Introduction
Recent historiography has increasingly interpreted interwar antifascism through transnational rather than exclusively national frameworks. The 1920s and 1930s were a significant period for the development of transnational solidarity and global protest movements.Footnote 1 During this period, exile communities and migrant political cultures became active producers of cross-border antifascist networks.Footnote 2 Newspapers, often sent illegally to Italy,Footnote 3 were among the principal instruments of interwar political struggle against fascism. Research on Italian American radicalism has also shown that migrant political identities were shaped by labor conflict, ethnic belonging, and continued engagement with Italian politics.Footnote 4
The United States had a wide-ranging and politically diverse Italian American radical press, including socialist, communist, anarchist, and syndicalist newspapers published in major centers of Italian migration. The reach of these campaigns extended beyond the borders of the United States.Footnote 5 As historians such as Philip V. Cannistraro, Francesco Durante, John Patrick Diggins, and Marcella Bencivenni have noted, Il Nuovo Mondo (1925–1931) was one of the leading Italian American newspapers opposed to fascism during the interwar period.Footnote 6 As previous scholarship has shown, a number of prominent figures in American and international antifascism collaborated with the newspaper at various points in its history.Footnote 7 Among them was Vincenzo Vacirca, whose political activity has been the subject of several studies in recent years.Footnote 8
Regarding Il Nuovo Mondo, however, the existing literature provides useful, albeit limited information. For instance, it has been estimated that during the latter half of the 1920s, the newspaper’s circulation ranged between approximately 25,000 and 35,000 copies.Footnote 9 In contrast, no systematic reconstruction has yet been undertaken of the newspaper’s actual distribution and clandestine circulation in Italy. This article addresses this gap through a comprehensive analysis of prefectural seizure records held in the Central Archives of the Italian State. Its main objective is to examine how one of the most important Italian American antifascist newspapers circulated between North America and Italy.
This documentation is significant in both quantitative and qualitative terms. From a quantitative perspective, this study provides a preliminary estimate of the number of copies confiscated and of their geographical distribution across the present-day regions of Italy. Existing scholarship has often treated figures on the circulation and seizure of Italian American antifascist newspapers in fascist Italy only in a rather approximate way. Pellegrino Nazzaro, for example, states that “According to archival material in Rome’s Central State [Archives], from June 1924 to June 1925”—that is, shortly before Il Nuovo Mondo began publication—“the Italian postal service seized over 20,000 copies of the above-mentioned newspapers throughout the nation.”Footnote 10 The Italian American antifascist newspapers to which the author refers are those listed on the two preceding pages: Il Martello, Il Proletario, La Notizia, L’Era Nuova, La Giustizia, L’Adunata dei Refrattari, L’Umanità Nuova, La Parola, Il Lavoratore, La Voce del Popolo, La Luce, Il Pupo, Unione Figli d’Italia, L’Italia, Il Corriere del Popolo. However, the sentence containing the numerical figure is not accompanied by any archival reference that could clarify either the figure cited (“20,000 copies”), the newspapers the scholar considered, or the period. Immediately afterward, Nazzaro refers generally to a file in the Central Archives of the Italian State when discussing testimony by Giacomo di Tella, also used here. That file contains no precise reference to the figure or to comparable totals.Footnote 11 Rather than offering broad estimates for seizures of the Italian American antifascist press as a whole, this article adopts a more cautious approach. It proceeds from a specific and significant case study: Il Nuovo Mondo. The estimate is based exclusively on documents that specify the exact number of confiscated copies; reports using generic expressions of quantity (such as “several copies” and “many copies”) are not counted for the total. On this basis, the available documentation indicates that at least three hundred copies of Il Nuovo Mondo were confiscated in fascist Italy between early 1926 and 1931. For the purposes of this study, the primary unit of analysis is the documented circulation event, defined as an instance in which one or more copies or excerpts of Il Nuovo Mondo were sent to a specific recipient or address in Italy.
Documentation produced by fascist authorities through seizures, investigations, and surveillance does not provide a complete map of circulation. It reveals only what the regime was able to detect and record. In the absence of alternative archival sources, however, even a necessarily partial reconstruction is of significant historiographical value. Furthermore, the archives of repression are valuable not only for measuring clandestine circulation but also for recovering actors, connections, practices, and exchanges that would otherwise remain invisible. Methodologically, the case study treats confiscated newspapers as traces of political communication. Each interception preserves information about a sender, a recipient, a route, a method of concealment, or a subsequent act of reading and distribution.
The archives of repression also shed new light on the newspaper’s demise. These records reveal a factor that previous scholarship, which attributed the cessation solely to internal conflict within the editorial staff, had overlooked.Footnote 12 More broadly, by cross-reading these reports, this study provides the first systematic mapping of the clandestine distribution in Italy of one of the leading Italian American antifascist newspapers of the interwar period. Attention is given to material practices through which a transnational political network operated: newspapers, letters, information, and money circulated through overlapping migrant, labor, political, and personal networks, linking Italian American antifascists with recipients and militants in fascist Italy.
