Michele Centrone (1879-1936)

Born in Castellana (Province of Bari) on 30 December 1879,  the carpenter son of Antonio Centrone and Rosa Baccarelli. Moving to Milan, he joined the PSI [Italian Socialist Party] in January 1897 and went on to become secretary of the Carpenters’ and Cabinet-makers’ League attached to the Camera del Lavoro and donated to the Milan-based Lotta di classe newspaper that carried the odd article of his. By the start of 1900 he was associating with Carlo Colombo, Davide Viganó, Pietro Fermo and other anarchists and he joined the “Sempre sulla breccia” (Still in the Breach) libertarian group, together with his brother Vincenzo. In the summer of 1900 he signed a declaration of solidarity with anarchists on trial in Ancona for “seditious association” and the following August he was arrested for “suspect political behaviour”. His home was ransacked and the police seized lots of anarchist and socialist papers and subversive pamphlets. Forcibly “repatriated” to Castellana and then called up into the army, Centrone then had a file opened on him by Milan Police Headquarters on 9 May 1901, which stressed his disregard for the authorities. 

Towards the end of 1903 he emigrated surreptitiously to the United States and settled in San Francisco. Two years later he helped draft a manifesto commemorating the regicide carried out by Gaetano Bresci and from 6 September 1909 on was managing editor of Nihil, an anarchist individualist paper published in San Francisco. Associated with the anti-organizationist school of thought, on 8 March 1913, in Cronaca Sovversiva (published in Barre) he defended Joe Russo aka l’Unico from accusations levelled in Il Proletario and in October 1916 he attempted to hold a rally in San Francisco to lobby for the release of Carlo Tresca and other comrades under threat of death sentences in Minnesota. Sentenced to a 10-day prison term, he refused the release offered if he would throw the support of the carpenters behind the election campaign of the judge who had convicted him. Harassed by the US authorities because of his principles, he was expelled from the USA in 1920 and deported back to Italy, arriving in Naples on 11 April that year. That July he took part in the UAI [Italian Anarchist Union’s] anarchist congress in Bologna. That September he was on record as living in the Castellana area, in Popoli d’Abruzzo with a relative from early 1921 until 19 February 1923, when he left Italy. 

Crossing into France, he set sail from Saint Nazaire for the USA where he tried to land once more, this time under the alias of Francesco Paglia. He was identified and turned away and sent back to Italy, arriving there that June and in July he was arrested in Popoli d’Abruzzo for travelling on a phoney passport. In July 1924 he returned to France, only to be expelled in March 1928. He then fled to Brussels and in the April 1929 edition of the Paris-based La Diana he exposed the spying and provocateur activities of a bunch of fascist agents operating in émigré circles. Expelled from Belgium by the end of that year he was reported in Luxembourg by June 1930 along with the “proletarian poet” Antonio Gamberi, before attempting to rent a room in Paris from Emilia Buonacosa, Federico Giordano Ustori’s courageous widow.[see notes below] 

In May 1931, OVRA [Mussolini’s secret police] reported that Centrone had allegedly left France in order to return to Italy around the time when Michele Schirru’s trial [for planning to assassinate Mussolini] was to take place, and the head of the fascist police ordered local prefects to “exercise maximum vigilance in order to ensure the capture of said subversive”. In June 1932 Centrone joined the Paris-based Anarchist Committee for Political Victims in May 1933 and was even listed among the attentatori living outside of Italy. A letter from him in the 15 October 1933 edition of L’Adunata dei Refrattari (New York) he took issue with the aid that the Committee for Political Victims had been funnelling to Sante Pollastro,[see note below] stirring up controversy in the ranks of the anarchists gathering in Puteaux. In 1934, Centrone dropped out of sight and the chief of police, fearing that he had returned to Italy to attack some bigwig, urged his prefects to “step up strict vigilance for the purpose of detaining him”. In November 1935 he took part in Sartrouville (France) in the Symposium of Italian anarchist emigres across Europe and that December attended a conference organized in Paris by the Giustizia e Libertà movement. 

