Rossella Di Leo (Catania, Italy, 1951) became an anarchist in the wake of the 1968 student protests that broke out all over the world. She left her native Sicily at the end of 1970 and moved to Milan, the city of origin of her maternal family, to study political science at the University of Milan in the hottest years of protest. In Milan, she continued her anarchist militancy, becoming close to the area of the Federated Anarchist Groups (GAF), who were particularly active at the time in the counter-information campaign following the Piazza Fontana massacre in December 1969 and the killing of Giuseppe Pinelli, who was one of the GAF’s best-known exponents.
Her path soon intersected with that of Amedeo Bertolo, who became her militant and life partner, to the point that their biographies from 1971 onwards largely coincide. Alongside political activism, which was very intense throughout the 1970s, since 1971 she has been engaging in an equally intense editorial and cultural activity, which is still a fundamental part of her life. Her editorial journey, initially as a journalist, began with the birth of the monthly journal A/Rivista Anarchica (February 1971), continued with the international quarterly Interrogations, founded in Paris in 1974 by Louis Mercier Vega, and finally landed at Volontà, which was based in Milan from 1980 until its closure in 1996. Since 1976 she has been a driving force behind the cultural activities of the Centro Studi Libertari/Giuseppe Pinelli Archive, which in its forty-five years of life has organised hundreds of conferences, workshops and seminars, often international in scope, aimed at keeping alive the historical memory of anarchism and renewing contemporary anarchist thought, including the ‘Venice 1984’ international anarchist meeting. However, her greatest commitment has always been in the field of publishing, from the beginnings in 1975 with the Antistato publishing house to the anarchist publisher elèuthera, co-founded with Amedeo Bertolo in 1986, which to date remains her core activity.