At a three-thousand-strong conference in Livorno in January 1921, an assertive twenty-year-old named Secondino Tranquilli gave a provocative speech to fellow members of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI).

Tranquilli recalled the recently murdered communists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg — and insisted that all reformists should be immediately ejected from the PSI. “He was confident, almost to the point of arrogance,” writes historian Stanislao G. Pugliese in his brilliant 2009 biography, Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone. (Tranquilli soon adopted the pseudonym “Silone.”)