text: In 1893, influenced by the burgeoning cooperative movement, the spread of Marxist propaganda in the Mantuan countryside, and meetings with socialist leaders like Filippo Turati, Leonida Bissolati, and Anna Kuliscioff, he joined the Italian Socialist Party (at the time called Italian Socialist Workers' Party). In August 1894 he attended the Socialist congress for the Lombardy region, which was held in semi-clandestine fashion due to the repressive measures taken by Prime Minister Francesco Crispi. In November he was sentenced to 75 days of internal exile for his political activities.
  From the beginning he held reformist views and advocated for revisionist positions, including an alliance between the proletariat and the petite bourgeoisie in defense of democratic institutions. In 1896 he proposed that the Party should endorse liberal, bourgeois candidates in run-off elections, and claimed that the main task of the working class was the transformation of Italy into a modern bourgeois democracy before socialism could be established. In spite of early calls for full land collectivization eventually he moved towards more moderate solutions, like the voluntary creation of cooperatives, in agriculture as well. He was critical of the decision to call the general strike of September 1904, but nonetheless collaborated with revolutionary syndicalists for the duration of the strike.
  Internationally he supported other reformists like Eduard Bernstein, Alexandre Millerand, and Jean Jaurès.