distant and singular stories . An example : the polysemy of curate , a key concept for a description of the experiences of Ada and Ursula , is today a ground for questioning society as a whole , the feminine and the masculine , about the future .
Signs of their presence and action in Ventotene remain in Spinelli ’ s writings , in letters , literary works , as well as papers in various archives .
Ventotene , the small island with the “ loud voice ” - the wind that sweeps its streets and “ makes them sound like organ pipes ” ( Paganelli , 1975 ) - hosted an enormous number of confined people : eight hundred , with three hundred guards , between 1942 and ‘ 43 . Until the 1990s it was almost devoid of physical traces of their passage : the barracks were destroyed , just “ a small plaque on a piece of white wall ”; an absence that made the “ cancellation of the memory of confinement ” “ disturbing ” ( Ramondino , 1998 ). Not even the names of the two women . They met in Ventotene in 1939 , when the police of the fascist regime authorized them to join their husbands , Ursula with her first daughter in July , Ada in December , in a climate weighed down by the material difficulties of the life of the confined , struggling with the scarcity of food and conflicts between political groups . Marriage cohabitation begins in Ventotene for Ada and Ernesto . From the diaries of Spinelli and from fleeting references in the diaries of other confined , images of one or the other appear , of Ursula also the beauty - “ Really , halos and nimbus around her body ” - , which corresponds to the description of Colorni ’ s sadness on a day when the “ blonde wife is about to leave ”. ( Paganelli , 1975 ).
It was the time of confrontation and the progressive elaboration of the theses that will lead to Manifesto , in the first draft completed in the summer of 1941 . Without a philological analysis of
78