... strange political bedfellows.

The more recent leap, from a party that doggedly defended Stalinism even after the Hungarian and Polish uprisings (and their crushing) and after Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s savagery, to today’s “Left Democrats,” sending a delegation to the Socialist International and a party leader (D’Alema) to Palazzo Chigi—this remarkable leap was possible largely because of the odd range of personalities the post-Salerno party embraced.
Emblematic of this range was Giorgio Amendola, who was both a revered post-War Communist leader and an avowed non-Marxist.
Son of the liberal antifascist Giovanni Amendola, Giorgio Amendola’s first political memory was of the family’s going into hiding (with friends in Rome) when the regime’s June 1924 murder of the Socialist (PSUP) leader Giacomo Matteotti signaled peril to all leading anti-fascists. Amendola’s father was also a target of Fascist violence and fled to France where he died of the wounds suffered. Giorgio, a teenager, was already an anti-fascist, but now he sought a way to be active. Naturally, he went in search of the leaders of the great democratic parties of liberal Italy. Most of these were in exile in Paris. What Amendola found in Paris was a bunch of tired old men, incapable of any action beyond palaver in Latin Quarter cafes. (S. Y. Agnon writes that when European Zionists would get a little money together they didn’t go to Israel, they went to conferences.) Shocked and discouraged, Amendola sought contact with the one group reputed to be actively engaged in battling the Fascist regime, the Italian Communists. (Amendola revealed that even here the talk exceeded the accomplishments. Their greatest pre-War loss of men and women came in getting messages from one cell to another; the Fascist Okra had successfully infiltrated the party’s corps of couriers.)
Joining the Communist Party was a hard decision for Amendola. He was in regular contact with his intellectual mentor, Benedetto Croce, a strong liberal democrat (after a youthful Marxist flirtation), and had great trepidation in admitting to Croce his new affiliation. (Croce understood.) Enrolling in 1929, Amendola’s anti-fascist zeal earned him arrest and exile on the island of Ponza, more than 50 miles out into the Mediterranean from Gaeta and Naples. (The Ponza exile was multi-party, including also Ugo La Malfa.) Liberated in September 1943, Amendola became an important leader of the late stages of the Resistance. He represented the party at the assembly to write the new constitution (1946) and in the Chamber of Deputies from 1948. This non-Marxist, who had only sought to find, wherever it might be, some real action against the Fascists, sat on the platform of the party congresses for the next 20 years as one of the supreme leaders of the party, alongside such tough old hard-liners as Pietro Ingrao and Giancarlo Pajetta. Amendola was the leader of the “Right Amendoliana,” always seeking cooperation (and, in the Historic Compromise, coalition) with the other parties of the Left and Center, and also dreaming of a new Europe. His vision of the party’s future was clearly closer to what exists today than that of any other post-War PCI leader. But he still hugged Pajetta when the “Internationale” was played.
Amendola was not the ultimate offspring of the Salerno Switch, however. We’ll meet that personality next week and, with him, arrive at the era of opposition to Silvio Berlusconi.