Foundation

In the mid-nineties of the 19th century, the Italian Socialist Party owned numerous newspapers and periodical journals published in various parts of the Italian Kingdom, but those had limited runs, and they were funded by the same militants of the Party.^[1] However, PSI (the Italian-language abbreviation of the Italian Socialist Party) obtained an important standing in the elections of 1895,^[2] and during the IVth Socialist Congress of Florence in July 1896, programs for the editorial development were promoted along with the origination of a nationwide newspaper.

The first number of Avanti! was published on 25 December 1896, on Christmas, because the new newspaper sought to represent Italian socialism as intended as "a new voice that does not descend from the airy high sky, but it lifts up from workshops and fields and predicts the peace to men of good will" or their own rendition of what they considered a "holy birth".^[3] After all, Jesus Christ was referred to as the "first socialist in history" in the contemporary socialist iconography.^[4]

The first director was Leonida Bissolati, with Ivanoe Bonomi, Walter Mocchi, Alessandro Schiavi, Oddino Morgari and Gabriele Galantara as editors. The last one was a designer and satirical cartoonist who drew the logo for the newspapers, characterized by an italic font and the exclamation point at the end with the typical liberty style of the end of the 19th century.^[5] Along with Guido Podrecca, Galantara was also the founder in 1892 of L'Asino, an important satirical journal.^[6]

Avanti! was inspired by the newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany called Vorwärts.

Previously, other newspapers had been founded with the same title: on 30 April 1881 Andrea Costa founded the Avanti!^[7] and philosopher Antonio Labriola launched Avanti (without exclamation mark)^[8] in May 1896, on which the libertarian socialist Francesco Saverio Merlino wrote.

Di qui si passa

In the editorial of published in the first number of Avanti!, director Bissolati wrote an ideal and political manifest of the identity of the new newspaper, challenging the contemporary order.

Addressing directly to the Italian Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Antonio Starabba, Marchese di Rudinì, who had warned the PSI leaders and subscribed with the intimation "di qui non-si passa" ('Do not pass from here'), Bissolati answered "di qui si passa" ('From here we pass'), manifesting the faith and "scientific" certainty in the affirmations of socialist reasons and in the conquest of power by workers:^[9]

And now today this gentlemen instead—who does not act on his whim but obeys to instincts of the colourful conservatory party which stays behind him—does not find he can do anything better against us than retake, with less noise and more hypocrisy, the methodic of the suicide of Crispi.^[10]

So, after solemnly declaring in Parliament that hoping to suppress socialism is madness because the attempt to suppress the thought would be so much worthy; after recognizing that every violent attempt against socialism and thought is an attempt against the modern civilization, Starabba is precisely going to suppress the civilization, to choke thought. And just for this reason, Mr. Starabba, that we pass despite your prohibitions.

We pass to exercise that influence we deserve in public fights, in the economical life, in the moral development; we pass despite you, as we passed despite Crispi; and we have the force to pass, winning your resistances, because arresting socialism is not possible without arresting that immense movement of transformation which operates into the society and has an impact in consciences. Socialism, Mr. Starabba, is not a chimera of deludes who want to remould the world accordingly their dream, but it is the clear and precise consciousness of the imperious necessities which are urgently needed, in the practice of life, by the majority of men. (...)

Well: socialism is not but the reflection and the formula of this thought, that experience of sufferings and daily fights educates in the working masses. Or you may rather send your policemen in places where that thought is elaborated, send them to dismantle organization of workers and socialist clubs; you may, committing crimes under your penal code, suppress for workers and socialists the elementary rights of reunion, speak and association promised by your Statute; you may make again the right to strike as a crime, welding again the collar of servants to the necks of modern wage earners, in disfigurement to the principles declared by the bourgeois revolution; you may indulge your whim of sending some socialist in jail or in the isles; you can meditate, as representative of a class went to power with plebiscites, how many attempts you like against the popular suffrage; you can do all of that and much more, but you can not make that those acts of brutal reaction would not demonstrate, also more clearly, that the cause of workers emancipation and the cause of socialism are all one with the cause of freedom of thought and of the civil progress. [...]

