Biography
Maurizio Valenzi was born in Tunis on November 16th 1909, from a Jewish family of Livorno, installed in Tunisia for many generations. He devoted to painting and from 1930 to 1931 he opened a studio in Rome with the friend Antonio Corpora. Between 1935 and 1936 he joined a group of Italians in the Tunisian Communist Party. With the friend Loris Gallico he founded the weekly review “The Italian of Tunis”. In 1937, to the epoch of the government of the Popular Front, he was in Paris to connect the group of the Tunisians communist with the Foreign Centre of the PCI and he worked at the editing of the “Voice of Italians” directed by Giuseppe Di Vittorio. In 1939 Giorgio Amendola and Velio Spano went to Tunis. In December of 1939 he married Litza Cittanova. In January 1941 his child Marco was born.
In November 1941 he was arrested, tortured with electricity, he resisted to the interrogations, was condemned to the life sentence and to the forced jobs by the fascist regime of Vichy and internee for one year to Lambèse in Algeria. From July to November 1942 his wife Litza was also in the jail. Finally freed by the Allies in March 1943, he was sent by the PCI to Naples, to prepare the arrival of Palmiro Togliatti from the Soviet Union. He arrived in the city in January 1944. In Broggia Street an apartment is organized for the communists who arrived from various places. There Togliatti was hosted and Maurizio Valenzi lived the period that has later been called “The turning point of Salerno”. Experience that he has told in the book “there is Togliatti”, published by Sellerio in 1995.
He remained in Naples also after this period always working as official of party. In 1952 he was elected as provincial councillor. In that year his daughter Lucia was born. He is senator for three legislatures from 1953 to 1968; in particular he was named Secretary to the Presidency of the Senate and, in other occasion, Secretary of the Foreign Committee. In that same years he covered different other institutional roles and of party, becoming Secretary of the Communist Group to the Senate, member of the Central Committee of Control of the PCI. He was also City Councillor of Forio of Ischia from 1964 to 1970.
He took back the activities of drawing and painting, never completely abandoned, after 1968.
City councillor of Naples from 1970 to 1975, Maurizio was elected Mayor with a relative majority. The Council remained to the government of the city for years thanks to the consent of the citizen and the technical vote of other political strengths on the occasion of the budget. He was confirmed Mayor of Naples until 1983 in the period of the terrorism and the earthquake. In that years he belonged also to the Central Committee of the PCI. After the 1980 earthquake, as Mayor, was named Extraordinary Commissioner for the Reconstruction. In 1984 he was elected to the European Parliament where remained in charge until 1989. On the occasion of his 90th birthday, in 1999, a big anthological exhibition was organized in the Maschio Angioino.
Maurizio Valenzi died the 23rd June 2009, in time to see the birth of the Foundation dedicated to him.
