According to one commentator, Oliviero Zuccarini's political philosophy amounted to an internationalist and idealistic form of republicanism that placed him somewhere between Mazzini, Mill and Sorel.
[3] Oliviero Zuccarini was born into a large and growing family at Cupramontana, a small hill town a short distance inland from Ancona.
Closer to home, in the Kingdom of Italy he became fascinated by the spread of republicanism during the final decade of the nineteenth century and culminated in the assassination at Monza of the (by this time conspicuously conservative) king.
Publications to which he contributed at this stage included "Libertà economica", based in Bologna, "Popolano" published in Cesena, and Napoleone Colajanni's "Rivista Popolare".
[1] Increasingly alarmed by the growth of statism, in 1903 he founded a "Società del libero pensiero" (loosely, "Society of Free Thought"), and the following year successfully stood for election to the local municipal council.
[1][4] Over the next couple of years in Rome, within the Italian Republican Party, Zuccarini built an increasingly effective political partnership with his fellow freemason Giovanni Conti.
During the second half of 1914 Italian volunteer legions nevertheless emerged, and travelled to France to join the French army in its battles against the "Central Powers".
Despite treaty obligations to fight on the side the Austro-Hungarian empire, there were powerful historical memories across most of Italy of colonial subservience to Vienna during the decades before 1860.
In the meantime, Oliviero Zuccarini had already emerged in 1914 as a passionate interventionist in support both of "the democracies" and in pursuit of a quasi-Mazzinian vision of "Pan-European Federalism", derived from a long-standing strand of political thought among Italian intellectuals mistrustful of government from Rome.
[1][4] During the first ten years of the twentieth century the Italian Republican Party experienced a progressive electoral collapse, most obviously in the expanding industrial cities.
Some others were the socialist pioneer Arcangelo Ghisleri, the precocious radical Piero Gobetti, the leftist lawyer Guglielmo Pannunzio, and the Mazzinian historian Gaetano Salvemini.
[10] The author starts by contextualising contemporary politics in what he sees as a continuum between the "liberal experiment" that ended in 1922 with the Fascist dictatorship that followed it.
He highlights the simple inefficiency of Italy's ruling class and the enduring presence of an influential "petty bourgeoisie" susceptible to the blandishments of nationalism.
And yet, those same people were happy to acknowledge the ideology of labour, a top-down authoritarian modernising agenda and the successes of Rossoni's Fascist syndicalism, built on foundations already constructed long before 1922 through the brilliant exploitation of weaknesses in the liberal state.
True to the Mazzinian heritage, Zuccarini also brings into the mixture the problematic nature of a labour movement and a reformist brand of socialism that had tended towards collusion with the institutions of a conservative Sardinian-Italian monarchy.
[4] In the view of the man from Cupramontana, the worst outcome of the twenty years of dictatorship would have been something else: "the destruction of Italians' awareness of and pride in their national individuality"[b] That was because the Mussolini government had sacrificed the spirit of the people in order to feed the needs of their "vast state machine".
A generation of young people had been raised "without ideals", trained simply to "repeat the same phrases, chant the same hymns, and follow to the same mantras".
[4] Responding to intensifying political pressure in Rome and the arrival of American and British forces in Sicily, on 25 July 1943 the king finally ordered the arrest of Mussolini.
[4] As a member of the subcommittee set up in 1944 by the short lived "Ministero per la Costituente" Zuccarini was able to return to another of his preferred themes, reiterating the need to maximise local autonomy and move Italy towards a federalist structure.
In the longer term it can be argued that Italian constitution arrangements would indeed move closer towards the federalist ideals favoured by Zuccarini, but in 1944 it was clear only that his proposals encountered significant resistance.
The republican structure was chosen by voters in preference to a continuation of the monarchy in a referendum announced three months earlier and conducted on the same day as the general election, on 2 June 1946.
Nevertheless, his carefully detailed scheme for reorganising and devolving regional-level government and his passionate commitment to federalist decentralisation was only peripherally evident in the commission report, which formed the basis for "Titolo V" ("Section 5") of the constitution approved by the assembly in December 1947.
He would have preferred to wait for the emergence of some sort of pan-European federalist structure to complement and replace the nation states which had provided the framework for two "world wars" in the space of a single generation.
His impressively coherent programme for a liberal federalist republican future brought him into ever more direct confrontation with the tight-knit group around Ugo La Malfa who took control of the party secretariat in 1949.
By strengthening the government's position in parliament the idea was to deliver in Italy the level of political stability which, at that time, was associated with England and America; but the law would also have represented a major retreat from democratic purity.
In the event, it was not just Mazzinian idealists who were horrified: enough politicians (and commentators) were appalled by the proposals to ensure that the "Legge Truffa" was withdrawn and revoked after just three months.
The contrast with what he had hoped could have become a meeting point for Italy's true democrats not prepared to tolerate the political and social rebirth which the country so badly needed.
He used its pages to continue the fight for the political causes that remained dear to his heart: administrative decentralisation, social justice and the labour movement.
Nevertheless, Zuccarini's lonely voice in support of local autonomy and the resolving if social problems continued to be raised in the columns of "Noi Repubblicani" till April 1970.