Does it seems therefore to you that we pass, Marchese?

— Leonida Bissolati

• Advertising poster for the subscription to Avanti!, 1896
• Advertising of Avanti!, 27 December 1896
• Portrait of Leonida Bissolati, first director of Avanti! in 1896
• Advertising poster drawn by Gabriele Galantara for the subscription to Avanti!, 1898
• Editorial staff of Avanti! in 1905. From the left, seated, the first is satirical artist Gabriele Galantara and the second is Ivanoe Bonomi. At the middle there is the director Leonida Bissolati.
• Avanti! of 1º May 1910

Format, prize and headquarters

The socialist daily newspaper was formed by four broadsheet pages. One copy cost 5 cents of lira, the annual subscription 15 lire, the six-monthly one 7.50 lire, the quarterly one 3 lire and the monthly one 1.25 lire.

The headquarters was located in Rome, in Palazzo Sciarra-Colonna of Via delle Muratte. In 1911, on the initiative of Turati, the headquarters of the newspaper was moved from Rome (where an office for parliamentary chronicle remained) to Milan, in Via San Damiano.

The number of pages became six, including news of Milan.

Repression of 1898

From January to May 1898, several popular protests blew up in almost all the Italian peninsula, for bread, work and against taxes, but the government suppressed the revolts. On 7 May in Milan, the government declared the state of siege and gave full powers to general Fiorenzo Bava-Beccaris, who ordered to open fire against the crowd. Hundreds of people were killed and thousands were injured. The exact number of victims has not never been clarified.^[11]

On 9 May, general Bava-Beccaris, with the support of the government, dismantled associations and clubs considered subversives and arrested thousands of people belonging to socialist, republican and anarchical organizations, including some parliamentarians: among others, they were Filippo Turati^[12] (with his partner Anna Kuliscioff), Andrea Costa, Leonida Bissolati, Carlo Romussi (radical) and Paolo Valera.

All anti-government journals and newspapers were banned and on 12 May the entire redaction of Avanti! was arrested in Rome.

Avanti! and the Red Week

On 7 June 1914, in Ancona, an antimilitarist meeting was held in the local headquarter of the Italian Republican Party, organized by Pietro Nenni, a republican leader at the time and director of the local journal Lucifero, along with the anarchist Errico Malatesta. At the end, Carabinieri opened fire on the participants while they were leaving the hall, killing two republicans and an anarchist. As a reaction, The Chamber of Work declared a general strike and various revolts occurred. On 9 June, a great crowd took part to the funerals of the three killed which crossed the whole city. The news about the slaughter spread throughout all Italy and provoked demonstrations, parades and spontaneous strikes.

In particular, souls were inflamed by the calls of Benito Mussolini, socialist at the time and director of Avanti!, who had caught in Ancona, during the XIV Congress of PSI from 26 to 28 April 1914, an important personal success, with plaudits for the results of dissemination and sells of the party newspaper, granted to him personally by congress members.^[13][14]

On the number of 8 June 1914 of the socialist newspaper, Mussolini wrote:^[15]

In cities and in fields the answer to the provocation will raise spontaneous. We do not go through the events, neither we feel authorized to track the course, but we have the duty to second and flank them.[..] And we hope that with their action the Italian workers will be able to say that it is the time to make it end.

— Benito Mussolini

With his articles, Mussolini, by leveraging on his popularity inside the socialist movement and on the great diffusion of the newspaper, forced the Confederazione Generale del Lavoro (CGdL) to declare a general strike, an instrument which stopped every activity in the country and that the labour union believed it had to be used only in exceptional circumstances. Mussolini exploited the popular revolts for political purposes within the socialist movement: leadership of PSI was in the hands of revolutionary maximalists after the congress of Ancona, but reformist were still the majority in the parliamentary group and in CGdL.

