18 Facts About Giuseppe Romita

Giuseppe Romita was an Italian socialist politician.

Giuseppe Romita served several times as a cabinet minister and member of the Italian Parliament.

The son of Guglielmo Romita and Maria Gianneli, Giuseppe Romita came from a poor family: his father was a farmer and later foreman with three sons and three daughters.

Barely sixteen, in 1903 Giuseppe Romita enrolled in the Italian Socialist Party first in Alessandria and then in the Turin section, becoming an executive member of the local section of the Italian Socialist Youth Federation and a local correspondent for its newspaper, Avanguardia.

At the FIGS congress on 18 October 1910, Giuseppe Romita joined the national council embracing the anti-monarchical and republican theses.

Giuseppe Romita was secretary of the PSI section of Turin in 1911, increasing his political involvement and at the same time managing to graduate in engineering at the Polytechnic in 1913.

Giuseppe Romita returned to the secretariat of the Turin section of the PSI following the arrest of the previous secretary and therefore participated in the "bread revolt" of August 1917, ending up in jail until April 1918.

In January 1921, following the Livorno split, Giuseppe Romita chose to remain in the PSI and in May of that same year he was re-elected to parliament.

In October 1922 the PSI sanctioned the expulsion of the gradualist tendency, which Giuseppe Romita tried to prevent by mediating to the last.

Giuseppe Romita's ideas, supported by Nenni at the extraordinary congress of the PSI in April 1923, prevented attempts to merge the party with the Communist Party of Italy.

Giuseppe Romita was arrested on 16 November 1926 and sentenced to five years of confinement, first in Pantelleria and then in the more unreachable Ustica.

Giuseppe Romita was acquitted but confined to the island of Ponza.

Giuseppe Romita was granted parole in 1929 but was expelled from the register of engineers.

Giuseppe Romita was sentenced to confinement at Veroli where he could be joined by his family.

Giuseppe Romita managed, despite the outbreak of the war, to establish a nucleus of socialists and even to refound a socialist executive in hiding, of which he was elected secretary with a mandate to take care of northern Italy.

Giuseppe Romita left the PSI in June 1949, and in December of that year he founded the Unitary Socialist Party.

Giuseppe Romita was elected to the central committee of the PSDI at the Milan congress in 1957.

Giuseppe Romita died in Rome on 15 March 1958 at the age of 71 from a heart attack.