The central question is not simply where Il Nuovo Mondo circulated. It is how the material circulation of a leading Italian American antifascist newspaper created and sustained political connections between North America and Italy, and how fascist authorities sought to identify, monitor, and disrupt those connections. The article argues that Il Nuovo Mondo functioned less as the centralized headquarters of a transnational organization than as a particularly significant node within overlapping networks of migrants, labor activists, political militants, relatives, and local contacts.
The novelty of this study lies not in showing that Italian American antifascist newspapers occasionally reached fascist Italy. Rather, it reconstructs the geographical extent, mechanisms, actors, and multidirectional connections of that circulation. In this respect, the case study of the clandestine circulation of Il Nuovo Mondo provides a microhistorical perspective from which to analyze the material practices of transnational antifascism between North America and Europe. Rather than examining cross-border solidarity primarily through organizations and political leaders, the article reconstructs the everyday practices through which Italian antifascist propaganda operated.
Il Nuovo Mondo and antifascist networks in North America, 1925–1931
Il Nuovo Mondo. Quotidiano dei Lavoratori italiani d’America was published between November 15, 1925, and November 29, 1931. Its founder and first editor was Frank Bellanca. The newspaper’s headquarters were located in New York, at 81 East 10th Street (1925–1929) and, later, at 401 Broadway (1930–1931).Footnote 13 New York remained the principal editorial and organizational center of Il Nuovo Mondo, apart from the brief transfer of publication to Chicago between October 2, 1929, and February 8, 1930, for financial reasons.Footnote 14 Although the core editorial staff was based in New York, contributors lived elsewhere as well. Pietro Maniscalco, for instance, wrote in Florida.Footnote 15 A report of the fascist authorities shows that in 1927 three Italian antifascist exiles residing in Paris, Alberto Cianca, Alberto Giannini, and Alberto Tarchiani, wrote articles for Il Nuovo Mondo from France. According to the report, these articles were concealed in transatlantic shipments to New York.Footnote 16 This transatlantic collaboration became more institutionalized in February 1928 with the creation of a Paris correspondence office directed by Alberto Giannini.Footnote 17
Il Nuovo Mondo was by no means the only Italian-language antifascist newspaper in the United States: contemporary sources and subsequent scholarship identify numerous socialist, communist, anarchist, and syndicalist newspapers published in major Italian American centers during the 1920s. These included socialist titles such as La Parola del Popolo and Il Corriere del Popolo, anarchist publications such as Il Martello and L’Adunata dei Refrattari, and communist newspapers such as Il Lavoratore and L’Unità Operaia.Footnote 18 In terms of circulation, however, Il Nuovo Mondo occupied an unusually prominent position. Radical papers such as Il Proletario and Il Martello generally circulated between 5,000 and 8,000 copies, with peaks of around 10,000; Il Nuovo Mondo reached an estimated 25,000–35,000 copies.Footnote 19 As stated in a report by the Italian authorities, Il Nuovo Mondo was also the newspaper that the Anti-Fascist Alliance of North America (founded in 1923,Footnote 20 hereinafter AFANA) chose as “its organ to fight fascism and its duce by all means.”Footnote 21 In this regard, a letter sent in 1927 by an Italian American worker to the Ambassador Giacomo De Martino is significant: the author harshly criticized the daily attacks that Il Nuovo Mondo was publishing against the duce and Italian fascism in general.Footnote 22 Combative assertions of antifascism appeared regularly throughout Il Nuovo Mondo’s six-year history.Footnote 23 In addition to being fiercely antifascist, Il Nuovo Mondo was a socialist-oriented periodical. By 1927, its political position had become increasingly identified with the socialist and social-democratic wing of Italian American antifascism and with organized labor, in explicit opposition to the communist current represented by Il Lavoratore.Footnote 24 In 1928, the newspaper fully supported the presidential candidacy of socialist Norman Thomas, for whom it carried out “useful propaganda.”Footnote 25
Turning to a closer analysis of Il Nuovo Mondo, as highlighted by Bencivenni, this newspaper “adopted the style of mass-market metropolitan dailies with a tabloid format and a wide range of general features,” from “articles about political ideology” to “crime news and current events of the city of New York.”Footnote 26 The newspaper functioned as both a mass-circulation daily and an instrument of antifascist mobilization, connecting political militants, labor organizations, and Italian readers across various regions of the United States.
Several columns published between 1925 and 1931 provide a useful litmus test for analyzing Il Nuovo Mondo’s political engagement. From a historiographical perspective, the most significant is “Voci del pubblico,” which published correspondence from Italian American workers and activists who were subscribers to the newspaper. Two letters from December 1925 are particularly relevant. In the first, an Italian American worker from New York wrote: “I really enjoyed the publication of your newspaper Il Nuovo Mondo. I read it every day and try to share it with as many Italians as I can […]. I am a long-time subversive and promise to collaborate from time to time to interest the many members of my country’s community in reading Il Nuovo Mondo.” In the second letter, an Italian American worker from Pittsburgh noted that “all the workers” in Pennsylvania were reading Il Nuovo Mondo and its articles against Mussolini.Footnote 27 These testimonies suggest that the dissemination of the newspaper depended not solely on sales and subscriptions, but also on circulation within Italian American communities.
