In the history of Italian-language anarchism, the political, cultural,
and sometimes ideological relationships woven between the variousregional anarchisms remain largely to be investigated. Indeed, the
history and persistence of the anarchist presence in many places in
Italy has yet to be outlined in terms of social, artistic, and even
literary characteristics useful for reconstructing specific identities
on which relationships on a larger scale were then founded, even, to use
an overused term, «transnational». And what is known to historians so
far often lacks a true in-depth analysis of ideological tendencies, of
their own positions, of similar or adversarial «parties», of the
consistency of the struggles and alliances, and of their very evolution.
All things that, beyond a sterile chronicle listing or, on the contrary,
the hagiographic exaltation of events and characters, would be very
useful to our movement in orienting itself today.
Among Sicilian and Southern anarchists in general (Calabrian,
Neapolitan, Apulian), but also Roman, Lombard, Romagna, etc., there have
existed in different periods networks of relationships, support and
mutual aid, which have not been limited to the exchange of letters or
fundraising but have seen the collaboration and active presence on site
of more or less well-known militants. A privileged relationship has
always linked Sicilian anarchists with Tuscan ones in this sense: I
point out here some elements that in my opinion deserve greater
historiographical attention.
Between 1890 and 1891 - the time of the Capolago congress - we witness a
rushing recovery of the Italian anarchist movement throughout Italy. The
Tuscan groups, which lacked a specific press organ, distributed hundreds
of copies of the main Sicilian anarchist newspapers («Il Proletario»
and, from July 1892, «L'Uguaglianza Sociale» of Marsala), which they
filled with collaborations and correspondence from Arezzo, Cecina,
Empoli, Florence, Livorno, Lucca, Orbetello, Pietrasanta, Piombino,
Pisa. The newspapers arrived at the port of Livorno, which had an
ancient and profitable commercial exchange with that of Marsala. The
anarchists of the Sempre Avanti! circle of Livorno acted as collectors:
the shoemaker Giuseppe Daveggia (1871-1942) and the student Virgilio
Milanese - probably Virgilio Mazzoni (1869-1959) -; Giuseppe Barsanti
(1860-1941), a sculptor from Pietrasanta; and above all Pietro Raveggi
(1872-1951) of the Orbetello Social Studies group.
«Il Proletario» reported the constitution, on 29 and 30 March 1891 -
between Easter and Easter Monday - of a Livorno anarchist federation
composed of the circles and nuclei: Libertà e Lavoro, Studii Sociali, La
Campana, Spartaco section B, Garibaldi, Nucleo anarchico Salviano, Primo
Maggio, I Ribelli, M. Bacunin section Ardenza, Studii Sociali section B
Roma, I Figli del mondo; to which was added on Saturday 3 April the
group La Nuova Rivoluzione; who all declared themselves
communist-anarchists, paid «some weekly, some monthly, to the federal
fund what their strength allowed», organized propaganda groups in the
various neighborhoods of the city and adhered to the «Capolago program».
On the same days, in Orbetello, the Maremma anarchist federation was formed.
Daveggia, Mazzoni, Barsanti and Raveggi are among those so-called
"minor" militants who have mainly nourished the history of Italian
anarchism but whose existence is still ignored by "mainstream"
historiography. The police will report them as assiduous collaborators
of the Sicilian anarchist press even in the following years. They
revived a tradition - to which they were all linked by family history -
which had seen the ports of Tuscany, Livorno more than all, as the first
place of access and asylum for the protagonists of the Sicilian
revolutions before the Unification (Jacobins and Carbonari, veterans of
'48 and conspirators of '60) and, in the period in which Florence was
the capital, as an opportunity for meeting, and amalgamation, of
Mazzinians and proto-socialists of the island (Saverio Friscia,
Salvatore Battaglia, Antonino Riggio, Eliodoro Lombardi, Pasquale Calvi,
Filippo lo Presti, Giovanni Pantaleo, etc.).
From the same tradition of the Risorgimento came two Sicilians with
crossed destinies, Pietro Gori and Paolo Schicchi, the first an
organizer, the second an anti-organizer: Gori had rushed to his hometown
"to preach waiting" on April 26, 1891, on the eve of the failed
insurrection of May 1; Schicchi, who would have accused him of that
failed tactic, would have him as a defense attorney two years later, at
the trial in Viterbo. In the meantime, most Tuscan anarchists had
distanced themselves from the "Capolago program" and were taking on
intransigent positions (Raveggi even collaborated with the "Croce di
Savoia", one of the two newspapers published by Schicchi in Geneva). On
12 July 1892, the "Sempre Avanti!..." was born in Livorno, soon to
become the organ of the "Schicchian" anarchist current. It was precisely
in the surroundings of the city of Livorno that Paolo Schicchi, carrying
the passport of another Tuscan anarchist sculptor, Giuseppe Di Ciolo
(1861-1933), would have found refuge if he had escaped arrest on 3
October 1892 at the Pisa station.
