The ceremony coincides with the 120th anniversary of the birth of Frassati-Gawrońska, who was often called ”an Italian who fell in love with Poland and loved it with all her heart.”
Frassati was born in 1902 in the Italian town of Pollone. Her father was the founder of the La Stampa daily newspaper, her mother was a painter, while her brother, Pier Giorgio Frassati, who died of polio at the age of 24, was beatified in 1990.
In 1925, at the age of 23, Luciana Frassati, by then holding a law degree from the University of Turin, married Polish diplomat Jan Gawroński, who served as secretary to the Polish ambassador to Italy and the Vatican.
One of their six children, Jaś Gawroński, is a journalist and politician, and a former member of the European Parliament.
The couple lived in Austria, where Jan Gawroński served as the last ambassador of Poland before the country’s annexation by Nazi Germany in 1938.
They subsequently moved to Warsaw. After Germany invaded Poland, Frassati-Gawrońska became active in the Polish resistance movement. Thanks to her Italian passport, she was able to move freely around Europe.
In one of her most daring exploits, she helped the wife of General Władysław Sikorski leave Poland.
On Christmas Eve 1939, the woman left Warsaw with Frassati-Gawrońska posing as a nanny.
At the beginning of January 1940, she was re-united with her husband, then the prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile in Paris.
Thanks to a personal conversation with Italian leader Benito Mussolini, Frassati-Gawrońska managed to secure the release of a large group of professors of the Jagiellonian University of Kraków in southern Poland.
Of the 144 professors arrested by the Germans in the infamous Sonderaktion Krakau operation, 101 were released at the request of Mussolini and Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano.
In all, Frassati-Gawrońska made seven missions to occupied Poland as an emissary of the Polish government-in-exile.
In 1993, she received the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for her services to the country.
She died in 2007 in her native town of Pollone in northwestern Italy, at the age of 105.
A biography of Frassati-Gawrońska, written by Marina Valensise and entitled The Daredevil, was published in Italy several years ago.
(mk/gs)