Amilcare Cipriani
Amilcare Cipriani (18 October 1844 – 30 April 1918) was an Italian socialist, anarchist and patriot. He was born in Anzio and came from a family from Rimini. At 15 he fought with Giuseppe Garibaldi at the Battle of Solferino during Italy’s fight for independence. In 1860 he joined Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand in Sicily, helping to conquer the Bourbon kingdom. After a return to the regular army, he left again to join Garibaldi in the 1862 Rome expedition, hoping to make Rome part of Italy. The royal army defeated Garibaldi at Aspromonte; Cipriani escaped and fled to Greece, where he took part in expelling King Otto.
In 1867 he joined the First International. He helped defend the Paris Commune in 1871 and was sentenced to death, but was exiled to the French penal colony of New Caledonia along with thousands of others. After an amnesty in 1879, he returned to France in 1880 but was soon expelled. He was arrested in Italy in 1881 for conspiracies and spent seven years in prison before a popular campaign won his release in 1888.
In 1891 he helped found the Socialist Revolutionary Anarchist Party at the Capolago Congress. At the Zürich Congress of the Second International in 1893, Cipriani resigned his mandate in solidarity with Rosa Luxemburg and other excluded anarchists. In 1897 he joined the Garibaldi Legion and fought in Greece during the Greco-Turkish War, where he was wounded; he was imprisoned again in Italy for three more years starting in 1898.
Cipriani was elected deputy several times but never took an oath of allegiance to the king. He supported Peter Kropotkin’s views on World War I and wrote for Le Plébéien and other anarchist publications. He died in a Paris hospital on 30 April 1918 at the age of 73. His writings were banned in Italy in 1911. One of Benito Mussolini’s middle names, Amilcare, was chosen in Cipriani’s honor.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 02:57 (CET).