Girolamo Li Causi
| Girolamo Li Causi | |
|---|---|
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| Member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies | |
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In office 1946–1968 |
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| Constituency | Sicily |
| Personal details | |
| Born | January 1, 1896 Termini Imerese, Italy |
| Died | April 14, 1977 (aged 81) Rome, Italy |
| Political party | Italian Communist Party |
Girolamo Li Causi (January 1, 1896 – April 14, 1977) was an Italian politician and a leader of the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI). He was actively involved in the post World War II struggle for land reform and against the Mafia in Sicily. He labelled the large estate (the latifondo) Sicily's central problem.
Li Causi was born in Termini Imerese, a town in the province of Palermo on the northern coast of Sicily. The son of a shoemaker, he graduated with an economics degree from the University of Venice in northern Italy. As a student he joined the Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano, PSI).
Forced to leave Venice by the Fascists after Mussolini’s March on Rome in October 1922, he went to Rome and then Milan, where he helped organise the Third Internationalist’ faction of the PSI. In the summer of 1924 he adhered to the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI). He was part of the editorial staff of the Communist newspaper l'Unità and the magazine Pagine rosse. After the failed assassination attempt on the fascist prime minister Benito Mussolini in September 1926, the PCI was outlawed and the publication of l'Unità suppressed. A clandestine edition resumed on the first day of 1927 in which Li Causi was actively involved.
Li Causi became the PCI interregional secretary in Piedmont and Liguria, where he succeeded in producing clandestine copies of L’Unità and in helping organise rice workers’ strikes in Piedmont. He fled to Paris in mid-1927, but was arrested on May 10, 1928 in Pisa, during one of his clandestine return trips. Li Causi was sentenced to 20 years and nine months in prison. In 1937, as the result of a political amnesty, he was released from prison and banished to the penal colony on the island of Ponza. When Mussolini was forced to resign on July 25, 1943, Li Causi stayed in the penal colony on the island of Ventotene, 40 kilometres to the east of Ponza.
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