Uguccione Ranieri di Sorbello
In 1926 he interrupted his university studies to do military service, initially at the Scuola Allievi Ufficiali of Rome (anti-aircraft artillery department) and later at Forte Belvedere in Florence, where he rose to the rank of Second Lieutenant.
The decision to abandon his legal career was not welcomed by his father, marquis Ruggero Bourbon di Sorbello, who cut off his support with the clear intention of making his son come to his senses, forcing him to return to Perugia, the city where the family lived.
It was in this climate of generational tension that the conditions would ripen for a decision that would mark a fundamental turning point in Uguccione’s life: leaving Italy to move to the United States.
Returning to Italy in 1937, Uguccione began working with a temporary contract at the newly created Ministry of Popular Culture (MinCulPop); he was then hired the following year, with the title of First Secretary.
Uguccione later recalled in some of his autobiographical writings the key role played by Marie-José:She surrounded herself with anti-Fascists to help her save the monarchy from the abyss toward which Mussolini was dragging it and the nation.
In many long talks with the Princess I proposed various possibilities for action (assassination of the tyrant and a coup d’etat in the Quirinale, a flight for her and her son to reach the Allied troops that had already landed in Sicily, etc.).
Following the announcement of the armistice on September 8, 1943, Uguccione deserted, heading south and taking refuge at the villa of his friends Zeno and Andreola Vinci in Cupra Marittima.
The IS9 network developed its activities in various parts of the Italian peninsula, especially along the Eastern Alps, where it was mainly a question of rescuing the crews of Allied bombers shot down by enemy antiaircraft, and in the areas between the Marche and Abruzzi regions, where there was a high concentration of escaped prisoners.
There, together with the partisans of the Garibaldi “Nino Nannetti” Division, he managed to unite and bring to safety a large group of missing American airmen and to capture more than a thousand German soldiers.
In 1946 Uguccione provided his services as a press officer for the Italian delegation at the Paris Conference, where he translated Alcide De Gasperi’s speech into English for foreign journalists, for which he earned their praise.
His close association with his friend, the writer and journalist Donato Martucci, which began in the 1930s,[11] bore fruit in the form of two of his most original creations in 1948 and 1950: the political fantasy novels Non votò la famiglia De Paolis and Lo strano settembre 1950, both published by Longanesi, which were greatly successful both in Italy and abroad.
He became a member of the Executive Committee of the Italian section, working with the group’s two magazines, Notizie federaliste mondiali and Federalismo nel mondo, participating in conferences and events.
This was a 15-page monthly publication written in English, the decidedly ambitious purpose of which was to make the complexity of Italian political and cultural life comprehensible to the English-speaking world, including professionals working in the field of communication among its privileged audience.
The success of this original publication among the readership of insiders earned him the praise of numerous Italian and foreign communication professionals, including the journalist and writer George Weller (1907‑2002), winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1943 and director of the Chicago Daily News office in Rome in the 1950s.
Starting in 1954 Uguccione oversaw the restoration of the home of Antonio Meucci and Giuseppe Garibaldi on Staten Island, which was later opened as the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum, to honor the memory of the two great Italians who had once lived there.
A first series of presentations on themes from the Italian Risorgimento to the development of Italy in a century of united history took place from April to May 1961, touching eastern Canada, the Midwest, Texas and the Atlantic coast states.
/ Educated in the Montessori system / he has always been honest within and without / and in life has never taken a step / if not freely and in good faith.» The most efficacious profile, however, remains that left by Indro Montanelli, a long-time friend of Uguccione who knew well his strengths and weaknesses.
In a lengthy article published in Il Corriere della Sera on May 28, 1970, almost a year after his friend’s death, Montanelli remembers him as "the most naive, scatterbrained, mud-splattered man in the world, but also one of the most generous, unpredictable, warm, candid, fascinating and poetic.
A volunteer for a risky war mission, he was landed behind German lines, where he created, with intelligent initiative and cool contempt for danger, an efficient organization for the recovery of Allied prisoners, succeeding in saving many of them.
