Paolo Alberto Rossi

Rossi was born in Rome in 1887.[2] His father, Egisto, was a Tuscan scholar of Sanskrit and his mother was American,[3] whose uncle was Laurenus Clark Seelye, the first president of Smith College. After high school graduation in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1912 Rossi received a law degree from the University of Rome.[4]

Rossi served in the Italian Army as an infantry officer in World War I. He was wounded in the Karst region in southwestern Slovenia. After a brief legal practice in Rome,[4] in 1920 he was nominated and assigned to serve as Italian Vice Consul of New York and then Italian Consul General of Pittsburgh and New Orleans.[2] In the 1930s Rossi served in the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome and the consulates of Aleppo, Smirne and Sarajevo.[2] In 1947 he reopened the Consulate General's office in Marseille.[4]

Between 1948 and 1952 Rossi was the Plenipotentiary Minister of the Italian Consulate of Shanghai.[2] He witnessed the fall of Shanghai by the communists led by Mao Tse-tung. In 1970, Rossi published a book about it: “The Communist Conquest of Shanghai;: A Warning to the West”.[1]

In Shanghai, Rossi was known to be a "very cultured man, that spoke english splendidly".[3] He participated in the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China, hosted at the Broadway Mansions Hotel.[5][1]

At the conclusion of his diplomatic career, Rossi opened a law practice in New York to serve Italian immigrants.[4]

Rossi married Giacinta Porfilio, sister of Italian American entrepreneur Almerindo Portfolio and had three sons.[4] Rossi wrote a biography in Italian about his brother in law, titled La Vita di Almerindo Portfolio, (1966).[4]