On 10 June 1914, a political rally was held in the Arena di Milano in front of 60,000 people, while the rest of Italy was struggling and paralysed, Romagna and Marche were insurgent and rail workers finally announced to join to the general strike. After reformists of all parties said that the strike was not the revolution but only a manifestation against the massacre of Ancona, and that they would not be dragged into a useless carnage, Filippo Corridoni and Mussolini intervened. The latter exalted the revolt and his speech was reported and published by Avanti! on the following day:^[16]

In Florence, in Turin, in Fabriano there are other deaths and other injured, it is necessary to work into the army to avoid shootings on workers, it is necessary that the money of the soldier will be soon a fact accompli. [...] The general strike had been from 1870 to today the most serious revolt that had shaken the third Italy. [...] It was not a strike for defense, but for offense. The strike had an aggressive attitude. Crowds that once did not even dare to come into contact with the public force, this time they were able to resist and fight with a non-expected impetus. Here and there the striking multitude had gathered around those barricades that rehashers of an Engels phrase had relegated, with an hurry which betrayed devious concerns, if not the fear, between the relics of the romances of the fifteenth century. Here and there, always denoting the trend of the movement, shops of gunsmiths have been assaulted; here and there fires have flamed and not just of the taxes as in first revolts in the Mezzogiorno, here and there churches had been invaded. [...] If – buy any chanceo – instead of Mr. Salandra, there was Mr. Bissolati at the Presidency of the Council, we would have made the general strike of protest even more violent and definitely insurrectionalist. [...] Especially a cry has been launched and followed by an attempt, the cry of: "To the Quirinal!".

— Benito Mussolini

To prevent the monarchy from feeling threatened and declaring the state of siege, giving public powers to the army, the CGDL concluded the strike after 48 hours and invited workers to resume their activities.

That move frustrated the warlike and insurrectionist purposes of Mussolini who, on the Avanti! of 12 June 1914, accused the syndicalist leaders of felony saying: "The Labour Confederation, in ending the strike, has betrayed the revolutionary movement."^[17]

The general strike lasted only two days, while the revolutionary movement was gradually running out after keeping entire zones of the country in check.

On 20 June 1914, the socialist parliamentary group, formed in majority by moderates and reformists, disproved Mussolini about the events of the "Red Week" and confirmed the traditional gradualist and parliamentary position of the "historical" leadership of PSI, saying that the revolt was:^[18]

[...] the fatal and also too expected consequence of the foolish policy of the Italian leaderships, whose blind stubbornness on replacing to the urgent economical and social reforms the illegal militarist and pseudo-colonialist wasting frustrates the work of education and discipline of the Socialist Party for the gradual transformation of the political and social orders and rehabilitates the cult of violence within the masses [...] [in contrast with] [...] the fundamental concept of modern international, right which the great civil and social transformations and the emancipation of proletariat from the capitalist serfdom in particular are not achieved with the tantrum of disorganized crowds, whose fail revives and re-energizes the most evil and stupid movements of interior reactionism. It is then necessary to remain more than ever on the parliamentary field and in the propaganda among the masses within the most decisive opposition against all the militarist, fiscal and protectionist addresses of the government and to watch over for the defense to the bitter end at any cost of the settled public freedoms, intensifying at the same time the assiduous and patient work, the only which is really revolutionary, of education, intellectualisation of the proletarian movement.

At the end of the same month, on 28 June 1914, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo shifted Italian attention on the European dynamics which will lead to World War I, opposing interventionist to neutralist, until the entry into war of Italy on 24 May 1915.

Avanti! during WWI

In 1914–1915, Avanti! supported an important campaign for the absolute neutrality towards the opposite sides in WWI.

After maintaining that position, decided by the vast majority of PSI, Benito Mussolini pushed the socialist newspaper into an interventionist campaign with his articles as director. Thanks to his retinue within the party, Mussolini asked to the national direction of PSI to endorse his new line or otherwise he would resign, as he did in the following day.

