Edmondo Rossoni

Edmondo Rossoni (May 6, 1884 – June 8, 1965) was an Italian Fascist politician.

Life

Born to a working-class family in Tresigallo, a small town in the Province of Ferrara, Rossoni was imprisoned in 1908 for his revolutionary activities as a syndicalist. Leaving Italy for the United States, he was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World union and worked in Socialist organizations there, before editing the nationalist newspaper La Tribuna - renamed L'Italia Nostra.

A renegade of Socialism, Rossoni joined Benito Mussolini's Fascist movement in 1921. After the March on Rome, he continued his political activities before becoming undersecretary to the President of the Grand Fascist Council from 1932 to 1935.

He served as Italian Minister of Agriculture and Forestry from 1935 to 1939. In this capacity, he ordered the replanning and reconstruction of his native town of Tresigallo along rationalist lines, intending to transform it into a "new town" of Italy.

Rossoni made himself famous on July 25, 1943, by voting against Mussolini's leadership inside the Grand Council (thus siding with the coup d'état initiated by Dino Grandi). When Mussolini regained power in northern Italy, creating the Italian Social Republic, Rossoni was sentenced to death in absentia. After escaping to Canada, he returned to Italy in 1947 when his sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment.

References

• Tutti Gli Uomini del Duce (article in Italian; contains image of Rossoni)
• Tinghino, John J., Edmondo Rossoni: From Revolutionary Syndicalism to Fascism (New York: Peter Lang, 1990).