Umberto's One-Man War

Umberto Calosso has spent most of his 56 years fighting a rear-guard action against Fascism. In 1923 Mussolini jailed him for speaking against the new order. Calosso escaped to the north, where he got a job as a schoolteacher, but, not content merely to teach, he began editing an anti-Fascist newspaper. Hearing that Mussolini's blackshirts were after him, he fled Italy.

In 1936, after teaching school in Malta, Calosso was invited to lecture at the University of Saragossa. He arrived in Spain just as Franco began his revolt. Calosso left the train, grabbed a rifle and joined the war. Later he turned up in French Tunisia, but had to flee again when France fell and Hitler moved in. He ended up broadcasting to Italy from London for the BBC.

Last week, back in Italy and now a right-wing Socialist deputy, Calosso was fighting the same war and still losing. At the first of a series of 20 lectures on "political literature" which Calosso is delivering at the University of Rome, a pro-Fascist student released a stink-bomb in the classroom, while others cried out: "You helped us lose the war!" Next day, as Calosso waited on a street corner for a taxi, another student stepped up and emptied a can of red paint over his head. To top it all, police stopped a girl entering Calosso's classroom with a box full of angry hornets.

"It is bad, it is bad," said long-suffering Umberto Calosso with a cheerful smile, "that these boys and girls should have come under the evil spell of Fascism, but I have my duty. If they tear down the place, I shall keep right on with my lectures." Now protected by a green-coated cop at the door, and anti-Fascist students who check off everyone who enters, Calosso has another 15 lectures to go.

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