We’re happy to present The Illumination of Fulvia Ferrari, our fourth installment on this mysterious woman and her family. This latest video reveals more details about her life in the San Francisco Bay Area and the people she met along the way, including Mario Savio, Chet Baker, and a future member of the Symbionese Liberation Army named Mizmoon. Between 1964 and 1978, Fulvia lived through an intoxicating, violent, and warlike time that eventually forced her to flee California forever.

When she arrived back from Italy in 1963, Fulvia had access to both the younger generation of new anarchists popping up in San Francisco and the older generation of anarchists like her father, Enrico Travaglio. There were others as well, such as Vicenzo Ferrero, an anarchist who arrived from Northern Italy in 1905. Just two years older than her mother, Vincenzo became one of the main anarchist figures in the Latin Quarter and edited the L’Emancipazione newspaper from 1927 to 1932. This paper would eventually transform into Man!, the first English language publication put out by this group of Italian anarchists. Man! existed up until 1939 and connected the older generation of anarchists with the young ones who now spoke English. As it turned out, Enrico Travaglio never liked Marcus Graham, the editor of Man!, but he remained friends with Vincezno Ferrero for the rest of his life.

Vincenzo Ferrero, 1934

Shortly after Fulvia arrived in San Francisco, Vincenzo was arrested across the bay in Oakland along with his friend Domenico Sallitto. In the spring of 1934, these two anarchists were imprisoned until their deportation proceedings and a massive solidarity campaign was launched to prevent them from being shipped directly to fascist Italy. Domenico was ultimately freed but Vincenzo was ordered back to Italy by the judge, a man who knew this deportation was a death sentence. Vincenzo was luckily out on bail and went into hiding once the deportation order was given. All of this occurred in the lead up to the 1934 General Strike that saw San Francisco paralyzed for days on end, a historic battle that nineteen year-old Fulvia fought in from start to finish. Once the smoke cleared, her three uncles had been killed by agents of the ship-owners, the city was taken over by federal soldiers, and the dark tide of fascism was still rising across the planet.

SF General Strike, 1934

Vincenzo lived a clandestine life in the San Francisco Bay Area from the 1930s until 1974, the year he revealed his true identity to Paul Avrich. During all that time, this anarchist went by the name John the Cook and inhabited the underground realms of those fleeing from the law. Before she left for the USSR in 1938, Fulvia was able to meet with Vincenzo in his hide-outs and passed messages for him back to their comrades in the Latin Quarter. When she returned in 1947, Vincenzo was still underground and knew much more about navigating a clandestine existence within the US, a set of skills he shared with Fulvia whenever they’d meet on the waterfront for a drink. Despite his ability to stay invisible, the post-WWII police-state with its ID cards and Social Security Numbers made their lives more difficult. Even worse, the FBI was now given a free hand to begin it’s anti-communist witch-hunt and scrutinize the members of the old radical circles.

Black Hawk jazz club, SF, Tenderloin, 1961 (one of Fulvia’s haunts)

Vincenzo lived in the San Francisco Bay Area until his death in 1985, over six years after Fulvia had fled. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, he gave Fulvia advice on the quickly changing political landscape and helped her understand the days leading up to her birth. Her father Enrico Travaglio had left San Francisco in 1906 after the Great Earthquake and spent the next two decades in the Pacific Northwest, mostly between Home, Tacoma, and Seattle. Unlike her father, Vincenzo remained in San Francisco and knew Fulvia’s mother Isabelle quite well before she left in 1915, although she never did say goodbye to him. Isabelle’s final acts were to travel north to Home, sleep with Enrico, give birth to Fulvia on her aunt’s commune, and then board a ship for the journey to Siberia. It remains unclear if Vincenzo knew who Fulvia really was, although he did remain friends with her father until Enrico’s death in 1968. After this old sailor’s ashes had been scattered at sea, the social conflict in the US kicked up into a higher register of violence and disorder.

