| Bruno Segre | |
 Segre in January 2014, aged 95. | |
| Centenarian |
Bruno Segre (4 September 1918-27 January 2024) was an Italian centenarian, lawyer, journalist, partisan, and politician.
Biography[]
Early Life and Studies[]
Bruno Segre was born in Turin, Piedmont, Italy on 4 September 1918. He attended the University of Turin from 1937 to 1940, being the last student of Luigi Einaudi, of whom his father had been the first in 1901.
Segre graduated in law on 15 June 1940, with a dissertation dedicated to Benjamin Constant, the founder of Liberalism. However, there were fascist racial laws and Segre, the son of a Jewish father, was not allowed to practice as a lawyer. In these years, he earned his living by giving private lessons, compiling degree theses, and collaborating, under the pseudonym Sicor, in weekly novels, in the magazine L'Idea Naturista and in L'Igiene e la Vita (the latter was soon suppressed by the fascist government following one of his anti-racist articles).
Arrest[]
On 21 December 1942, Segre was arrested for political defeatism. He spent over two months in prison, while his father was interned in Abruzzo. In 1943, he began a clandestine existence with his family in a small village in the Cuneo area, between Busca, Caraglio and Dronero.
In September 1944, in Turin, Segre tried to escape arrest by the National Republican Guard. The result was a shootout from which he was saved thanks to the metal cigarette case he wore in his jacket, which stops the run of a bullet. However, he was captured and locked up in the barracks in via Asti. Then, he was transferred to the Le Nuove judicial prisons, from where he luckily managed to get out some time later, paying a U.P.I. official. In the summer of 1946, he wrote a memoir dedicated to the events of this experience of imprisonment, Quelli di via Asti, which he decided to publish only in 2013.
He joined the Armed Resistance by enlisting in the 1st Alpine Division of the Giustizia e Libertà movement in Pradleves (Val Grana). He took part to the liberation of Caraglio.
Career[]
After the Liberation, on the eve of the institutional referendum, in a chance meeting in Turin in Piazza Castello with Umberto II (called "the King of May"), Segre provocatively asks him if he would vote for the Monarchy or the Republic: Umberto is stunned and leaves quickly.
Segre then worked as a reporter for the liberal newspaper "L'Opinione", which replaced "La Stampa" at the time and was directed by Franco Antonicelli and Giulio De Benedetti. It was in this environment that he met Alcide De Gasperi, Ferruccio Parri, Gaetano Salvemini, Piero Calamandrei, Leo Valiani, Giuliano Vassalli and numerous other personalities from the world of culture and politics. After the closure of "L'Opinione", he became the editor of the Social Democratic newspaper "Mondo Nuovo", directed by Corrado Bonfantini, in 1947. This newspaper ceased publication in 1948.
Then, Segre took legal practice up again. He passed the exam of prosecutor, while continuing his collaboration with "Paese Sera", "Il Corriere di Trieste", "Corriere di Sicilia" and other newspapers. In 1949, the first issue of "L'incontro" was published: it was an independent monthly that closed 70 years later, at the end of 2018.
In the 1970s, Bruno Segre, during his press campaign in favor of divorce, rented a small tourist plane from which 50,000 posters were launched on Turin with this text: "Divorce does not come from heaven, but from the law of Hon. At 6 p.m., he spoke at the Teatro Gobetti, who was full of seats.
From 1958 to 1968 he was a councillor of the Psychiatric Hospitals of Turin, Collegno, Grugliasco; then a councillor of the Piedmont-Valle d'Aosta Regional Order of Journalists; and a national councillor of the Italian National Press Federation.
From 1975 to 1980 he was leader of the Italian Socialist Party in the City Council of Turin, but left the PSI at the time of Bettino Craxi. From 1980 to 1990, he was statutory auditor of the San Paolo Bancary Institute in Turin, and the director of various companies owned by the Institute.
Later Life[]
He is president of the Turin Provincial Federation of the National Association of Persecuted Italian Anti-Fascist Politicians (ANPPIA). He is also the honorary president of the National Freethought Association "Giordano Bruno" (of whose official organ, Libero pensiero, he was director for years), and the honorary president of the Turin Consulta for the secularism of the Institutions.
He is also the vice-president of the Turin Cremation Society (SOCREM in Italian), after having been for 40 years president of the Italian Federation of SOCREM, founder and director of the magazine "L'ara".
In September 2018, Segre celebrated his 100th birthday and became a centenarian.
On 22 August 2023, due to journalistic errors, his person was confused with that of Bruno Segre (born 1930), a philosopher and essayist of the same name and also an expert on Jewish culture, who had died the day before.
Bruno Segre died in Italy on 27 January 2024 at the age of 105 years, 227 days.
References[]
- Bruno Segre: "Io, 95 anni, cronista della Shoa" La Repubblica, 24 January 2014
- Bruno Segre, un secolo vissuto di corsa. «Ginzburg era antipatica, Einaudi un po’ noioso…» Il Dubbio, 21 December 2017
- La festa dei cento anni dell'avvocato Bruno Segre La Stampa, 5 September 2018
- Bruno Segre: "Fascismo era slogan e ignoranza, ora la libertà è il bene supremo" Torino Oggi, 31 January 2019
- Bruno Segre (102 anni) a Paraloup: “Il mio sogno cantare tra queste baite partigiane La Badoglieide scritta da Nuto” La Stampa, 18 August 2021
- Bruno Segre, la memoria di un secolo TGR Piemonte (RaiNews), 26 January 2022
- Putin, Ucraina, NATO: intervista a Bruno Segre L'Incontro, 22 April 2022
- Lunga vita a Bruno Segre Il Torinese, 22 August 2023
- https://www.lastampa.it/torino/2024/01/27/news/morto_torino_bruno_segre_105_anni-14025204/