As a journalist he was the director in charge of the daily newspaper Risorgimento Liberale (Liberal reawakening) in the 1940s and of the weekly political magazine Il Mondo (The World) in the 1950s.
[1][2][3] Mario Pannunzio was born in Lucca, a prosperous Tuscan city a short distance inland to the north of Pisa.
While still at university he became a regular visitor at the Caffè Aragno in the city centre, which was a favourite meeting point for cerebrally inclined intellectuals during the 1930s.
Newly set up by Leo Longanesi, and operated under the auspices of the Rizzoli-Corriere della Sera group, the weekly news magazine was produced using the then innovative Rotogravure printing process.
[10] Identified as one of the best of Longanesi's "apprentices", Pannunzio was invited to Milan by Angelo Rizzoli who was planning to launch a new magazine using "Rotogravure".
Pannunzio joined with Leo Longanesi to compose the editorial which appeared in Il Messaggero on 26/27 July 1943, celebrating the return of liberty.
During December 1943 Pannunzio was arrested by Nazis while he was in the newspaper's print works: he spent several months in the Regina Coeli (prison).
Pannunzio did not hesitate to oppose the National Liberation Committee ("Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale" / CLN), a broad coalition of political groupings united only by opposition to Fascism and, until the general election of June 1946, the closest thing occupied post-war Italy had to a government.
He was particularly critical of the CLN's muted response to the Foibe massacres, ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia and over the issue of Italian prisoners still held in the Soviet Union after the end of the war.
[10] Pannunzio now received separate offers from the journalist turned media magnate Gianni Mazzocchi and from the Rizzoli-Corriere della Sera group to take on leadership of a new magazine.
In the meantime, Pannunzio contributed to the weekly magazine L'Europeo, produced by Gianni Mazzocchi and under the editorial control of his friend Arrigo Benedetti.
The number and the quality of its contributors combined with the various issues tackled made its managing editor, Mario Pannunzio an informal but influential member of the political class, despite operating from outside from outside the conventional parliamentary institutions.
On 15 July 1954 Pannunzio, Carandini, Libonati and Paggi reacted by resigning - in Panninzio's case for the second time - from the Liberal Party.
Pannunzio himself had been imprisoned during the German occupation for "antifascist resistance" between October 1943 and February 1944, after which it was he who had taken on leadership of the Risorgimento Liberale, the daily newspaper which, it could be argued (and was), had defined postwar Italian liberalism between 1943 and 1948.
Members elected that year to the party national executive were Bruno Villabruna, Leopoldo Piccardi, Ernesto Rossi and Marco Pannella.
The causes of the breach were a combination of political and personal differences, with additional bitterness triggered by allegations on the activities of Leopoldo Piccardi during the Fascist years.
He set about obtaining and photocopying articles from the weekly magazine "Oggi" covering the years from 1939 to 1943, in order to find material that he might use to challenge Pannunzio's own anti-fascist credentials.