Avanti! (Newspaper)
Avanti! was the newspaper of the Socialist Party of Italy (PSI) from 1896 to 1993 . The name of the newspaper was taken from Vorwärts , the newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany . The first edition appeared in Rome on December 25, 1896 . It was initially directed by Leonida Bissolati .
In 1911 the newspaper was relocated to Milan . Avanti! promoted a broad publicity for the absolute neutrality of Italy in the First World War . After initially supporting this position, the newspaper later tended to intervene in the war under pressure from its editor-in-chief Benito Mussolini , who supported the ideas of irredentism . Mussolini was therefore removed from office and subsequently expelled from the PSI.
On April 15, 1919, fascist squadrons set fire to the newspaper's headquarters in Milan , and the Mussolini government (from 1922) banned its publication in 1926; therefore the Avanti! Published in exile as a weekly newspaper in Paris and Zurich .
The newspaper reappeared in Italy in 1943, but in the aftermath of World War II, when the PSI lost its prominence to the Communist Party and the Christian Democrats , the circulation was reduced and Avanti! never again became the influential newspaper it was between the wars. The Avanti! but gained a certain fame among professional readers in the 1980s thanks to the articles of the socialist party chairman Bettino Craxi , who signed columns on political analysis with the pseudonym Ghino di Tacco .
The newspaper was closed in 1993 because it was not spared the crisis of PSI and the other major parties in the wake of the tangentopoli scandal at the end of the First Republic. Today a newspaper called Avanti! published by Valter Lavitola and Sergio de Gregorio , which is related to the Nuovo PSI (New Socialist Party).