08/09/2026
📜 : Ventotene, 8 September 1940: Ernesto Rossi writes to Ada Rossi
Forty years after the death of Altiero Spinelli, our monthly series looks back at an encounter that would become both a profound friendship and an important intellectual partnership.
In 1940, Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi were both confined on the island of Ventotene by the Fascist regime as political prisoners. There, in the enforced isolation of internal exile, two remarkable minds found one another.
On 8 September 1940, Rossi wrote to his wife, Ada, describing the young man he had come to know. Spinelli, then 33, had already spent much of his adult life imprisoned or in confinement. Rossi called him “l'uomo di maggiore valore che ho conosciuto finora al confino”—the man of greatest worth he had met during his confinement.
He described a man of extraordinary intelligence and vast culture, who had continued to study throughout prison and exile, learning languages and reading mathematics, physics, history and philosophy. But he also saw something more personal: someone tolerant, ready to laugh and joke, and able to distinguish the trivial from the essential values of civilisation.
And, alongside his words, Rossi drew him.
✏️ This small portrait and the accompanying letter offer a rare and intimate glimpse of Altiero Spinelli—not yet the celebrated European federalist of later years, but a young political prisoner seen through the eyes of a friend.
Their meeting on Ventotene was, in many ways, a chance encounter created by repression. Yet from that encounter grew a deep personal, intellectual and political affinity. Together with Eugenio Colorni, their discussions on the island would contribute to the development of the Manifesto di Ventotene, imagining a peaceful and united Europe beyond the nationalism and war that had devastated the continent.
Sometimes history begins with a meeting between two people who recognise, in one another, a shared way of seeing the world.
The letter and Ernesto Rossi's sketch of Spinelli are preserved at the Historical Archives of the European Union in the Ernesto Rossi private fonds.
Consult the Rossi fonds here: https://loom.ly/0Q_53xo
