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.
Life 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 some years before the full implications of this development became widely apparent. 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.
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 of “confinement” that would remove him from antifascist activist.Commissione di Torino, ordinanza del 7.7.1927 contro Velio Spano (“Dirigente dell'organizzazione giovanile comunista”). In: Adriano Dal Pont, Simonetta Carolini, L'Italia al confino 1926-1943. Le ordinanze di assegnazione al confino emesse dalle Commissioni provinciali dal novembre 1926 al luglio 1943, Milano 1983 (ANPPIA/La Pietra), vol. I, p. 76 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”. 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”.
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 the conditions under which political prisoners were being held, gained significant traction.
By November 1935 Spano was in Egypt, having been sent by in the party to undertake a propaganda assignment among the Italian troops advancing across Libya towards Suez to discourage British intervention in the intensifying Abyssinian War. For this mission he used the francophone cover name “Paul Conibet”. Between 1935 and 1937 he then undertook a number of further clandestine visits to Italy on behalf of the exiled party leadership in Paris, this time using the cover name “Renzo Lojacono” with the recurring objective of trying to maintain a certain level of organised antifascist activity, principally in Naples and Rome.
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 on co-directorship, with the Torinese Mario Montagnana, for l'Unità, the party's mass-circulation daily newspaper which had been banned by the Italian government in 1926, but of which clandestine copies were nevertheless produced, not always with the same frequency, in Milan, Turin, Rome and Paris between 1927 and 1944 (when regular daily publication resumed).
Through most of 1938 he was also intensively engaged in political work in support of popular front activities. During the summer of 1938 he organised a “party school” near Longwy, in the mining region of northern Lorraine, with Luigi Vitobello.
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 Gallico and her sister Diana alongside many others who would have considered themselves members not of the exiled Italian party, but as members of the Tunisian Communist Party which had been established (initially, as a branch of the French party) in 1934. By mobilising extensive support locally in a remarkably short amount of time, Spano was able to establish in Tunisia an antifascist daily newspaper called “Il Giornale”, an Italian language newspaper with significant financial backing from Tunisia's Jewish community, which set itself up in opposition to “Unione”, a daily newspaper produced with support from the Italian government. Spano served as editor-in-chief of “Il Giornale”. However, in (probably) 1939, as the international situation deteriorated, the newspaper's assets were seized and publication of it was permanently terminated.
Nadia Gallico