the Second World War, she travelled to Egypt regularly to acquire papyri and participate in excavation campaigns. In 1935, she succeeded Vitelli as head of the Istituto Papirologico at the same university, which took on its founder's name to become the Istituto Papirologico Girolamo Vitelli. Norsa remained in the position of Institute head until 1949, overseeing excavations at Antinoopolis and another two fascicules of the PSI. Anti-Semitism directed against Norsa under Italian fascism made her stint as Institute head difficult. Mario Capasso has argued that the reason for her not having been appointed professor at the University of Florence during this period was that the university considered her Jewish. The publication of some tables of literary papyri, originally intended to be published by the Institute of Classical Philology at Sapienza University of Rome, was repeatedly put off due to the insistence of Vincenzo Ussani, the institute director, on first clarifying Norsa's racial status. The tables were eventually published by the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. Norsa's application to visit Egypt for the second season of the Antinoopolis excavation in 1939 prompted an enquiry by the government into her racial status, meaning she was not able to go. The enquiry eventually declared her race to be mista non ebrea (mixed, not Jewish). During her time at the Institute, Norsa played a key role in the acquisition of further papyri and ostraka, using funds offered by Enrico Rostagno, and maintained a network of other papyrologists and antiquities dealers. She is credited with the recognition and publication, in 1937, of a fragment of Sappho found on an ostracon (Sappho 2), and with the acquisition for the Institute of a papyrus copy of Callimachus' Lock of Berenike (PSI IX, 1092). In 1947–8, Norsa stepped down as head of the papyrology course at the University of Florence and was replaced by Vittorio Bartoletti, another student of Vitelli. She retired from the position of head of the Istituto Papirologico in 1949, and was made the honorary president of the Association Internationale de Papyrologie in the same year. Later life Norsa's house had been bombed in March 1944 during the Second World War, destroying all of her books and papers and killing her sister-in-law, Eugenia. Unable to afford any rebuilding work, she spent the rest of her life as a temporary guest first at the Laurentian Library, then at various religious institutions. She suffered a stroke in