Giovanni Amendola

Giovanni Amendola (April 15 1882 – April 7 1926) was an Italian journalist and politician, noted as an opponent of Fascism.

Amendola was born in Salerno. After he graduated with a degree in philosophy, he collaborated with some newspapers, among them being "Il Leonardo" of Giovanni Papini and "La voce" of Giuseppe Prezzolini. After that, he obtained the chair of theoretical philosophy at the University of Pisa.

Attracted by the politics, he was elected three times to the Italian Chamber of Deputies for Salerno. In the 1910s, Amendola supported the Italian liberal movement, but he was completely against the ideology of Giovanni Giolitti. During World War I, he adopted a position of democratic irredentism and, at the end of the war, he was nominated minister by Prime Minister Francesco Saverio Nitti.

His critical positions while confronting the right-wing extremism cost him a series of aggressions from the Fascist hired killers. In 1924 Amendola refused to adhere to the "Listone Mussolini", and attempted to become Prime Minister, as the head of a liberal coalition which ran in elections. He was defeated, but continued the democratic battle by writing columns for the "Il Mondo", a new daily newspaper which he founded together with other intellectuals.

Amendola is probably most famous for his publishing of the Rossi Testimony on 27 December 1924, during the height of the Matteotti Crisis, in one of his newspapers. The document directly implicated Prime Minister Mussolini in the murder of Giacomo Matteotti (leader of the Socialist PSU party) on the 10 June 1924, as well as declaring that he (Mussolini) was behind the reign of terror which led up to the 1924 general elections (held 6 April).

Resented by Benito Mussolini for his prominent activism, Amendola was, together with the United Socialist Party deputy Giacomo Matteotti and the popular priest don Giovanni Minzoni, one of the régime's earliest victims: he died at Cannes in agony from violence inflicted by Blackshirts.

His son, Giorgio Amendola, was an important communist writer and politician.