Gli articoli sul Popolo d’Italia nel percorso di Ernesto Rossi giornalista

The essay underlines the importance of journalism for Ernesto Rossi, the Italian liberal-democratic, anti-fascist and Europeanist economist. Persecuted by the Fascist regime and co-author of the Federalist Ventotene Manifesto, Rossi would become an acute polemicist in republican Italy, above all criticizing misgovernment, clericalism and big economic powers. The central part of the text concentrates on Rossi’s activities after World War I, and focuses on his participation in the conflict and his aspiration to overcome the traditional ruling-class. Close to the (former) combattenti [fighters], Rossi contributed to Benito Mussolini’s Popolo d’Italia from 1919 to 1922, when the country experienced difficulties in returning to any form of normalcy. The essay confirms Ernesto Rossi’s appreciation of the first Fascist programme as much as it was an anti-thesis to prewar Italy; it draws attention to a few remarkable issues beyond his voluntarism, his youthfulness, his anticommunism, as well as his technical and even economicist approach.