Gino Bibbi

Gino Bibbi (5 February 1899 - 8 August 1999) was an Italian engineer, political activist, anarchist, militant antifascist who participated in the Spanish Revolution of 1936 as a republican fighter pilot. Earlier, he had placed his engineering skills at the service of the causes for which he fought. He supplied the SIPE grenade-bomb which his cousin Gino Lucetti threw at Mussolini's car in Rome on 11 September 1926. The bomb exploded only after bouncing off the roof of the car containing its intended target: Mussolini was undamaged. Bibbi was arrested, but later escaped and fled abroad.

Biography Provenance and early years Gino Bibbi was born at Avenza, a small town between the coast and Carrara, into which it has subsequently been subsumed. Carlo Bibbi, his father, is described variously as a timber merchant and an owner of lands and quarries (presumably of marble). In political terms, Carlo Bibbi would have been considered a liberal and a moderate. Gino Bibbi was born with at least one sibling, Marietta "Zingrina" Bibbi (1895–1993), who was four years older than he was. She trained as an elementary school teacher, but is not believed ever to have taught. The two would remain closely allied, after they grew up, in personal and political terms. Relatively little is recorded of his childhood, but he grew up in a city that was already well known for leftist militancy, and from something he later wrote it appears that the schoolboy Gino Bibbi already suffered from a guilt-driven social conscience: "I came close to crying when I saw my school friends did not even have shoes. I, being rich, was shamed by their poverty". He also became friendly with the Molinari family, especially with two of Ettore's sons, Libero and Henry, an idealistically driven family of anarchist-scientists whose class background was not dissimilar from Bibbi's own.

Meanwhile, in October 1922, in Rome, the Mussolini government took power. Viewed through the retrospective prism supplied by Adolf Hitler in 1933 it becomes easy to see the slide towards one-party dictatorship in Italy as a relatively gradual transformation. Nevertheless, the systematic use of violence as a tool of political influence had already been on display for a number of years across Italy, and especially in Milan and the north more generally. Unlike many people at this stage, libertarian anarchists such as Bibbi and his circle were disinclined to give the fascists the benefit of the doubt. It seems to have been during 1923 that he spotted Renato Ricci in the centre of Carrara and thrust a handful of "subversive" political leaflets in the face of the man who was one of Carrara's leading (and as matters later turned out most politically astute) young fascist paramilitaries. Bibbi fled on his motorbike but was chased, pulled off his bike, and very badly beaten. His father's timber mill was later torched. In 1924 Bibbi's name appears on a list of subscribers to Errico Malatesta's newly launched (and short-lived) anarchist review magazine "Pensiero e Volontà". Despite the brutal thuggery to which he had been subjected at Carrara after his encounter with Ricci in 1923, he continued to advertise his anarchist convictions, and the assault in 1923 turned out to be the first of several such incidents. Memorably, on 18 May 1924 he turned up in the centre of Carrara on horseback and then, switching to a motorbike, distributed antifascist leaflets all round the city in broad daylight. He was immediately arrested, but then released under an ad hoc amnesty (“assolto per amnistia”). A few years later, a file note dated 1928 in the prefecture at the adjacent municipality of Massa described Bibbi as a boy "of seemingly mild character, of good education, of average intelligence and good upbringing .... He professes to believe in anarcho-communist principles, and is viewed as a solitary somewhat dangerous idealist." No harm befell Mussolini as a result of the attack. The next day a number of the attacker's family members were arrested, including his cousin Gino Bibbi and his sister Maria. Details of Bibbi's own involvement were made public only in 1984, with the posthumous publication of detailed memories provided to two interviewers by one of Lucetti's small band of co-conspirators, Umberto Tommasini (1896–1980). Despite there being no separate source corroborating Tommasini's recollections, his reports of the affair were consistent with what was already known, and are generally accepted by later commentators. The bomb used was an SIPE grenade-bomb manufactured in Milan by the "Società Italiana Prodotti Esplodenti" an explosives products company located near the "Politecnico di Milano" where Bibbi was still registered as a student. (He seems never to have completed his degree course.) It was Bibbi who provided the closely knot of conspirators from Carrara with the bomb and with other unspecified weapons which might prove of use in the attack or its aftermath. The police made repeated attempts to implicate Bibbi in the plot, but were un able to find the necessary evidence. Whatever the conspirators knew, they remained silent, and most were eventually released without charge, including Adele Crudeli, the 67-year-old mother of Lucetti. It was probably on Ustica that Bibbi came to know the family of Calogero Cirino, with members of which he would be closely involved during the early 1930s. Clara, the daughter of the family, shared much of Bibbi's period of confinement: the two would be romantically linked for some years, before separating in 1935. submitted the first of many lengthy reports to the ministry on which he confirmed that he had taken the necessary steps to collect intelligence on Bibbi's arrival in Paris. Cremonini was among the most skilful members of the government security service, and infiltrating informants into groups of exiled anti-government activists was central to his role. His reports were no doubt of great interest to Italian government agencies, just as they have subsequently become for historians. For Bibbi his arrival in Paris marked the start of a period of intense activity and keeping constantly on the move between France, Switzerland and, perhaps most critically, Spain. In Spain he worked closely with Gigi Damiani, a larger than life figure among the exiled Italian anarchists during this time. They worked with others on a bold scheme to use an aeroplane to liberate and extract from Italy the seriously sick anarcho-socialist journalist Errico Malatesta, who had been kidnapped in Rome by fascist paramilitaries. Funding was obtained from sections in the CNT (Spanish Trades Union Confederation). However, this plan too was thwarted by a lack of discipline on the part of comrades who breached their secrecy instructions by discussing it with Ángel Pestaña, a Spanish anarchist. Pestaña blew the whistle, writing in the union newspaper "Solidaridad obrera" ("Workers' solidarity"), after becoming convinced that the Italian gang in their midst had plans for the funds provided by the Spanish trades unionists that were very much less noble than claimed.

