The Golden Voice of Mussolini and Roosevelt

On the evening of May 9, 1936, a slim, elegant woman stood in Rome’s Piazza Venezia and – in perfect English – broadcast Mussolini’s famous speech on the conquest of Ethiopia. Her name was Lisa Sergio (1905–1989), her nickname “the golden voice” of Mussolini. A Florentine journalist, with American parents, she was fired from her job at the Propaganda Ministry the following summer, most likely for gossiping about a brief affair with her boss, Mussolini’s son in law, Galeazzo Ciano.

Aided by Nobel-winning Guglielmo Marconi, she established herself in the US and resumed broadcasting, now as a liberal commentator, surrounding herself with a network of luminaries, including Eleanor Roosevelt. After the war, she was accused by the FBI of Communist sympathies and in the McCarthy years banished from the radio. Tired of this situation, in 1960, she moved to Washington, where she re-invented herself as a travelling lecturer in current affairs. She remained in the US for the rest of her life.