Cagliari lawyer Cesare Pintus, republican, Lussu-born, card-carrying Sardista, is a “hombre vertical”, coherent and rigorous, he embodies the values of April 25 in his militancy and in his generous dedication to the democratic cause. Historian Gianfranco Murtas notes: “Pintus republican follows Lussu in Giustizia e Libertà. Joining the Psd'Az he wrote to him: neither I nor Pinna will ever say a word against the unity of Italy”. He is arrested in 1930 and sentenced, with Francesco Fancello, to 10 years of imprisonment by the Special Tribunal. He remains in prison for six years. Due to the very harsh detention regime he contracts a serious form of tuberculosis, which is the cause of his death in 1948 at the age of 47 in the sanatorium of Pra Catinat in Piedmont.
Mayor of Cagliari
After the fall of fascism, Cesare Pintus was secretary of the CLN of Cagliari, editor in chief of the Unione Sarda and mayor of his city. This is how Manlio Brigaglia and Giuseppe Podda remember him in the volume celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the newspaper founded in 1889: “A staunch defender of democratic freedoms. Under his leadership, the capital comes back to life. The industrial apparatus begins to function again, public services emerge from the long paralysis, work resumes in the construction sites that were built to rebuild houses. It is the miracle of Cagliari”. The mayor writes: “From the data collected by the census carried out by the Technical Office of the Municipality, it appears that out of a total of approximately 7,000 buildings that made up the town of Cagliari, 862 were completely destroyed and 1,647 more or less damaged, for a complex of 4,000 thousand apartments. I believe I am not far from the truth when I say that to date, over 2,000 affected apartments have already been restored to efficiency and reused”.
Greetings to Lussu
In the columns of the Unione Sarda Pintus bids farewell to Emilio Lussu who returns home after a long exile between “fronts and frontiers”: “We found it perfectly logical that the fascist regime had struck the best, had tried to eliminate the bravest, just as with the same methods it had eliminated Di Vagno, Piccinini, Minzoni and Matteotti...We will see him again and we will reconcile ourselves in him and in his name we will confidently resume the path towards our destiny”. In the post-war period, again in the Unione, he underlines how important it is to strengthen the reborn democracy “a healthy propaganda that, by exposing the wounds of the past, and demonstrating all the resulting damage, traces the path of justice and freedom”.
The farewell
His friend Antonino Lussu, remembers Gianfranco Murtas, writing the epitaph: “Cesare Pintus died of an illness contracted in prison when an avant-garde sacrificed its life for the freedom of the nation”. On the day of his death, L'Unione Sarda remembered him thus: “He was one of the most outspoken figures of Sardinian anti-fascism. He never bowed to the pressing regime: he endured with a manly spirit the trial and the sentence and the prison for many years. He paid without ever repenting the serious physical consequences of his imprisonment, and also economic ones, since, after harassment of every kind, he was even banned from practicing his profession…Now he died poor and far from his land, on the eve of that autonomist achievement that was the constant dream of his generous republican soul”.
