«In Pontedecimo there were just over twenty of us and we were just over
twenty years old. The only exception was Ugo Scattoni who had at leastdouble that. With his Roman accent he reminded me that the struggle
could not be limited to the industrial cities of the North alone. He
spoke little but when he did he brought a practical meaning to the
discussion. I thought a lot about what he said. Over the years we often
found ourselves working together politically and I had the opportunity
to get to know him better and understand why he had spontaneously
attracted my respect.
At midday I went to the restaurant in the Ostiense neighborhood where he
ate and we had lunch together. We sat among the workers in overalls and
ordered fettuccine and meat. Scattoni invariably cut his slice of meat
in two. He ate half and made a sandwich of the other which he carefully
wrapped with a paper napkin. He didn't talk about his personal affairs,
he was very reserved and didn't give confidence. Sometimes I managed to
make him laugh by telling him ironic details about political events and
figures.
I was intrigued by the systematic half ration of meat and one day I
asked him why. He replied that that was dinner. He worked half the day
in a craft workshop to be free to engage in political and trade union
activity the rest of the time.
The pay, however, was halved. Consequently his food also became so" (1).
This is how Arrigo Cervetto remembered his comrade Ugo Scattoni, Roman
metal worker, partisan, grassroots leader of the FIOM and founder of the
Anarchist Proletarian Action Groups (GAAP). An austere man, a
libertarian communist militant firm in his ideas, to which he had
devoted himself totally since he was young with an intense and constant
revolutionary commitment (2).
«He has maintained a coherence and
exceptional moral integrity, until the last day of his life", testifies
Marcello Cardone, also a partisan, his companion in the Anarchist Group
"Roma Centro" and in the GAAP. «We and all those in the
Piramide-Ostiense area, where he played, appreciated him very much.
And he has always lived alone off his work, without asking anyone for
anything" (3).
Cervetto still remembers: «Only from my comrades did I learn that his
brother had been shot at the Fosse Ardeatine as a militant of the
"Bandiera Rossa" group, a group with which he too had fought the
partisan struggle» (4). Numerous Roman anarchists were included in the
Red Flag formations, established by the Communist Movement of Italy, a
revolutionary Marxist organization dissident from the Communist Party (PCI).
The workshop where they worked, in Via Galvani, in the popular
neighborhood of Testaccio, had been used by Scattoni and his brother
Umberto to hide part of the weapons used on 10 September 1943 in the
battle of Porta San Paolo against the Nazis (5).
On the same street Scattoni lived at number 63, in the lots of the
Istituto Case Popolare, later demolished because they were unhealthy.
After the war he contributed to the revival of the anarchist movement
militating in the Lazio Anarchist Federation (FAL), in which he was a
member of the Correspondence Commission, and was present as a delegate
at the IV National Conference of the Italian Anarchist Federation (FAI)
(Canosa di Puglia, 22-24 February 1948).
Since 1947 he has collaborated with «Umanità Nova», the FAI weekly, with
articles on trade union issues and local news of the anarchist movement,
also dealing with film criticism (6).
Contrary to the «nullist» drift of the FAI and the FAL, influenced by
the anti-organisation current, he fought to affirm class anarchism and
in 1948 promoted the establishment of the «Roma Centro» Anarchist Group
(7). The Group, which holds its meetings at the FAL headquarters in
Piazza Fiammetta 11, is made up of around twenty militants. Together
with Scattoni and Pier Carlo Masini, who will also be among the founders
and managers of GAAP, it includes Pasquale Angeloni, Antonino Arnao,
Dario Bessi, Pasquale Borgese, Salvatore Candela, Marcello Cardone,
Luigi Carlizza, Mario Castrichella, Franco Oberdan Casucci, Milena
Casucci, Libero Chiocchini, Salvatore Cubeddu, Antonio D'Antimi,
Tommasino Di Cola, Elio Faraoni, Carlo Giacomini, Tancredo Maroncelli,
Angelo Giacinto Pagliai, Armando Pagnanelli, Mario Saurini, Renzo
Sbriccoli and Augusto Scapaticci. Most of them are young workers,
several of whom fought in the Resistance (8).