Four other columns focused respectively on New York, Italian communities in America, the workers’ movement, and “Cronache dell’Italia schiava” (“Chronicles of Enslaved Italy”).Footnote 28 “Cronache di New York e dintorni” (“Chronicle of New York and Its Surroundings”) provided updates on initiatives promoted by antifascist locals, such as the conference “Under fascist rule” held at Trout Park, Elgin (Illinois), on March 21, 1926.Footnote 29 Following a similar approach but with a broader geographical scope, “Cronache Coloniali” (“Colonial Chronicles”) informed readers about the activities of workers’ locals of AFANA operating throughout the United States.
The newspaper therefore did more than report on antifascist activity. Its columns connected geographically dispersed initiatives involving local meetings, lectures, labor campaigns, and organizational activities. This function was of particular importance outside New York, where the paper could serve as a point of contact between local workers’ communities and the broader antifascist movement. The circulation of the newspaper was facilitated by political meetings and labor networks. The relationship between press circulation and political mobilization was therefore reciprocal. Il Nuovo Mondo publicized local antifascist initiatives, while organizers and speakers at those same initiatives encouraged workers to read, subscribe to, and financially support the newspaper.
Antifascist militants and collaborators of Il Nuovo Mondo such as Vincenzo Vacirca and Giovanni Buscemi widely promoted the newspaper on a national scale through itinerant propaganda and political lectures. These initiatives, undertaken specifically to secure financial backing for Il Nuovo Mondo, are documented not only in New York but also in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Illinois.Footnote 30 The tours of Vacirca and Buscemi show that Il Nuovo Mondo’s circulation depended not only on the postal system but also on antifascist activists. These activists physically connected the Manhattan center with Italian American communities outside New York. Tours and lectures combined political propaganda with appeals for material and financial support. Fundraising at conferences and lectures could take different forms. During some events speakers explicitly solicited monetary contributions, while at others they encouraged participants to purchase or subscribe to the newspaper.Footnote 31
The newspaper’s mounting financial difficulties were accompanied by growing internal rivalries. However, extensive documentation preserved in the Central Archives of the Italian State in Rome suggests that internal conflict provides only part of the explanation for the newspaper’s eventual demise. Particularly revealing is the correspondence with Rome of Emanuele Grazzi, the Italian Consul General in New York and a key figure in the fascist authorities’ surveillance of Il Nuovo Mondo.Footnote 32 In June 1928, Grazzi referred explicitly to a “skillful and constant sabotage”Footnote 33 conducted by the Italian authorities in the United States. As discussed below, Umberto Caradossi and his network of agents and informants played a central role in this broader campaign against the newspaper between 1926 and 1931, drawing on agents and informants operating in the United States.Footnote 34 From the outset, Il Nuovo Mondo’s political activity attracted close attention from Italian diplomatic authorities in the United States. A report sent by Ambassador Giacomo de Martino in May 1926 illustrates this concern.Footnote 35 As previous studies have noted, De Martino repeatedly attempted, “in vain … to persuade the US government” to suppress the newspaper.Footnote 36 His representations to the US State Department produced no substantial result.Footnote 37 That state of impasse provides the context for De Martino’s mounting frustration, which also emerged in his correspondence with Dino Grandi concerning a death threat against Vittorio Emanuele III published in Il Nuovo Mondo on November 5, 1929.Footnote 38
From the fascist authorities’ perspective, the failure to obtain action from the US government encouraged a more discreet strategy of surveillance and covert interference with the newspaper. The surveillance was primarily organized through the Italian diplomatic and consular apparatus. In April 1926, at the request of Consul General Emilio Axerio, the Italian Consulate in New York re-established its confidential police office (Ufficio Riservato). Umberto Caradossi, an Italian public-security official operating under diplomatic cover, was placed in command.Footnote 39 The system encompassed direct observation of antifascist militants, the collection of information through informants, monitoring of political and editorial contacts, and the transmission of reports from New York to the Italian authorities in Rome.Footnote 40
One component of this strategy involved monitoring and, in some cases, tailing individuals associated with the editorial staff of Il Nuovo Mondo, under Caradossi’s coordination and with the assistance of informants. Those placed under surveillance included Frank Bellanca,Footnote 41 Pietro Maniscalco,Footnote 42 Giovanni Buscemi,Footnote 43 Vincenzo Vacirca,Footnote 44 and Domenico Marino Calamatta.Footnote 45 In particular, the fascist surveillance of Calamatta led to two relevant results for Italian authorities. First, it provided information on the “popular food warehouse” organized by Calamatta at the headquarters of Il Nuovo Mondo and the antifascist militants gravitating around it.Footnote 46 Second, it led to the interception in Italy of several copies that Calamatta himself had sent to Barga, near Lucca, in Tuscany.”Footnote 47 This case shows that surveillance in the United States and seizures in Italy formed two ends of the same transatlantic repressive network coordinated by Italian authorities both in Rome and New York.
