‘I am a woman,’ Ada Gobetti wrote in a clandestine Piedmont newsletter in 1943:

An insignificant little woman, who has revolutionised her private life — a traditionally female one, with the needle and the broom as her emblems — to transform herself into a bandit… I am not alone.

Ada, one of four female partisans whose interconnected stories weave through this history, knew what few Germans or Italian fascists yet suspected.