At a three-thousand-strong conference in Livorno in January 1921, an assertive twenty-year-old named Secondino Tranquilli gave a provocative speech to fellow members of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). Tranquilli recalled the recently murdered communists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg — and insisted that all reformists should be immediately ejected from the PSI. “He was confident, almost to the point of arrogance,” writes historian Stanislao G. Pugliese in his brilliant 2009 biography, Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone. (Tranquilli soon adopted the pseudonym “Silone.”)

But Tranquilli’s suggested purge of the reformists did not transpire — and on January 21, 1921, the left wing of the PSI itself withdrew, to create the Communist Party of Italy (PCI). By 1923, the erudite Antonio Gramsci had become its leading figure; when he was jailed by Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government in 1926, the young lawyer Palmiro Togliatti instead took over the reins, leading the PCI through the tumultuous decades up till his own death. As for Silone, over the 1920s he became a member of the PCI inner circle, known for his intelligence and dogged work as an underground political operative and editor in several European cities, between repeated arrests and deportations.

Already after his emotional appearance in Livorno, Silone had suddenly collapsed, coughing up blood. This created a pattern of severe physical trauma and illness, resulting from the great transformations he lived through. His work for the PCI, lasting throughout the party’s first decade, would be all-consuming and dangerous, often shared by his colleague and lover Gabriella Seidenfeld, an intelligent and resourceful partner. “He was a solitary type,” wrote Seidenfeld, after working a few weeks with Silone for the PCI, “sickly, with sad eyes. Very intelligent.”