in 1989 and moved to Southern California in 1991. In 1994, he took American citizenship. He mainly spent his time in retirement working on a number of inventions. Enthusiastic about ecology and aviation, he was a qualified pilot, and patented a form of paraglider. Right up to the day of his death, he was working on a system to generate energy from gravity. His unparalleled capacity to generate love and good cheer around him won him many friends and admirers His survivors include his wife of 43 years, Elise Hunt, his daughter from his first marriage, Elisa Roselli, resident in the UK, and his sister Lucia, inTurin.