Giuseppe Di Vittorio

"This is a despicable invention of Mussolini, Corridoni would never have been a fascist. He was too honest, courageous and loyal to put himself at the service of the landowners!"

"The bosses do not consider workers to be human beings; they consider them to be machines, automatons. But workers are not just any old tools; they cannot be hired or sold. Workers are human beings; they have their own personalities, their own self-respect, their own ideas, their own political opinions, their own religious beliefs, and they want these rights to be respected by everyone, and first and foremost by their owners."

"I am not, have never claimed to be, nor do I claim to be a representative of culture. However, I am representative of something. I believe I am representative of those deep layers of the humblest and poorest masses who aspire to culture, who strive to study and seek to attain that level of knowledge that will enable them not only to ensure their own elevation as individuals, develop their personalities, but also to achieve the status that gives the masses a higher sense of their social function and their national and human dignity. Culture not only frees these masses from the prejudices that come from ignorance and the limits it places on people's horizons: culture is also a tool for moving forward and helping the whole national society move forward, progress and rise."

"The Red Army firing on workers in a socialist country is unacceptable."

"I know the bitterness, the disappointments, the time that union activity sometimes requires, with results that are not entirely satisfactory. I know all this well, because I too have been a union activist: you know very well that I do not come from above, I come from below."

"[From the telegram of condolence to his wife] I join in the deep sorrow felt by you and by all those who, having known Giuseppe Di Vittorio as I did since the period of our joint efforts to rebuild the trade union movement, were attracted by his humanity and his passionate fervour in defending the working classes."

"As a teenager, Giuseppe Di Vittorio was still semi-literate. When he realised that it was impossible to assert his rights in those conditions, he got himself a dictionary."

"The dominant figure in Italian trade unionism after the war was Giuseppe Di Vittorio. The son of a semi-literate farm labourer from Puglia, he became involved in anarcho-syndicalism at a very young age. A soldier in the First World War, wounded at Monte Zebio, he later met Gramsci and Togliatti's Turin group and became one of the leaders of the Communist Party, following its turbulent and tortuous history, from the head-to-head struggle of the 1930s, with all its anti-socialist sectarianism, to the Spanish Civil War, the Popular Front and the Resistance. Like the other leaders of the PCI, Di Vittorio moved during these years from maximalist positions to possibilist and reformist positions, but always maintaining a relationship with real society, with its needs and hopes, and always preserving that respect for man that Stalinism had completely erased."

"Luciano Lama had a great mentor in Di Vittorio: accompanying him on his numerous trips, he got to know the reality of southern Italy and understood the importance of direct contact with the masses."