Constituted in 1949, its peak was in the 1960s, when its membership reached 200,000 and it thus sought to gain a profile independent of its parent organisation.

The Federation's newsletters and publications thus assumed a more avant-garde role, most importantly "La città futura" (taking its name from a special issue published in February 1917 by the Federazione giovanile piemontese del Partito Socialista drawn up by Antonio Gramsci himself) and "Nuova generazione" (drawn up, not without some protests, in 1956).

On 8 October 1990 Gianni Cuperlo (the secretary of the FGCI) proposed to Ariccia, following the line of Achille Occhetto, that the FGCI be dissolved in order to create the Sinistra Giovanile, a federal organisation with the aim of creating four associations in schools, in territories, in universities, in workplaces, all federated together.

When the Party of Italian Communists (PdCI) was born in 1998 as the result of a split in the PRC, the new party created the Youth Federation of Italian Communists (FGCI) on the model of the dissolved federation.

Its first 7 congresses occurred in the form of the Federazione Giovanile Socialista Italiana (Fgsi)