He was prosecuted for taking part in an anti-Austrian demonstration and took refuge in Pavia, where he obtained a degree in law in March 1861.
[1] Gnocchi-Viani became a journalist, and worked for the Mazzini papers L'Unità italiana (Italian Unity) and IlDovere di Genova (The Duty of Genoa).
Gnocchi-Viani's 1870 pamphlet Dal Concilio a Dio showed his growing independence from Mazzini's philosophical and religious views, and his adherence to materialistic concepts.
He found that the anarchists had taken control of the Roman IWA section, and decided to join the anti-Bakunin faction.
[1] That year he and other evolutionist Socialists who wrote for La Plebe founded the Northern Italian Federation of the International, an organization that believed in using legal means and was opposed to anarchists and insurrectionists.
"[4] Gnocchi-Viani believed that history had to be seen as more than just a chronicle of events, but also as an account of ideas, schools, theories and doctrines.
At the end of 1885 Gnocchi-Viani went to France to study labor relations for the journal Il Sole.
[9] In 1893 he was the first secretary of the Humanitarian Society of Milan, which aimed to improve the education and conditions of the working classes.
[1] His Dieci anni di camere del lavoro is an important source of the early history of the chamber of labor in Italy.