The presentation of the book Nuvole, uccelli e lacrime umane. Lettere su natura e rivoluzione (NdA Press), a collection of letters by the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, has been translated and edited by Caterina Zamboni Russia. The preview presentation will take place on Wednesday, February 26, 2025, at 6:00 PM at the Libreria All’Arco in Reggio Emilia.

Born in Poland in 1871, Rosa Luxemburg was an emblematic figure of the twentieth century: a revolutionary and theorist of socialism, she co-founded the Spartacus League with Karl Liebknecht in opposition to the then-emerging Weimar Republic, becoming a key figure in the uprisings of the period. She died in Berlin in 1919, assassinated by German paramilitary forces.

Revolutionary, intellectual, philosopher—these are the many facets through which Rosa Luxemburg is traditionally portrayed. However, from her extensive correspondence with friends and party comrades, a previously overlooked image emerges. Away from congresses, street protests, and political agitation, Luxemburg reveals herself surrounded by a host of animals and plants—a multitude of wasps, great tits, hornets, buffaloes, wildflowers, and acacia trees. Symbols of fragility and beauty, autonomy and suffering, the animals that populate her letters reflect the thoughts of one of the greatest thinkers of the last century, as well as an experience deeply rooted in human life and the everyday, despite her imprisonment and the wartime context.

Nuvole, uccelli e lacrime umane is a collection of letters—some never before translated into Italian—that offer readers a portrait of an intellectual capable of empathizing with the fate of the animals and plants that shared her days of imprisonment. It is in the struggle of natural life—a ladybug, a great tit, a flower picked in the prison courtyard—that Rosa Luxemburg glimpses and better understands the equally fragile human condition. Of herself, she once confessed: “I feel at home only in the world where there are clouds, birds, and human tears.”