Summary — The author gives an intellectual and political profile of Adolfo Tino, a notable political personality, who was born in Avellino in 1900 and died in Milan in 1978. After some early journalistic experience, the advent of Fascism prevented Tino from continuing to write freely, as a result of which he moved to Milan where he began working as a lawyer, though without giving up his critical stance with respect to Mussolini’s political regime. The author also uses a precious testimony provided by Riccardo Bacchelli to reconstruct Tino’s social environment — his meetings and his friendships — in Raffaele Mattioli’s salon in the 1930s. He then illustrates the contribution of Tino and his great friend Ugo La Malfa to the birth of the Partito d’azione and to the establishment of the basic principles of its political strategy (based on liberal democratic principles of a republican stamp), an example of which is to be found in the text Chi siamo, co-authored by La Malfa and Tino. After 25 July 1943, and the collapse of any hope of a rapid political turn-around, Tino was forced to flee to Switzerland — to Lugano, in the Ticino Canton — while keeping his contacts both with the Partito d’azione and with the resistance, which he was later to join. However, with the collapse of Fascism, Tino’s political activity soon carne to an end, along with the rapid decline of the Partito d’azione, following a brief period in the government led by Ferruccio Parri (a government which Tino had criticised at its birth, warning of the risks of being conditioned by the other parties — both the Christian Democrats and the Socialists and Communists). After 1946, Tino’s "public" appearances were to be limited to the economic and financial sector, including as the president of Mediobanca.