Juan De Marchi

Juan De Marchi (born Giovanni de Marchi in Turin, 10 June 1866 - 1943) – surname also spelled as Demarchi – was an Italian-born anarchist, best known for his friendship and influential role in the development of Salvador Allende's political identity.

In 1893, when he aged twenty-seven, De Marchi moved from Italy to Argentina, where he was involved with the Latin-American Anarchist movement that arose around the newspaper Umanità Nova, stoked by figures such as Pietro Gori and Enrico Malatesta.

Later on he moved in Chile, where he worked as a shoemaker in Valparaíso.

When he was about sixty-three years old, Allende was attending high school at the Liceo Eduardo de la Barra in Valparaíso. It was at that time that the adolescent Allende came into contact with De Marchi's political and intellectual ideas. As Allende once said:

When I was a boy, aged about fourteen or fifteen years, after the lessons at the high-school of Valparaíso, I usually was going in the workshop of a shoemaker, Juan De Marchi, an Italian anarchist, by whom I was eager to stop exchanging opinions about foreign and national situation. De Marchi was aged 63 at the time, and he willingly agreed to talk to me about events of life; he even lent me his books and, furthermore, he taught me to play chess.

According to other interviewers, De Marchi had an important role in shaping Allende's ideology.