Giorgio Pisanò

Giorgio Pisanò (Ferrara, January 30, 1924 – Milan, October 17, 1997) was an Italian journalist, essayist and politician.

Giorgio Pisanò
Senator of the Italian Republic
Personal details
Born(1924-01-30)January 30, 1924
Ferrara, Kingdom of Italy
DiedOctober 17, 1997(1997-10-17) (aged 73)
Milan, Italy
NationalityItalian
Political party
AwardsIron Cross 1st Class, Iron Cross 2nd Class

Biography

Pisanò was born on January 30, 1924, in Ferrara to his father Luigi,[1] an Apulian law graduate from San Vito dei Normanni who worked as a civil servant. In Ferrara during the 1920s, Luigi met and married Iolanda Cristiani,[1] a local girl while on duty in the local prefecture. Giorgio was the first of five children.[1] His family moved from one city to another, as prefecture officials, and he got his high school diploma in Taranto during the war era.

World War II

In 1942, at 18 years old, as an officer in the GIL,[1] Pisanò commanded the search and rescue company trained to rescue the population during bombings. His father was later sent to the prefectures of Messina, Pescara and Pistoia. The day after the Armistice of Cassibile Giorgio was right in the Tuscan city, where with other young men he organized the reopening of the Casa del Fascio[1] and the occupation of the abandoned "Gavinana" barracks, awaiting a German division. He soon volunteered for 20th Marine Infantry Division,[2] asking to be part of the NP's (Nuotatori Paracadutisti, Marine Paratroopers).[3] His training was held in Jesolo, while the parachute launches were held in Tradate.[3] Intending for intelligence collection behind enemy lines, he worked together with Pistoiese soldier Ruy Blas Biagi.[4] In 1944 he was sent on a mission over the Anglo-American lines and was parachuted near Rome.[1] After completing the mission assigned to him, he was captured by the British Army while trying to return[5] to northern Italy. Though not identified to be a fascist agent, he was nevertheless caught for movement into a warzone without permission[5] and imprisoned for a month in Arezzo.

After returning to northern Italy Pisanò was decorated with the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Class by the Abwehr[6] and promoted twice for distinguished service,[1] toward the end of the war serving in Valtellina as lieutenant of the 28th "Ruy Blas Blagi" Black Brigade in Pistoia, assigned to special service of the General Headquarters.

On April 20, 1945 he reached Valtellina where the commission for the final defense of the Italian Social Republic—the Ridotto Alpino Repubblicano—was being organized, and on the 27th he joined the column led by Major Renato Vanna of the Special Border Militia of the National Republican Guard, partaking in the events leading up to dissolution.

He was taken prisoner by partisans on April 28, 1945[1] at Ponte and held in Sondrio prison where he documented the executions by firing squad of his fellow prisoners there[7] which lasted until May 13[8] when the carabinieri took the prisoners away from the partisans.[9] From August 29 to October 26, 1945, he remained imprisoned in the Milanese prison of San Vittore.[10] He was then transferred to the Allied concentration camp R707 di Terni[1] and to Rimini where he remained until November 1946.

After his imprisonment ended, he went to Lucino to reunite with his family, now rattled following the purging of his father. In order to help his family he began smuggling between Italy and Switzerland. Pisanò rediscovered politics and came across his life profession: journalism.[1]

Post-war and political militancy

In 1947 Pisanò was among the founders of the Italian Social Movement in Como, becoming its first secretary.[1] His professional activity would begin in 1948 when he would take the positions of editor and correspondent of the Meridiano d'Italia, a neo-fascist weekly managed by Franco De Agazio.[N 1][1] It is with Meridiano d'Italia, with joint direction from Franco Maria Servello, that Pisanò began to conduct research on post-war homicides carried out by the partisans, many of them linked to the mystery of the Gold of Dongo.[N 2][2]

Pisanò was a national council member of the Youth Students and Workers Group of the MSI in 1949.[11] In 1951 he founded and held the office of first Lombardian president of the Student Association "La Giovane Italia," which would merge in 1954 with Giovane Italia.[12]

Journalism and non-fiction writing

In 1954, now a professional journalist, he took a job[N 3] at Oggi, a weekly periodical founded by Angelo Rizzoli[13] and directed by Edilio Rusconi.[2] In 1958 Pisanò defended Raoul Ghiani in the unsolved Fenaroli murder case, along with the Italcasse scandal, which involved "black funds" to political parties and the granting of questionable loans uncovered in an investigation by the Bank of Italy.[14]

