Maria Federici

Anna Maria Agamben was born in L'Aquila in 1899, the oldest of six children in a well-off family of Armenian descent.^[1] She studied literature at the Sapienza University of Rome, after which she became a history and Italian teacher.^[1] She married the playwright Mario Federici in 1926. Unhappy with the Mussolini government, they moved to Bulgaria in 1929, later relocating to Egypt and then Paris.^[1] She returned to Italy in 1939 and was part of the Italian resistance movement during World War II. In 1944 she was one of the founders of the Italian Women's Centre, of which she was president until 1950.

Following the war, she was a Christian Democracy candidate in the 1946 elections and was one of 21 women elected to the Constituent Assembly. The following year she founded the National Association of Emigrant Families, which she remained president of until 1981. She was subsequently elected to the Chamber of Deputies from Perugia in the 1948 elections and sat on the Labor and Social Security. After retiring from politics in 1953, she focussed on women's and emigrants' issues.^[1]

She died in Rome in 1984.