Ministry of the Interior documents indicate an organized attempt to disrupt the newspaper’s distribution from within Il Nuovo Mondo’s own administrative structure through an informant working for the Italian authorities. In this context, “boycott” referred not simply to discouraging readers from purchasing the newspaper, but to systematic interference with its circulation and sources of revenue. One documented measure involved discouraging Italian businesses in the United States from advertising in Il Nuovo Mondo, thereby reducing its advertising income and exacerbating its precarious financial position. The surviving Italian records, however, provide only fragmentary evidence of how these measures were implemented in practice. By 1929, three years after fascist surveillance of the newspaper had begun, the publishers themselves publicly attributed Il Nuovo Mondo’s difficulties to what they described as a “boycott engineered from Rome.”Footnote 48 Caradossi coordinated this broader campaign against the newspaper between 1926 and 1931, drawing on agents and informants operating in the United States.Footnote 49
The campaign against the newspaper is explicitly documented in Grazzi’s correspondence from June 1928.Footnote 50 In January 1929, Grazzi himself referred to an “intelligent and systematic boycott” revealing the deliberate character attributed to the operation by the fascist authorities.Footnote 51 The boycott formed part of a broader strategy intended to undermine the newspaper’s circulation and financial viability. However, the evidence does not suggest that fascist interference was the sole cause of the newspaper’s financial difficulties or eventual demise. Contemporary fascist reports themselves acknowledged that Il Nuovo Mondo was increasingly affected by a broader crisis within the antifascist movement and by hostility from other radical groups. In November 1928, for example, Il Nuovo Mondo came under particularly strong attack from two prominent Italian American radical newspapers published in New York, Il Lavoratore and Il Martello,Footnote 52 with which Il Nuovo Mondo had very serious disagreements as early as 1926.Footnote 53 The evidence indicates that the Italian authorities deliberately sought to exploit and exacerbate these existing vulnerabilities. For instance, immediately after Il Nuovo Mondo temporarily transferred its headquarters from New York to Chicago in 1929, Grazzi instructed the Italian Consul General in Chicago, Giuseppe Castruccio, to oppose the newspaper “in every way possible with the tact that the matter requires.”Footnote 54
When the newspaper finally suspended publication in November 1931, its circulation had fallen to fewer than 2,000 copies.Footnote 55 Grazzi presented this outcome as evidence of the efficacy of the measures undertaken against the newspaper. Such retrospective claims by fascist authorities should be treated with some skepticism. Nevertheless, they show that weakening the newspaper financially and accelerating its existing crisis were deliberate objectives of the Italian authorities. The fascist campaign against Il Nuovo Mondo thus contributed to the eventual demise of one of the principal Italian American antifascist newspapers.
What, then, was the actual distribution and circulation of this Italian American newspaper, which Italian authorities defined as a dangerous antifascist “center of subversion,”Footnote 56 and which was the object of systematic surveillance?
The clandestine circulation of Il Nuovo Mondo in Italy
In the mid-1920s, antifascist newspapers printed in the United States were widely distributed both in America and, illegally, in Italy. A variety of sources attest to the extent of propaganda penetration achieved in the United States during the first half of the 1920s. Umberto Molossi, who served as head of the Public Security Office at the Consulate in New York from 1900 to 1924,Footnote 57 reported in 1923 that “Italian communist, anarchist, and socialist newspapers” were being sent even “to small mining and industrial towns” where “no other Italian newspaper” had yet arrived.Footnote 58
To counter the antifascist struggle led by Italians abroad, beginning in 1923, the Italian Ministry of the Interior issued circulars containing lists of “subversive publications published abroad.” Following those of April 11 and May 8, in a third circular, issued on June 15, 1923, Emilio De Bono specified: “since it has come to our attention that numerous copies of subversive Italian newspapers from America are being sent to Italy wrapped in American newspapers, special surveillance is required in the ports of the Kingdom, as well as at border stations.”Footnote 59 It was in circular no. 48179 of December 23, 1925, that Il Nuovo Mondo—only a month after it began publication—was included among the “subversive press” banned from entering the Kingdom of Italy.Footnote 60
As emerges from the documentation produced by the fascist authorities, at least three hundred copies of Il Nuovo Mondo were sent to Italy, either complete issues or individual newspaper cuttings. In certain instances, complete issues were dispatched from the United States, often concealed within other American newspapers to circumvent border controls; in others, senders selected and mailed individual clippings or articles.Footnote 61 Accordingly, the term “circulation” in this article refers both to complete original issues and to selected excerpts.
According to the sources consulted, the most common method was to wrap Il Nuovo Mondo inside conservative or moderate American newspapers with the clear intention of evading border controls. No evidence has emerged of systematic unauthorized reprinting of Il Nuovo Mondo by other newspapers or organizations for clandestine distribution in Italy. The seizure records concern complete issues, cuttings, or individual articles of the newspaper itself.
