Elma Baccanelli

Born in the United States to Italian parents, Elma Daisy Baccanelli was a major figure in the history of the transatlantic relations between Italy and the United States. Baccanelli attended Columbia University where, in addition to English literature, she studied Italian literature, philology and linguistics and had Giuseppe Prezzolini as a professor. After concluding her studies, Baccanelli taught Italian in a New York City school and worked as a translator and proof-reader for New York Times. Noteworthy is also her assistant position for New York's first Italian American mayor Fiorello La Guardia during his third consecutive term that ended in 1945. 

During World War II, Baccanelli served in the US Army Auxiliary Corps and performed several missions for the Office of War Information in the United States. In 1944, Baccanelli was assigned to Italy where she worked for the US Information Service and later for the US Embassy in Rome in the Psychological Warfare Branch. In 1947 Baccanelli took the reins of the newly formed Foster Parents' Plan office in Rome, an international program of financial support for the young victims of the war as well as the first nongovernmental humanitarian organization to invent the long-distance adoption formula. By intervening with concrete measures, the program helped 11,385 Italian children, including war orphans and children mutilated due to bombing. In addition to directing the administrative procedures of the project, Baccanelli personally visited the children taken in charge. Prioritising the direct and personal communication between the assisted and the American benefactors, Baccanelli encouraged the children to periodically write a letter to their adoptive parents in the United States in order to keep them updated on their progress.

At her home in Rome Baccanelli organized dinners and cocktail parties on a regular basis, inviting intellectuals, academics, military attachés, entrepreneurs and American diplomats. Among her regular guests there were also some of the most prominent exponents of twentieth-century Italian literature and culture, who were friends of her husband Carlo Laurenzi, a journalist and special correspondent of La Stampa and Corriere della Sera. Worth mentioning are Carlo Levi who painted a twilight portrait of Elma Baccanelli, Eugenio Montale who made a dedication to her daughter Laura on a first edition of Ossi di seppia, Teresa Foscari Foscolo, the Venetian noblewoman who was very active in Italia Nostra and was Bassani's friend and muse, Alfonso Gatto, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Vitaliano Brancati, Carlo Cassola, Giorgio Bassani, Giovanni Macchia and Manlio Cancogni. 

Baccanelli led Foster Parents' Plan operations for twenty-two years, until the Rome office closed in March 1969. A month later, Baccanelli fell ill, and, in July of the same year, she died at the age of fifty years. 

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