Emilio Lussu

Emilio Lussu was born in Armungia on 4 December 1890, where he spent his childhood years. After completing his classical studies and obtaining a Law degree from the University of Cagliari, he took part in the Great War as an officer of the "Sassari" Brigade, fighting on the Carso, the Asiago Plateau, the Bainsizza and the Piave. He soon began to doubt the meaning of the war, yet continued to fight with great valor out of a steadfast commitment to his initial interventionist choice and a deep sense of responsibility toward his soldiers. A highly decorated officer (two Silver Medals and two Bronze Medals for Military Valor), after the end of the conflict he returned to Sardinia on 14 September 1919, preceded by the accounts of Sardinian veterans about his deeds. 

A driving force behind the ex-combatants' movement, on 15 April 1921 he was among the founders of the Sardinian Action Party, with which he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in the general elections of 15 May. During this period, Lussu became one of the great witnesses to the rise of fascism in Italy and Sardinia, taking an increasingly clear and radical stance of opposition. Re-elected to the Chamber in 1924, on 31 October 1926 he was assaulted in his Cagliari home in Piazza Martiri, choosing not to flee and fatally striking one of his attackers. After thirteen months spent in prison, in October 1927 he was acquitted on grounds of self-defence but immediately sentenced by the regime to five years of deportation to Lipari. On 27 July 1929 he managed a daring escape together with Carlo Rosselli and Francesco Fausto Nitti, reaching France. In Paris, together with Carlo Rosselli, Alberto Tarchiani and other anti-fascists gathered around Gaetano Salvemini, he was among the founders of the Justice and Liberty movement, in which he was active throughout his entire period of exile. In 1933, he met Joyce Salvadori for the first time in Geneva; she would become his wife and share with him the experience of the clandestine struggle against Nazi-fascism during the years of the Second World War. 

In the 1930s he wrote and published his major works in Paris: La Catena (1930), Marcia su Roma e dintorni (1933), Teoria dell'Insurrezione (1936) and Un anno sull'Altipiano (1938). In 1939, turning his memory back to the Sardinia of his origins, he wrote Il Cinghiale del diavolo, a tale of hunting and magic set in the countryside of Armungia.

With the fall of Mussolini, Lussu returned to Italy in August 1943, settling in Rome and taking part in the Resistance as a leader of the Action Party. In 1945, after the Liberation, he served as Minister of Post-War Assistance in the Parri government and Minister for Relations with the Consulta in the first De Gasperi government. In 1946 he was elected to the Constituent Assembly, becoming a member of the Committee of 75, tasked with drafting the project of the Republican Constitution. A senator by right in the first parliament of the Italian Republic, he was re-elected to the Senate in 1953, 1958 and 1963, first as a member of the PSI and finally of the PSIUP. His years as a socialist parliamentarian were rich with speeches both inside and outside the chamber, from the defence of the democratic and anti-fascist republic to the campaigns for the redemption of Sardinia, with which he would always remain in contact and which he would champion until the very end. He died in Rome on 5 March 1975.