Discovery of the World

Luciana Castellina is one of Italy’s most prominent left intellectuals and a cofounder of the newspaper il manifesto. In this coming-of agememoir, based on her diaries, she recounts her political awakening as a teenage girl in Fascist Italy—where she used to play tennis with Mussolini’s daughter—and the subsequent downfall of the regime. Discovery of the World is about war, anti-Semitism, anti-fascism, resistance, the belief in social justice, the craving for experience, travel, political rallie