ABSTRACT
No exact dates can be given for Silone's entry into Switzerland, nor for the beginning of his cultural and political activities there. A native of the Abruzzo, he was one of the founding members of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1921, and continued to work for its underground and international organisations after it was made illegal in Italy at the end of 1925. He moved between Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany, Spain and Russia, coordinating clandestine PCI activities. As illness and doubt weakened his attachment to the Party, he spent more and more time in Switzerland: the PCI gave him sick leave in autumn 1929 and he began writing his first novel Fontamara in a Davos sanatorium.4 Before the influx of refugees from Nazi Germany in 1933, patients at Swiss sanatoria did not have to register with the police until three months after their arrival, which is probably why both the Swiss authorities and Silone himself date his actual exile from 1930.5 Having been admitted with acute pneumonia and suspected tuberculosis, Silone spent the following year undergoing treatment in Davos and Zurich. He was finally expelled from the party in July 1931 for conspiracy and his opposition to the Stalinist svolta, making him one of the first in an international line of 'exes'. 6 The Swiss authorities confirmed his official status as a political refugee in February 1932,7 and in the early spring of 1933 he became a houseguest of the philanthropist grain merchant Marcel Fleischmann in Zurich, at GermaniastraBe 53, where he remained for eleven years.8