On 2 August 1936 he set off for Spain along with Equo Giglioli, Renzo Cavani, Bruno Gualandi, Mario Girotti, Libero Luppi and Socrate Franchi and, once in Barcelona, enlisted in the mainly anarchist Italian Column commanded by the Italian republican Mario Angeloni. On 28 August 1936 he took part in the fighting in Monte Pelato on the Aragon front and died there after he was shot in the head.

[Entry by R. Bugliani and G. Piermaria]

From the Dizionario Biografico degli Anarchici Italiani (BFS) Pisa

Notes (also from the DBAI)

Federico Giordano USTORI (1891-1930)

Shoemaker and type-setter born in Canosa (Bari). After moving to Milan in 1909 he became a prominent agitator at protests over the execution of Francisco Ferrer and Japanese anarchists and an advocate of direct action and expropriation. Militantly against Italian entry into the Great War, deserting from the army in 1915 after he was called up. He fled to Switzerland where he was close to Il Risveglio. On his return he became a printing worker for Umanita Nova but went on the run when a warrant was issued for his arrest in the wake of the bombing of the Diana Theatre. He was eventually cleared by a Milan court of any connected charges and then met and married fellow-anarchist Emilia Buonacosa. He wrote for L’Adunata dei Refrattari (New York) from an anti-organizationist, violently individualist vantage point. Antifascist and anti-communist. In October 1930 he underwent what should have been a minor operation in Paris but caught an infection that led to his dying in agony. 

Emilia BUONACOSA USTORI (1895-1976)

A factory worker, her commitment to libertarian ideas led to her being included in 1913 in a list of “dangerous subversives”. She was then living with the anarchist Ernesto Danio and active in labour agitation. She later moved to Milan and married fellow anarchist Federico Giordano Ustori, with whom she moved abroad in 1927. They settled in Paris, frequenting exile circles; she took part in Giustizia e Libertà movement meetings and was catalogued as an anarchist capable of carrying out acts of terrorism. After Ustori died, she took up with the communist Pietro Corradi and by 1937 was in Barcelona with the anarchist Romano de Russo who was, informants reported, organizing an antifascist outrage. In 1940 she was deported from France to Germany before being handed over to the Italian police due to alleged “subversive” activity abroad. The rest of her life was spent in various forms of custody and in precarious health, doggedly lobbying for her release. In 1959 she applied for an “invalidity pension aggravated by political persecution”. The police, however, still had her fascist file as “active”, classifying her as a “dangerous subversive” and arguing that she had “gone looking for persecution, which, essentially, she deserved.”

Sante (Santo Decimo) POLLASTRO (1899-1979)

In trouble with the authorities from the age of 11, he racked up a number of criminal charges between 1912 and 1916 as a thief. Drafted into the army, he deserted, only to be captured in 1919 but a charge of desertion was dropped on the grounds of “mental illness” and he was sent to an asylum. He then led a gang that specialized in robbing trains. In 1922 he was accused of killing a bank messenger and sentenced  (in absentia) to 30 years in prison plus 10 under special surveillance. Further wrangles with the law led to his shooting his way out of an ambush in which his associate Renzo Novatore was killed and further killings of carabinieri were credited to him. According to some newspapers he led a 56-strong gang, some of them individualist anarchists or thereabouts.  He was caught in Paris in 1927 and tried for theft and in 1928 was sentenced to 15 years’ hard labour plus a 20-year residence ban. In 1929 he was extradited to Italy to face an enormous list of charges with many co-accused. The charges included murder of 6 carabinieri and a fascist in 1926. This led to his being convicted of 5 killings and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1931 he was banished to the prison island of Ventotene. After the British landed there in 1943, he led a revolt by the “lifers” demanding food before surrendering to the British. The year after that he attempted another escape and received another conviction. From 1944 to 1953 he was shuttled from prison to prison. He was finally released in 1959 and became a street trader, dying in 1979. There is some dispute as to his ideological driver as he declined to answer questions about his political thinking at the trial following his repatriation from France in 1929. 

