Velio Spano

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Velio

Velio Spano (15 January 1905 – 7 October 1964) was a Sardinian-born antifascist activist and, at times, fighter through the Mussolini years. He is also remembered for his (mainly political) writings: he later came to be identified, increasingly, as a journalist. After the leader fell from power in 1943 and Italy was liberated in 1945, he became an increasingly mainstream politician, serving as a member of the senate between 1948 and 1963, and playing an increasingly prominent leadership role in the Communist Party.

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Velio

Provenance and early years Velio Spano was born at Teulada, a little town close to the southern tip of Sardinia, which had been part of Italy since unification. Attilio Spano, his father, worked for the government. Antonietta Contini, his mother, was a school teacher. When Velio was just 5 the family relocated some fifty kilometers to the north, to Guspini, a slightly larger and more dynamic small town in which the local economy was, at that time, dominated by lead and zinc mining. Over the next 13 years he grew up among the mining community in Guspini, which was widely regarded as a hotbed of socialism. He was exposed to the prevailing left-wing ideas of the time, and to the potential power of effective political organisation. After he passed his eleventh birthday he became based, for most of the year, in Cagliari where he attended the Giovanni Siotto Pintor Middle School for two years. He then transferred to the Giovanni Maria Dettori High School, where he successfully completed the “classical” curriculum in 1922 which opened the way to a university-level education. It was also In October 1922 that Mussolini took power across the water in Rome, although it would be…Citește mai mult

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Young militant Early in 1925 Spano took on the leadership of the University Communist Group at Rome, jointly with Altiero Spinelli. His activism did not go unnoticed by the security services on the group and in 1926, at the invitation of the party there, he moved to Turin, and industrial city with a long-embedded tradition of liberalism and socialism to take on the leadership of the University Communist Group there. He enrolled at the university to continue his studies, but by 1927 had abandoned these. That year he joined the organisational apparatus of the Young Communists (FCCI), which had been an illegal organisation shortly after the Fascist take-over in 1922. Operating, as far as possible, below the radar of officialdom, he identified himself at this time using the code name “Mariano”. By this time he had become, in the words of at least one commentator, a “professional revolutionary” in response to the government's systematic construction of the institutional underpinnings for an authoritarian tyranny including, notably, the so-called ”exceptional laws” (‘’” leggi eccezionali del fascismo"’’) of 1925/26. He was arrested in Turin and sentence to a two month prison term and recommended, at the same time, for some more systematic form…Citește mai mult

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French exile, Egyptian assignment In 1932, as part of a more general amnesty announced the previous month to celebrate the first ten years of fascism in Italy, 639 of the 1,056 prisoners formally classified as political prisoners were released. Velio Spano was one of those released. In January 1933 he became aware that the authorities again searching for him with a warrant for his capture, however, and decided to emigrate to France. Through 1933 Paris was rapidly becoming an informal headquarters for exiled communists from Italy and Germany. Spano became part of the illegal organisation abroad of the Italian Communist Party, taking charge of the section handling management and liaison in respect of Italian emigrant workers. In October 1934 he teamed up with the French polymath-philosopher Romain Rolland and others to launch a call for the release of Antonio Gramsci whose health had deteriorated steadily and alarmingly since his arrested and imprisonment by the Italian authorities in November 1926. Gramsci enjoyed a formidable reputation among Europe's left-wing intellectual elite, which was particularly well represented in France, and the campaign for his release, and for an international delegation to be permitted to visit Italy in order to make a determination of…Citește mai mult

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The Spanish war In December 1936 Spano was sent by the party to Barcelona to contribute to the antifascist struggles in the Spanish Civil War which had broken out six months earlier. He joined the “interbrigadistas” being set up in Spain by the Comintern. His initial focus was on political broadcasting, for which he displayed an exceptional set of abilities, initially in Barcelona and later in Madrid from where, starting in February 1937, to was placed in charge of “Radio Milano Libera”, a wholly Italian language station targeting the Italian army units sent by Mussolini to fight alongside Franco's ”nationalist” forces. There was also a clear intention, given the frequencies used, that the station's antifascist political messages should be heard in Italy, where it was not always so easy to deliver antifascist messages through the broadcast media from closer to home. On the evidence of the number of people arrested in Italy on suspicion of listening to the “Radio Milano Libera” transmissions sent across from Madrid, it appears that the station attracted a significant listenership. Towards the end of 1937 Spano returned to Paris where a focus of his energies was on political j0urnalism through the print media. He took…Citește mai mult

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Tunisia In October 1938 the party sent Spano to Tunisia. Tunisia had been a “French protectorate” since 1881 in the context of the so-called nineteenth century European “scramble for Africa”. French control over Tunisia had been an ongoing source of tension between France and Italy from the outset, reflecting longstanding colonial rivalries. Commercial ties across the Mediterranean had existed for centuries, and during the second half of the nineteenth century Tunisia had been a favourite destination of Tunisian emigrants, so that on many streets the Italian language was as likely to predominate as French. During the 1920s and 1930s, reflecting the wider surge in nationalism, rejection of French “protection” was becoming more widespread across Tunisia itself. In this context, Spano's mission was to strengthen the organisation of antifascist activities among the large Italian expatriate community and strengthen bonds of friendship with the French government in France, which still represented a beacon of freedom and democracy at a time when fascist currents were strengthening across much of Europe. Spano launched an energetic propaganda programme and established contacts with numerous young communist activists from Italy who by this time had found refuge in to Tunisia. These included Maurizio Valenzi, Ruggero Grieco, Nadia…Citește mai mult

