Family provenance and early years Paolo Battino Vittorelli was born (as Raffaello Battino) in
Alexandria at a time when
Egypt was controlled militarily and politically as
part of the British empire. His family identity would have been regarded as
Graeco-Italian Jewish. His ancestral roots tracked back to
Corfu, which had been ruled from
Venice for half a millennium until the
end of the eighteenth century, and which remained heavily influenced by Venetian and Italian culture through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Amedeo Battino, his father, had graduated from the
University of Athens and then as a newly qualified lawyer moved to
Egypt in 1908, attracted by the commercial opportunities and the booming free-wheeling economy which had opened up to European businesses since the Opening of the
Suez Canal back in 1864. His mother, born Blanche Caroli, ended up in Alexandria after Giacomo Caroli, her own father (and thereby Raffaello's maternal grandfather) had moved to Egypt following the death of his wife (born Emilia Mattatia, Raffaello's maternal grandmother), and set himself up in business as the owner-manager of a small hotel in
Alexandria. Giacomo Caroli was born in
Trieste but moved to Corfu when he married, as his second wife, Emilia Mattatia, who had grown up on
the island. The child grew up bilingual, fluent both in Italian and in French, which was the language still favoured by the largely "expatriate European" community of bourgeois businessmen and bureaucrats in Egypt. In 1937, based in
Paris, Paolo Vittorelli became a contributor to the movement's weekly political magazine which was also named
Giustizia e Libertà.
"Giustizia e Libertà" in Egypt In 1938 comrades sent him back to Italy with instructions to make contact with underground antifascists; but he was intercepted at the frontier by Italian police and returned to France where he was now based until 1940. On 8 February 1948
Azione Socialista Giustizia e Libertà gave birth to the
Unione dei Socialisti (UdS), a political party created by
Ivan Matteo Lombardo. The new party then linked up with other left-leaning political parties to form
Unità Socialista. The overriding objective was to preclude an East German-style Moscow-backed political alliance with the
Italian Communist Party (PCI) ahead of the critically important a couple of months before the
1948 general election. A year later, following an election outcome which had disappointed socialists and communists alike, a further political coming together on the political centre-left created the
Partito Socialista Unitario (PSU). Vittorelli was appointed party deputy secretary and permanent delegate to the re-emerging
Socialist International. Vittorelli was not entirely comfortable with this outcome. The so-called
"Fraud Law" proposed by the government early in 1953 appalled Vittorelli, as did the attitude of the
PSDI to the government proposal to distort general election results by awarding extra parliamentary seats to whichever party gained the most votes. Together with
Tristano Codignola,
Piero Calamandrei and Aldo Garosci, Vittorelli resigned from the PSDI and joined the
Unità Popolare (UP), a newly formed coalition of democrats from the political centre and left which came together to oppose the Fraud Law. The law was passed by parliament, but would be repealed in 1954 without ever having been implemented, apparently because the government, still in power, but with a greatly reduced majority following the
1953 general election, concluded that it was becoming so unpopular with voters as to be electorally counter-productive. The UP failed to achieve significant traction with voters. It nevertheless limped on for several years. In 1963 he was one of seven men elected to
membership of
the senate by voters in the
Basilicata electoral district, whom he represented on behalf of the Socialist Party. The others from Basilicata were
Christian Democrats (4) and
Communists (2). Across the country the Socialists ranked third, securing 44 of the 315
Senate seats as against 85 for the Communists and 132 for the Christian Democrats. Vittorelli served as a senator for the full (at that time)
five-year term, until 1968. During his time in the senate he also found time to publish a translation into
Italian of
Isaiah Berlin's
1939 biography of
Karl Marx. Vittorelli's translation, which appears to have been the first Italian language version produced, appeared in 1967: it was republished a number of times, most recently in 2021. The 2004 edition is enhanced by an introduction from
Bruno Bongiovanni. At the time of
unification, the architects of the Italian constitution had been derived from the constitutional monarchy of
Piedmont-Sardinia, and during the ensuing half-century drawn on the example of the highly centralised Anglo-French nation-state model. Further centralisation of power with national government followed during
two decades of Fascism. Partly as a reaction against fascism, and partly out of respect for
the United States and for neighbouring
Switzerland, both of which had emerged from the disastrous first half of the twentieth century without suffering the deathly indignity of military invasion or the destructive impacts of economic collapse, post-war Italy turned towards a federal structure with the
1947 republican constitution. This involved a progressive devolution of political decision-making to the
regions. Progress was slow, partly on account of concerns that the "red provinces" of
Tuscany and
Emilia-Romagna would "turn communist" and somehow become
Moscow proxies. That never quite happened, at least not in the terms the doomsters had foreseen; but it was only in 1970, more than two decades after the rest of the 1947 constitution had been implemented, that elections were held for
"consigli regionali" ("regional parliaments"). Paolo Vittorelli stood for election in the
1970 Piedmontese regional election as a PSI candidate and was elected. In terms of party votes the Socialists were comfortably outperformed in the election, but no party gained an overall majority and the regional government was therefore a PSI-DC coalition administration. Presidency of the
regional parliament alternated between the two parties. Between 23 July 1970 and 3 March 1972, Paolo Vittorelli served as president of the Piedmont regional parliament. Later during the decade Vittorelli was a founder, in 1979, of the
Istituto Studi e Ricerche Difesa ("Institute of Defence Studies and Research"), In
1972 Vittorelli stood successfully for election to the
Chamber of Deputies as a Socialist Party member for the Torino-Novara-Vercelli electoral district. He served as a
member of parliament throughout the
1972-76 and
1976-79 parliamentary sessions. Between 1976 and 1978 he also took charge at
Avanti!, the party's
Rome-based mass-circulation daily newspaper. During his two-year incumbency, following the successful precedent set by
la Repubblica,
Avanti! switched from broadsheet to tabloid format, with a corresponding increase in the number of pages. Vittorelli also oversaw the introduction of red ink, used in combination with the traditional black type-script.
Authorship During his later decades, Vittorelli turned increasingly to writing books. At the
1981 Viareggio Prize awards he was recipient of the President's Prize for his memoires of the (defunct since 1947) Action Party, "L'età della tempesta. Autobiografia romanzata di una generazione". He followed through in 1998 with a sequel, also based on his knowledge of the Action Party, this time entitled "L'età della speranza. Testimonianze e ricordi del Partito d’Azione" and dealing with what one source identifies as the party's "militant years" (
"... agli anni della militanza").
Final years Paolo Vittorelli's final years coincided with further ructions among the parties of the left in Italy. During the 1990s the PSI burst apart and collapsed, partly under the weight of its internal contradictions and partly due to the tsunami of
corruption scandals which hit the political class at that time. In 1998, taking his lead from
Valdo Spini, who was also a former PSI member, Vittorelli joined the
Democratici di Sinistra (Democrats of the Left; DS), a coming together of formerly separate centre-left groupings hoping to construct a modern European Social Democratic party. == References ==