Among the anarchist with whom he engaged most frequently in Tunis, observers identified Vincenzo Mazzoni, Giulio Barresi, Nicolò Converti, Antonino Casubolo and Luigi "Gigi" Damiani. It was with Damiani that he would team up to produce the short-lived periodical "I Domani" ("Tomorros") during the summer of 1935. Two other men deserving a mention in this context are Modestino Guerriero and Francesco Castellana, also identified as trusted operatives Nos. 489 and 467 alias "Carlo" and "Averardo" of the OVRA, without whose regular reports to the Chief of Police back in Rome, this information on Bibbi's movements and contacts during his time in North Africa would probably have gone largely unremarked by subsequent researchers. The Italian police, possibly taking their lead from the Italian consul on the spot, became convinced that Bibbi and Londero were working on new plans to attack the leader, for which the entrepreneurial activity at the canning factory was simply a front organisation. Beyond the sources based on Italian government informants there is no surviving evidence in support of such suspicions, however: other sources insist that Bibbi's principal preoccupation at this stage was on remaining solvent. In May 1936, after a long separation, his sister Maria came to stay with them and write a report of her visit to her brother and his new wife. She was able to report back to their uncle Domenico, who was struggling to sustain what remained of the family business in Avenza, notwithstanding harassment by the authorities and local fascist thugs. She wrote that her brother was less than satisfied with his working conditions at the little packaging factory, but there was reason to believe that things would improve over time. She also reported back to others in Italy. While her brother undertook his factory work, during her stay she was able to help Lolita run the house and look after "the hens, the dogs, the pigeons and the goat" (which, apart from the dogs, were presumably kept as food sources). There were frequent visitors to the house, and passionate discussions on contemporary politics. Clearly Bibbi and his visitors were well informed on the latest developments in respect of resurgent Italian imperialism and of Germany where "Hitler was putting in place systems to eliminate all those whom he considered subhuman: that is to say Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, the handicapped, communists and Jehovah's witnesses". The marriage was followed by the births of the couple's two children, Marco and Camilla.