From the first reported seizure of two issues in January 1926Footnote 62 onward, the records document several strategies used by antifascists to distribute Il Nuovo Mondo illegally in Italy. Issues of Il Nuovo Mondo were dropped at railway stations, as occurred on the night of May 10, 1927, along the Naples-Rome railway line, at the stations in Cassino and Frosinone (in Lazio).Footnote 63 In January 1927, two issues of Il Nuovo Mondo sent by Antonio Brindisi, a resident of Paterson, New Jersey, to his fellow countryman Rocco San Severino were confiscated in Tricarico (near Matera, in Basilicata), wrapped in an American newspaper “with the obvious aim of hiding them from the border control service.”Footnote 64
In most documented cases in which the recipient was identified, Italian prefectural and public security authorities conducted house searches and investigations. These measures targeted recipients in Italy and, in many cases, members of their households. The risks faced by recipients in Italy did not necessarily lead to arrest or criminal prosecution, but could entail identification, political profiling, surveillance, and the transmission of names to the Italian police.
The risks also extended to senders in the United States. In 1927, the Prefecture of Pescara investigated Alfredo Calandra, a tailor originally from Castilenti and resident in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, after printed material he had mailed to Carlo Giampaolo in Collecorvino was confiscated. The investigation reconstructed Calandra’s migration history and political development, while a later consular report characterized him as a “subversive” who frequently sent prohibited newspapers to different people in Italy and relied on information supplied by an informant.
Recipients could likewise become visible to the authorities simply through repeated interceptions: in the province of Messina in 1926, thirty-five copies were seized while being sent to Vincenzo Terranova, a resident of Patti described as a sympathizer of the socialist deputy Ettore Lombardo Pellegrino, and fifty-eight copies intended for Antonio Starvaggi, editor of the newspaper Gazzetta di Messina e delle Calabrie. These cases therefore suggest a graduated spectrum of risk rather than an automatic equation between receiving the newspaper and being arrested as a communist or anarchist: financial support, receipt of prohibited material, or repeated correspondence could cause an individual to be named, investigated, politically classified, or placed under surveillance.
As noted above, prefectural records of seized issues and clippings provide a broad overview of Il Nuovo Mondo’s clandestine distribution. A comprehensive analysis of all the documentation produced by the prefectures indicates that the newspaper circulated clandestinely in almost all of Italy’s current regions, with the exception of the Aosta Valley. Il Nuovo Mondo in fact reached twenty-seven cities and villages of Abruzzo, five of Basilicata, two of Calabria, six of Campania, fifteen of Emilia-Romagna, three of Friuli Venezia Giulia, three of Lazio, one of Liguria, five of Lombardy, nine of Marche, nine of Molise, two of Piedmont, five of Apulia, two of Sardinia, thirteen of Sicily, ten of Tuscany, three of Trentino-Alto Adige, three of Umbria, three of Veneto.Footnote 65 This widespread distribution helps illuminate the social scale of antifascist communication. The circulation reconstructed connected major migrant centers in North America (from New York to Montreal) not only with large Italian cities but also with provincial towns and very small communities.
Further analysis has identified four regions in which the surviving documentation records the highest concentration of intercepted circulation of Il Nuovo Mondo: Abruzzo, Emilia-Romagna, Molise, and Sicily. These regional concentrations should not, however, be interpreted as a straightforward index of the relative strength of antifascist sentiment. Nor can regional population size or the scale of emigration alone account for the pattern. Relatively small Molise appears prominently alongside Sicily, Abruzzo, and Emilia-Romagna, while heavily emigrant regions such as Campania and Calabria show much more limited documented circulation. This pattern argues against a purely demographic explanation. The evidence suggests that different mechanisms could produce similar patterns of clandestine circulation: in some areas pre-existing traditions of political activism may have facilitated reception, while in others migration and the persistence of family connections with Italian communities in North America appear to have been important. The geography reconstructed here should therefore be understood as the product of an intersection between political and migratory networks rather than as a map of antifascist sentiment alone. In 1923, a fascist from Pueblo (Colorado), Giacomo di Tella, had reported to the authorities that antifascist newspapers were regularly sent to Italy, often to the same cities where, as we shall see, seizures of Il Nuovo Mondo were also documented. Significantly, di Tella’s “semi-complete” list already identified in 1923 Abruzzo and Molise as destinations for Italian American antifascist newspapers sent from the United States. It included L’Aquila, Sulmona, Ortona, Pescara, Isernia, Agnone, and Campobasso. Sicily was likewise identified as a destination, particularly the provinces of Palermo, Girgenti (Agrigento), Siracusa, Trapani, and Messina.Footnote 66
With regard to the confiscation of Il Nuovo Mondo in Abruzzo, mention can be made of the repeated seizures of issues of Il Nuovo Mondo sent to Angelo and Pietro Continenza, residents of Cerchio (near L’Aquila): investigations conducted by the fascist authorities revealed that the two brothers were, in fact, engaged in correspondence with individuals residing in America who were opposed to the regime.Footnote 67 From Italian-American militants, the Continenza brothers received “various clippings of the newspaper Il Nuovo Mondo containing anti-national and anti-patriotic articles offensive” toward Mussolini.Footnote 68
Clandestine circulation was not confined to major Italian cities. It extended to small towns and villages, showing that antifascist printed material could penetrate local communities. The tiny hamlet of Corniglio (near Parma), in Emilia-Romagna, is noteworthy because, between 1928 and 1929, a total of twelve copies of the newspaper were requisitioned.Footnote 69 Emilia-Romagna also illustrated why regional concentrations cannot be explained solely by the scale of emigration to the United States. In the case of Cesena, surviving records identify individual antifascist migrants in Canada who repeatedly sent copies back to Italy: in January 1927 five copies addressed to Giordano Versaglia were sent from Montreal by the antifascist militant Ernesto Alvisi.Footnote 70 Therefore, the archival evidence points to identifiable political and personal connections linking a specific Italian locality to antifascist migrants in North America rather than simply to the demographic weight of emigration.
