Celeste Negarville

Celeste Negarville (17 June 1905 – 18 July 1959) He was born in Avigliana.

Early life to 1934 Negarville was born in Avigliana, but his family moved to Turin in 1912, where his father found work as a worker at Fiat. He started working as a teenager as an electrician, while simultaneously following professional evening courses.

In 1919 he joined the Socialist Youth Federation and, in 1921, the newly formed Communist Party of Italy of Gramsci and Bordiga. After the 1922 Turin massacre he was arrested and then released, but summoned back to court. He absconded to Paris, where he worked at the Renault factory until his trial in Italy ended with an acquittal for lack of evidence. Returning to Italy, in 1924 he was appointed Piedmontese regional secretary of the Italian Communist Youth Federation (FGCI). In the same year he returned to Paris, where he remained during the Nazi occupation, undertaking clandestine organizational tasks for the party. He returned home on foot across the Maritime Alps in January 1943. Having settled in Milan, he was one of the main organizers of the strikes at the end of March 1943.

Political career Deputy to the Constituent Assembly, he was also undersecretary for foreign affairs in the Parri government and in the first De Gasperi government . In August 1945, as Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, he confided to the Soviet ambassador that his party considered "Italian demands on Trieste" unacceptable and that "the Communists would not have tolerated such behavior by the Italian delegation at the Peace Conference".

Subsequently, from 17 December 1946 to May 1948, he was mayor of Turin, the first democratically elected in republican Italy. In 1948 he became a member by right of the new Senate, under the 3rd final provision of the Constitution, by virtue of having been imprisoned for more than 5 years by the Special Fascist Tribunal for the Defense of the State. He kept his seat after the 1953 election, and was then elected deputy in 1958.

A member of the leadership of the PCI, he was Secretary of the party’s Turin federation in the years when the automation of the plants was changing the internal organization of the factories and, above all, of Fiat. He ably faced the attack led by Vittorio Valletta, that sought to use these changes to dismantle the workers' post-war gains. The defeat of the CGIL in the elections for the Internal Commissions of Fiat prompted changes in the governing bodies of the party. Negarville left Turin and assumed the Italian leadership of the Peace Movement, a role that also led him to take on important international initiatives.

Later years Indro Montanelli reports that in 1956 Negarville was sent by the party to Moscow together with Gian Carlo Pajetta. Here, like Pajetta, he was shocked by Nikita Khrushchev's account of how Beria would be physically eliminated by the new Soviet leadership.

Again according to Montanelli, Negarville later wanted to follow the example of Eugenio Reale, who left the party, but refrained from doing so solely because his wife's family was in Russia and therefore feared for her.

The Municipality of Turin named a street after him on the outskirts of the city, in the Mirafiori Sud district.