Spanish Civil War Revolution broke out in Spain in July 1936, marking what quickly came to be seen as the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Thanks to his engineering skills and training Bibbi was initially involved in the urgent tasks around reconfiguring and reorganising a range of production facilities in the industrial areas surrounding Valencia. The timelines in the sources become somewhat blurred in respect of his activities during the Civil War years between 1936 and 1939. There are references to his having used his piloting skills, for instance in terms of "flying reconnaissance flights", but having moved on quite soon after finding that the republican air force had come under the control of "Stalinist" elements. His activities during the Civil War evidently also involved him in frequent travel between Valencia and Barcelona and further afield, notably to Paris. It was in Paris that on 13 October 1936 Bibbi was suddenly arrested and sentenced to an eight-day prison sentence in respect of a new "infringement of a decree of expulsion". Back in Spain, it appears that he was keen to enlist as an aviator, to judge by a surviving message dated 3 November 1936, and sent from the Italian consulate in Tunis to the Interior Ministry in Rome, though the message in question is not entirely clear on the point. In December 1936 he was arrested by the local (republican) police and narrowly avoided being lynched by a crowd that quickly gathered round and accused him of being a "Mussolini spy". His life was saved only through the intervention of the Valencia regional CNT (trades union confederation) and the local council from Gandia, the nearby village in which he was still living with his family. During this part of the civil war he seems to have engaged in "unseen warfare", engaged in sabotage actions behind the frontlines, and in "arms procurement and smuggling" on behalf of republican fighters. Bibbi was nevertheless hampered in his effectiveness not just by the surveillance squads monitoring the role of Italian exiled anarchists in the fighting, but also by the constant attentions of Togliatti's "secret police". Togliatti's first loyalty was not to any Italian party but to Stalin, whom many across Europe on the non-anarchist political left continued to view as the best hope for a non-fascist future. It was Togliatti who is believed to have ordered and choreographed the deaths of Berneri and Francesco Barnieri during May 1937. His experiences in Italy and Spain during the 1930s had left him implacably hostile to "international communism", seen by many after 1945 across western and central Europe as a poorly disguised surrogate for Stalin's still unquenched imperial ambitions. Bibbi's priorities were both his work as an engineer and political work behind the scenes in the anarchist movement. He was deeply critical of the Carrara branch of the Italian Anarchist Federation, believing them to have become bizarrely subordinated to the policies of the PCI (Italian Communist Party). Many years later an interview was made public in which Bibbi recalled his return to Europe in 1948: "... I was surprised that Italy had been turned communist. What was considered as 'red fascism' had taken over in Italy". He was in attendance again in May 1951 at the National Convention for Political Victims at Bologna. The early 1950s was a period during which he re-embraced some of the most powerful friendships he had made in Spain, notably with Romualdo Del Papa and Randolfo Pacciardi. Pacciardi, who was a member of the post-war Italian government between 1948 and 1953, was something of a political soulmate. In particular, their experiences in Spain had left them with an enduring shared mistrust of the Italy's well-funded and unfailingly slick Communist Party. His positions nevertheless led to hostility if intensifying harshness between Bibbi and certain of his anarchist former comrades such as, in particular Failla, Mazzucchelli and Marzocchi which led, by the end of that decade, to Bibbi's irreversible breach with mainstream anarchism. His point of no return may have arisen in September 1968 when he attended the International Convention of Anarchist Federations, conveniently held on that occasion in Carrara. A fellow delegate was Daniel Cohn-Bendit who, slightly improbably, had joined the French Anarchist Federation the previous year. Bibbi was withering: "They have come to propose a united front of the left! This stuff is fifty years old. Suicidal!". (Sono venuti a proporre il fronte unito delle sinistre!) Roba di cinquant'anni fa. Un suicidio!

The presidential system and plurality voting were two defining aspirations of the "New Republic" party which never found favour with either the Christian Democrats or the Communists, the two parties which created the political weather. The way in which Pacciardi, as the leader of new "New Republic", took so much of his political inspiration from Charles de Gaulle also attracted suspicion from mainstream political liberalism and the centre-left, both of which were better represented among the media commentariat than in the country's political hierarchies. Increasingly "New Republic" came to be labelled as "neo-fascist". Gino Bibbi, as both a close friend of Pacciardi and one of the movement's best known members, fell foul of this development. He himself faced trial at Lucca in connection with his alleged associations with the anti-communist "Movimento di Azione Rivoluzionaria", a fringe terrorist grouping founded by Carlo Fumagalli which had also attracted the neo-fascist label. It remains not entirely clear whether Bibbi ever had contacts with the terrorist group, but in terms of the matters alleged before the court in Tuscany he was acquitted on all charges.

After these experiences Bibbi spent the final quarter century of his life, still resolutely identifying himself as an old-fashioned anarchist, and still completely estranged from the contemporary institutions of anarchism and their leaders. After he died on 8 August 1999, slightly more than six months after his one hundredth birthday, Gino Bibbi's mortal remains were sent for cremation with the red and black anarchist scarf fastened securely around the neck.