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# 74 •nECEMBER 14 , 2015
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GREAT ITALIANS OF THE PAST:
ALTIERO SPINELLI
By Giovanni Verde
the year of the murder of
Giacomo Matteotti, with
Fascism now in power and
the Communists forced
underground. The activities of the party soon will
keep him from the love
of his family and he will
be forced to move to Milan to escape the police.
However, the attempt is
useless because on June
3, 1927 Altiero is arrested
because of special laws
against political opponents introduced by fascism,
and convicted to sixteen
years and eight months in
Altiero Spinelli was born in prison, after a year already
Rome on August 31, 1907, passed in San Vittore jail.
but spent his early years
in Campinas, in Brazil, be- In 1937 he gets transfercause his father was the red to Rome but, while
Italian Vice-Consul in the eagerly awaiting the time
South American country. of release, he receives the
He signs up to the Italian abrupt news of the tranCommunist Party in 1924, sfer to the confinement of
The first name that comes
out when every European
thinks about the European
Union, is Altiero Spinelli.
He was the one to dream a
continent in harmony after
being the scene of two
world wars. The ideas of
this Italian dreamer marked the exciting season
of European integration in
its infancy. His example of
life and struggle has been
a symbol of the power of
ideas in front of the drama
of violence, war, intolerance.
22 | WE THE ITALIANS
www.wetheitalians.com
Ponza, a small isle in the
Lazio region.
The politician is in fact confined in two different locations: in Ponza from 1937
to 1939 and in Ventotene,
another small island close to Ponza, from 1939 to
1943. In those years of confinement, Spinelli is one of
the few members of the
Italian Communist Party to
distance himself from Stalin, the Moscow Trials and
the Soviet communism in
general. In June 1941, during the confinement on
the island of Ventotene,
Spinelli, with the collaboration of Ernesto Rossi
and Eugenio Colorni, writes the basic document of
European federalism: the
“Manifesto per un'Europa
Libera e Unita” (Manifesto for a Free and United