He participated as a delegate in the Third National Congress of the FAI
(Livorno, 23-25 April 1949) presenting two resolutions aimed at
affirming the role of anarchists in the class movement and in society,
which triggered the clash with the anti-organisation group of the
magazine «Volontà» ( 9). With his Group he is among the promoters of the
Tuscan-Lazio Interregional Committee and then of the Initiative Group
«For an oriented and federated movement», which intends to bring the FAI
to the positions of communist and organized anarchism. In this context
he participates in the national study collective and gives his
contribution with Masini, Cervetto and Sbriccoli to the drafting of the
document Resistenzialesmo plan of defeat, in which the «liberal» and
«anti-revolutionary» influences exercised in the FAI by the «Volontà»
group are denounced» (10).
Due to disagreements with the anti-organizers within the FAL, the Group
will meet in Via Montebello 89.
In 1950, following the attempt to orient the FAL in a classist
direction, he was among the promoters of the Lazio Anarchist Union,
which in its first conference (Frascati, 12 March 1950) brought together
over twenty groups from the entire region (11). In this period he was
considered by the police authorities to be the «most active exponent» of
the «dissident anarchists of the Central Rome group» (12).
In the National Anarchist Conference «For an oriented and federated
movement» (Genoa-Pontedecimo, 24-25 February 1951) he was among the
founders of the GAAP, a libertarian communist organization that made a
radical break with traditional anarchism and with the FAI.
He was elected to the Organization and Propaganda Commission and took on
the role of managing director of the newspaper «L'Impulso», for which he
wrote articles on work and the union. The monthly, then fortnightly, is
distributed in Rome in around a hundred copies on some newsstands and
through militant circulation.
The «Roma Centro» Group becomes the Roman section of the GAAP, acquiring
new comrades: Antonio Berrettoni, Domenico Di Maio, Luigi Gorgone,
Antonio Guerra, Antonio Liguori, Nello Spirito and Nino Zerbini, all of
proletarian extraction, some of whom are former partisans ( 13). In
Lazio there are around forty members of GAAP, concentrated in the
provinces of Rome, Rieti and Latina.
Active in the CGIL, he and other comrades formed the Roman Trade Union
Defense Committee, an expression of the minority current promoted by the
militants of the GAAP and the FAI, within which he represented the
metallurgical workers. At the II National GAAP Conference (Florence, 1-2
June 1952) he presented the report on the Importance of Trade Union
Defense Committees, supporting class unity. In the Third National
Conference (Livorno, 26-27 September 1953), in the midst of the
bourgeois offensive of the centrist governments and the supremacy of the
PCI over the workers' movement, he appealed to the need to «arouse
ourselves the reasons for mobilizing the masses, to face the growing
reactionary pressure and to educate the masses to direct action, free
from the confederal bureaucracy" (14).
With the V Conference (Pisa, 30 October-1 November 1955) he became part
of the National Committee.
Already a member of the Steering Committee of the FIOM of Rome, in the
XII National Congress (Genoa, 18-22 January 1956) he was elected to the
Central Committee with the support of the metallurgical workers of his
city. In the same period he was convicted as director of «L'Impulso» for
an article against the Segni government.
Following the VI National Conference of the GAAP (Milan, 13-15 October
1956) he intervened in the controversy with the dissidents of the «Roma
2» Group, reaffirming the priority of the intervention in the CGIL and
defending the decision to structure the organization into a party,
resulting among the signatories of the expulsion order. He shares the
choice to adopt the new name of Libertarian Communist Federation and is
among the supporters of the unification of the revolutionary left (15).
In the VII National Conference (Genoa, 28 April 1957) he approved the
merger with the Movement of the Communist Left (MSC).
While maintaining good relations with Cervetto and Masini, he did not
share their subsequent political choices, which led the former to found
Lotta Comunista and the latter to join the Socialist Party. Having
concluded the MSC experience, in the early seventies he moved closer to
the FAI, supporting the need for a political and organizational relaunch
and contributing to the reconstitution of the «Roma Centro» Group.
Now seventy years old, he died in his city on May 1, 1976, on the day
consecrated by the workers' struggles. Cervetto celebrated him in his
obituary as «the militant of many common sacrifices and of many common
battles against fascism and reformism, the brotherly friend of many
common hopes» (16).
Note:
(1) Arrigo Cervetto, Quaderni 1981-82, in ID., Opere, vol. XXIX,
Chronology of life and works. Notebooks and Notebooks. Indices, Lotta
Comunista, Sesto San Giovanni, 2020, p. 408.
