Piero Gobetti
Piero Gobetti (Turin, 19 June 1901 – Paris, February 1926) was a journalist, publisher and political writer, one of the earliest and most uncompromising voices of liberal antifascism. In just over seven years he founded three magazines and a publishing house that printed more than a hundred titles, before fascist persecution forced him into exile, where he died at the age of twenty-four.[1][2]
From the grocery shop on Via XX Settembre to university
He was the only child of Giovanni Battista Gobetti and Angela Canuto, from a farming family originally from Andezeno, who ran a grocery shop in Turin at Via XX Settembre 60: the family lived in the same building, which later also housed his editorial offices.[1] He attended the Pacchiotti primary school, the Balbo gymnasium and the Gioberti lyceum; in 1918 he enrolled in law at the University of Turin, where his teachers included Luigi Einaudi and Francesco Ruffini, and he graduated in June 1922 with a thesis on the political philosophy of Vittorio Alfieri.[1] In 1922 he drew a spare self-portrait:
«I believe I can recognise my most innate qualities in a fundamental dryness and an inexorable will.»
With his fellow student Ada Prospero, whom he married on 11 January 1923, he learned Russian from the exile Rachele Gutman: the two translated Andreev, Pushkin and Kuprin, and Gobetti's writings on the Soviet revolution were later published in the volume Paradosso dello spirito russo (1926).[1]
Three magazines in seven years
Still a lyceum student, in November 1918 he founded with some classmates the fortnightly student magazine Energie Nove, published until February 1920 under the banner of cultural renewal and polemics against positivism.[1][2] From August–September 1920 he frequented the editorial offices of Antonio Gramsci's Ordine Nuovo and, from early 1921 to October 1922, wrote hundreds of literary and theatrical reviews for the communist daily: it was his contact with Turin's working-class movement that pulled him away from the liberalism of his teacher Einaudi.[1] The ANPI describes him as a figure of the progressive liberal left and an admirer of Gramsci.[3]
On 12 February 1922 the first issue of the weekly La Rivoluzione Liberale appeared, gathering a wide circle of contributors: alongside already-established names, young friends such as Giovanni Ansaldo, Natalino Sapegno and Carlo Levi, liberals such as Filippo Burzio, and democratic and socialist innovators such as Carlo and Nello Rosselli.[1] For Gobetti, the Risorgimento had remained unfinished because it had failed to transform the nation's conscience, and fascism exposed its historical failings; the task of carrying it forward fell to intellectual and working-class elites capable of releasing living energies.[4] On 23 November 1922, a few weeks after the March on Rome, he published the Elogio della ghigliottina (In Praise of the Guillotine), writing: «We ask for the whip so that someone may wake up, we ask for the executioner so that we may see clearly».[1][5] On 23 December 1924 the third periodical was born, Il Baretti, devoted to literature and culture, which outlived its founder.[1]
Montale's publisher
From March 1923 Gobetti was also a publisher: under the imprint Piero Gobetti editore, later Edizioni del Baretti, he published more than a hundred volumes in just over two years, with authors including Salvemini, Einaudi and Vilfredo Pareto.[1] In 1925 he printed Eugenio Montale's Ossi di seppia.[1] His best-known book, La rivoluzione liberale. Saggio sulla lotta politica in Italia, came out in 1924 with Cappelli in Bologna and framed the Italian problem as a matter «not of authority, but of autonomy».[1] In December 1924 he promoted the Gruppi della Rivoluzione Liberale in various cities, following Salvemini's example.[1]
Persecution
On 6 February 1923 he was arrested for alleged anti-national activities and on 29 May was detained again, with searches of his premises.[1] On 1 June 1924 Benito Mussolini telegraphed the prefect of Turin to «make life difficult again for this pointless opponent of the government and fascism».[1] On 5 September 1924, after the article Come combattere il fascismo (How to Fight Fascism), a fascist squad attacked and beat him.[1] On 27 October 1925 he received a formal warning; on 8 November the last issue of Rivoluzione Liberale appeared, and on 11 November a prefectural order forced him to cease all journalistic and publishing activity.[1] According to Il Post, he was beaten repeatedly on Mussolini's direct orders and developed a heart condition.[6]
Exile and death in Paris
On 28 December 1925, in the new home at Via Fabro 6, his son Paolo was born.[2] A few weeks later, on 8 February 1926, Gobetti left for Paris intending to continue his publishing work abroad; two days after arriving he fell ill with bronchitis.[1] According to the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani he died on 15 February 1926 from the resulting complications[1]; the ANPI and Il Post give the date as 16 February.[3][6] He was buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery.[1]
The house on Via Fabro and his legacy
Ada Gobetti kept most of her husband's papers in the house at Via Fabro 6; in 1961 they became the core of the Centro studi Piero Gobetti: the archive holds around 6,500 documents including notebooks, manuscripts, photographs and letters, and his personal library some 3,000 volumes, with a strong nucleus of Russian literature.[2] Among the Centre's founders and its first president was Norberto Bobbio.[7]
His moral and revolutionary reading of liberalism, open to the working-class movement, had a lasting influence on the Giustizia e Libertà movement and on later political thought.[4] In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci credited the Gobettian groups with a role in «modernising» Italian culture.[1] After the war, Giulio Einaudi editore published his political, historical and theatrical writings, his correspondence with Ada and other letters, down to the collection La democrazia da fare (2026).[8]
Pages linking here
- Adriano Olivetti
- Carlo Levi
- Felice Casorati
- Gianni Rodari
- Giulio Einaudi editore
- Norberto Bobbio
- Teatro Gobetti
- Terra Madre Salone del Gusto