Velio Spano

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.

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 some years before the full implications of this development became widely apparent.

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”.

For a teenager with Spano's political background and instincts, however, there was little chance of giving the leader the benefit of the doubt, and in 1923 he reacted by joining the popular anti-Mussolini street protests in Cagliari that had been unleashed by the coup and then, in 1923, by joining the Cagliari Young Communists (FCCI).

In December 1923 his father secured an important promotion which involved the family relocating to Rhodes, which had been ruled as an Italian colony since 1912.

Velio was almost 19 by this point, however, and did not accompany his parents.

Instead he moved to Rome and in Summer 1924 enrolled at the university there to study for a degree in Jurisprudence.

At around the same time, almost certainly in another part of Rome, the socialist parliamentarian Giacomo Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered by fascist paramilitaries giving rise to widespread revulsion and a rapidly intensifying appreciation of the true nature of Mussolini's fascism.

Following his disappearance, almost no one expected he would ever be found alive.

His body was found just outside the city a couple of months later.

Almost at once Spano joined the Lazio region Young Communists.

It was at about the same time that he came across the brilliant philosopher-journalist Antonio Gramsci.

They would engage together in long discussions about “The Sardinian question”.

Spano would later recall he owed his life-long commitment to communism, at least in part, to these discussions with Gramsci.

Early in 1925 Spano took on the leadership of the University Communist Group at Rome, jointly with Altiero Spinelli.

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 of “confinement” that would remove him from antifascist activist. During his two-month imprisonment his case was referred to the government's special court ("Tribunale speciale per la difesa dello Stato") in Rome, which was invited to consider his role in the (illegal) reconstitution of the ”Communist Party of Italy”.

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.

The special court delivered the outcome of their deliberations on 12 April 1928 and imposed on him a sentence amounting to a further five years and five months for “communist association and propaganda”.

The total sentence handed down was set at six years.

Spano's prison experiences are known primarily through what he himself said and wrote of them.

He tried to grasp the opportunities for personal and political development presented, writing of the experience to his family in 1930, “I have not lost a single centimeter of my stature”.

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 the conditions under which political prisoners were being held, gained significant traction.

After the leader fell from power in 1943 and Italy was liberated in 1945, he became an increangly mainstream politician, serving as a member of the senate between 1948 and 1963, and playing an increasingly prominent leadership role in the Communist Party.

Velio Spano was born at Teulada, a little town close to the southern tip of Sardinia, which had been part pf 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.