Abstract
Antonio Gramsci was born in a context of deep crisis in the young Italian state, which was particularly serious in Sardinia as it was historically shaken after centuries of colonial rule and affected by such chronic misery and structural underdevelopment that left him no way out. In 1891, Italy had for a few years been plunged into a customs war with France, which was waged by Crispi to defend the burgeoning industry and Italy’s large agricultural production, but with very serious consequences for the Italian South.
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Notes
- 1.
Antonio Gramsci was born in Ales (Oristano), a small village in the interior of Sardinia, on January 22, 1891. Born to Giuseppina Marcias and Francesco Gramsci, he was the fourth of seven children. Three years later, the family moved to Sorgono, near Ghilarza, Giuseppina’s hometown, where little Antonio Gramsci spent all his childhood and adolescence.
- 2.
After the collapse of the last right-wing government in Cavour, Agostino Depretis, the new president of the council of ministers, abandoned the policy of free exchange in favor of customs protectionism. Aimed at protecting the burgeoning national industry of the North and large-estate farming in southern Italy, and maintained by Francesco Crispi, the new prime minister, this policy led to the denouncing of old trade treaties and to a customs war with France and thus to the closure of this key market to some Italian products (citrus fruits, olive oil, cattle, wine, cereals, leather), which were particularly important to the Mezzogiorno region.
- 3.
The term Risorgimento refers to the process of Italian unification, which began in the first war of independence in 1848 and led to the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.
- 4.
The Mezzogiorno region comprises Italy’s southern continental area (also called Italia meridionale, Suditalia, Bassa Italia or just Sud) and the island provinces of Sardinia.
- 5.
For more details on the contemporary history of Sardinia, see Gianni Fresu, La prima bardana. Modernizzazione e conflitto nella Sardegna dell’Ottocento (Cagliari, Cuec, 2011).
- 6.
Francesco Salaris, “Atti della Giunta per la Inquiesta Agraria”, in Le inchieste parlamentari sulla Sardegna dell’Ottocento (Sassari, Edes, 1984), 172.
- 7.
Antonio Zanelli, Condizioni della pastorizia in Sardegna, report to the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Trade (director of the animal husbandry division of Reggio Emilia; printed under the supervision of the Agrarian Committee of Cagliari, Tipografia Editrice Dell’Avvenire di Sardegna, 1880).
- 8.
An old unit of measure adopted in the region of Sardinia, equivalent to 3,986.75 square meters.
- 9.
Antonio Gramsci, “Uomini, idee, giornali e quattrini”, l’Avanti!, 23 jan. 1918, em Guido Melis (org.), Gramsci e la questione sarda (Cagliari, Edizioni della Torre, 1977), 88.
- 10.
On September 4, 1904, the police violently suppressed a demonstration for wage increase for miners in front of the company’s headquarters in Buggerru, the mining center of southwestern Sardinia. That resulted in three deaths and dozens of people injured.
- 11.
These themes were thoroughly discussed in the works of Girolamo Sotgiu, one of the most influential historians, from our point of view, of contemporary Sardinia. We are referring especially to the following works: Lotte sociali e politiche nella Sardegna contemporanea (Cagliari, Edes, 1974); Movimento operaio e autonomismo (Bari, De Donato Editore, 1975); Storia della Sardegna sabauda (1720–1847) (Bari, Laterza, 1984); Storia della Sardegna dopo l’Unità (Bari, Laterza, 1986).
- 12.
“Those who know Gramsci’s thought and practice will understand that it can be correctly asserted that the origin of his thought and practice lies not only in the factories in Turin, but also in Sardinia, in the conditions imposed by Italian capitalism on the island” (Palmiro Togliatti, “Ho conoscio Gramsci sotto il portico Dell’università di Torino”, in Cesare Pillon, I comunisti nella storia d’Italia, Rome, Edizioni del Calendario, 1967, 81).
- 13.
Togliatti, Gramsci (Rome, Editori Riuniti, 1972), 4.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
In 1897, Francesco Gramsci, working at a registry office in Ghilarza, engaged in a fierce clash involving the many liberals who controlled the electoral college. In the quarrel between Francesco Cocco Ortu, who was an elected member of parliament, and the young Enrico Carboni Boi, the latter’s claims, supported by Francesco Gramsci, led to a backlash from the losing faction. For this reason, that same year, Francesco was the subject of an investigation and was subsequently arrested on a charge of embezzlement, extortion and forgery of official documents. In 1905, he was sentenced to five years in prison.
