The party newspaper for the Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party) from 1896 to the party's disintegration following the mani pulite corruption scandals of the early 1990s. For much of its early existence it had to operate underground, but was a large-scale operation by 1912 when Benito Mussolini took over its editorship for a couple of years, before he was dismissed and expelled by the Socialists for going against the party line by opposing Italian neutrality in World War I.
During the Fascist ventennio the paper once more had to be circualted clandestinely, only returning to open publication under the aegis of the Comitati Nazionali di Liberazione (CNL) after Rome fell to the Allies in June 1944. Between then and 1992 it served again as a party mouthpiece for the PSI in its gradual move from hard left opposition to membership of the governing coalition, although becoming less important than the formerly Socialist-run RAI 2 television channel. It still struggles on as a low-circulation independent centre-left newspaper.
The word itself is literally "Forwards!" but is used to some extent as a general exhortation or encouragement to soldiers or sportsmen, an instruction to move along, or (the phrasebook sense) as an affirmative response to a knock on a door (the sense in which it is encountered in the Billy Wilder film noded here by haruspex).