Lelio Basso (25 December 1903 – 16 December 1978) was an Italian democratic socialist politician, political scientist and journalist. Early life Lelio Basso was born in Varazze (in the province of Savona) into a Liberal bourgeois family. In 1916, he and his family moved to Milan where he attended the liceo classico Berchet. He enrolled at the Faculty of Law at the University of Pavia in 1921, and joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). He studied Marxist doctrine, and was close to Piero Gobetti during his Liberal Revolution phase. In his youth, Basso worked on Critica sociale, Il Caffè, Avanti!, Coscientia, Quarto Stato, and Pietre - which he directed in 1928, initially from Genoa, then from Milan. In 1925, he graduated in Law with a thesis on the concept of freedom in Marxist thought. In April 1928, Basso was arrested by the Fascist authorities in Milan and interned on the island of Ponza, where he studied for his degree in philosophy. He returned to Milan in 1931 and, while practising as a lawyer, graduated with a thesis on Rudolf Otto. In 1934 he once more took up politics as director of the Centro Interno Socialista, with Rodolfo Morandi, Lucio Luzzatto and Eugenio Colorni. This work was interrupted by his imprisonment in the internment camp in Colfiorito (Province of Perugia) from 1939 to 1940. In the Resistance and the early Italian Republic After lengthy, secret preparations, he was present at the founding of the Movimento di Unità Proletaria (MUP) on 10 January 1943. The leading group of the movement was formed by Basso, Luzzatto, Roberto Veratti, and Umberto Recalcati. After 25 July (when Benito Mussolini was ousted by a coup d'état inside his Grand Council of Fascism), the movement joined with the PSI to form the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity (PSIUP), with Basso as one of the leading figures. Later in 1943, Basso went against the party line to found the clandestine newspaper Bandiera Rossa. In the period leading up to the 1945 Liberation, Basso was an active member of the Italian resistance movement and, with Sandro Pertini and Rodolfo Morandi, he set up the covert executive body of the PSIUP in northern Italy (the territory of the Fascist Italian Social Republic), which he had the responsibility for running. Post-1945, Lelio Basso was elected Vice-secretary of the PSIUP, and, in 1946, became a deputy to the Italian Constituent Assembly