- 16.
In the capital of Sardinia, Gramsci first shared a room at 24 via Principe Amadeo, then he moved to a damp room at 149 Corso Vittorio Emanuele, and attended the Liceo Classico Dettori. On a tight budget, he was hardly able to afford any luxury, which usually consisted of just coffee at Tramer, a café at piazza Martiri, or a frugal meal with his brother at the trattoria at piazza del Carmine.
- 17.
Gianni Francioni, Francesco Giasi and Luca Paulesu (eds.), Gramsci. I quaderni del carcere e le riviste ritrovate (Catalogo della mostra, Cesena, Biblioteca Malatestiana, 17 jan.–31 mar. 2019, Rome, MetaMorfosi, 2019).
- 18.
L’Unione Sarda, Sardinia’s main newspaper, published Gramsci’s first article in 1910.
- 19.
“I myself have no race: my father is of recent Albanian origin (the family fled from Epirus after or during the wars of 1821 and soon became Italian); my grandmother was a Gonzalez and descended from some Italian-Spanish family from southern Italy (many remained there after the end of Spanish rule); my mother was Sardinian, born to Sardinian parents; and Sardinia was united with Piedmont only in 1847, after having been a personal fief and property of Piedmontese princes, who received it in exchange for Sicily, which was very distant and less defensible. However, my culture is Italian and this is my world: I have never felt torn between two worlds, although the Giornale d’italia affirmed that in March 1920. In this newspaper, a two-column article attributed my political activity in Turin, among other things, to the fact that I am Sardinian and not Piedmontese, or Sicilian” (Antonio Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Turin, Einaudi, 1975, 506–7).
- 20.
In addition to the great and unsurpassed work of Giuseppe Fiori (Vita di Antonio Gramsci, Rome/Bari, Laterza, 1989), which is methodologically halfway between the accurate reconstruction of history and the meticulous investigation of the journalist who availed himself of a multitude of unique first-hand accounts, Angelo D’orsi’s biography is an important attempt to go deeper, not only formally, which was able to show the effective weight of Gramsci’s years in Sardinia. Gramsci Una nuova biografia (Milan, Feltrinelli, 2017).
- 21.
In 1911, after school holidays, Gramsci won a scholarship intended for the kingdom’s needy youth, which allowed him, despite enormous financial difficulties, to enroll in the Facoltà di Lettere of the University of Turin.
- 22.
Francesco Guicciardini, Ricordi politici e civili (Lanciano, Rocco Carabba, 2008)
- 23.
Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere (Turin, Einaudi, 1977), 1776.
- 24.
Eugenio Garin, Con Gramsci (Rome, Editori Riuniti, 1997), 48.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
That is the case of Franco Lo Piparo’s book, L’enigma del quaderno (Rome, Donzelli, 2013), which, to support his thesis on the disappearance of one of the Prison Notebooks, hands down three unappealable, and overall unsubstantiated, sentences regarding the reason for this disappearance and those responsible: a notebook is missing; it was Togliatti who made it disappear; Gramsci repudiates communism and his party in this missing notebook. Paradoxically, to support his arguments, the author used the very absence of documents capable of proving them. The logical structure of his reasoning is the following: if these documents were not found, that means they were destroyed, and therefore, there were things to hide, and certainly the culprit was Palmiro. All the assumptions made about this unbelievable tale of Gramscian espionage would have stemmed from the conspiracies of the communist ruling group, especially Togliatti, which would have planned everything and eliminated the clues with the complicity of poor and helpless Gramsci’s wife, sister-in-law and close friend (Piero Sraffa), all KGB agents watching Gramsci under Stalin’s command. Even if one admits that one notebook is missing, why would Gramsci concentrate all his criticisms of communism in this single volume? This hypothesis contradicts even the structure of the Notebooks and the working method adopted by Gramsci. In all other volumes, nothing is found on this alleged issue.
- 27.
Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere (Turin, Einaudi, 1977), 1249–50.
- 28.
Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, trans. Joseph Buttigieg, Prison Notebooks, v. 3 (New York, Columbia University Press, 2007), 183.
- 29.
Ibid., 183–184.
- 30.
For those wishing to venture into this territory, we suggest Guido Liguori’s volume Gramsci conteso. Interpretazioni, dibattiti e polemiche 1922–2012 (Rome, Editori Riuniti/University Press, 2012).
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Fresu, G. (2023). The Premises of an Uninterrupted Discourse. In: Antonio Gramsci. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15610-6_1
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