Moreover, this clandestine circulation should not be interpreted exclusively in terms of a bilateral connection between the United States and Italy. Copies sent to Italy from antifascists living in Montreal reveal a broader North American network in which Italian migrants outside the United States also participated in the circulation of the newspaper. The Montreal connection also demonstrates the newspaper’s transnational reach in Canada. Antonio Spada, for instance, operated in Montreal and was described as “one of the more active” Italian American antifascist militants “in all of Canada.”Footnote 71 As indicated in the register of commercial agents of Il Nuovo Mondo active during the latter half of the 1920s, the only agent not operating in the United States (T. Boschi) was located precisely in Montreal. The archives of repression provide clues about the Montreal connection: two Italian antifascist militants residing in the Canadian city, the already mentioned Alvisi and Pietro Evaristo Gualtieri, sent multiple copies of Il Nuovo Mondo to their hometown, Cesena (Emilia-Romagna).Footnote 72 The shipments of copies of this newspaper from Montreal indicate that the clandestine circulation of the newspaper belonged to a broader diasporic political space in which Italian migrants from different parts of North America could engage in the same antifascist struggle.
Sicily was the region to which the largest number of issues of Il Nuovo Mondo were sent and subsequently requisitioned. Sicily should not be interpreted here as a centralized distribution hub, but rather as one of the principal regional destinations for the clandestine circulation of Il Nuovo Mondo in Italy. The geographical spread of the seizures—from Messina and Catania to smaller towns and villages—suggests the existence of receptive local networks connected to Italian American antifascists. Two examples of local antifascist militants and recipients of the newspaper were Giuseppe Lupis and Francesco La Porta, who were active in the province of Ragusa.Footnote 73 The Sicilian origins of several figures associated with the newspaper may have facilitated the circulation on the island: among these, the already mentioned Frank Bellanca, Vincenzo Vacirca, Giovanni Buscemi, and Domenico Marino Calamatta were all of Sicilian origin. The exceptionally high concentration of intercepted copies may therefore reflect the conversion of pre-existing migration ties into channels of political communication. Sicilian migrants associated with the newspaper could send antifascist material to individuals and communities with which they retained personal or political connections. At the same time, cases such as Giuseppe Lupis and Francesco La Porta show that these materials encountered antifascist interlocutors within Sicily itself. The evidence thus points to an interaction between diaspora connections and local political receptivity.
From the first documented seizure in the city (April 23, 1926), Messina, in particular, emerged as the preferred destination for the clandestine distribution of copies of Il Nuovo Mondo. The following year, a note issued by the Ministry of the Interior to the Prefectures of Sicily on May 13, 1927, stated that a few days earlier “many copies [of the] known antifascist newspaper Il Nuovo Mondo” had “arrived in several Sicilian cities, especially Messina.”Footnote 74 As was the case in Abruzzo (Cerchio) and Emilia-Romagna (Corniglio), copies of the antifascist newspaper were also sent to the most remote Sicilian hamlets. For example, within a little more than two weeks, between April 11 and 28, 1928, multiple seizures can be documented in the hamlets of Randazzo, San Nicolò and Dolceria (all near Catania).Footnote 75 In Sicily, as elsewhere, issues and articles from Il Nuovo Mondo were often shipped with other antifascist newspapers. One of the most heterogeneous shipments reached Emanuele Sammartino, a barber residing in Agrigento (in Sicily), in March 1929: two packages contained six issues of Il Nuovo Mondo, as well as several copies of L’Emancipazione, Il Lavoratore, L’Adunata dei Refrattari, and Il Martello.Footnote 76
These examples make it difficult to establish a single causal relationship between regional levels of emigration and the geographical distribution of Il Nuovo Mondo. The surviving evidence is therefore better suited to reconstructing specific connections than to isolating the relative weight of population size, migration, political orientation, and policing as independent variables. Moreover, because the geographical pattern examined in this article derives from fascist seizure records, higher numbers of interceptions may reflect differences in the effectiveness and intensity of local surveillance. Regional figures should therefore be treated primarily as evidence of documented connections rather than as quantitative measures of antifascist strength or migratory intensity.