Black Panther Party ‘Free Breakfast for Children’ program, San Francisco, 1968

The decade between 1968 and 1978 was the fever pitch of the Cold War and Fulvia fought her version of it from her home in San Francisco. While we’ve detailed her involvement with Mario Savio in the video, one relationship that deserves mentioning here is Fulvia’s brief meeting with a young woman named Patricia Soltysik, later known to the world as Mizmoon. One stoned evening in Berkeley in 1973, Fulvia spoke to Patricia and her lover Camilla about the true evil of the Hearst empire. Starting with their oil fields in Mexico, Fulvia detailed the Hearst family’s every crime, including the overt fascism of the late William Randolph Hearst. Given they were in Berkeley, with its streets and university buildings named for the Hearst family, these revelations struck Patricia and Camilla to the core. During her final meeting with the couple, Fulvia took them on a walk and reminded them the San Francisco Chronicle had just printed the full Berkeley address of Patricia Hearst in its society column. Fulvia said it would be shame if something happened to such an innocent UC Berkeley student.

Mizmoon (middle), Cinque (left), Patty Hearst (right), SF, 1974

When young Patricia Hearst was eventually kidnapped by a group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army, Fulvia knew exactly who’d done it. The group had already lost its mind on LSD and assassinated the first black school superintendent in Oakland for a pointless reason, an act that made Fulvia highly suspect. It was later revealed that its leader Cinque had been a police informant in Los Angeles, making the assassination even more suspicious. Nevertheless, the group desperately grasped for a good idea after this vile act when two of its members were arrested and they soon settled on a suggestion of Mizmoon and Camilla’s: they’d kidnap the granddaughter of an old California fascist and demand his son feed the entire state. Along with millions of others, Fulvia was genuinely surprised when Patricia Hearst announced she was joining the SLA and showed up at a bank robbery in San Francisco with a machine gun in her hands. Within months, most of the group had been incinerated by the police on live television during a 1974 shootout in Los Angeles, a brutal reminder of what these guerrilla groups were facing. By 1975, the rest of the SLA was arrested in their San Francisco safe-houses, along with Patricia Hearst.

Patricia Hears mugshot, San Francisco, 1975

The urban guerrilla struggles of the 1960s and 1970s quickly transformed from organic expressions of rebellion into a geo-political chess-game between the USA and the USSR. While the anarchist versions of these groups acted continuously from the 1950s to the 1980s, they never received the sheer amount of material support as their communist counterparts. Unlike the anarchists, armed groups such as the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades obtained arms, money, and logistical support from the satellite nations of the USSR. Unlike these communists, the anarchists only had the money and arms they could raise themselves, some of it supplied by Fulvia and her friends. Despite all her efforts, Fulvia watched the global conflict become polarized between the two super-powers, with most of the young people flocking to either the communist or capitalist banners. To many of these US baby-boomers, anarchism was an antiquated political philosophy from their parent’s time that was far less exciting than Leninism and Maoism, the shiny new ideologies of the 20th century.

Andreas Baader & Gudrun Ensslin, Paris, 1969

Fulvia did what she could within this nightmare and only left San Francisco when her life was seriously in danger. The fateful month she left, November 1978, saw Jim Jones poison almost a thousand of his followers at their compound in Guyana, most of them plucked from the Bay Area. Many of their ashes are now buried in Oakland. This terrible month culminated in the assassination of Harvey Milk in San Francisco by a former police officer and led to the fiery White Night riots in 1979, although Fulvia was gone by then. A cloud of darkness fell on San Francisco in the 1980s that brought with it intense corporatism, the AIDS epidemic, Reagnism, and the consumerist conclusion of the Cold War. Luckily for us all, international anarchism survived through the collapse of the USSR and continued to grow until the present day.

Grave for Jonestown victims, Oakland

We hope our latest video sheds some light on Fulvia’s activities during the 1960s and 1970s and reveals the clear links between her time and our own. As we’ve stated before, Fulvia was one of thousands of others who kept anarchism alive through the darkest periods of history, and like thousands of others, her name and story have been mostly lost to collective memory. Our cinematic narrative has nearly reached the present day and in our final installment we’ll reveal how close we are to this unbelievable and uncanny history of resistance. We hope these words and images find you well, wherever you might be on this earth, and with any luck we’ll be able to finish the rebellion started by people like Fulvia, her mother Isabelle, and her grandmother Josephine.

Approximate image of Josephine Lemel Ferarri