[3][5] The child grew up bilingual, fluent both in Italian and in French, which was the language still favoured by the largely "expatriate European" community of bourgeois businessmen and bureaucrats in Egypt.
[4] In France he came into contact with the Rosselli brothers and joined up with their exiled antifascist Justice and Freedom (Giustizia e Libertà; GL) movement.
Aldo Garòsci, a leading group member and anti-Mussolini activist who had been in Paris since 1932, suggested that he should use the secret pseudonym "Paolo Vittorelli".
Raffaello Battino's code name became a new identity, however, which he would retain for the rest of his life, long after the Fascist regime and its officials had lost their leader and fallen from power.
[7] In 1938 comrades sent him back to Italy with instructions to make contact with underground antifascists; but he was intercepted at the frontier by Italian police and returned to France where he was now based until 1940.
The Italian government hastily declared war on France in June 1940 and launched its own invasion from the south-east: this had little military impact, but it confirmed and strengthened the Rome-Berlin "axis" alliance.
Vittorelli and his comrades undertook an exhaustive four-year programme of visits to the prisoner-of-war camps where they engaged with Italian captives and shared their antifascist convictions.
He accepted appointment as editor-in-chief of the Piedmont edition of the party's clandestine newspaper L'Italia Libera, following editor Ginzburg's arrest and death by torture.
At this stage, however, Vittorelli lined up with other purists, including Tristano Codignola, Piero Calamandrei, Aldo Garosci and Giuseppe Faravelli to establish Azione Socialista Giustizia e Libertà ("Socialist Action for Justice and Freedom"), a socialist-democratic political third force which drew intellectually and spiritually on the legacy of the pre-war anti-fascist Giustizia e Libertà movement.
[4][10] On 8 February 1948 Azione Socialista Giustizia e Libertà gave birth to the Unione dei Socialisti (UdS), a political party created by Ivan Matteo Lombardo.
The overriding objective was to preclude an East German-style Moscow-backed political alliance with the Italian Communist Party (PCI) ahead of the critically important a couple of months before the 1948 general election.
Together with Tristano Codignola, Piero Calamandrei and Aldo Garosci, Vittorelli resigned from the PSDI and joined the Unità Popolare (UP), a newly formed coalition of democrats from the political centre and left which came together to oppose the Fraud Law.
The law was passed by parliament, but would be repealed in 1954 without ever having been implemented, apparently because the government, still in power, but with a greatly reduced majority following the 1953 general election, concluded that it was becoming so unpopular with voters as to be electorally counter-productive.
Progress was slow, partly on account of concerns that the "red provinces" of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna would "turn communist" and somehow become Moscow proxies.
That never quite happened, at least not in the terms the doomsters had foreseen; but it was only in 1970, more than two decades after the rest of the 1947 constitution had been implemented, that elections were held for "consigli regionali" ("regional parliaments").
[3] Between June 1969 and May 1976, Vittorelli worked as editorial director at Il Lavoro, a respected PSI daily newspaper produced for the Genoa region.
Testimonianze e ricordi del Partito d’Azione" and dealing with what one source identifies as the party's "militant years" ("... agli anni della militanza").