Max Salvadori

Max Salvadori , actually Massimo Salvadori Paleotti , also known as Max William Salvadori Paleotti (born June 16, 1908 in London , † August 6, 1992 in Northampton (Massachusetts) ), was an Italian historian and anti-fascist , brother of Joyce Lussu and brother-in-law of Emilio Lussu .

Life

Max Salvadori, born in London in 1908, was the only son and the second oldest of the three children of Count Guglielmo Salvadori Paleotti and the Giacinta Galletti de Cadilhac. The father Guglielmo was the son of Count Salvadori Paleotti of Fermo and his cousin Adele Emiliani. The mother Giacinta Galletti was the daughter of the Garibaldine lieutenant Arturo Galletti de Cadilhac and grandson of the Garibaldine general Bartolomeo Galletti, who, like Arturo, took part in the defense of the Roman Republic in 1849 , and the writer Margaret Collier, who came from the English nobility.

Max's father, a liberal with very good connections to Anglo-Saxon intellectuals and politicians, had moved from Porto San Giorgio to Florence in 1906 to teach at the Istituto di Studi Superiori . In 1921 he ran for the political elections without success.

On May 24th, 1923, as a fifth grade student at the grammar school, Max suffered a first attack from fascist classmates. The following year, on April 1, 1924, when Guglielmo Salvadori was attacked in front of the sede del fascio by around 30 squadrists for his collaboration with some English weekly newspapers such as the New Statesman and the Westminster Gazette , which had published critical articles about the fascist regime , his anti-fascist son came to his aid and sustained injuries.

In March 1925 decided Guglielmo Salvadori, however, with the family in the Switzerland move, to 30km from Lausanne remote Begnins , where he remained in a kind of auto-exile to September 1934th In this way Max spent his youth between Italy and abroad, in cosmopolitan societies, and enjoyed a non-formal education that was determined by the cultural interests of the family. After being perfectly bilingual in Italian and English through his parents' upbringing, he also improved his German and French during his Swiss years. After successfully completing his studies in Geneva in March 1925 , he joined the anti-fascist movement Giustizia e Libertà and returned to Italy, where he completed a second university degree at La Sapienza University in Rome , while secretly for the dissemination of the anti-fascist underground press and was in contact with the Roman group of Giustizia e Libertà.

In 1932 he was arrested together with around 40 companions and, after months of imprisonment in Regina Coeli prison in Rome, sent into exile on the island of Ponza . With Salvadori, eight other militants were deported from Giustizia e Libertà to Ponza for a period of 3 to 5 years. In 1933, 10 years after the March on Rome , all nine were released through an amnesty ( amnistia del decennale ). Since he had both Italian and British citizenship, after his release from Ponza he traveled again via Switzerland to England and from there to Kenya . As an officer in the British Army, he took part in the Sicily campaign in 1943 and in the landings of the Allies in Salerno and Anzio with the task of organizing the resistance against the Mussolini regime . Salvadori had a role of the first order in the reorganization of the "political" activities of the N. 1 Special Force ( Special Operations Executive ) in Italy and in the attempt to coordinate their activities with those of the Partito d'Azione . From 1945 to 1973 he taught history and politics at Smith College in Northampton (Massachusetts) , interrupted by several assignments at UNESCO in Paris and NATO .

His most important works include The Rise of Modern Communism from 1952, American Capitalism from 1954 and The Liberal Heresy from 1977. His books on the years from the rise of fascism to 1945 in Italy, in which he is a protagonist and observer, are also fundamental attended privileged position: Resistance ed azione: ricordi di un liberale (“ Resistance and action: memories of a liberal”) from 1951; Storia della Resistenza italiana ("History of the Italian Resistance Movement") from 1955, with a foreword by Riccardo Bauer, and La Resistenza nell'Anconetano e nel Piceno ("The Resistance in the area around Ancona and Ascoli Piceno ") from 1962. 1992, a few months before his death, a conference on his person was held in Fermo, his hometown and the place of his former forced residence, which was organized by the Società operaia di mutuo soccorso (“Workers' Society of Mutual Support”) of Porto San Giorgio.

Max Salvadori's younger sister Gioconda Beatrice, better known as Joyce Lussu, was a well-known writer and poet and partisan at the side of her husband Emilio Lussu ; later she was the political spokesperson for the Partito d'Azione and the Partito Socialista Italiano and also campaigned for the liberation of the colonies .

literature

• MRD Foot, Obituary: Max Salvadori . In: The Independent , September 8, 1992.
• Alessandra Grasso: Appunti per una biografia politica di Max Salvadori. Aracne, Rome 2014, ISBN 978-8854866539 .
• Mauro Canali: Leo Valiani e Max Salvadori. I servizi segreti inglesi e la resistance. In: Nuova storia contemporanea 14 (2010), pp. 29-64.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Adriano Dal Pont, Simonetta Carolini (ed.): L'Italia al confino. Le ordinanze di assegnazione al confino emesse dalle Commissioni provinciali dal novembre 1926 al luglio 1943 . Milano 1983, Vol. 3, pp. 1377-1378; Mario Giovana: Giustizia e Libertà in Italia 1929–1937. Storia di una cospirazione antifascista . Torino 2005, pp. 316-318
2. ↑ In the Roman house prison Salvadori suffered from the inhumane conditions and the solitary confinement; he heard the screams of the tortured every day. Finally, under the impression of the nervous strain and the increasing discouragement, he gave in and distanced himself from his anti-fascist commitment in a letter to Mussolini . Salvadori himself goes into detail and openly in his political memoirs on this episode, which he describes as a "serious mistake". Nevertheless, he was not released, but deported with the others to Ponza. - Cf. Massimo (Max) Salvadori, Resistenza ed azione. Ricordi di un liberale , Foggia 1990 (Bastogi), p. 104. The polemic surrounding the alleged political ambiguity of Salvadori was triggered in 2004 by the publication of "Le spie del Regime" (The informers of the [fascist] regime) by Mauro Canali.
3. ↑ After his release from Ponza, he was forced to stay in Fermo for two months.