Among the Sorios of the twentieth century, Leandro is the one whose story has left the deepest traces in the Italian public record. Not by his own choice — quite the opposite — but because his biography crossed paths with one of the hot spots of nascent fascism: Gino Lucetti’s attempt on Benito Mussolini’s life, on 11 September 1926. From that day on, his life was pulled into the orbit of an enormous affair, and he — a twenty-seven-year-old Brescian waiter, in a hotel room in Rome — ended up in the courtroom, in prison, in internal exile, and finally in the Resistance. A trajectory worth telling in full, because it is one of those that show what it meant to be an Italian anarchist in the heart of the twentieth century.
Brescian origins
Leandro Sorio was born in Brescia, in the working-class neighbourhood of Chiesanuova, on 30 March 1899. He is one of the last born of the nineteenth century, and grew up in the working and artisanal Brescia of the early Giolittian age. His family, like so many in that neighbourhood, was of humble origin. His parents — whose names the sources do not preserve — belonged to that class of urban workers of provincial Lombardy who in the 1910s and 1920s formed the social basin of working-class opposition, both socialist and anarchist.
The available biographical sources — the Dizionario biografico degli anarchici italiani (Biblioteca Franco Serantini, Pisa, 2000), the entry in Brescia anticapitalista, and the Italian Wikipedia entry derived from these — agree in describing Leandro Sorio as “a militant from a young age in the anarchist movement”. It is a significant detail: anarchism, in Italy, had its earliest deep roots in the Apuan area (Massa-Carrara, where Gino Lucetti would be born) and in the northern industrial centres, and in Brescia, at the start of the twentieth century, there existed a small but lively libertarian tradition — made of local groups, clandestine readings, workers’ solidarity, anti-militarism.
We do not know the details of his early political formation. We do know, however, that, like many anarchists of his generation, Leandro Sorio was probably influenced by the great workers’ mobilisations of the biennio rosso of 1919–1920, by the agitation against military intervention in Libya and in the First World War, by the figure of Errico Malatesta (the old historic leader of Italian anarchism, then returned to Italy after a long exile), and by the first fascist squadrist aggressions which, in Brescia too, began to strike at the workers’ and socialist sections between 1920 and 1922.
Rome, 1920: the new life of a militant waiter
In 1920 — at just twenty-one — Leandro Sorio moved to Rome. The capital was then a city in expansion, capable of absorbing labour from the industrial North and the rural South. He found work as a waiter at the Trento e Trieste hotel, a mid-range guesthouse where travellers, military men in transit, and professionals on business would stop. The job of waiter was at that time a common occupation for young migrant workers coming into the city: relatively stable, with board and lodging provided, but badly paid and with no career prospects.
In Rome, Sorio came into contact with the Roman anarchist groups, a small but active network that gravitated around figures such as Vincenzo Baldazzi, a former Arditi del Popolo, and historic circles such as those of San Lorenzo and Testaccio. These were the years in which fascism, after the March on Rome of October 1922, began to tighten its grip on the country. The repression of anarchists, already intense, became systematic. Yet the hardest fringes of the antifascist opposition — the Arditi del Popolo, the individualist anarchists, certain dissident communist groups — continued to operate clandestinely.
How directly Sorio was involved in these militant networks is a question the sources do not clarify. The subsequent police documents — based on the so-called “biographical sheet” of the Casellario Politico Centrale — describe him as a convinced anarchist militant, but not as an organisational leader. He was rather, in the formula of the Biblioteca Franco Serantini, the “factotum of the hotel”: the young Brescian ever present, who knew all the guests, who knew who came in and who went out, and who — as would emerge dramatically in the summer of 1926 — could, if needed, host someone in a room without asking too many questions.
