Name Luigi Romersa Role Journalist | Died 2007, Rome, Italy | |
 | ||
Luigi Romersa (Boretto, July 5, 1917 - died Rome, March 19, 2007) was an Italian journalist and writer who worked as a war correspondent during the Second World War. He probably was the only Italian to enter USA Army missile bases during the Cold War. He was a friend of Wernher von Braun. He was best known for his essays about World War II. He was married to Mary Kisselov, the daughter of Georgi Kisselov, a Bulgarian Industrialist who was sent by his government to Turkey as an emissary in hopes of establishing a pact with the Allies to avoid the threat of a German Alliance. She is also the granddaughter of General Pantelay Kisselov a Bulgarian hero who returned a region back to Bulgaria taken by Romania in an earlier conflict. During the war in 1916, Bulgaria was determined to retake the Dobrudja. The decisive factor was the takeover of the Romanian fortress around the city Tutrakan. My grandfather was the commander of a corps of two divisions and was tasked with the mission to retake Tutrakan. He was able to take over the fortress within two days, thus making the way for the conquest of all of Dobrudja to once again be free. For this coup my grandfather was revered as a hero and by decree of King Ferdinand. the village where he had his headquarters was named after hin, as well as streets in the cities of Varna, Swishtov, Russe, and Tutrakan.
Contents
Biography
Romersa was born in Boretto, near Reggio Emilia, and studied Law in Parma. He started his journalistic career writing for the newspaper La Gazzetta di Parma (The Parma Gazette). He was at first a Benito Mussolini supporter, so he could move to Milan, where he worked for the newspaper Corriere della Sera (Evening Courier). Later, he moved to Rome, where he wrote for the local newspaper Il Messaggero (The Messenger).
On Mussolini's invitation, he went to Germany to be present for Nazi war experiments in October 1944 in Rügen Island, in the Baltic Sea: in fact Hitler wanted to show a new bomb to Mussolini. This is told in Hitler's Bomb by the German historian Rainer Karlsch (Hitlers Bombe (Hitler's Bomb) - ISBN 3-421-05809-1, released on March 14, 2005).
After the war, he worked as a foreign reporter for the weekly magazine Tempo (Time) in Milan. He worked there for decades, traveling around the world, from the South Pole to Israel - during the Six-Day War - and Bahrain, where he covered the 1973 oil crisis. Romersa was also in Kindu, Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as in Port Said, Egypt, in 1956, to be present at French-English attack. He was also interested at NASA's Apollo program. In 1962, he won the Saint Vincent Prize for Journalism.