(2) See Maurizio Antonioli et al. (dir.), Biographical dictionary of
Italian anarchists, vol. II, BFS, Pisa, 2004, ad nomen; Franco
Bertolucci (ed.), Anarchist Proletarian Action Groups. The ideas, the
militants, the organization, vol. III, The militants: the biographies,
BFS, Pisa/Pantarei, Milan, 2019, ad nomen.
(3) Interview with Marcello Cardone in Valerio Gentili (ed.), The
Memorandum of the Roman Red Army and the anarchists in the Roman
Resistance, Notebooks of the International Antifascist Action Archive,
n. 1, 2012, p. 29.
(4) Cervetto, op. cit., p. 408.
(5) See Marcello Cardone, Reflections on the Resistance, in Marco
D'Ubaldo, Remo Marcone (ed.), «This rebellious city...». The other
Resistance from the 1920s to the Liberation, Massari, Bolsena, 2007, p.
53; Alessandro Portelli, The order has already been executed. Rome, the
Fosse Ardeatine, memory, Feltrinelli, Milan, 2012, p. 125.
(6) See Anarchist activism in Lazio (a. XXVII, n. 46, 16 November 1947);
To the S.A.R.A. of Rome (a. XXVIII, n. 5, 1 February 1948); Act! Act!
(a. XXVIII, n. 6, 8 February 1948); In the winter of the Roman workers,
voices of pain and misery (a. XXIX, n. 2, 9 January 1949); The Celere
occupies Breda in Torre Gaia (a. XXIX, n. 17, 21 April 1949); From the
crisis of CISA Viscosa to the demobilization of Breda (a. XXIX, n. 19, 8
May 1949); The problem of the land (a. XXIX, n. 43, 23 October 1949);
Current considerations on cinematography (a. XXIX, n. 45, 6 November 1949).
(7) See Rome (Gruppo «Roma-Centro»), «Umanità Nova», a. XXVIII, n. 36, 5
September 1948.
(8) See Bertolucci, op. cit., by appointment.
(9) See a resolution on the political situation (paragraph 3), «Umanità
Nova», a. XXIX, n. 15, 10 April 1949; A resolution on workers' problems
(paragraph 5), «Umanità Nova», a. XXIX, n. 17, 21 April 1949;
Controversial jokes, «Volontà», a. III, n. 12, 15 June 1949.
(10) See Resistance plan of defeat. (Critical notes on the address of
the magazine «Volontà»), «L'Impulso», a. II, supplement. at no. 2,
February 1950.
(11) See First Conference of the Lazio Anarchist Union, «Umanità Nova»,
a. XXX, n. 13, 26 March 1950.
(12) Central State Archives, Ministry of the Interior, General
Directorate of Public Security, General Affairs Division, Annual
Categories, 1954, b. 18, f. «Anarchist groups of proletarian action»,
Rome Police Commissioner to the Chief of Police, 8 May 1951.
(13) See Bertolucci, op. cit., by appointment.
(14) The GAAP are consolidated and strengthened by the third National
Conference in Livorno, «L'Impulso», a. V, n. 10, 15 October 1953. On
Scattoni's participation in the III National Conference of GAAP see.
Central State Archives, Ministry of the Interior, General Directorate of
Public Security, General Affairs Division, Annual Categories, 1954, b.
18, f. «Anarchist proletarian action groups», Prefect of Livorno at the
Ministry of the Interior, 3 October 1953.
(15) On Scattoni's participation in the VI National GAAP Conference, see
Central State Archives, Ministry of the Interior, General Directorate of
Public Security, Confidential Affairs Division, Annual Categories,
1957-1960, b. 73, f. «Anarchist proletarian action groups. VI national
conference in Milan", Police Commissioner of Rome at the Milan Police
Headquarters, 14 February 1957.
(16) Our mourning, «Communist Struggle», a. XII, n. 69, May 1976. See
also the obituary of the «Roma Centro» Anarchist Group, Mourning ours.
Ugo Scattoni, «Umanità Nova», a. LVI, n. 18, 8 May 1976.
Photographic documents:
1. Scattoni, standing in the center, at the IV National GAAP Conference
(Bologna, 31 October-1 November 1954);
2. Scattoni at the XII National Congress of the FIOM (Genoa, 18-22
January 1956) (Franco Serantini Library Archive, Pisa).
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