Mario Candotto

From Umanità Nova
August 7, 2025

Today we say goodbye to a free man. A "rebel," as he liked to call himself.

And Mario Candotto's life was a work of art and a hymn to rebellion and freedom.

Anti-fascism, the Resistance, and deportation. Then came the dream of building socialism in Yugoslavia. A dream that almost immediately revealed itself to him as a scam or a nightmare. He then returned to Ronchi and the construction site, becoming more and more drawn to the anarchist group.

An Esperantist like Giuseppe Pinelli and a staunchly anticlerical for over 20 years, he embraced libertarian sentiments. For this reason, after the Piazza Fontana massacre, his little house on Via Redipuglia was searched, the same house from which he had been taken for deportation to Dachau 25 years earlier.

During the Years of Lead, he reconnected with the PCI, then led by Berlinguer, and with institutional anti-fascism. Allergic to states, he recognized himself, but always wore only the ANED striped handkerchief with the red triangle and the red Garibaldi flag: never the tricolor.

Until the end, he remained in constant contact with and attentive to young people and to those who, from the streets, anarchist circles, and self-managed collectives, advance libertarian and radical demands.

The libertarian Caffè Esperanto club in Monfalcone, the Ronchi partisan group, the anti-fascist festival Če povem in Slovenia: these were groups Mario knew, appreciated, and engaged in dialogue with. A comrade among comrades.

“ Anarchy is not chaos. A splendid idea, even if perhaps unrealizable,” he still told us today.

Mario's great ability was to escape the fate of victim that his difficult life seemed to have reserved for him. His ability to laugh at even the most tragic aspects of his life was perhaps the main escape route from that fate.

A protagonist until the end, lucid and present. The last time we saw each other, on his birthday, he had words of condemnation for the ongoing genocide in Gaza perpetrated by the state of Israel.

Bertold Brecht wrote perfect words to describe the exemplary figure of Mario:

"There are men who fight for one day and are good, others who fight for a year and are better, there are those who fight for several years and are even better, but there are those who fight all their lives: they are the indispensable ones."

Long live Mario Candotto!

Long live anarchy!

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