Giuseppe De Felice Giuffrida
Giuseppe De Felice Giuffrida was an Italian socialist politician and journalist from Sicily. He is considered to be one of the founders of the Fasci Siciliani a popular movement of democratic and socialist inspiration. As the first socialist mayor of Catania in Sicily, from 1902 until 1914, he became the protagonist of a kind of municipal socialism.
Giuseppe De Felice Giuffrida
De Felice Giuffrida in prison in Palermo
The Fasci Siciliani, short for Fasci Siciliani dei Lavoratori, were a popular movement of democratic and socialist inspiration that arose in Sicily in the years between 1889 and 1894. The Fasci gained the support of the poorest and most exploited classes of the island by channeling their frustration and discontent into a coherent programme based on the establishment of new rights. Consisting of a jumble of traditionalist sentiment, religiosity, and socialist consciousness, the movement reached its apex in the summer of 1893, when new conditions were presented to the landowners and mine owners of Sicily concerning the renewal of sharecropping and rental contracts.
Popular depiction of the crackdown on the Fasci Siciliani (Il movimento dei fasci siciliani dei lavoratori, 1955, by Onofrio and Minico Ducato)
Bernardino Verro, one of the leaders of the Fasci
Prime Minister Francesco Crispi
The heads of the Fasci Siciliani in the courtroom cage at the trial in April 1894