After the leader fell from power in 1943 and Italy was liberated in 1945, he became an increangly mainstream politician, serving as a member of the senate between 1948 and 1963, and playing an increasingly prominent leadership role in the Communist Party.
When Velio was just 5 the family relocated some fifty kilometers to the north, to Guspini, a slightly larger and more dynamic small town in which the local economy was, at that time, dominated by lead and zinc mining.
At around the same time, almost certainly in another part of Rome, the socialist parliamentarian Giacomo Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered by fascist paramilitaries giving rise to widespread revulsion and a rapidly intensifying appreciation of the true nature of Mussolini's fascism.
By this time he had become, in the words of at least one commentator, a “professional revolutionary” in response to the government's systematic construction of the institutional underpinnings for an authoritarian tyranny including, notably, the so-called ”exceptional laws” (‘’” leggi eccezionali del fascismo"’’) of 1925/26.
He was arrested in Turin and sentence to a two month prison term and recommended, at the same time, for some more systematic form of “confinement” that would remove him from antifascist activist.
The special court delivered the outcome of their deliberations on 12 April 1928 and imposed on him a sentence amounting to a further five years and five months for “communist association and propaganda”.
In October 1934 he teamed up with the French polymath-philosopher Romain Rolland and others to launch a call for the release of Antonio Gramsci whose health had deteriorated steadily and alarmingly since his arrested and imprisonment by the Italian authorities in November 1926.
Gramsci enjoyed a formidable reputation among Europe's left-wing intellectual elite, which was particularly well represented in France, and the campaign for his release, and for an international delegation to be permitted to visit Italy in order to make a determination of the conditions under which political prisoners were being held, gained significant traction.
[2][4][12][13] By November 1935 Spano was in Egypt, having been sent by in the party to undertake a propaganda assignment among the Italian troops advancing across Libya towards Suez to discourage British intervention in the intensifying Abyssinian War.
[1][2] Between 1935 and 1937 he then undertook a number of further clandestine visits to Italy on behalf of the exiled party leadership in Paris, this time using the cover name “Renzo Lojacono” with the recurring objective of trying to maintain a certain level of organised antifascist activity, principally in Naples and Rome.
[4] In December 1936 Spano was sent by the party to Barcelona to contribute to the antifascist struggles in the Spanish Civil War which had broken out six months earlier.
His initial focus was on political broadcasting, for which he displayed an exceptional set of abilities, initially in Barcelona and later in Madrid from where, starting in February 1937, to was placed in charge of “Radio Milano Libera”, a wholly Italian language station targeting the Italian army units sent by Mussolini to fight alongside Franco's ”nationalist” forces.
On the evidence of the number of people arrested in Italy on suspicion of listening to the “Radio Milano Libera” transmissions sent across from Madrid, it appears that the station attracted a significant listenership.
Spano launched an energetic propaganda programme and established contacts with numerous young communist activists from Italy who by this time had found refuge in to Tunisia.
He was held there until Paris fell to the Germans in June 1940, which generated delight among some of the more vocal Tunisian nationalist but also, in political terms, ushered in a period of increased uncertainty for the territory.
[1][4] Despite the best endeavours of the police, who were answerable to the Vichy government for as long as Tunisia retained the status of a “French” protectorate, Spano managed to avoid recapture.
Spano was able to undertake intense clandestine “political work” among members of Italy's conscript armies, organising little secret cells of communists and distributing anti-fascist newspapers.
Five months later, in early May 1943, Tunisia was liberated by British and American forces, while many surviving members of the Italian army disappeared or became prisoners of war.
Two and a half weeks earlier, with American forces approaching from the south and high-profile fascist leaders escaping towards the north, the city had effectively liberated itself.
English-language historiography tends to downplay the Italian contribution to the country's liberation from fascism while an opposite tendency is apparent in many Italian-language sources.
As far as the Communist Party was concerned, the demand in support of immediate abdication was softened abruptly with the arrival in Naples of Palmiro Togliatti on 27 March 1944.
[4] In May 1945 he attended the party's second regional congress in Sardinia on behalf of the national directorate and repeated his urgings not to focus on the “autonomy” agenda to the exclusion of the pressing need for social reforms.
On 8 August 1945 he participated as a member at the inaugural meeting of the provisional leadership team for the “Consulta nazionale” (‘’loosely, “national council”’’) set up on the basis of a royal decree dated 5 April 1945 (‘’” Decreto legislativo luogotenenziale 5 aprile 1945, n. 146”’’) [26] on the basis of an initiative from post-fascist political leadership groups that had emerged in Rome and Milan.
He was prominently involved in the turbulent social and political developments during the later 1940s on the island, notably in respect of farm worker uprisings and land occupations.
[28] In August 1949 Spano accepted a party request that he should visit the newly relaunched People's Republic of China following more than two decades of intermittent civil war.
[4] Nevertheless, after Stalin died, and as the contents of so-called “secret speech” spilled across from Moscow, to be followed by what optimists termed the Khrushchev Thaw in east–west relations, by 1961 Spano found himself in passionate and increasingly open disagreement with party leader Palmiro Togliatti on their respective attitude to the Soviet Union and on the extent to which Soviet-inspired communism could be considered compatible with Italian notions of parliamentary democracy.
The principle exception concerned the African continent, in which Spano, encouraged by his Tunisian-born wife, had taken a particular interest ever since his Tunisian exile during the later Mussolini years.