Gino Bibbi (5 February 1899 - 8 August 1999) was an Italian engineer, political activist, anarchist, militant antifascist who participated in the Spanish Revolution of 1936 as a republican fighter pilot. Earlier, he had placed his engineering skills at the service of the causes for which he fought. He supplied the SIPE grenade-bomb which his cousin Gino Lucetti threw at Mussolini's car in Rome on 11 September 1926. The bomb exploded only after bouncing off the roof of the car containing its intended target: Mussolini was undamaged. Bibbi was arrested, but later escaped and fled abroad.
Biography Provenance and early years Gino Bibbi was born at Avenza, a small town between the coast and Carrara, into which it has subsequently been subsumed. Carlo Bibbi, his father, is described variously as a timber merchant and an owner of lands and quarries (presumably of marble). In political terms, Carlo Bibbi would have been considered a liberal and a moderate. Gino Bibbi was born with at least one sibling, Marietta "Zingrina" Bibbi (1895–1993), who was four years older than he was. She trained as an elementary school teacher, but is not believed ever to have taught. The two would remain closely allied, after they grew up, in personal and political terms. Relatively little is recorded of his childhood, but he grew up in a city that was already well known for leftist militancy, and from something he later wrote it appears that the schoolboy Gino Bibbi already suffered from a guilt-driven social conscience: "I came close to crying when I saw my school friends did not even have shoes. I, being rich, was shamed by their poverty".
Student, army conscript and antifascist activist Bibbi studied at the "Istituto tecnico" (college) in Pisa, but his study was interrupted when he was conscripted for military service in February 1917. He attended a "junior officer" course at Parma, emerging with the rank of an infantry second lieutenant ("sottotenente"). From there he was sent to join the frontline fighting at Lagarina, near the Austrian frontier. He was sent back after a few months, badly sick with abdominal typhus. In October 1922 he was placed on what appears to have been some form of indefinite leave from the army and returned to his home at Carrara, He re-enrolled for a degree course in engineering at the Pisa "Istituto tecnico" (college), a relatively short distance along the coast to the south. However, at the end of 1922 he moved on to the "Politecnico di Milano", beyond the mountains to the north. There are indications that by this time he may already have "gravitated towards the anarchist movement". From other sources it would appear that when he first enrolled at Milan he would still have considered himself an "interventionist democrat" with republican leanings. In any case, it was while he was at Milan that his ideals and political choices matured and crystallised. It was probably during this period that he came to know the influential anarchist theorist, Camillo Berneri, with whom he would remain in touch until the latter's assassination in 1937. He also became friendly with the Molinari family, especially with two of Ettore's sons, Libero and Henry, an idealistically driven family of anarchist-scientists whose class background was not dissimilar from Bibbi's own.
Meanwhile, in October 1922, in Rome, the Mussolini government took power. Viewed through the retrospective prism supplied by Adolf Hitler in 1933 it becomes easy to see the slide towards one-party dictatorship in Italy as a relatively gradual transformation. Nevertheless, the systematic use of violence as a tool of political influence had already been on display for a number of years across Italy, and especially in Milan and the north more generally. Unlike many people at this stage, libertarian anarchists such as Bibbi and his circle were disinclined to give the fascists the benefit of the doubt. It seems to have been during 1923 that he spotted Renato Ricci in the centre of Carrara and thrust a handful of "subversive" political leaflets in the face of the man who was one of Carrara's leading (and as matters later turned out most politically astute) young fascist paramilitaries. Bibbi fled on his motorbike but was chased, pulled off his bike, and very badly beaten. His father's timber mill was later torched.
His commitment to antifascism undiminished by the assault, Bibbi continued as an active member of the anarchist circles in his home city and at Milan where, at this stage, he was still a student. Through his involvement with the USI (trades union) he came to know Alibrando Giovannetti: the two men worked together on distributing "Rassegna Sindacale" and other items of trades union propaganda. In 1924 Bibbi's name appears on a list of subscribers to Errico Malatesta's newly launched (and short-lived) anarchist review magazine "Pensiero e Volontà". Despite the brutal thuggery to which he had been subjected at Carrara after his encounter with Ricci in 1923, he continued to advertise his anarchist convictions, and the assault in 1923 turned out to be the first of several such incidents. Memorably, on 18 May 1924 he turned up in the centre of Carrara on horseback and then, switching to a motorbike, distributed antifascist leaflets all round the city in broad daylight. He was immediately arrested, but then released under an ad hoc amnesty (“assolto per amnistia”). A few years later, a file note dated 1928 in the prefecture at the adjacent municipality of Massa described Bibbi as a boy "of seemingly mild character, of good education, of average intelligence and good upbringing .... He professes to believe in anarcho-communist principles, and is viewed as a solitary somewhat dangerous idealist."