11 September 1926: the Porta Pia attempt
To understand the turning point of Leandro Sorio’s life, one must briefly reconstruct the context. Gino Lucetti was a twenty-six-year-old Carrarese anarchist, a marble cutter from Avenza, who, after fleeing to France to escape fascist reprisals — he had wounded a fascist militant in Carrara in 1925 — had returned clandestinely to Italy in the summer of 1926 under the false name of Ermete Giovannini, with the precise intention of killing Mussolini. He had taken lodging in a pension in via Sant’Agata dei Goti, and in the days before the attempt had moved between other safe havens offered by Roman anarchist militants. Among these, according to the sentence of the Special Tribunal, was also Leandro Sorio’s room at the Trento e Trieste hotel.
On the morning of 11 September 1926, at 10:20, Lucetti positioned himself behind a newsstand on the square of Porta Pia, at the level of what was then the Bar Nomentano. When the black Lancia Lambda carrying Mussolini from Villa Torlonia to Palazzo Chigi went past, Lucetti threw a SIPE-type hand grenade — a First World War device still in circulation. The bomb hit the upper edge of the rear right-hand window, bounced off the bodywork, and exploded on the ground, wounding eight bystanders and leaving Mussolini completely unharmed. Lucetti, also armed with a pistol loaded with dum-dum bullets, was overpowered by a passer-by — one Ettore Perondi — before he could even flee.
The Porta Pia attempt was one of the most dramatic moments of the early phase of the fascist regime. Mussolini, infuriated, sacked the chief of police Francesco Crispo Moncada and appointed in his place Arturo Bocchini, who would turn the Italian police into an instrument of mass surveillance for the next fifteen years. A few months later, in November 1926, the “fascistissime laws” would be enacted, establishing the Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State and the regime of police internal exile (confino) for political opponents.
The trial and the twenty-year sentence
The investigation into Lucetti’s Roman network proceeded swiftly. On 15 September 1926 — four days after the attempt — Leandro Sorio was arrested at the Trento e Trieste hotel, together with Stefano Vatteroni, also a Carrarese anarchist, fellow townsman and childhood friend of Lucetti. The charges levelled at the two were the gravest: “attempt against the life of Mussolini, wounding, attempt to provoke public disorder”.
The trial took place before the Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State — the political court newly established by the regime — on 11 June 1927. The presidency was entrusted to General Carlo Sanna, with Judge Buccafurri as relatore. Sentence no. 20 of 11 June 1927 sentenced:
- Gino Lucetti to 30 years’ imprisonment, as the material perpetrator of the attempt
- Leandro Sorio to 20 years for “non-necessary complicity”
- Stefano Vatteroni to 18 years and 9 months, also for collusion
The formula of “non-necessary complicity” is legally important: it applied to those who, without having directly taken part in the execution of the crime, had provided material aid (such as hospitality) or moral support to the culprit, but in a form not indispensable to the success of the action. As for the evidence actually gathered against Sorio, it was thin: the very sentence admitted that “against” Sorio and Vatteroni “it can only be proved that they are friends of Lucetti’s”. Lucetti himself, moreover, throughout the investigation and the trial, never named any accomplice, maintaining that he had acted alone. The conviction was therefore, in large part, an act of political example-setting: the aim was to strike the Roman anarchist network, and Sorio — the “factotum” of the hotel — was the most available face on which to inflict the punishment.
Twenty years in prison for having hosted a friend in a hotel room: the disproportion between the charge and the sentence is the hallmark of a political justice.
Prison: ten years of cells
Leandro Sorio served his sentence in various prisons of the peninsula. The sources do not provide a complete list, but they specifically mention his stay in the prison of Civitavecchia, described as a “hard prison” and considered particularly trying for his physical health. It is likely that, like other political convicts of the time, he also knew Regina Coeli in Rome, Fossombrone in the Marches, and the other penitentiaries of the fascist concentration system.
A note by Brescia anticapitalista reports that during these years Sorio was “isolated from friends and family” — a condition of affective as well as physical deprivation. The correspondence of political prisoners was systematically intercepted, visits were limited, readings were monitored. The fascist regime applied to its opponents a treatment designed to wear them down psychologically as much as physically.
