Further details of Severino Di Giovanni’s life can be found in Osvaldo Bayer’s essay The Influence of Italian Immigration on the Argentinean Anarchist Movement:
Among the Italian exiles reaching Argentina were pro-organization anarchists (such as Luigi Fabbri and Ugo Fedeli, who lived there for a time before settling in Montevideo) and some individualists. Among the latter there was one group that demonstrated that they were ready to resort to equally radical methods in order to combat the radicalization of the regime back in the home country. The most determined of these was Severino Di Giovanni, who was born in Chieti in 1901. In Buenos Aires, he embarked upon a period of violence that might be regarded as the nearest forerunner of the urban guerrilla war that was to proliferate on a much greater scale—albeit flying different ideological colors—in the Argentina of the 1970s…
The dizzying spiral of violence started almost innocently on June 6, 1925. That day, Buenos Aires’s Italian colony was celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the accession to the Italian throne of Victor Emmanuel III. The festivities culminated at the Colón (Columbus) Theatre, in the presence of the Argentinean president, Marcelo T. De Alvear, and Italian ambassador, Luigi Aldrovandi Marescotti, the Count Viano. When the orchestra struck up the Italian national anthem, a noisy incident erupted: a gang of anarchists, Severino Di Giovanni among them, disrupted the occasion by scattering leaflets and chanting: Death to fascism! That was the start of it. They were all members of the L’Avvenire group except for Di Giovanni, who belonged to the Renzo Novatore circle and was publisher of the magazine Culmine.
Some days after that, in connection with the campaign on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti, the group around Di Giovanni embarked upon a bombing campaign targeting premises belonging to US firms, as well as the US Embassy. Di Giovanni remained closely linked to the New York-based L’Adunata dei Refrattari paper and with groups that followed the line of the Italian individualist Luigi Galleani , a school of thought to which Vanzetti belonged. The flurry of violent acts in Buenos Aires and Rosario would culminate in high explosive bombs going off at Italy’s consulate-general, entirely demolishing it, claiming the lives of nine people, and seriously injuring another thirty-four. Those attacks and bank raids galore triggered an indiscriminate political crackdown on Italian and domestic anarchists. This was why La Protesta, the leading Argentinean anarchist newspaper, and the FORA labor confederation, openly attacked the gang of Italian individualists over these incidents. Relations became so strained that Severino Di Giovanni would put several bullets into and kill La Protesta’s managing editor, López Arango, after the paper dismissed him as a “fascist agent.”27 There was no truth to any of these accusations.
Domenico Tarizzo’s book L’Anarchie (Seghers, 1979) offers some additional detail:
Di Giovanni was born into a very poor family. An intellectual and worker, he was working as a typesetter when the fascists came to power, and in 1923 he immigrated to Argentina. In Buenos Aires, he both wrote and published the anarchist paper, Culmine, which carried a column titled “Face to Face with the Enemy” and cataloged attacks. [In 1926] he orchestrated a massive demonstration calling for the release of Sacco and Vanzetti. He was arrested there for a bomb attack on the US embassy, only to be freed for lack of evidence. This brought him into contact with two brothers of Italian extraction, Alejandro and Paulino Scarfó, with whom he would take part in underground activity. [In August 1927, when the news broke that Sacco and Vanzetti had been executed,] two bombs exploded in Buenos Aires: one at the Washington monument, one at a Ford dealership. The US ambassador placed an insertion in the press, arguing that Sacco and Vanzetti had been common criminals. In the light of that provocation, those anarchists supporting violent action (notably Di Giovanni and the Scarfó brothers) retaliated with a string of attacks. The police blamed Di Giovanni for them all. That November, a manufacturer, whose strong point was not good taste, launched a new brand of cigarettes, “Sacco and Vanzetti.” His name was Gurevich, and a bomb made him halt production immediately. On Christmas Day, the National City Bank was blown up. Two of its American and Argentinean customers were killed and another twenty-three injured. On May 3, Di Giovanni bombed the Italian consulate, the bugbear of antifascists and anarchists; nine people died and thirty-four were hurt. Shortly after that, the anarchists blew up a pharmacy belonging to a well-known fascist, Beniamino Mastronardi, and, on February 1, 1931, the home of Colonel Afeltra, a notorious torturer of antifascists in Italy. Severino Di Giovanni was shot, captured following a shoot-out with the police. The following day, Paulino Scarfó was shot; in order to share his comrade’s fate, Scarfó confessed to all of the hold-ups carried out by the group. Di Giovanni had met Durruti who had taught him his bank hold-up technique. In 1930, he reprinted the works of Elisée Reclus in a very polished edition. That very year, General Uriburu seized power and set about shooting down anarchists.
26 This appendix was added as a note to the French edition, published on-line at: http://basseintensite.internetdown.org/IMG/pdf/anarexpropriateurs.pdf.
27 The actual author of that epithet was Diego Abad de Santillán. Several years later, he spread around that Di Giovanni had been a communist agent posted to Argentina by Palmiro Togliatti. See Santillán’s Memorias: 1897–1936 (Barcelona: Planeta, 1977), 212.