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 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.
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 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. 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.