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Nadia Gallico For much of Europe war broke out during September 1939, although Italian military involvement was deferred until June 1940. The Tunisian Communist Party went underground. Many of Spano's political comrades returned to Italy, seeking to avoid discovery by the authorities there by living “underground”, without registering any place of domicile with a municipality, and never staying in the same place for very long. Spano was keen to do the same, but was persuaded by the party leadership that he could be more helpful to the cause by remaining in Tunisia. Meanwhile, shortly after arriving in Tunisia in 1938 he had met Nadia Gallico, a lawyer's daughter who had grown up in Tunisia as a member of the Italian community and as part of a family that was avowedly pro-communist and anti-fascist. They married in May 1939: Nadia Gallico Spano played a leading role in Spano's task of organising antifascist resistance in Tunisia and subsequently proved a powerful source of life-long personal and political support. I due course Nadia also gave birth to the couple's three recorded daughters.

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Sbeitla Early during 1940 Spano was arrested and detained, together with other Italian communists, in the “concentration camp” at Sbeitla. He was held there until Paris fell to the Germans in June 1940, which generated delight among some of the more vocal Tunisian nationalist but also, in political terms, ushered in a period of increased uncertainty for the territory. Nadia Gallico Spano also spent time confined at the Sbeitla camp which later, she memorably described. Security did not depend on high fences and guard dogs: it was “a location on the edge of the desert. Not so much a concentration camp as a vast stretch of abandoned ground, without even one building, and defined by a line which it was prohibited to cross. Anyone who did so, even without meaning to, risked being shot without warning”.

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Tunisian Communist Party During 1941 Velio Spano reorganised the Tunisian Communist Party to take account of the changed circumstances. With many comrades having quietly slipped across to Italy he emerged, de facto, in a leadership role within what remained of the party. He established links with the Gollisti, with French socialists, and with the Neo Destour nationalists under Habib Bourguiba. There was a shared enemy: the collaborationist French puppet government at Vichy in central France. In November 1941, following betrayal by an informant, most of the remaining leading figures in the Tunisian Communist Party were arrested. During the trial that followed Velio Spano managed to escape. He was nevertheless convicted in absentia and sentenced to death. The verdict and sentence were restated March 1942 and again in June 1942. The basis for it was the determination that he had “reconstituted a party that had been dissolved and disseminated propaganda based on words supplied from Moscow through the Comintern. Despite the best endeavours of the police, who were answerable to the Vichy government for as long as Tunisia retained the status of a “French” protectorate, Spano managed to avoid recapture. During November 1942 Tunisia began to fill with German and Italian…Citește mai mult

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Italian liberation At the time of Spano's return to Italy during the second half of 1943 the country was being progressively liberated from the south by U.S. and English armies from abroad and by Italian partisan brigades partisan brigades from within. English-language historiography tends to downplay the Italian contribution to the country's liberation from fascism while an opposite tendency is apparent in many Italian-language sources. To the frustration of the partisans everything ground to a halt during the winter of 1943/44 due to the reluctance of the foreign invaders to engage in mountain warfare mountains through the winter, so Rome was liberated only in June 1944, by which time the Germans, having “rescued” Mussolini in September 1943, had installed him as the nominal leader of the so-called “Italian Social Republic”. The Italian Civil War fought out against this background is generally considered to have continued from September 1943 until May 1945. In Naples, Spano joined up with Eugenio Reale, Marcello Marroni and Clemente Maglietta to take on the leadership of the Communist Party which, based in Naples, they were able to reinstate in the liberated south of Italy. (Palmiro Togliatti, the party's longstanding leader between, by some criteria, 1927 and…Citește mai mult

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After the liberation In July 1944 Spano became part of the provisional directorate established for the so-called party “operativa” in anticipation of a liberated Italy It was also in July 1944, following the liberation of Rome the previous month, the Spano accepted the directorship of the newspaper l'Unità, responsible now for the Rome edition for the next two years. In May 1945 he attended the party's second regional congress in Sardinia on behalf of the national directorate and repeated his urgings not to focus on the “autonomy” agenda to the exclusion of the pressing need for social reforms. On 8 August 1945 he participated as a member at the inaugural meeting of the provisional leadership team for the “Consulta nazionale” (‘’loosely, “national council”’’) set up on the basis of a royal decree dated 5 April 1945 (‘’” Decreto legislativo luogotenenziale 5 aprile 1945, n. 146”’’) on the basis of an initiative from post-fascist political leadership groups that had emerged in Rome and Milan. Following the abolition of the monarchy in June/July 1946, Velio Spano served as an under-secretary at the Agriculture Ministry in the short-lived first government of the Italian Republic. Meanwhile in December 1945, at the fifth national congress…Citește mai mult