Amendola, Giorgio

(1907–1980)

   The son of Giovanni Amendola, he enrolled in the Partito Comunista Italiano/Italian Communist Party (PCI) in his native Naplesin 1929. Two years later, he embarked secretly for Paris to participate in the organizational work of the PCI in the French capital. On one of his secret repatriations, he was arrested and tried by the Special Tribunal (for political crimes). His sentence was reduced—after an amnesty for the 10th anniversary of the advent of the regime—to five years of confino. He was given two more years for having organized protests among the other prisoners. In 1937, he accepted PCI orders to return to France to take charge of party publications.

   When he reentered Italy in 1943, it was to assume responsibilities as the party’s leading expert on the South and as one of the directors of party clandestine activities. After 8 September 1943, he represented the PCI on the Military Council of the Comitati di Liberazione Nazionale/National Liberation Committees (CLN). In that capacity, he was one of the organizers of the Via Rasella partisan bombing of a German guards’vehicle, an event that led to the Fosse Ardeatine killings. From Romehe went to Milan, where he narrowly escaped arrest, then on to Turin, where he was one of the three directors leading what had become a popular insurrection. In the 1945 government of Ferruccio Parri, he was undersecretary to the Council Presidency, a post he retained in the first government of Alcide De Gasperi until July 1946. He served in the Constituent Assembly and on the Central Committee of the PCI as well as in the newly elected Parliament, to which he was regularly re elected. In 1976, he was also chosen for membership in the European Parliament.

   By the time of the 11th Party Congress in 1966, Amendola had moved to the relative right within the Central Committee, closer to Giorgio Napolitano, Enrico Berlinguer, and Luigi Longo. Amendola even proposed reunification with the Partito Socialista Italiano/Italian Socialist party (PSI). Such a union, if victorious, would have permitted the pursuit of policies of full employment and increased public spending on pensions, schools, hospitals, and housing. Amendola was a vigorous critic of the 1968 student revolts and of the far-left movements that emerged from them. Amendola died in Rome in June 1980.

   See also Resistance.