The new interventionist newspaper of Mussolini, Il Popolo d'Italia, would be published on 15 November 1914, with syndicalists and dissidents from the Socialist Party.

On 23 November, Mussolini was expelled from the Socialist Party and the satirical cartoonist of Avanti!, Giuseppe Scalarini, drew the cartoon Giuda for the newspaper, representing Mussolini, with a dagger and the money of betrayal, approaching silently to hit Christ (the socialism) in the back.^[19][20]

Giacinto Menotti Serrati was appointed as new director of Avanti! during all the WWI, and he will be one of the leaders of the maximalist side of PSI and he will adhere in 1924 to the diktat of Lenin and Trotsky, joining the Communist Party of Italy.

• Avanti! of 1 May 1915
• Avanti! of 1 May 1916 with censor cuts
• Avanti! of 1 May 1917 with censor cuts
• Avanti! of 1 May 1918
• Avanti! of 1 May 1919

Five squadrist assaults against Avanti!

Between 1919 and 1922, Avanti! was attacked and devastated by five squadrist assaults:^[21]

The Avanti! is the symbol and the flag of anti-fascism. It is its more efficient fight instrument. But since that the fight is a bloody civil war, the daily newspaper is also at the centre of the war itself: it is a blockhouse to be sieged, intimidated and conquered according to the squadrismo. There is more: a strong emotive charge. Because if Avanti! is the idol of socialists, for Mussolini it is personally the object of a great love which have been transformed, after the traumatic clash of 1914, into envy and inner hate. The newspaper had been besieged and put on fire five times between 1919 and 1922. And every time it rises from the ashes: even in 1921, ro be moved in a new, huge headquarter. Around its rotary presses and linotype machines, there are shootings, stabbings, beatings, clashes between redactors and fascists, between soldiers and squadrists, fire of machine guns, dead and injured.

Journalists, employees, typographers live in tension and peril. There are revolvers in drawers. The telephone is used also to call for help the comrades. All the assaults have the same story, the same comments, the same mechanics, the same consequences: a script similar, more in general, to the civil war one. Every time that political circumstances suggest it or allow it, fascism attack. The aggressors are militarily organized, while defenders are not. Squadrists prepare themselves with pickaxes and incendiary bombs because the goal is already the devastation of the newspaper to prevent the publication of it. The defence of Avanti! is passive, like in all the other episodes of the civil war. In a more or less open way, assailants are almost always protected [...] by forces of the State. In the aftermath of the assaults, the newspaper preaches caution, suggests to not fall into the trap of provocations.

The reaction to the squadrist violence is indeed exclusively political and propagandistic: huge strikes and solidarity parades. Along with an extraordinary subscription to support the newspaper, repair the damages and relaunch it. It is the way of socialists, absolutely loser. But maybe obliged, considering that the force is on the side of squadrismo, because it has a now growing supply of money, thanks to the support of agrarians and industrials, and mostly because it has a coverage of the State power which becomes complete over time.

— Ugo Intini, Avanti! Un giornale, un'epoca

Pietro Nenni at Avanti!

On 19 April 1921, Nenni signed its first article for the socialist newspaper under the title of "The failure of Versaglia policy".^[27]

In Paris, Nenni subscribed to PSI and began a path which, in around two years, would lead him to the leadership of the autonomist side of the Party. During the Congress of Milan in 1923, it was in favour of the merger between PSI and the Communist Party of Italy, as imposed by the Soviets and supported by Serrati and the Party secretary Costantino Lazzari. The congress appointed Nenni as new director of Avanti!.

