Delio Cantimori

Delio Cantimori (born August 30, 1904 in Russi , † September 13, 1966 in Florence ) was an Italian historian and politician.

Life

Delio Cantimori was the eldest of the three children Carlo and Silvia Sintini. From 1919 to 1922 he attended high school and the first grade of the Liceo classico in Ravenna ; he passed the Abitur in 1924 at the Giovan Battista Morgagni high school in Forlì . In November of the same year he won a competition within the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa , where he enrolled in the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy. Cantimori made lasting friendships there with members of the Scuola Normale and professors such as Aldo Capitini , Umberto Segre and Giuseppe Saitta , his philosophy teacher who was strongly influenced by Giovanni Gentile . He recommended his Catholic friend Michele Maccarone, whom he had met in Forlì, to take part in the Scuola Normale competition: Maccarrone actually won it. However, the relationship between the two subsequently turned out to be difficult due to diverging ideals.

During these years Cantimori went from the familiar Mazzinianism to a fascism with a republican and anti-clerical character, as represented by the monthly magazine Vita Nova , which was founded by Saitta and Leandro Arpinati and on which he worked from 1927 to 1932. Corporate fascism appeared to him to be a synthesis of the two extremes of communism and reaction, and the authoritarian fascist state, viewed as revolutionary by anti-capitalist tendencies, was the culmination of the Italian Risorgimento according to the theses Gentile, Gioacchino Volpes and Saittas .

He successfully completed his studies on June 21, 1928 with a thesis on Ulrich von Hutten and the relationship between Renaissance and Reformation ( Ulrico di Hutten e le relazioni tra Rinascimento e Riforma ), which he published in 1930 after a few revisions under the title Ulrich von Hutten ei rapporti tra Rinascimento e Riforma published. The transition to dealing with themes of the Renaissance was already apparent in 1927 with the essay Il caso Boscoli e la vita del Rinascimento (“The Boscoli Case and the Life of the Renaissance”), which was published in the Giornale critico della filosofia italiana . Cantimori's writings Osservazioni sui concetti di cultura e di storia della cultura (“Observations on Concepts of Culture and Cultural History”) (1928), Bernardino Ochino, uomo del Rinascimento e riformatore (“Bernardo Ochino, man of the Renaissance and reformer” belong in the same context. ) (1929) and Sulla storia del concetto di Rinascimento (“On the History of the Concept of the Renaissance”) (1932).

In 1929 he became a teacher at the Liceo classico Dettòri in Cagliari , where the future novelist Giuseppe Dessi was one of his students. In 1931 he completed a second degree in German at the University of Pisa and became a teacher at the Liceo classico Ugo Foscolo in Pavia . After receiving a scholarship, he moved to Basel to study theology at the local university, where he met the Protestant theologian Karl Barth, among others . In July 1932 he returned to Italy and, thanks to another scholarship, he traveled for a year in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Poland and England, where he collected a lot of material for a research project on the heretics in Italy in the 16th century collected. In 1934 Giovanni Gentile offered him a position as a research assistant at the Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici in Rome, where he worked as editor of the institute's magazine and director of the library. In 1936 he published a series of writings by Carl Schmitt under the title “Principi politici del nazionalsocialismo” for the Sansoni publishing house , which he prefixed with his own introduction. In 1939 he received a call for the chair of Storia Moderna at the University of Messina; In 1940 he returned to the Scuola Normale at Gentile's behest.

Towards the end of the 1930s, Cantimori came closer to the Communist Party, also through the influence of his wife Emma Mezzomonti, who was an active communist. In 1940 he worked for the Dizionario di politicia des Partito Nazionale Fascista.

After a break in teaching during the Republic of Salò, he resumed his work at the Scuola Normale in 1944 when Luigi Rosso was appointed director of the college. In 1948 he became a member of the Communist Party, from which he resigned after the 1956 Hungarian uprising was suppressed. During this time he was editorial advisor at the Einaudi publishing house and wrote for the magazines Il Politecnico and Società . In 1951 and 1952 he and his wife translated the first book of Karl Marx 's Das Kapital . After leaving the Communist Party, his focus of interest shifted from the political present back to the 16th century. Delio Cantimori died on September 13, 1966 when he fell off the stairs of his library.

Library and personal archive

Cantimori's personal archive contains his papers, files, personal documents, manuscripts, preparatory material, conference texts, lectures, speeches and can be viewed in the Scuola Normale Superiore in the Fondo Cantimori. The old, rare books and manuscripts that Cantimori's library contained are now in the Palazzo del Capitano, while the modern material from his library is in the college's modern library and can be viewed in the online catalog.

The Historiographical Debate on Cantimori

In the more general context of the history of science dealing with the transition of Italian intellectuals from fascism to communism after the fall of the regime, some historians after 2000, in particular Eugenio di Rienzo , Paolo Simoncelli and Nicola D'Elia , dealt with the personality of Cantimori. As early as 1935, Benedetto Croce , who did not understand “what Cantimori's political confession” was, spoke of the “confusion and contradiction of his intellectual and moral attitudes”.

Adriano Prospero, a student of Cantimori, always vigorously defended his former teacher and rejected his characterization as "national Bolshevik"; He accused several researchers (Eugenio Di Rienzo, Ernesto Galli della Loggia, Giuseppe Bedeschi, Pietro Citati, Piero Craveri), in Cantimori, “the 'mistakes' of Italy in the 20th century, divided equally between the two Molochs, fascism and communism” to condemn and make him the "scapegoat for all evils of the Italian past". In return, Di Rienzo accused him of “making political use of history” and the tendency to glorify Cantimori a priori as a “liberal-democratic, progressive” figure.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Catalogo online (Wayback Machine, accessed August 11, 2019).