Felice Chilanti, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetFelice Chilanti
Italian journalist
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Ceneselli, Veneto, Italy
About Felice Chilanti
- Felice Chilanti (10 December 1914 in Ceneselli – 26 February 1982 in Rome) was an Italian anti-fascist and journalist who was born to a Rovigo peasant family soon before Italy entered World War I.
- Chilanti moved to Rome as a teenager to study agronomy and from 1934 took up employment as a writer for the farming union’s in-house journal.
- He was soon drawn to the Fascist Left by Giuseppe Bottai and Edmondo Rossoni who were syndicalists who viewed Fascism as a social revolution against capitalism.Chilanti wrote an October 1939 article in Benito Mussolini's Gerarchia welcoming the Hitler-Stalin pact as heralding the future collaboration of the Soviet and Fascist régimes.
- During the war Chilanti became increasingly disillusioned with his government's failure to live up to its purported anti-capitalist objectives.
- While seeking to advance such radical policies he formed a group around the newspaper Ventuno Domani, whose collaborators included novelist Vasco Pratolini. This 'anarcho-Fascist' circle drew the attentions of philo-Nazi American poet Ezra Pound.
- Chilanti and his ally, Vittorio Ambrosini, mounted one of the most militant of all Left-Fascist projects when they attempted to eliminate the foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano, whom the plotters saw as a conservative brake on the regime.
- Chilanti was quickly arrested and sent into internal exile [confino].
- Chilanti then adopted communist politics from his Croatian cellmates. During the Italian Resistance Chilanti was co-editor of the dissident-communist newspaper Bandiera Rossa, organ of the Movimento Comunista d'Italia, an idiosyncratic force that Chilanti labelled 'the party of Stalin who fought for Bordiga'.
- After liberation Chilanti joined the Italian Communist Party.
- He later grew disillusioned and signed up to the extra-parliamentary Avanguardia Operaia.
- As a result of throat cancer Chilanti was unable to speak in his final years. Chilanti wrote numerous novels of which many were of a semi-autobiographical bent.
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