Degiac Adegu of Mekele, follower of Ras Mengesha Yohannes, Ethiopia, photograph by Luigi Naretti, from L’Illustrazione Italiana, Year XXII, No 3, January 20, 1895.
In the interests of fostering physical media, the text of ‘Colonization’ is print only.
A decade before Vladimir Lenin wrote his Imperialism and years before Rosa Luxemburg wrote her Accumulation of Capital, an Italian anarchist named Antonio Calavazzi wrote a short article titled ‘Colonization,’ first published in the Cronaca Sovversivaanarchist newspaper in 1906. Taking up less than a single page, this article was actually just one of many Italian anarchist texts dealing with colonialism, and unlike their English-speaking counterparts, the Italians had been critiquing colonization for a decade, starting with the First Italo-Ethiopian War of 1895.
Antonio Cavalazzi was good friends with Errico Malatesta, and despite numerous public conflicts between Italian anarchist factions, Cavalazzi and Malatesta were still close as of 1912. Both of them shared a hatred not just for the Italian colonialism they were familiar with, but the colonialism of every modern kingdom, empire, or republic. While he is certainly famous, contemporary readers are wholly unfamiliar with Malatesta’s anarchist anti-colonialism, just as they are wholly ignorant of Cavalazzi’s extensive body of work.
Malatesta and Cavalazzi had both been imprisoned on Italian penal colonies, and after his own escape, Cavalazzi made his way to Switzerland where he began writing for Il Risvegliorun by Luigi Bertoni. Ultimately expelled to France, Cavalazzi was invited to become co-editor of the Cronaca Sovversiva, and he moved to Barre, Vermont sometime in 1905. Within a year, Cavalazzi was writing about colonialism, specifically the atrocities perpetrated by the Belgians in the Congo. Coincidentally, it was Malatesta who likely had a hand in convincing an outed informant to assassinate King Leopold II of Belgium in 1902, an act which he almost accomplished.
Writing about the holocaust in the Congo was not popular in the 1900s, and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the famed Sherlock novels, could hardly generate any interest in his 1909 book The Crime of the Congo. Doyle would later become friends with Malatesta, but years before that, it was the Italian anarchists who wrote desperately about the situation in the Congo, and among them was Antonio Cavalazzi, one of the main voices of the Cronaca Sovversiva.
Biography
Antonio Cavalazzi was born on September 6, 1877 in the town of Lugo, located in the northern Italian province of Ravenna. Like his father, Antonio became a barber and only completed his second grade of elementary school before working full time. As a teenager, Antonio became involved with the anarchist movement in Lugo, forming a group with his comrades in 1891 known as the Giovani Ribelli, or the Young Rebels.
This anarchist group held lectures, pasted up propaganda, and printed newspapers until 1893, when fifteen of them were tried as a criminal conspiracy and found guilty, although Antonio wasn’t put on trial due to his young age. Despite this apparent leniency, Antonio was arrested in 1894 under new anti-anarchist laws and sent into domicilio coatto, or forced residence, a form of house arrest served in a remote village.
Antonio was first sent to Porto Ercole on the coast of the Grosseto province, then to the Tremiti Islands off the coast of Foggia province. It was here that he met many older anarchists, who completed his radical education over the next six years. In 1900, after learning he would have to serve another three years in forced residence, Antonio escaped the islands and fled north to Switzerland, eventually settling in Biasca, a town in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino.
Antonio became an anarchist union organizer and began contributing articles to Il Risveglio, a two page anarchist newspaper inaugurated in Ticino on July 7, 1900. The paper was founded by the anarchist Luigi Bertoni, who worked closely with Antonio during the paper’s first years. It was in this time that Antonio began using the pseudonym Ursus for his articles, and he wrote regularly during his time in Ticino, eventually moving to the French-speaking city of Geneva in 1901.
However, an anti-monarchical article Antonio published in the January 18, 1902 issue caused a diplomatic incident between Switzerland and Italy, with both countries recalling their ambassadors. Antonio retained his anonymity for the next years, but after the Geneva general strike of 1902, he and hundreds of other anarchist exiles were deported from Switzerland in early 1903 for their agitation.
Antonio soon settled in Paris, joining the local barber’s union and attending every protest called by the Bourse du Travail, or the Labor Exchange, as well as writing for Il Risveglio as a Parisian correspondent. Antonio remained in France until sometime in early 1905, when he was invited to come live in Barre, Vermont and be an editor of the Cronaca Sovversiva, an Italian anarchist newspaper.
Antonio sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and soon established a barbershop in Barre located at 301 North Main Street. His shop was located in the Scampini Block, a three-story granite building designed by Angelo Scampini, one of the first Italian stone-workers in Barre and a godfather of the local anarchist movement, which was largely composed of other stone-workers.
