Arcadia Italy

Mimosa is the ​official ​flower of International Women's Day in Italy. Mimosa trees are found all over the landscape: from city gardens to coastal cliffs, farmland to hilly inclines. Their heady smell fills March's Spring air up and down the Italian peninsula. In some areas, especially when winters are mild, Mimosa trees begin to bloom in late January and through February, culminating in the beginning of March with their heavy branches and bold bursts of color. On the 8th of March, ​​street hawkers and windshield washers at traffic lights, all have prettily wrapped token branches of mimosa for sale, for it is customary on March 8th to bring every significant woman in your life a Mimosa. Florists incorporate the fuzzy little blooms into more intricate arrangements of roses​, tulips, irises or daffodils.

Traditionally, women will go out to dinner on their own on March 8th, in groups of friends, cousins, sisters. It is the one day when the woman in the traditional Italian home is not expected to cook and serve all meals to her family. Nowadays, such gender distinction is not quite as evident and women get together on occasions all throughout the year; but after my thirty years in Italy, I do remember when it was quite a special event for women to go out without their men on that one day.

Women on March 8th are celebrated and revered, even more so than usual, in Italy. Among the government's initiatives this year, free museum entrance to all women. ​One of Rome's major hospitals is offering for the whole week free women's health check-ups in everything from reproductive health to endocrinology, cardiology and dermatology.​

It is a special day to raise awareness, as well: a day to remember and tell the stories of women who struggle - the oppressed, the victims of chauvinistic regimes - and women who triumph - explorers, poets, scientists, leaders.

On March 8th, our UN Familiarization Group was honoured by special invitation from the Director of Gender, Kawinzi Muiu,​ ​to the World Food Program's International Women's Day events. 

I take this opportunity to share with you, Italophiles and future Italophiles, a few of my favorite Italian women:

Tina Anselmi

At 17 in 1944 she joined the Resistance movement, having witnessed the hangings of partisans by the Nazi-Fascists. She was the first female member of parliament and sat as labour minister and minister of health, as well, for several terms. Most importantly, she penned the first legislation on equal rights in the Italian Republic.

Rita Levi-Montalcini

Nobel Laureate, she was a neurologist and educator who studied medicine at a time in Italy when women were meant to be wives and mothers. She received her degrees in 1936 in Turin where she taught. The 1938 racial laws under Mussolini decreed that Jews could no longer work in most professions or in Italian universities. ​Therefore, Rita Levi-Montalcini up a clandestine lab in her bedroom and continued her research. Levi-Montalcini was also a Senatore a Vita, an honor in the ​Italian government​.

Incidentally, Eliana Vigneti, a dear friend of Arcadia Italy and of mine, worked with Levi-Montalcini up to the moment the latter retired. She, too, graced the stage at the moment of the Nobel Prize. She then ​shifted career gears and applied her scientific reasoning to culinary art​s​, ​opening, ​with her family, Lo Spirito di Vino. A veritable discovery in flavor, tradition and culinary perfection which stands in ​the ancient Jewish ​quarter of Trastevere​,​ atop the oldest place of worship in the Jewish faith outside the Holy Land.

​Maria Montessori

Maria was a revolutionary educator, developing​ her​ the world renowned​ Montessori method which bases advancement and learning cycles on the pupil's intellectual maturity and learning style rather than age-based groups. ​A forward thinker decades before her time, she became Italy's first female doctor in 1896.

Nilde Iotti

Nilde joined the progressive Communist Party of Italy, the PCI in 1943, just at the time when the Partisan movement was so instrumental in freeing Italy from the Nazi occupation, especially in her native Emilia Romagna. She ran the Women's Defen​s​e League and was very active in women's rights legislation. She then went on to serve as Presidente della Camera (Speaker of the House) from 1979-1992.

Franca Rame

Franca is probably most well-known for her lifetime relationship and collaboration with Nobel laureate and playwright, Dario Fo. Together they brought to the stage (and in public television) the condition of the Woman in Italy. From the 60s - 80s, they gave female voices to issues of divorce, rape, discrimination and oppression. ​Another forward-thinker well before her time, ​Franca Rame's depiction of ​the vicious attack and rape she ​experienced first hand in 1973 is one of her most popular and most powerful monologues.

Of course, Italian women continue to make their mark in Italian politics, culture, business and social affairs. Female designers, directors, actors, politicians and thinkers are much more common these days than they were when the above-listed heroines were paving the way.

Students at Arcadia Italy programs will certainly learn quite a bit about women in Italy and quite often from women in Italy.

Happy Women's Day - which we like to think is EVERYDAY.