Since then, during the whole exile in France and the period of underground in Italy, the relationship between Pietro Nenni and Avanti! had become stronger until 1948.^[28]

On 31 December 1925, the Mussolini Cabinet made the law n. 2037 on press passed by the Chamber of the Deputies and on 31 October 1926 the newly established fascist regime closed all the publications issued by the opposition. Avanti!, like all the other antifascist newspapers, was obliged to interrupt their prints in Italy but continued to be published in exile, under the impulse of Nenni, in Paris and Zürich every week.

Fall of fascism and 1946 referendum

Second post-war period

During the second post-war period, Avanti! had not reached the same circulation and influence obtained between the two wars but it became a witness, through its titles, of the rebuilding of Italy and its democratic evolution.

After 1994

With the dismantling of PSI, the newspaper fell under liquidation, as other assets of the party. The last congress, held in Rome on 12 November 1994, appointed a liquidator commissioner, Michele Zoppo, to whom was given Avanti among with other assets.

After that date, three different periodical appeared in news stands that, though all of them recalled to the historical socialist newspaper, were completely different politically aligned:^[52]

• In 1996, the clone newspaper L'Avanti! (with the "L") was published by the International Press of Valter Lavitola and directed by Sergio De Gregorio, founder in 2000 of the political movement Italians in the World and elected as senator with Italy of Values in 2006 and then with The People of Freedom in 2008.^[53][54][55] This newspaper ceased its publication after a few months and reappeared in 2003. Lavitola made of his periodical an instrument for political movements that had nothing in common with the editorial line of the original socialist newspaper. Furthermore, L'Avanti was close to the center-right premier Silvio Berlusconi.^[56] Lavitola and De Gregorio were investigated by prosecutor of Naples for criminal association aimed to fraud against the State: Lavitola, as de facto owner and co-administrator of International Press, and De Gregorio, as effective partner since 1997 and hidden co-administrator of the same company, along with other ten defendants, declared that the publisher of L'Avanti! had the requirements for obtaining the funds provided by the law for publishing, cashing illegally a total of €23,200,000 received between 1997 and 2009. For this crimes, Lavitola and De Gregorio suffered a preventive seizure of assets for €9 million in July 2012.^[57] On 9 November 2012 Lavitola negotiated a sentence of 3 years and 8 months in front of the Judge for preliminary investigations of the Court of Naples,^[58] while the process of De Gregorio, whom sentence was reduced to house arrest in his Roman apartment of Parioli following a failed re-election during the political election of 2013,^[59] was still in progress on 4 June 2015, with the request of plea bargaining by the former parliamentarian. Court of Accounts of Lazio, with sentence n. 24/2015 of 11 March 2015, condemned Valter Lavitola and Sergio De Gregorio to give back €23,879,000 to the State for the publishing funds obtained illegally by L'Avanti between 1997 and 2009.^[60]
• In 1998, Avanti! della domenica began to be published weekly as the body of Italian Democratic Socialists (SDI), sided on center-left, and it directly referred to the Sunday supplement of the historical Avanti!, issued between January 1903 and March 1907. After ceasing the publications in 2006, the weekly was issued again since 7 February 2010 (with Dario Alberto Caprio as editor-in-chief) as the official body of the new PSI (heir of SDI), member of Socialist International and the European Socialist Party. In this occasion, Ugo Intini, former director of Avanti!, greeted the new release of the socialist weekly with an editorial entitled Di qui si passa, quoting the title of the inaugural editorial wrote by Leonida Bissolati in 1896;
• In 2003, Fabrizio Cicchitto and other former socialists re-constructed Avanti!, with Bobo Craxi as director. Although this Avanti! was formally neutral, its former director was a close friend of another former socialist Gianni De Michelis, who was then secretary of the New Italian Socialist Party (NPSI). The NPSI, which was in coalition with the centre-right, was an antagonist of the socialists who found home in the centre-left led by the Italian Democratic Socialists, who created an opposing weekly paper with the name of Avanti della Domenica which however ran out of funds and closed soon after. In 2006, Fabio Ranucci becomes director and quickly defines the paper an independent "socialist" newspaper of information. However, with the re-composition of the small often tiny Socialist political formations into the modern-day Italian Socialist Party in 2007, the paper became strongly associated with the latter.^[52]