While the Scampini Block could be counted on to host anarchist meetings, Antonio’s barbershop became an informal headquarters of the Cronaca Sovversiva, as well as a small social center. As one Cronaca writer described, the barbershop was a place where someone could freely request a price lists of the best food import houses, which provide items at prices between 25 and by 30 percent less than those of the local shop keepers and petty criminals.
Antonio became a main writer of the Cronaca Sovversiva, often writing more content than its main editor Luigi Galleani. In the city of Barre, Antonio was also a well known agitator, speaking at a rally in support of Galleani when he was threatened with prison. Antonio was one of the main organizers of Galleani’s legal defense, and thanks his gift of learning languages, Antonio was often the public face of the anarchists when dealing with the English speaking legal system.
Antonio also became treasurer of the Cronaca Sovversiva, and in 1909 both he and Galleni were accused of stealing $260 out of $3,000 donated for his bail fund, although they were later exonerated by the New York City wine seller who posted the bond for Galleani. Antonio stepped down as editor and treasurer, although he continued to write articles for the paper.
At the end of 1910, an anarchist-turned-capitalist attacked Antonio at his barbershop and then sued the Cronaca group for $5,000. Antonio was arrested in January 1911 as a result of this conflict but was bonded out by his many comrades in Barre. He remained behind when the Cronaca relocated its operations in 1912, the same year he helped organize an anarchist convention in East Boston on the Mexican Revolution. By the fall of 1912, he was also involved in raising money for Errico Malatesta, then facing trial in London.
In 1913, Antonio ran an item in the Cronaca asking his comrades to stop sending mail to his Barre address, instructing them to direct any correspondence to a PO Box in Lynn, Massachusetts, where he appears to have moved. However, this may have only been a forwarding address, for shortly afterward he became a patient at the Tewksbury Sanatorium, about thirty miles northeast of Lynn. It’s likely that Antonio had terminal tuberculosis, and after suffering for nearly two years, he passed away on July 7, 1915.
The bulk of this short biography is drawn from the obituaries written for Antonio by his close comrade Luigi Galleani, who wrote that the man of frail build, of pallid gaze, of sparse and sparing speech, who seemed to bend every effort toward concealing himself, toward hiding away, toward passing among people ignored and unnoticed, was a soldier of the finest mettle, a man of character, of energy, and of will.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider donating to The Transmetropolitan Review.
‘Colonization’ in the Cronaca Sovversiva
From The Transmetropolitan Review (18/03/2026)
In the interests of fostering physical media, the text of ‘Colonization’ is print only.
A decade before Vladimir Lenin wrote his Imperialism and years before Rosa Luxemburg wrote her Accumulation of Capital, an Italian anarchist named Antonio Calavazzi wrote a short article titled ‘Colonization,’ first published in the Cronaca Sovversiva anarchist newspaper in 1906. Taking up less than a single page, this article was actually just one of many Italian anarchist texts dealing with colonialism, and unlike their English-speaking counterparts, the Italians had been critiquing colonization for a decade, starting with the First Italo-Ethiopian War of 1895.
Antonio Cavalazzi was good friends with Errico Malatesta, and despite numerous public conflicts between Italian anarchist factions, Cavalazzi and Malatesta were still close as of 1912. Both of them shared a hatred not just for the Italian colonialism they were familiar with, but the colonialism of every modern kingdom, empire, or republic. While he is certainly famous, contemporary readers are wholly unfamiliar with Malatesta’s anarchist anti-colonialism, just as they are wholly ignorant of Cavalazzi’s extensive body of work.
Malatesta and Cavalazzi had both been imprisoned on Italian penal colonies, and after his own escape, Cavalazzi made his way to Switzerland where he began writing for Il Risveglio run by Luigi Bertoni. Ultimately expelled to France, Cavalazzi was invited to become co-editor of the Cronaca Sovversiva, and he moved to Barre, Vermont sometime in 1905. Within a year, Cavalazzi was writing about colonialism, specifically the atrocities perpetrated by the Belgians in the Congo. Coincidentally, it was Malatesta who likely had a hand in convincing an outed informant to assassinate King Leopold II of Belgium in 1902, an act which he almost accomplished.
Writing about the holocaust in the Congo was not popular in the 1900s, and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the famed Sherlock novels, could hardly generate any interest in his 1909 book The Crime of the Congo. Doyle would later become friends with Malatesta, but years before that, it was the Italian anarchists who wrote desperately about the situation in the Congo, and among them was Antonio Cavalazzi, one of the main voices of the Cronaca Sovversiva.
