Il Solco: rivista mensile di cultura popolare [The Furrow: monthly review of popular culture], Anno 1, No. 9. New York: Il Solco Publishing Co., September 1927.

Nos. 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9 (Jan. - Sept. 1927) are in the collection; these issues contain part of Vacirca's novel Il rogo [The Pyre]; according to Durante, Il rogo continues into 1928.

Vincenzo Vacirca (b. Sicily, 1886; d. Italy, 1956) was a member of the Socialist Party of Italian Workers by age 16, and organized the first union of peasants in Ragusa in Sicily at that tender age, for which he was subsequently arrested and imprisoned. In 1911 he was elected a member of the Chamber of Deputies in Bologna and visited Russia, where he interviewed Lenin, Trotsky and other Communist leaders for his articles published in L’Avanti! Condemned to five years in prison by the judges of Siracusa for his anti-fascist writings, Vacirca returned to the U.S. in 1925, only to meet the fascists’ continued pursuit.

A writer both of novels and fiery political speeches, he was serially compelled to flee (or in some cases, expelled) from Brazil, Argentina, and Austria. In New York, between 1913 and 1919, he managed the newspapers La Lotta di Classe (Class Struggle); in Chicago, La Parola del Popolo (The People’s Word); in Boston, the daily La Notizia (The News), and the socialist weekly L’Internazionale

Arturo Giovannitti and Carlo Tresca were good friends and comrades of Vacirca in political struggle.

It wasn’t only his writing that was fiery: Vacirca spoke at political rallies, and one in Newark turned into a brawl, with gunshots and a knifing. He was the first publisher of Il Nuovo Mondo (The New World), the first anti-fascist daily newspaper  outside of Italy, located in that East 10th Street building which Vanni Montana later characterized as “the citadel of Italian American anti-fascism,” and to which Cordiferro contributed. In 1926, he was deprived of Italian citizenship, and his goods and property were confiscated. Later, he participated in forming the Partito Socialista dei Lavoratori Italiani, and from a rigorously anti-Communist position, directed the party nationally from 1949 to 1952.

He had several publishing arms, including La Strada, located on West 21st Street in Manhattan, a few steps from where I lived for more than a decade in the 1970s-1980s, and down the block from writer Carl Marzani.