The sources converge on a significant fact: “in prison Sorio’s political faith grows stronger and harder”. Detention did not break him; on the contrary, it radicalised him. He left prison more convinced of his anarchist ideas than when he had entered — a common phenomenon among the political prisoners of those years, who in the fascist cells continued to read, discuss and educate themselves.
Confino: Ponza and the Tremiti, 1937–1943
In February 1937, after ten years in prison, Leandro Sorio was amnestied on the occasion of one of the periodic pardons granted by the regime. His freedom, however, lasted a week. The carabinieri arrested him again, signalling to the prefecture his “irreducible dangerousness”. The logic of the system was simple: the formal sentence had expired, but the watched man was still a militant anarchist and thus had to be removed from circulation anyway.
The instrument used was police confino, an institution introduced by the laws of 1926 which allowed the Provincial Commissions to assign a citizen to a remote locality — typically an island — for a period of up to five years, renewable, without trial. In September 1937 Sorio was sent first to Ponza and then to the Tremiti islands, two of the main confino colonies of the regime, where the dense community of political opponents gathered: anarchists, communists, socialists, giellisti, Slavs of the eastern border.
On the Tremiti, where he was to spend much of his confino, Sorio mixed “chiefly with anarchist elements” — his historic militant comrades — but also with communists such as Umberto Terracini and Mauro Scoccimarro, two leading figures of the Communist Party of Italy who were likewise confined on the same islands. It is a precious detail: it tells us that the forced cohabitation created in the confino colonies an unexpected political laboratory, where men of different traditions confronted, discussed, sometimes clashed, but just as often built friendships and bonds that would last beyond the Liberation. Terracini would become President of the Constituent Assembly in 1947; Scoccimarro would be Minister of Finance. Sorio would return to Brescia.
In June 1942, at the expiry of his period of confino, the officials decided to detain him further “for war reasons”: Italy was at war, and subversives could not be set free. Only in August 1943, after the fall of fascism and Mussolini’s arrest (25 July 1943), did the prefecture register Sorio’s return to Brescia.
The Brescian Resistance, 1943–1945
Sorio was forty-four years old when he set foot back in the city. Seventeen years spent between prison and confino — from 1926 to 1943 — had taken a heavy toll on his physical health, particularly because of the Civitavecchia prison. And yet he did not stop. A few days after his return, on 8 September 1943, Italy signed the armistice with the Allies and the country plunged into civil war: in the North the Italian Social Republic was born, Mussolini’s puppet state under German control; in the valleys and the cities the armed Resistance began.
In Brescia, one of the first cities of northern Italy in which the partisan movement was organised, Leandro Sorio had to go into hiding with the advent of the RSI, and worked actively with the Brescian Resistance as a liaison. The role of “liaison” — a technical term in the partisan lexicon — meant the person who shuttled between the armed formations in the mountains and the urban networks of support (procuring food, weapons, information, false documents). It was a dangerous and fundamental task, particularly suited to a man like Sorio: physically worn but with years of clandestinity behind him, known and trusted in the workers’ and antifascist circles of the province.
The sources do not specify in which partisan formation he operated, but given his anarchist militancy it is likely that he gravitated around the Matteotti Brigades (of socialist-libertarian orientation) or the mixed formations of the Val Trompia and the Val Camonica, the Brescian valleys that were the theatre of intense resistance activity. The Brescian Resistance — which paid a very high price in blood in the twenty months between September 1943 and April 1945 — saw the participation of anarchists, communists, Catholics, azionisti, in a plural mobilisation that, after twenty years of dictatorship, rebuilt the fabric of grass-roots democracy.
The post-war years at Tavernole sul Mella
When Brescia was liberated on 27 April 1945, Leandro Sorio did not choose a political career. While many of his fellow confino comrades — Terracini, Scoccimarro, Pertini, Pajetta — entered the institutions of the new republican Italy, he took a different road. He moved into his sister’s home, at Tavernole sul Mella, a small comune of the Val Trompia (province of Brescia), where the Mella river valley narrows between wooded mountains.
