Obituary: Max Salvadori

I WAS delighted to read M. R. D. Foot's excellent obituary of Max (Massimo) Salvadori (8 September), writes John Vernon. It would have been sad if the passing of this courageous and outstanding patriot had gone unnoticed in England, a country for which he had a very special feeling. After his return to Italy in 1943 Max was to exercise a most salutary influence on many, mostly young British, officers in SOE, to whom he revealed a perennial Italy far removed from the sorry farce to which the dictatorship had reduced the country.

A very handsome man, he took after his mother, Giacinta Galletti di Cadilhac, who, like her husband, Conte Guglielmo Salvadori-Paleotti, came of an old land-owning family in the Marche, each of which had a worthy part in the Risorgimento and the building of a democratic Italy. The English strain came from Giacinta Salvadori's own mother, who was Margaret Collier, daughter of Robert Collier, first Baron Monkswell.