Rusconi—who in the meantime had founded Gente magazine[13]—commissioned Pisanò in 1960 to collect all the photographic and documentary material on the Resistance[1] for a report in a weekly to be published in installments.[N 4] In the same year he married Fanny Crespi who bore him two children, Alessandra and Alberto.[1]

In 1963 Pisanò founded the weekly Secolo XX ("20th Century") in which he began to public controversial news on "burning issues."[13] He would cause particular stir in the investigation he published on the mysterious death of the head of Eni, Enrico Mattei.[14]

Alongside his journalistic writing in those years were his essays in historical non-fiction, with several texts[1] about World War II and fascism during the RSI such as Blood Calls Blood (1962),[1] The Generation That Did Not Surrender (1964), History of civil war in Italy, 1943–1945 (1965), The Latest in Gray-Green, History of the armed forces of the Italian Social Republic[1] (1967) Mussolini and the Jews (1967), and Black Pen, History and battles of the Italian Alps. He spoke at the Conference of the Parco dei Principi Hotel[N 5] in 1965 on the revolutionary war on the basis of anti-communism.

In 1968 he revived the weekly Candido, heir to the one founded by Giovannino Guareschi and which had ceased publication in 1961,[N 6] assuming the position of director which he kept until 1992. Candido led many journalistic news campaigns, coming to openly denounce the socialist leader Giacomo Mancini.[N 7] His protest against socialist leader Mancini culminated in being accused by Dino De Laurentiis for extortion in 1971 and his incarceration in Regina Coeli, where he spent 114 days before being acquitted of all charges by the Court of Rome on July 14 and released. On March 13, 1972 Pisanò was a victim of the first attack on the part of the Red Brigades, followed by two others directed against Candido's editors and production facilities.[N 8]

Candido's 1980 ran a particularly virulent campaign aimed at demonstrating that behind the Aldo Moro there was an interweaving of the interests of shady persons connected to the Lockheed bribery scandals.[14] In 1982 Pisanò covered the death of banker Roberto Calvi,[14] appearing on television[2] with Calvi's bag, delivering it live to the director of TG2 of RAI.[13]

Political activity and parliament

Pisanò was elected senator in 1972 by the MSI-DN,[13] in the Lombardy district.[15]

Reelected to five consecutive terms[2] (1976, 1979, 1983 and 1987) until 1992, he was a member of the permanent Parliamentary Committee for Defense and Constitutional Affairs, the Parliamentary Committee of RAI Supervision, the Antimafia Parliamentary Committee and of the Parliamentary Committee of P2.[1]

From 1980 to 1994 he was city councilor of Cortina d'Ampezzo.

A year after the 1988 death of Almirante, Pisanò founded a comunitarian faction within the MSI-DN, after his exit from MSI on July 25, 1991, the faction became Movimento Fascismo e Libertà, with Pisanò as national secretary.[16]

The party was the only party to expressly refer to fascism with the symbol itself, which included and highlighted in the center a beam of red, making explicit reference to the ideologies of the Italian Social Republic and the social right, such as corporatism, the socialization of the economy, monetary taxation and nationalism.[17]

Contemporary trials for violation of the 1952 Scelba law—which criminalized the defense of fascism—led to the acquittal of Pisanò and other members of the party since, contrary to the offense identified by law, the party has advocated for a bicameral Presidential Republic with President of the Republic enjoying full powers and elected by the people, instead of the re-establishment of the fascist dictatorship. The party elected some municipal councilors especially in Asti, on the occasion of the 1992 general election.

In the 1990s Pisanò returned to publishing, writing several texts about the Italian Social Republic. In 1995, after the "svolta di Fiuggi"—when the Italian Social Movement made a turning point away from fascist symbolism to become a bona fide and legal force in politics—and the definitive transformation of the party into the National Alliance, Pisanò decided to associate with Pino Rauti in the conservation project of the historic Italian Right Party, which would have given rise to the Tricolour Flame. A few months later, however, he left his political life, due to his deteriorating health.

