This essay examines the early years of Pietro Ingrao’s long militancy within the Italian Communist Party. The present essay focuses on Ingrao’s experience as director of the newspaper «l’Unità», started in February !"#$ and ended in !"%&. This experience represents the central point in the first part of his life. Therefore, after a quick description of his training years and his journalistic career till the direction of «l’Unità», the focus is on the ten-year leadership of the newspaper with a detailed analisys of the party’s interventions in the journal’s management. Despite this interventions aimed at an «ideological strengthening» of it and at an increase in distribution, they concided with budgetary problems and drop in sales, that plagued «l’Unità» during the fifties.