Emilio Lussu

Emilio Lussu was born in Armungia on December 4, 1890 and spent his childhood years there. After completing his classical education and obtaining his law degree from the University of Cagliari, he participated in the Great War as an officer of the "Sassari" Brigade, fighting on the Carso, on the Asiago Plateau, on the Bainsizza and on the Piave. He soon began to doubt the meaning of war, yet continued to fight with great valor out of steadfast consistency with his initial interventionist choice and a deep sense of responsibility towards 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 September 14, 1919, preceded by stories from Sardinian veterans about his deeds. 

As an organizer of the movement of war veterans, on April 15, 1921 he was among the founders of the Sardinian Action Party, through which he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in the political elections of May 15. 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 line of opposition. Re-elected to the Chamber in 1924, on October 31, 1926 he was attacked in his Cagliari home in Piazza Martiri, choosing not to flee and fatally striking one of his attackers. After thirteen months in prison, in October 1927 he was acquitted on grounds of self-defense but immediately sentenced by the regime to five years of deportation to Lipari. On July 27, 1929 he managed to escape from it adventurously 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 exile. In 1933, he met Joyce Salvadori for the first time in Geneva, who would become his wife and would share with him the experience of clandestine struggle against 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, returning in memory to his native Sardinia, he wrote Il Cinghiale del diavolo, a hunting and magic tale 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 was minister of Post-War Relief 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 part of the commission of 75, tasked with writing the draft of the republican Constitution. Senator by right in the first parliament of the Italian Republic, he was re-elected to the Senate in 1953, in 1958 and in 1963, serving first in the PSI and finally in the PSIUP. His period as a socialist parliamentarian was rich in interventions in the chamber and beyond, from the defense of the democratic and anti-fascist republic to battles for the redemption of Sardinia, with which he would always remain in contact and which he would care for until the end. He died in Rome on March 5, 1975.