Biography
Antonio Cavalazzi was born on September 6, 1877 in the town of Lugo, located in the northern Italian province of Ravenna. Like his father, Antonio became a barber and only completed his second grade of elementary school before working full time. As a teenager, Antonio became involved with the anarchist movement in Lugo, forming a group with his comrades in 1891 known as the Giovani Ribelli, or the Young Rebels.
This anarchist group held lectures, pasted up propaganda, and printed newspapers until 1893, when fifteen of them were tried as a criminal conspiracy and found guilty, although Antonio wasn’t put on trial due to his young age. Despite this apparent leniency, Antonio was arrested in 1894 under new anti-anarchist laws and sent into domicilio coatto, or forced residence, a form of house arrest served in a remote village.
Antonio was first sent to Porto Ercole on the coast of the Grosseto province, then to the Tremiti Islands off the coast of Foggia province. It was here that he met many older anarchists, who completed his radical education over the next six years. In 1900, after learning he would have to serve another three years in forced residence, Antonio escaped the islands and fled north to Switzerland, eventually settling in Biasca, a town in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino.
Antonio became an anarchist union organizer and began contributing articles to Il Risveglio, a two page anarchist newspaper inaugurated in Ticino on July 7, 1900. The paper was founded by the anarchist Luigi Bertoni, who worked closely with Antonio during the paper’s first years. It was in this time that Antonio began using the pseudonym Ursus for his articles, and he wrote regularly during his time in Ticino, eventually moving to the French-speaking city of Geneva in 1901.
However, an anti-monarchical article Antonio published in the January 18, 1902 issue caused a diplomatic incident between Switzerland and Italy, with both countries recalling their ambassadors. Antonio retained his anonymity for the next years, but after the Geneva general strike of 1902, he and hundreds of other anarchist exiles were deported from Switzerland in early 1903 for their agitation.
Antonio soon settled in Paris, joining the local barber’s union and attending every protest called by the Bourse du Travail, or the Labor Exchange, as well as writing for Il Risveglio as a Parisian correspondent. Antonio remained in France until sometime in early 1905, when he was invited to come live in Barre, Vermont and be an editor of the Cronaca Sovversiva, an Italian anarchist newspaper.
Antonio sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and soon established a barbershop in Barre located at 301 North Main Street. His shop was located in the Scampini Block, a three-story granite building designed by Angelo Scampini, one of the first Italian stone-workers in Barre and a godfather of the local anarchist movement, which was largely composed of other stone-workers.
While the Scampini Block could be counted on to host anarchist meetings, Antonio’s barbershop became an informal headquarters of the Cronaca Sovversiva, as well as a small social center. As one Cronaca writer described, the barbershop was a place where someone could freely request a price lists of the best food import houses, which provide items at prices between 25 and by 30 percent less than those of the local shop keepers and petty criminals.
Antonio became a main writer of the Cronaca Sovversiva, often writing more content than its main editor Luigi Galleani. In the city of Barre, Antonio was also a well known agitator, speaking at a rally in support of Galleani when he was threatened with prison. Antonio was one of the main organizers of Galleani’s legal defense, and thanks his gift of learning languages, Antonio was often the public face of the anarchists when dealing with the English speaking legal system.
Antonio also became treasurer of the Cronaca Sovversiva, and in 1909 both he and Galleni were accused of stealing $260 out of $3,000 donated for his bail fund, although they were later exonerated by the New York City wine seller who posted the bond for Galleani. Antonio stepped down as editor and treasurer, although he continued to write articles for the paper.
At the end of 1910, an anarchist-turned-capitalist attacked Antonio at his barbershop and then sued the Cronaca group for $5,000. Antonio was arrested in January 1911 as a result of this conflict but was bonded out by his many comrades in Barre. He remained behind when the Cronaca relocated its operations in 1912, the same year he helped organize an anarchist convention in East Boston on the Mexican Revolution. By the fall of 1912, he was also involved in raising money for Errico Malatesta, then facing trial in London.
In 1913, Antonio ran an item in the Cronaca asking his comrades to stop sending mail to his Barre address, instructing them to direct any correspondence to a PO Box in Lynn, Massachusetts, where he appears to have moved. However, this may have only been a forwarding address, for shortly afterward he became a patient at the Tewksbury Sanatorium, about thirty miles northeast of Lynn. It’s likely that Antonio had terminal tuberculosis, and after suffering for nearly two years, he passed away on July 7, 1915.
The bulk of this short biography is drawn from the obituaries written for Antonio by his close comrade Luigi Galleani, who wrote that the man of frail build, of pallid gaze, of sparse and sparing speech, who seemed to bend every effort toward concealing himself, toward hiding away, toward passing among people ignored and unnoticed, was a soldier of the finest mettle, a man of character, of energy, and of will.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider donating to The Transmetropolitan Review.