Torquato Gobbi

By profession atypographer and book binder, he joined the anarchist movement by attending the "Circolo Francisco Ferrer Guardia" in Reggio Emilia. His participation in the strikes of the autumn of 1911 against the sending of troops to Libya, sees him as the protagonist and immediately reported to the authorities as an anarchist and therefore criminally prosecutable for "distribution of anti-military posters" and brochures in support of the rebel soldier Augusto Masetti. At the beginning of 1914 Gobbi is one of the promoters of a meeting in favor of Masetti who had been interned in Reggio Emilia.

Militant of the Italian Trade Union (USI), sides with the trend of Armando Borghi who strenuously opposes the war and the interventionist faction led by Alceste De Ambris. In January 1915 he participated in the national anarchist congress in Pisa organized to develop a unified strategy of opposition to war. During this period, he convinced his young friend Camillo Berneri, secretary of the Italian Socialist Youth Federation of Reggio Emilia, to abandon socialism to embrace anarchism.

In June 1916, during a semi-clandestine congress in Florence, he was elected together with Temistocle Monticelli, Pasquale Binazzi, Gregorio Benvenuti and Virgilio Mazzoni at the International Anarchist Action Committee (CAIA) to coordinate the fight against the war in Italy and in connection with foreign comrades. His anti-militarist propaganda cost him several judicial persecutions, particularly between April 1917 and February 1918, when he was sentenced to ten years in prison.

After the amnesty of March 1919, he returned to freedom and resumed his activism by participating in the founding congress of the Italian Anarchist Communist Union, held in Florence from 12 to 14 April. With the advent of fascism he was repeatedly attacked in Reggio Emilia, for this reason, after taking part in the 3rd Congress of the Italian Anarchist Union (November 1921) he decided to emigrate to France.

Member of the "Gori group" of Paris, in which among others Armando Borghi, Angelo Diotallevi, Alberto Meschi and Enzo Fantozzi, is naively involved in the pseudo-anti-fascist adventure of Ricciotti Garibaldi, who will soon turn out to be a provocateur in the pay of the fascist OVRA. In 1927 he was a member of the Pensiero e Volontà group and one of the editors of his propaganda body: La Lotta Umana, directed by Luigi Fabbri (Paris, October 1927 - 1929April 1929).

Like many other editors of the newspaper (Fabbri, Fedeli, Berneri), on September 16, 1927 he was expelled from the transalpine country. He then travels to Belgium, to Brussels, where he is hired as a worker in a button factory, while actively continuing in his anti-fascist and anarchist activity. Expelled from Belgium in 1929, despite the intervention of the "Italian League of Human Rights", he decided to emigrate to Latin America to reach Luigi Fabbri in Montevideo.

In the Uruguayan capital he collaborates in the magazine « Studi Sociali » (Montevideo-Bienos Aires, 40 issues from 16 March 1930 to 15 May 1935) directed by Luigi and Luce Fabbri. Later, from 1930, he directed himself towards reformist socialism of a libertarian nature.

During the Second World War he became president of the Montevideo Committee of the association Italia Libera and organized many demonstrations against Nazis - fascism. After the war, Gobbi remains in his residence in Uruguay, where he opens a bookstore and founded the publishing house Libreria Italiana. Depressed due to the severe economic crisis affecting Uruguay in the 1960s, Torquato Gobbi committed suicide in May 1963.