Born in Turin on August 5, 1875.
Died in Milan on July 16, 1954.
Lawyer, publicist, lecturer, literary and dramatic critic, he was deputy of Corteleona and Milan. A member of the Republican party, he directed the newspaper * «L'Italia del Popolo». In 1929 he was appointed senator and in 1932 he joined the national fascist party.
As director of the newspaper "L'Italia del Popolo", a republican and anti-clerical Lombard organ, around 1905 Cappa published a long disparaging correspondence from the Casa Divina Provvidenza of Como, sent by the lawyer. Luigi Lanfranconi, furious at the competition that the Guanellian work had with the lay recreation center he founded. Don Guanella forgave the rudeness and thus won over Cappa's soul, who later repented of having acted motivated by "revolutionary anxiety". Converted to the faith, he commemorated the figure of don Guanella twice, once at the Politeama di Como on 16 July 1927, the other at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan on 15 December 1940, when he confessed: «How to want him bad? Either I could stain myself with the perversity of falsehood and slander him, as many dared to say that he was pursuing unconfessed profits and selfish satisfactions of vanity, or bend my forehead before a hero of Christian charity, for whom the mortification, the giving of oneself, the live in hardship, in renunciation, in order to help the weak and the unhappy".
Sources:
ALBERTO MALATESTA, Ministers, deputies, senators from 1848 to 1922, vol. I, Rome, “Italiana” Biographical and Bibliographic Encyclopedia, 1940, p. 202.
Biographical repertory of the Senators of Fascist Italy, edited by Emilio Gentile and Emilia Campochiaro, vol. CD, Rome, Bibliopolis, 2003, p. 529.
Guanellian sources:
SACRA RITUUM CONGREGATIONE, Comen. seu Mediolanen. Beatificationis et canonizationis servi Dei Aloysii Guanella [...]. Positio super virtutibus, Summarium, Romae, Typis Guerra et Belli, 1950, pp. 698-699 (witness Don Martino Cugnasca).
Necrology, in «La Divina Provvidenza», 1954, VII-VIII, pp. 23-24.
Photographs:
ALBERTO MALATESTA, Ministers, deputies, senators..., vol. I, p. 202.