EmailLuigi Pintor, a founder and editor of the communist daily Il Manifesto, who has died of cancer aged 77, was one of the most stylish and pungent political commentators of the Italian left.
A member of the wartime resistance, of parliament, and of the central committee of the Italian Communist party (PCI), he was among the first politicians to challenge party orthodoxy in public, paying the price for it with summary expulsion. He found his true vocation as a journalist and writer, expressing heretical views in spare, essential prose and penning the pithy, excoriating headlines that became a hallmark of the newspaper he nurtured and supported for more than 30 years.
Pintor was born in Rome, but spent his adolescence in Sardinia. Like Enrico Berlinguer, secretary of the PCI when its influence was at its zenith, he turned his back on the Sardinian aristocracy, to which both belonged, to embrace the dream of proletarian revolution.
Pintor was deeply influenced by his elder brother, Giaime, a writer, critic and student of German literature, who was killed by a mine while fighting for the partisans in 1943. The task of recovering the body fell to Luigi, who followed his brother's example by joining the Partisan Action Groups (GAP), subsequently sacrificing his natural gift for music in favour of political engagement.
Pintor nearly died in the struggle for freedom. Arrested by the fascists, badly beaten and sentenced to death, he was saved by the timely arrival in Rome of the US fifth army. "Those events decided my entire future, shaping my whole way of thinking," he later observed.
From 1946 to 1965, he worked for the PCI's newspaper, L'Unita, of which he became deputy editor, and at the party's 1962 congress he joined the central committee. A purge after its 1966 congress resulted in him being "exiled" to the Sardinia committee, from where he was elected to parliament in 1968. However, in 1969, he was expelled from the party, together with other free- thinkers from the far left, for the crime of "fractionism".
Il Manifesto, named after Marx's best-known work, began as a monthly magazine in 1968, giving voice to other restive Communists such as Rossana Rossanda, Lucio Magri and Massimo Caprara. One of its first targets was the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, in an outspoken editorial by Pintor. The expulsions led to the creation of a dissident leftist group gravitating around the magazine, which maintained a small parliamentary presence.
Pintor had a clear idea of the appropriate relationship between a periodical and the party it supported - like a swallow in the party's hand, he suggested, a hand that must not grip too tightly, lest the bird suffocate, nor too loosely, lest it fly away. The PCI never got the balance right with Il Manifesto, and the publication, which became a daily in 1971, never ceased to be a thorn in its side.
Pintor outlined his idea of how journalism works in a letter to Rossana Rossanda written in 1973. To be read, a newspaper must not be boring, and in order not to be boring it must be more polemical, critical and propagandist, than constructive, propositional and educational, he wrote, "in a proportion of three-quarters to a quarter or at least of two-thirds to a third".
Even the most staid papers, he said, got their positive ideas across in negative, critical-polemical terms. "They are all demagogical rather than pedagogical, they do not educate but corrupt, and on the basis of the relationship that they establish with their readers, like that of a father who gives money to support a son's vices, they impose the essence of their point of view."
His sense of humour, the clarity of his writing and his polemical vigour set Pintor apart from other print journalists. But the Il Manifesto editor was also a master of the television debate. "He didn't lose a single one," his colleague Rossanda wrote in a tribute published after his death. "He hit home with his infallible, elegant wit, with never a low blow, immune from all vulgarity, convinced as he was that the people are noble and their cause is to be served with nobility." He served a further parliamentary term, from 1987 to 1992, as an independent leftist.
Pintor had more than his share of personal tragedy, a fact that coloured his writing with a vein of melancholy and disenchantment. He lost his first wife, Marina Girelli, 30 years ago and later, in quick succession, his children, Giaime and Roberta. His grief at the death of his son inspired a novel, La Signora Kirchgessner, which was published in 1998, one of six books written in little over a decade.
His last work, The Scenes Of The Crime, is due to be published later this week . By a strange twist of fate, it prefigures what would turn out to be Pintor's own experience: a man is told by his doctor that he has only two months to live. "Growing old is difficult, even for a stoic philosopher. Dying is difficult, even for a believer. But living is easy, to judge by the small number of suicides which I could now increase by jumping over the banisters that I don't jump over," he wrote.
He reflected "with relief that death will lead me back to where I was, that is nowhere," allowing himself to be seduced only for a moment by belief in a next world "where we can understand the things that are incomprehensible in this one".
He is survived by his second wife, Isabella Premoli.
· Luigi Pintor, journalist and politician, born September 18 1925; died May 17 2003
