Giovanni Defendi was an Italian revolutionary who fought for the Paris Commune, was imprisoned, and after release spent many years as a grocer and anarchist leader in exile in London.

A native of Cosenza, she had lost her parents in a cholera epidemic and had been adopted by the family of the internationalist Tito Zanardelli.

[2] In 1880 a letter was published in the Citoyen of Paris in which Giovanni Defendi and Emilia Tronzi-Zanardelli announced that on 1 May 1880 they had contracted a union libre, as opposed to a judicial or religious marriage.

[3] The Defendis opened a delicatessen at 12 Archer Street in the Soho section of London, home to many immigrants.

[7] In 1896 Defendi was one of three judges on an anarchist court of honor that found Francesco Cini guilty of stealing some money he had collected to help Spanish militants who had been tortured while imprisoned in Montjuïc Castle.