A newspaper’s transnational struggle cannot be reduced to a quantitative analysis of seizures. Such analysis is nevertheless useful for mapping areas of antifascist penetration. The seizure files are also valuable for mapping clandestine circulation. They occasionally preserve traces of how individual copies were read, exchanged, and annotated. This micro-level analysis reveals the social relationships concealed behind the geographical map. In this regard, one revealing example is the lending of a copy of Il Nuovo Mondo documented in Andretta, in the province of Avellino (Campania). According to a report drawn up on the day the newspaper was confiscated by the local prefecture, September 30, 1929, Guglielmo Erberto—the brother of an antifascist militant already known to the police—had received a copy of Il Nuovo Mondo by mail from the United States on September 9, 1929. After reading it, Erberto lent the same issue to a barber in the same municipality, Pasquale Di Salvo, in the following days.Footnote 77 The illegal newspaper was therefore received and read over a period of three weeks by at least two people, one of whom was the brother of an antifascist militant already known to the Italian authorities. More generally, the geographical distribution of seizures only captures a part of the newspaper’s clandestine circulation. Individual copies could connect emigrant senders, recipients in Italy, and additional local readers, thus demonstrating that Il Nuovo Mondo was not only a newspaper produced by Italian American antifascists, but also a vehicle that linked dispersed nodes of a wider transnational antifascist network.
Confiscated issues also contain handwritten comments and additions that would otherwise not appear in a simple review of newspapers in digital libraries. For example, in April 1931, Nicola Fuscò received in Italy two packages containing issues of Il Nuovo Mondo on which the (unknown) sender in the United States had added comments such as: “Difendi l’Anarchia!” (“Defend Anarchy!”), “Combatti per la libertà operaia!” (“Fight for workers’ freedom!”), “Morte ai nostri nemici!” (“Death to our enemies!”).Footnote 78 Similarly, in the margin of an article sent to Ardenno (near Sondrio, in Lombardy) an Italian American worker wrote a precise instruction in pencil on the first page: “quando avete letto questo giornale mettetelo nel fuoco e non lo lasciate vedere a nessuno” (“after you read this newspaper throw it in the fire and do not let anyone see it”).Footnote 79
The voices of the antifascist struggle are also embodied in the letters that accompanied the newspaper shipments. An emblematic case concerns Pellegrino Pellegrini, an antifascist from Pescia (near Pistoia, in Tuscany) who moved to New York and joined the editorial staff of Il Nuovo Mondo. On March 27, 1931, Pellegrini sent two copies of Il Nuovo Mondo to a barber in his hometown along with the following letter:
“Permit me to send you these two copies of our valiant and combative Nuovo Mondo. […]. I have already sent a large quantity, not only to friends and comrades, in Pescia but also in the Provinces of Lucca and Pistoia [in Tuscany]…. Now I am here at the editorial office of Il Nuovo Mondo in New York when I left the job of waiter…. I have been included on the blacklist by the government of Mussolini.”Footnote 80
In some cases, issues of Il Nuovo Mondo are also accompanied by the replies sent from Italy to Italian American correspondents. One of the clearest examples of this dialogue is a letter sent from Naples by Vincenzo Manna in January 1930:
“Dear Comrade, I am still waiting for news from you, hoping that all is well. I am also waiting for the copies of Il Nuovo Mondo that I requested in my previous letter. Through our comrade Luigi Napolitano, I have sent you 1,900 lire, which I collected from our six comrades. I would have sent you more, but I had to help our comrade Mulinaro, who had to stay in Rome for several days for a plan he had made but was unable to carry out due to excessive surveillance, although he thought it would be easy because everyone considers him a fervent fascist. […] I will be your comrade until death. Manna Vincenzo”Footnote 81
The letter documents one segment of the antifascist network between the United States and Italy. It is also notable for its reference to the sending of “1,900 lire.” At the time, this donation, like others documented by fascist police, was intended for the antifascist association Italia Libera. A few days earlier, this organization had launched an antifascist loan in New York, accompanied by a broad propaganda program. It issued shares worth twenty-six dollars each, and Il Nuovo Mondo was to administer the scheme.Footnote 82 The newspaper therefore functioned as an organizational and financial intermediary within a broader antifascist network between North America and Italy. The dissemination of newspapers from North America across Italy mirrored the reciprocal movement of financial resources and political support. Italia Libera, for instance, sought to use funds raised through the loan, including money sent from Italy, to support Il Nuovo Mondo.Footnote 83 In this sense, the newspaper functioned as a point of convergence for the circulation of money, information, and political relationships across the Atlantic. The case of Vincenzo Manna is illustrative in this regard. Manna’s letter also reveals the risks inherent in such exchanges. He was clearly aware of fascist surveillance—indeed, he reported that the “excessive surveillance” in Rome had already frustrated an operation planned by Mulinaro—yet he continued to communicate in explicit terms. Significantly, the 1,900 lire collected were not enclosed in the letter (later confiscated) but had been remitted through his comrade Luigi Napolitano. His letter was also not anonymous. Despite discussing surveillance, financial contributions, and the activities of other comrades, he signed it with his full name. Manna’s remittance shows that this network operated in both directions: antifascist newspapers moved toward fascist Italy, while money and requests for further material traveled back toward the antifascist organizations surrounding it. In brief, Il Nuovo Mondo, printed in New York, thus became a node in a transnational antifascist network.
