He edited several radical newspapers and spent much of his life exiled and imprisoned, having been jailed and expelled from Italy, Britain, France, and Switzerland.

He toured the United States, giving lectures and founding the influential anarchist journal La Questione Sociale.

The first of a long series of arrests came at age fourteen, when he was apprehended for writing an "insolent and threatening" letter to King Victor Emmanuel II.

[3][4] In April 1877, Malatesta, Carlo Cafiero, Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky and about thirty others started an insurrection in the province of Benevento, taking the villages of Letino and Gallo without a struggle.

[5] After working his passage on a French ship and being refused entry to Syria, Turkey and Italy, he landed in Marseille where he made his way to Geneva, Switzerland – then something of an anarchist centre.

Other delegates included Peter Kropotkin, Francesco Saverio Merlino, Marie Le Compte, Louise Michel and Émile Gautier.

He lived in Buenos Aires from 1885 until 1889, resuming publication of La Questione Sociale and spreading anarchist ideas among the Italian émigré community there.

[6] Malatesta found the situation irresistible and early in 1898 he returned to the port city of Ancona to take part in the blossoming anarchist movement among the dockworkers there.

[6] Malatesta was soon identified as a leader during street fighting with police and arrested; he was therefore unable to participate further in the dramatic industrial and political actions of 1898 and 1899.

[14] In subsequent years, Malatesta visited the United States, speaking there to anarchists in the Italian and Spanish immigrant communities.

[13] In 1902, the founding congress of the Unión Obrera Democrática Filipina - first national trade union federation in the Philippines - adopted Malatesta's book Between Peasants as being part of the political foundation of the movement.

[15] By 1910, he had opened an electrical workshop in London at 15 Duncan Terrace Islington and allowed the jewel thief George Gardenstein to use his premises.

On 15 January 1910, he sold oxyacetylene cutting equipment for £5 (£500 at 2013 monetary values) to George Gardenstein so that he could break into the safe at H. S. Harris jewellers Houndsditch.

[16] While based in London, Malatesta made clandestine trips to France, Switzerland and Italy and went on a lecture tour of Spain with Fernando Tarrida del Mármol.

[17] Malatesta then took part in the International Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam (1907), where he debated in particular with Pierre Monatte on the relation between anarchism and syndicalism or trade unionism.

[19] David Goodway writes that Malatesta held a "Mazzini-like role" and was "the leader of the Italian anarchist movement during its most important years.

Turcato writes how "Malatesta recalled in the Labour Leader that in the old International both Marxists and Bakuninists wished to make their program triumph.

[21] Anarchists who influenced Malatesta's political beliefs included Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Carlo Cafiero,[22] Peter Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus.

"[27] Despite their drawbacks, he advocated activity in the trade unions, both because they were necessary for the organization and self-defense of workers under a capitalist state regime, and as a way of reaching broader masses.