From L’Adunata dei Refrattari (Saturday, 19 September 1936)

FINAL GREETINGS

Barcelona, 19-8-1936, 20.45 hours

Dear Adunata,

From the station in Barcelona as we wait for the train that is to take us out to the Aragon front, together with a fair number of comrades who all send their best wishes, I offer you my warmest greetings on their behalf and on my own.

MICHELE

HOW THEY FELL

From Barcelona, comrade Frigerio sends news of the clash that occurred on 28 August on the Aragon front, where Michele Centrone and seven others perished.

Barcelona, 5 September 1936

Dear comrade,

It never crossed my mind that in writing to you after so many years I would have to do so in such extraordinary circumstances and, not to put too fine a point on it, such painful ones.

Extraordinary in that I had the chance to spend a few days in Barcelona in such exceptionally painful circumstances, because it has fallen to me to bring you the news of comrade Michele Centrone’s death on 28 August in a clash in Castilllo de San Juan, between Huesca and Almudevar.

Poor Centrone, as you know, was a member of the Italian Column. But, before daybreak on the 28th, at least 500 fascists attacked the position held by our people, deploying 2 armoured cars, several machine-guns, 2 cannons and 3 aeroplanes. In fending off the assault, all the Italians had was 5 machine-guns and 120 rifles.

The battle lasted a long time, up until half past nine. Despite the unequal forces, the fascists failed to achieve their purpose, that being to surround the position and wipe out its defenders. They withdrew, leaving behind lorries, guns and ammunition. On our side, there were no prisoners lost, no ground lost or arms lost, but even so, that outcome cost the lives of seven Italian comrades and of one Spaniard. Four were wounded.

The dead are Michele Centrone, Mario Angeloni, Giuseppe Zuddas, Vincenzo Perrone (and not Perona – editor’s note), Attilio Papparotto, Andrea Colliva, Bruno Falaschi and a Spanish Comrade, name unknown.

The wounded are: Cavani, Bremcig, Girotti, Rosselli, Matteucci and Franchi Pompeo. 

Here in Barcelona, Angeloni’s funeral was carried out: he had been removed to hospital to be operated upon. I shall not, as I might have done on other overpowering occasions, as language is too banal to convey the emotions that fill the heart every time one sees, marching behind a coffin covered in flowers and red flags, the militians of the revolution, shabbily dressed, shabbily equipped but whose intelligent proud faces shine with their indomitable determination to fight to the finish and with the flame of an enthusiasm undiminished by the difficulties and sluggishness of such a terrifying struggle.

You will assuredly have reports from other comrades, regarding how much enthusiasm there is and how much good will and if the accomplishments and planned changes have not come about as quickly as we might have wished, that is due solely to the demands of a war that revolutionaries would certainly not have wanted, but which they nonetheless are obliged to bear and win unless they want the sacrificing of so many lives and the efforts already made by the heroic Spanish workers to have been in vain. I shall leave it there for today, sending warm greetings from every one of us, especially from Carlo who is here with me. A warm handshake from

Alcine Frigerio

……………………..
The 28 August clash was followed by a number of minor clashes that left us with further wounded , more or less serious. Among the wounded are Petacchi, Gabbani, Bruno, Gianotti, Gonez (Barberis)(burns sustained from an armoured car having caught fire as the result of a bomb thrown by the fascists at the vehicle’s engine).
Gunshot wounds sustained in several skirmishes: Magrini, Pierantoni, Pezzuti.
…………………..
From a letter from Paris we have picked out these additional details regarding the 28 August clash:

“ … Our boys came under attack head-on and on both flanks, whereupon comrade Bifolchi, spotting the attempt at encirclement, redeployed machine-guns on both flanks just as the enemy was preparing to mount an attack with bayonets fixed. Such swift action ensured that the attack was fended off and the enemy were put to flight, leaving behind 8 of their dead, a number of prisoners, some machine-gun sections and some cannons.

Notably, in the dead fascists’ kitbags were found waxed ropes apparently meant to make our comrades suffer, should they have been taken prisoner. The enemy’s armaments consisted of ‘Fiat’-made Italian machine-guns, and some ‘Caproni’ and ‘Savoia Marchetti’ aircraft.

Translated by: Paul Sharkey.