Giorgio Pisanò died in Milan on October 17, 1997,[2] after a long illness.[N 9]

Published Works
  • Il vero volto della guerra civile. Documentario fotografico, Milano, Rusconi, 1961.
  • Sangue chiama sangue, Milano, Pidola, 1962.
  • La generazione che non-si è arresa, Milano, Pidola, 1964.
  • Giovanni XXIII. Le sue parole, la sua vita, le sue opere e le fotografie più belle. La prima biografia del papa santo, a cura di, Milano, FPE, 1965.
  • Storia della guerra civile in Italia, 1943–1945, 3 voll., Milano, FPE, 1965–1966.
  • Gli ultimi in grigioverde. Storia delle forze armate della Repubblica Sociale Italiana (1943–1945), 4 voll., Milano, FPE, 1967.
  • Mussolini e gli ebrei, Milano, FPE, 1967.
  • Penna nera. Storia e battaglie degli alpini d'Italia, con [./ Giambattista Lombi], 2 voll., Milano, FPE, 1968.
  • L'altra faccia del pianeta "P2". Testo integrale della Relazione conclusiva di minoranza presentata al Parlamento dal rappresentante del MSI-DN, Milano, Edizioni del Nuovo Candido, 1984.
  • L'omicidio Calvi nell'inchiesta del commissario P2 Giorgio Pisanò e nelle deposizioni della vedova. Con gli atti inediti del processo di Londra, Milano, GEI, 1985.
  • Storia del Fascismo, 3 voll., Milano, Pizeta, 1988–1990.
  • [./https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangolo_della_morte_(Emilia) Il triangolo della morte. La politica della strage in Emilia durante e dopo la guerra civile], con Paolo Pisanò, Milano, Mursia, 1992. [./Fonti librarie ISBN 88-425-1157-9]
  • [./https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gli_ultimi_cinque_secondi_di_Mussolini Gli ultimi cinque secondi di Mussolini], Milano, Il Saggiatore, 1996. [./Fonti librarie ISBN 88-428-0350-2]
  • Io, fascista, Milano, Il Saggiatore, 1997. [./Fonti librarie ISBN 88-428-0502-5]

Notes
  1. Franco De Agazio was killed by the "Volante Rossa" in Milan in February 1947.
  2. Dongo's gold is commonly understood to mean all the possessions owned by Benito Mussolini, Claretta Petacci and the hierarchy following him at the time of capture on the morning of April 27, 1945, named for where the fascists were captured just outside the town of Musso.
  3. Accused of having stolen the scoop on the Duce's diaries at the Oggi weekly, Pisanò was summoned to be interviewed by the publishing house Rusconi, who, struck by his personality, dubbed him with the epithet "shyster."
  4. Rusconi, who it must be remembered was deported to Auschwitz, was the first to commission him to investigate the so-called Triangle of Death, an area of northern Italy in which a particularly elevated number of political killings took place between 1943 and 1949.
  5. The Conference of the Parco dei Principi Hotel is the name by which the Conference on the Revolutionary War became known; organized from May 3 to 5, 1965 by the Institute of military studies Alberto Pollio at the Parco dei Principi in Rome.
  6. In an interview with Giampaolo Pansa in the book La Grande Bugia, Giorgio's brother, Paolo Pisanò, reports that Guareschi, shortly before his death, would have welcomed the journalist's ideas.
  7. Candido supported the Reggio Calabria uprising, dealt with various scandals and events of political-administrative-financial corruption: ANAS (National Autonomous Road Company) Italcasse, SIR (Italian Resin Society), the one following the Belice earthquake, and the first oil scandal that erupted in Italy in the 1970's.
  8. These events took place on September 2, 1972 and February 11, 1978, respectively.
  9. He was suffering from kidney cancer.

Sources
  1. Giorgio Pisanò entry (in Italian) in the Enciclopedia italiana .
  2. Sebastiano Messina, Giorgio Pisanò, l’irriducibile cacciatore di scoop in camicia nera, in La Repubblica, Roma, 18 ottobre 1997.
  3. Pisanò 1997. p. 106.
  4. Pisanò 1997. p. 107.
  5. Pisanò 1997. p. 73.
  6. Tirloni 2017. p. 38.
  7. Pisanò 1997. p. 83.
  8. Pisanò 1997. p. 96.
  9. Pisanò 1997. p. 98.
  10. Leone 2012. p. 114.
  11. Baldoni 1999. p. 354.
  12. Baldoni 1999. p. 433.
  13. Tirloni 2017. p. 39.
  14. Paolo Pisanò, Mio fratello Giorgio Pisanò cronista e giornalista scomodo, in Il Giornale, Milano, 31 marzo 2017.
  15. "Giorgio Pisanò on Senato.it".
  16. "MSI, SCISSIONE BIS GIORGIO PISANO' SBATTE LA PORTA – la Repubblica.it". Archivio – la Repubblica.it.
  17. "Fascismo e Libertà – Who We Are (in Italian)".
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