Such awareness of interception was not unique to Manna. For instance, a handwritten message on a clipping from Il Nuovo Mondo sent from New York to Michele Bicchiri, a shoemaker living in Isili, in the province of Nuoro (Sardinia), instructed him to show the article if it reached him: “if you receive it” (“fallo leggere questo articolo, se lo riceverai”).Footnote 84 This wording suggests that the possibility of interception was anticipated by at least some participants in these transatlantic exchanges. As the cases discussed above indicate, when such material was intercepted, intended recipients could also be exposed to police investigation and political surveillance. The surviving evidence does not explain why Manna considered such explicit correspondence an acceptable risk. It shows, however, that clandestine communication did not necessarily depend on an expectation of secrecy. Participants could be conscious of surveillance while continuing to rely on trusted intermediaries, such as Napolitano, and personal networks.
Conclusions
The research has reconstructed the clandestine distribution and circulation of Il Nuovo Mondo in fascist Italy. In doing so, it has examined broader problems including the way antifascist struggle operated across national borders within migrant and exile networks during the interwar period. The evidence shows that the political struggle waged by Il Nuovo Mondo was not confined to Italian American circles. It also operated clandestinely within fascist Italy. The newspaper therefore was not only a forum through which migrants debated fascism from abroad but also became an instrument through which antifascist militants attempted to maintain political connections between North America and Italy.
In quantitative terms, a systematic analysis of the surviving seizure records made it possible to determine that Il Nuovo Mondo was clandestinely distributed and circulated throughout Italy. The documents do not permit a reliable measurement of whether clandestine circulation increased or declined over time. However, they reveal qualitative developments. From the first documented interceptions in early 1926, clandestine circulation became geographically extensive and recurrent. As early as the newspaper’s first few months of publication, reports emerged of seizures ranging from Sicily to Veneto. In 1927, “many copies” of the newspaper were reaching both large towns and small centers, as respectively exemplified by Messina (Sicily) and Cerchio (Abruzzo). In the following years, its distribution continued to be widespread and frequent, again reaching both large and small towns: for example, in the tiny village of Corniglio (Emilia-Romagna), as many as twelve copies intended for three people were confiscated between 1928 and 1929. Significant evidence also survives from 1931, the newspaper’s final year of publication. By then, according to Italian authorities, circulation in the United States had presumably fallen to fewer than 2,000 copies. Yet Pellegrini wrote that he had sent copies “on a large scale” from New York to friends and comrades in his hometown of Pescia and the provinces of Lucca and Pistoia. The seizure cases involving antifascists discussed in this study, such as Pellegrini, Antonio Brindisi, Antonio Giovannetto, Ernesto Alvisi and Pietro Evaristo Gualtieri, reveal that political communication traveled back along emigrants’ pre-existing ties to their hometowns, families, friends, and “comrades.”
Another finding concerns the material and social infrastructure of political circulation among the United States, Canada, and Italy. The seizure records show that clandestine distribution reached not only major Italian cities but also provincial towns and small communities. This extensive reach demonstrates that individual migrants, workers, relatives, subscribers, and local sympathizers could themselves become intermediaries in the movement of political material. The 1929 case from Andretta, near Avellino in Campania, is revealing. Guglielmo Erberto, the brother of an antifascist militant already known to the police, received a copy of Il Nuovo Mondo from the United States. He lent it to the local barber, and the copy circulated for around three weeks before fascist authorities seized it. This demonstrates that a single mailed copy could generate further circulation, reaching additional readers beyond its initial recipient.
The research also demonstrates that this transnational network should not be understood as a simple one-way flow of propaganda from the United States toward fascist Italy. Seizure records instead reveal a more interactive structure. In addition to the case of Pellegrino Pellegrini, Vincenzo Manna’s letter from Naples documents movement in both directions. It records a request for further copies and the transmission to New York of 1,900 lire collected among six antifascist militants in Campania.
Records generated by fascist authorities do not provide a complete overview of clandestine circulation. They reveal only the shipments, people, and relationships that the authorities succeeded in detecting. Yet seizures and investigations preserved material traces that would otherwise have disappeared. These records therefore make it possible to recover private communications. Confiscated copies contain handwritten annotations and instructions. Police files occasionally record the subsequent lending and redistribution of individual issues. The analytical value of these sources therefore lies not only in the substantial number of intercepted copies but in reconstructing relationships, practices, and forms of political struggle.
Finally, the research reveals new aspects of the relationship between transnational political communication and fascist repression. The same cross-border connections that enabled the circulation of Il Nuovo Mondo prompted fascist authorities to develop overlapping mechanisms of surveillance and “boycott.” Consular intelligence and informants operated in the United States, while postal controls, prefectural investigations, seizures, and house searches targeted the newspaper and its recipients in Italy. Transnational antifascism thus generated a correspondingly transnational fascist response: the regime sought to extend political surveillance beyond Italy’s territorial borders and to reconstruct abroad the very connections through which dissent circulated. In this sense, the clandestine distribution of Il Nuovo Mondo involved two transnational networks. On the one hand, migrants and political activists enabled the newspaper to circulate across borders. On the other, fascist authorities sought to reconstruct those same connections in order to monitor and disrupt them.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, which helped improve the manuscript.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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