Born in Ferrara on 8 December 1918, Matilde grew up in a family of profoundly anti-fascist Jewish origin: her father, a professor of German at the Technical Institute of Ferrara, was fired in the early 1920s for his political opinions and forced the family to make long pilgrimages; her maternal uncle Ludovico Limentani was one of the very few signatories of the "Manifesto of anti-fascist intellectuals" promoted by Benedetto Croce after the Matteotti murder, and she was the cousin of Eugenio Curiel, an anti-fascist and fighter in the Resistance, a communist and director of the underground "L'Unità".

Back in Ferrara in 1929, she attended prep school and the classical high school Ariosto. Here she began her anti-fascist activism thanks to Francesco Viviani, her Greek and Latin teacher – who died in Buchenwald in 1945 – who introduced her to the group gathered around the socialist Alda Costa, to which Giorgio Bassani also belonged. She attended university in Padua and was among the students close to Concetto Marchesi and Norberto Bobbio, at the time of graduation in letters and philosophy she is denied praise as a Jew.

Together with Giorgio Bassani, she was a teacher at the Jewish school in Via Vignatagliata organised for young people expelled from city institutions as a result of the racial laws, and again with him she was arrested on 11 June 1943 for having distributed leaflets in memory of Giacomo Matteotti.

Released after 25 July 1943, she was warned of the fascist reprisal of 15 November and managed to escape to Rome, where she took the name of her cousin Giuliana Sala, who emigrated to America and where she soon came into contact with the activist groups of the PSIUP – Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity – thus beginning her partisan battle.

In Rome she met her future husband, Ulisse Finzi, and together with him was one of the promoters of the "Comando Superiore Partigiano", which carried out war and sabotage, disseminated the underground press and maintained contact with northern-central Italy. Matilde Bassani's experience is also dealt with by "Radio London" with the broadcast of "A Teacher Combatant"; however, she is forced to vigorously claim participation in the Resistance when in 1948 she realized with amazement that the commission for the recognition of Partisan Combatant of the Anpi of Rome had not recognized her that status.

After the Liberation, on 9 April 1945, Matilda married Ulisse Finzi, the comrade in struggle and life: from their union three children were born. She remained active in the Italian feminist movement and in the UDI, engaging in the battles for the law on divorce and abortion, and chooses to work in social affairs, dealing with parent-child relationships for the Juvenile Court. She resumed her studies and became a psychologist and a member of the Italian Society of Clinical Sexology, specialising in new sex therapies in Palo Alto, California, New York and Montreal.

She died in Milan on 1 March, 2009.

“From an early age I've sucked milk and anti-fascism. My family, in fact, was anti-fascist out of natural aversion to dictatorship, out of love of freedom. [...] I just pierced the potatoes so they all rotted and then I put a note in the hole (the potatoes went to Norway and Sweden) where I wrote: "we are Italian Jews and we are forced to work, to do forced labour, out of contempt against us". [...] The action cost us prison, but which Bassani and I had strongly wanted, was that of June 1943 (the 10^th). We went at night to attack posters in memory of Matteotti. My friend Laura Weiss from Trieste and a companion went to the city centre. The next day, on the 11^th, we were arrested. You were in jail for 40 days. When the police car arrived in front of the house, I knew it had come for me. And my mother, who had already been through so much for my father and who had always told me not to expose myself, to be careful, that I would make her die, said to me that time in greeting me: ‘Now do your duty!’”.

Matilde Bassani in Donne e Resistenza. Intervista a Matilde Bassani Finzi, edited by Anna Maria Quarzi, pp.88-90.