At Tavernole — a rural locality of a few thousand inhabitants, far from the spotlights of national politics — Sorio applied his anarchist ideals concretely to daily work. He set up the first workers’ cooperative of the Upper Valley, an experiment in working-class self-management that put into practice the historic principles of libertarian mutualism: common labour, fair distribution, democratic decision-making, independence from employers and from the State. The sources allude to the “ostracism of which he was the target in the early post-war years” — a sign that, in a valley where the old balances of power had not changed all that much, an anarchist returning from confino was not welcomed by everyone.
Sorio remained faithful to his ideals to the end. He did not renounce his militancy, did not convert to more moderate parties, did not seek honours. He continued to “profess his political creed” — as the sources put it — in the most coherent form available to him: working, organising, living as an anarchist in a small Brescian valley, with the stubborn dignity of someone who had paid twenty years in prison for his ideas and had no intention of disowning them in the post-war years.
Leandro Sorio died at Tavernole sul Mella on 14 December 1975, at the age of seventy-six. Bresciaoggi devoted a short obituary to him the following day.
Traces in memory
The figure of Leandro Sorio is cited in several works on the history of Italian antifascism. His biography is collected in the already cited Dizionario biografico degli anarchici italiani (Pisa, BFS, 2000), an international reference work for the history of Italian anarchism. He is mentioned in specialist studies such as Kathy E. Ferguson, Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011, p. 43), and in Pierre Vareilles’s volume on twentieth-century political attempts. He appears in the historical reconstructions of Lucetti’s attempt, whenever historiography retraces the events of Porta Pia.
In a Brescian valley, where he lived his last thirty years, his name is remembered by the circles of local antifascism and by the cooperative tradition of the Upper Valley. But his is a name that — like that of so many grass-roots militants of the twentieth century — has been largely absorbed by collective memory without becoming a cover name.
A Brescian trace of the Sorio surname
As far as the Sorio surname in particular is concerned, Leandro’s story is significant for one precise reason: it is the principal twentieth-century attestation of the surname outside the Veneto. Brescia is in fact the first large Lombard city one reaches moving westwards from the original Vicentine-Veronese nucleus of the surname, and the arrival of a family nucleus of Sorios in Brescia between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — Leandro’s parents must have settled there at least a few years before 1899, the year of his birth — is consistent with the general pattern of internal Veneto-Lombard migration tied to the Brescian industrialisation of the late nineteenth century. Brescia, with its steelworks, its arms factories, its iron industry, drew labour from the Venetian plain, from the Bergamo area, from the Valtellina.
We cannot say with certainty, from the available sources, from which specific Venetian branch the Brescian family of Leandro Sorio came. A focused genealogical search in the parish archives of the Chiesanuova neighbourhood of Brescia could bring to light the names of his parents and, from there, the trail of the Venetian village of origin. It is an investigation that remains open to whoever may wish to take it up.
What is certain is that, through Leandro Sorio, the Venetian surname enters twentieth-century Italian history by a lateral and dramatic door: that of fascist repression, the Special Tribunal, the islands of confino, the partisan Resistance, the long, silent post-war cooperative commitment. A life, his, that deserves to be remembered alongside those of the more ancient and more illustrious Sorios — not for the grandeur of his deeds, but for the coherence with which a young Brescian waiter carried forward, through twenty years of jail and half a century of militancy, the idea he had made his own at the age of twenty.
Sources consulted: Dizionario biografico degli anarchici italiani (Biblioteca Franco Serantini, Pisa, 2000); entry “Leandro Sorio” on Italian Wikipedia; “L’altra Brescia. I nostri: Leandro Sorio, l’anarchico che collaborò con Lucetti all’attentato a Mussolini”, in Brescia Anticapitalista, 4 August 2022; Bresciaoggi, 15 December 1975; Adriano Dal Pont et al., “Aula IV. Tutti i processi del Tribunale Speciale fascista”, Milan, ANPPIA/La Pietra, 1976, sentence no. 20 of 11 June 1927; Biblioteca Franco Serantini, biographical entry “LUCETTI, Gino”; Kathy E. Ferguson, “Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets”, Rowman & Littlefield, 2011.