In the Autumn/Fall of 1925 Bibbi was again badly beaten up by fascist thugs, probably by way of retribution following a gun fight between some fascists and his cousin Gino Lucetti which had taken place some time earlier. During this period Bibbi continued to sustain his contacts with Camillo Berneri and a number of other militant libertarians.
The assassination attempt On 11 September 1926 Gino Lucetti attempted to assassinate Benito Mussolini in Rome by throwing a bomb at the car on which the dictator was travelling as it passed the Porta Pia. The car was moving slowly and the bomb hit its roof and/or windscreen of the car before bouncing off it and exploding on the adjacent pavement. No harm befell Mussolini as a result of the attack. The next day a number of the attacker's family members were arrested, including his cousin Gino Bibbi and his sister Maria. Details of Bibbi's own involvement were made public only in 1984, with the posthumous publication of detailed memories provided to two interviewers by one of Lucetti's small band of co-conspirators, Umberto Tommasini (1896–1980). Despite there being no separate source corroborating Tommasini's recollections, his reports of the affair were consistent with what was already known, and are generally accepted by later commentators. The bomb used was an SIPE grenade-bomb manufactured in Milan by the "Società Italiana Prodotti Esplodenti" an explosives products company located near the "Politecnico di Milano" where Bibbi was still registered as a student. (He seems never to have completed his degree course.) It was Bibbi who provided the closely knot of conspirators from Carrara with the bomb and with other unspecified weapons which might prove of use in the attack or its aftermath. The police made repeated attempts to implicate Bibbi in the plot, but were un able to find the necessary evidence. Whatever the conspirators knew, they remained silent, and most were eventually released without charge, including Adele Crudeli, the 67-year-old mother of Lucetti.
Detention Meanwhile, in the absence of any trial, on 19 November 1926, the Provincial Commissioner condemned Bibbi to five years of "police confinement". On 30 July 1927 he reached the island of Ustica as one of a party of some thirty anarchists whom the authorities had determined "stood out on account of their restless [i.e. provocative and/or suspect] conduct". Among those confined on the island were several who, according to information supplied in the 1980s by Tommasini, had indeed been part of the assassination plot, including not just Tommasini himself, but also Anselmo Preziosi and Spartaco Stagnetti. Although, during the fascist years, there were at times more than a thousand people confined on Ustica by the authorities, it would be incorrect to think of the island as a "conventional" prison in Anglo-American terms. Shortly after he arrived, Gino Bibbi was joined there, on a purely voluntary basis, by his elder sister (and fellow anti-government activist), Maria. While some sources insist she was driven to this by her deep affection for her brother, others indicate that she was motivated by a wish to avoid being arrested in Palermo, where she was living at the time. It was probably on Ustica that Bibbi came to know the family of Calogero Cirino, with members of which he would be closely involved during the early 1930s. Clara, the daughter of the family, shared much of Bibbi's period of confinement: the two would be romantically linked for some years, before separating in 1935.
In the aftermath of the bomb attack on an inaugural ceremony at the "Fiera Milano" (exhibition ground), which took place on 12 April 1928, causing the deaths of 20 people (though not of the king, who was assumed to have been the intended target), Gino Bibbi was one of several hundred "subversives" who fell under suspicion. He was removed from his island exile to the infamous "Regina Coeli" ("Queen of the Heavens") jail in Rome and from there, shortly afterwards, to Milan, together with Libero Molinari. The police believed that Bibbi and Molinari, along with Nella Giacomelli and Libero's brother, Henry, were part of a "terrorist plot" devised by Camillo Berneri. It was one of a number of attempted police framings to which Bibbi would fall victim. As matters turned out, when they faced trial before the "Special Court" on 5 September 1928, Bibbi and Libro Molinari were acquitted on all counts, while the prosecution's investigations into the supposed complicity of Henry Mollinari and Nella Giacomelli were terminated, and the two suspects released, almost immediately, without matters progressing to any sort of court trial. During October 1928 Bibbi was returned to his island confinement, this time on Lipari, another of the islands a short distance to the north of Sicily, and somewhat larger than Ustica, the island on which he had previously been detained.
Confinement on Lipari provided him with the opportunity to get to know Carlo Rosselli, Emilio Lussu and Fausto Nitti, all three of them prominent among those who, after 1943, would be celebrated for their opposition to Mussolini's violence-based one-party dictatorship. In June 1929 Bibbi was the subject of another denunciation and he was taken back to Milan to face another trial. Accursed, along with others, of re-instating "a subversive organisation and propaganda", most of those accused were charged, apparently for lack of evidence, though three comrades received two-year jail terms, considered relatively lenient in view of the charges they had faced. By September 1929 Bibbi had been returned to Lipari where, between undergoing interrogation sessions and worse "fascist infamies on those accursed islands", he was involved in further networking with fellow anarchists and anti-fascists.
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