Background
Maria Pasquinelli was born in Florence, Italy on 16 March 1913.
Maria Pasquinelli was born in Florence, Italy on 16 March 1913.
She served as a nurse in Libya during World World War World War II In 1942 she went to work as an Italian teacher in Spalato, Croatia, where she denounced the killings of Italians in Dalmatia and Istria that occurred between 1943 and 1945. In early 1945 she tried unsuccessfully to unite all the Italians of Istria–both Fascist soldiers, as well as Catholic and Marxist partisans–against the annexation of Istria by the Yugoslavians under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito. Killing of General Robert de Winton
On 10 February 1947, in protest against the Istrian exodus, she went to the Istrian city of Pola to shoot and kill the Allied general in that city, Robert de Winton.
She was imprisoned for 17 years following the murder, and upon her release in 1964 she lived in Bergamo, where she died at the age of 100.
As a teenager, she was a member of the Italian Fascist Party.