All the three periodicals are no longer published: L'Avanti! of Lavitola since 2011; Avanti! of Bobo Craxi merged in Avanti! della domenica in 2006 and the last one ceased the publications on 6 October 2013, following the creation of online newspaper Avanti! on 5 January 2012, thanks to the definitive reappropriation of the original Avanti! by the new PSI of Riccardo Nencini.^[61]

First generation

• Leonida Bissolati (1896–1903)^[62]
• Enrico Ferri (1903–1908)
• Oddino Morgari (1908–1909)
• Claudio Treves (1910–1912)
• Giovanni Bacci (July 1912 – October 1912)
• Benito Mussolini (1 December 1912 – October 1914)
• Giacinto Menotti Serrati (October 1914 – 1922)
• Pietro Nenni (1922–1926)

Exile

• Ugo Coccia (issued in exile in Paris, 12 December 1926 to 1928)
• Angelica Balabanoff (Paris, 1928 – 1930 and 1930 – 1940 under the maximalist Italian Socialist Party)^[63]
• Pietro Nenni (published by PSI – Labour and Socialist International Section in exile in Zürich, for a certain time as a supplement of L'Avvenire dei Lavoratori: 1930 – May 1934)
• Pietro Nenni (published by PSI – Labour and Socialist International Section in exile in Paris with the title of Il Nuovo Avanti: May 1934 – 1939)^[64]
• Giuseppe Saragat, Oddino Morgari and Angelo Tasca (collegiate management but de facto managed by Saragat: published by PSI – Labour and Socialist International Section in exile in Paris with the title of Il Nuovo Avanti: 1939 – 1940)
• Pietro Nenni (printed in clandestinity in Palalda, Pyrénées-Orientales, in the Vichy France: October 1941 – January 1943)

Return in Italy

• Eugenio Colorni^[30] (illegally in Rome: 22 August 1943 – May 1944)
• Andrea Lorenzetti^[32][33] (illegally in Milan: September 1943 – May 1944)
• Guido Mazzali^[30][34] (illegally in Milan: May 1944 – April 1945)
• Pietro Nenni, with director Giuseppe Saragat (issued in Rome after its liberation: June 1944 – January 1945)
• Guido Mazzali (Milan edition: April 1945 – 1951)
• Ignazio Silone (Roman edition: 1945 – 1946)
• Sandro Pertini (Roman edition: 1946 – 1947)
• Riccardo Lombardi (Roman edition: 1948 – 1949)
• Sandro Pertini (Roman edition: 1949 – 1951)
• Tullio Vecchietti (1951–1957)
• Tullio Vecchietti as political director, Carlo Bonetti as editor-in-chief (1957–1960)
• Giovanni Pieraccini as political director, Franco Gerardi as editor-in-chief (1960–1963)
• Riccardo Lombardi (12 December 1963 – 21 July 1964)
• Francesco De Martino (30 July 1964 – 13 November 1965)
• Franco Gerardi (14 November 1965 – 17 November 1966)
• Gaetano Arfé and Flavio Orlandi as political directors, Franco Gerardi as editor-in-chief (18 November 1966 – 21 January 1969)
• Gaetano Arfé as political director, Franco Gerardi as editor-in-chief (22 January 1969 – 1 April 1976)
• Paolo Battino Vittorelli (1976–1978)
• Bettino Craxi as political director, Ugo Intini as editor-in-chief (1978–1981)
• Ugo Intini (26 April 1981 – 6 October 1987)
• Antonio Ghirelli (28 October 1987 – 8 December 1989)
• Roberto Villetti as political director, Francesco Gozzano as editor-in-chief (9 December 1989 – 1992)
• Giorgio Benvenuto as political director with the co-director Giuseppe Garesio, Francesco Gozzano as editor-in-chief (1992–1993)