The "Sempre Avanti!..." maintained, with the roles reversed, a constant
relationship with the Sicilian anarchist groups at the time of the Fasci
dei Lavoratori. In just one month, from November 4 to December 2, 1893,
the column «Movimento Siciliano» hosted 32 correspondences from Marsala
(7), Catania (6), Palermo (5), Caltagirone (3); Trapani (2), Canicattì
(1), Grammichele (1), Messina (1), Scicli (1), Adernò (1), Caltanissetta
(1), Licata (1), Girgenti (1), Ustica (1), in which opinions were
debated that were against (the majority) or in favor of the
participation of anarchists in the Sicilian Fasci movement.
The line of the newspaper, in which criticisms, even ferocious ones, of
the so-called «fasciomaniacs», were wasted, was opposed by Pietro
Raveggi who, on the eve of the state of siege of 1894, from the pages of
«Uguaglianza Sociale», invited the entire national movement, and
anarchists abroad, to identify in the Fasci «the spark of the
revolution». Instead of fighting them, it was necessary to enter them to
counter their reformist tendencies, take advantage of the enthusiasm and
moral quality of the members to transform them "into a valid means of
resistance and revolutionary propaganda". Indeed, Raveggi argued, "many
comrades should abandon certain exaggerated reluctances and enter them
determined to explain the need for collective property and the
simultaneous action of a revolt to take over all social wealth" (Tropie,
La lotta economica in Sicilia, 17 December 1893).
He thus also endorsed the creation of Fasci dei lavoratori "in
solidarity with Sicily", in other regions of Italy, not least Tuscany
itself, where they actually arose in Grosseto, Empoli, Pisa, and around
Florence and Carrara. In Livorno, however, more rapid means were
preferred: a large insurrectional demonstration accompanied the
beginning of the Carrara riots, on January 13, 1894, to protest against
the state of siege in Sicily, with strikes, riots and the throwing of a
bomb.
The repression did not sever the umbilical cord with Sicily. After the
years of "forced domicile" at the end of the 19th century, which saw the
"Avvenire Sociale" of Messina become the spokesperson of numerous
anarchists, many Tuscans (including Barsanti, Raveggi, Mazzoni and Di
Ciolo), relegated to the smaller islands, the Sicilian anarchist
movement reappeared on the national scene with renewed vigor and greater
mobility than in the past. More and more Sicilian anarchists will reach
the continent to give a strong hand to the national movement and also
carry out important functions, inaugurating a tradition, which has
lasted until today (it is enough to mention the names of Gianni
Diecidue, Alfonso Failla, Umberto Consiglio, Gino Cerrito and Franco
Leggio), whose historical significance is not yet well recognized.
This second season of intense relations between Sicilian anarchists and
Tuscan anarchists, in particular from Pisa and Carrara, began in the
early twentieth century with the collaboration of Antonino Azzaretti -
former director of the «Proletario» of Marsala - at the «Combattiamo!»
of Carrara and culminated in the repeated stays and propaganda tours
carried out from 1906 to 1914 by Emanuele Valenti (1881-1937), Giuseppe
Gugino (1885-living in 1939) and again Paolo Schicchi. The latter,
released from prison on May 27, 1904 but subjected to three years of
special surveillance, arrived in Pisa in 1909 with the intention of
graduating from that university. He held conferences and rallies in
Tuscany and Liguria to protest against the shooting of Francisco Ferrer,
alongside this activity with the foundation of the Libreria Editrice
Sociale and the Cooperativa tipografica «Germinal», where he printed
propaganda pamphlets and postcards, «Satana», a monthly magazine of the
Rationalist Association, and, from May 1, 1910, «L'Avvenire anarchico»,
a weekly magazine that would animate the panorama of Tuscan and national
anarchism, with an important set of news also from Sicily, until the
advent of fascism.
Less than twenty years had passed since that 1st May 1891 which had so
excited and so disappointed, instilling a sense of belonging and common
brotherhood, despite the differences in temperament, in the anarchist
militants of both regions.
Natale Musarra
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
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