Medea Vittoria Irma Norsa (1877–1952) was an Italian papyrologist and philologist. She headed the Istituto Papirologico Girolamo Vitelli in Florence from 1935 to 1949. Early life and education Norsa was born to Michele Norsa and Silvia Vittoria Krosna in Trieste on 26 August 1877, the oldest of four children. She was christened Medea Vittoria Irma on 16 September 1877. After Silvia's death in 1886, her father married Caterina Giovanna Furlani in 1894 and had three more children. Norsa's heritage has been discussed by several scholars: Antonio Carlini calls her father Jewish, while Gino Bandelli describes her father's family as having ceased all relations with the local Jewish community in the Austro-Hungarian empire after the mid-1800s. Her father's family is thought to have hailed originally from Mantua. Norsa studied at a girls' school in Trieste from 1891 and took the maturità exam in classics in 1900 at another school in Koper. She then left for university in Vienna, initially to study Italian literature. However, she then moved to the Istituto di Studi Superiori in Florence in 1901 after one year in Vienna. Norsa's year in Vienna and subsequent transfer to an Italian university was likely reflective of typical behaviour by Italian scholars in the Austro-Hungarian empire, to which Trieste belonged at the time. In 1906, she earned a degree in literature with full marks from the University of Florence, with a dissertation on Sophocles' Ajax and Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes. In December 1906, she began to collaborate with her mentor Girolamo Vitelli and obtained a diploma from the school of palaeography, still at the Istituto di Studi Superiori. Career Between 1907 and 1911, Norsa returned to Trieste and worked as a teacher at her former school. In this period, she also published part of her university dissertation in the school's journal. In 1911, Norsa returned to Florence to work with Vitelli on the first volume of Papiri Greci e Latini della Società Italiana (PSI), which was published in 1912. Their ongoing collaboration continued up to Vitelli's death in 1935, and resulted in 11 volumes of the series. For much of her career, Norsa continued to teach, first in licei classici in towns in Tuscany, then in Florence where she also obtained a university teaching post in classical papyrology in 1924. Norsa was made conservator of the papyrus collection at the University of Florence in 1925. From 1926 until the beginning of