Carlo Dell'Avalle

Carlo Dell'Avalle (Milan, 24 April 1861 – 10 December 1917) was an Italian politician, and the first secretary of the Italian Socialist Party.

Early career Son of Nicola and Adelaide Giani, he ran away from home at the age of eleven to avoid his family's chosen career for him in the church, in the college of the Barnabites in Milan. He worked as a printer, accompanying his activity with political interests and union organization. Initially close to the republican movement, he eventually espoused socialist ideas which in those years were spreading with the development of Italian industry.

In 1882 he founded the "Società Genio e Lavoro", which brought together the main workers' organizations of the Milan, including the railway workers and the workers of Pirelli. This idea was welcomed by leading members of the movement, such as Filippo Turati and Antonio Maffi, who proposed the name of the Italian Workers' Party. but he his appeals for moderation did not prevent the rising tide of popular discontent becoming an open revolt, unleashing the ferocious repression against the uprisings. Wanted, he fled to Lugano and in July he was sentenced by default to fifteen years' imprisonment. He returned from Italian-speaking Switzerland at the end of 1901, when the Milan court of appeal declared his sentence had lapsed. and in this way opened the work of the VI congress of the resistance (Genoa, September 1906) that was to see the foundation of the General Confederation of Labour (CGdL). Whether or not the Milan Chamber of Labor should join the CGdL was the cause of controversy in the Milanese labor movement, which would last for his entire secretariat. In 1911 he left the chamber secretariat to become administrator of the CGdL. He held various other positions including the chairmanship of the weekly La Battaglia proletaria, the organ of the Milan Chamber of Labour, and represented the CGdL in The Humanitarian Society.