Giovanni Amendola

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Giovanni Amendola (April 15, 1882, Salerno—April 1, 1926, Cannes) was an Italian journalist and politician, noted as an opponent of Fascism.

After he graduated philosophy, he collaborated with some newspapers, among them being Il Leonardo of Giovanni Papini and La voce of Giuseppe Prezzolini. After that, he obtained the chair of theoretical philosophy at the University of Pisa.

Attracted by the politics, he was elected three times to the Italian Chamber of Deputies for Salerno. In the 1910s, Amendola supported the Italian liberal movement, but he was completely against the ideology of Giovanni Giolitti. During World War I, he adopted a position of democratic irredentism and, at the end of the war, he was nominated minister by Prime Minister Francesco Saverio Nitti.

His critical positions while confronting the right-wing extremism costed him a series of aggressions from the Fascist hired killers. In 1924 Amendola refused to adhere to the "Listone Mussolini", and attempted to become Prime Minister, as the head of a liberal coalition which ran in elections. He was defeated, but continuated the democratic battle by writing columns for the Il Mondo, a new daily newspaper which he founded together with other intellectuals.

Resented by Benito Mussolini for his prominent activism, Amendola was, together with the United Socialist Party deputy Giacomo Matteotti and the popular priest don Giovanni Minzoni, one of the régime's earliest victims: he died in agony from violence inflicted by Blackshirts.

His son, Giorgio Amendola, was an important communist writer and politician.