Showing posts with label Giovanni Gentile. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Giovanni Gentile. Show all posts

1 February 2019

Teresa Mattei - partisan and politician

Former Communist who led Italian Women’s Union


Teresa Mattei was expelled from school for speaking out against Fascist laws
Teresa Mattei was expelled from school
for speaking out against Fascist laws
The politician and former partisan Teresa Mattei, who was the youngest member of the Constituent Assembly that formed Italy’s post-War government and later became a director of the Unione Donne Italiane (Italian Women’s Union), was born on this day in 1921 in Genoa.

After being expelled from the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1957, Mattei became a leading advocate of the rights of children as well as women and later campaigned for the prosecution of war criminals.

As a prominent executive of the UDI she was influential in the adoption of mimosa as the symbol of International Women’s Day, which takes place on March 8 each year, arguing that because the flower proliferated in the countryside it represented a more accessible alternative to violets and orchids.

The daughter of a lawyer who was prominent in the anti-Fascist Partito d’Azione (Action Party), Mattei herself was a active member of the Italian Resistance during the Second World War, using the nom de guerre "Partigiana Chicchi".

She was part of a group in 1944 that plotted and carried out the execution of Giovanni Gentile, the philosopher who had become the main intellectual spokesman for Fascism and who had part-written Benito Mussolini’s Doctrine of Fascism in 1932.

Teresa Mattei with her first husband, the partisan leader Bruno Sanguinetti
Teresa Mattei with her first husband, the
partisan leader Bruno Sanguinetti 
Mattei grew up in Milan and Varese and went to school steeped in antipathy towards Fascism, with the consequence that in 1938 at the age of 17 she was handed a blanket exclusion from all Italian schools because of her outspoken opposition to Mussolini’s anti-Jewish race laws and their  promulgation in the classroom.

Nonetheless, having moved with her family to Tuscany in 1933, she was accepted as a student at the University of Florence, where she graduated in philosophy before joining the partisans. She joined the Communist Party in 1942 and met her future husband, Bruno Sanguinetti, a resistance fighter of Jewish origin who was a commander of the Communist Youth Front and the major instigator of the plot to murder Gentile, a professor at the university.

Gentile was ambushed and shot dead as he left the prefecture in Florence, after which Sanguinetti proclaimed the assassination as vengeance for the death of Mattei’s brother, Gianfranco, a chemist and bombmaker for the partisans, who had hanged himself in prison rather than risk betraying his comrades under torture.

After the war had ended, Mattei was elected in the PCI lists to the Constituent Assembly for Florence and Pistoia. At 25 the youngest person to be elected in the organisation, she was a signatory to Article Three of the constitution of the new Italian Republic, declaring all citizens regardless of sex, race, language, religion, political opinions, personal and social conditions to have the right to equal social dignity and be equal before the law.

Prime minister Alcide de Gasperi addresses the Consituent Assembly in 1946. Mattei is in the third row, just behind him
Prime minister Alcide de Gasperi addresses the Consituent
Assembly in 1946. Mattei is in the third row, just behind him
Mattei married Sanguinetti in Budapest in 1948 and they had two children, Gianfranco and Antonella. However, Sanguinetti died suddenly in the early 1950s. She was married for a second time to Iacopo Muzio, a PCI official, with whom she had two more children, Gabriele and Rocco.

In the meantime, she was expelled from the PCI for her opposition to the Stalinist policies adopted under the leadership of Palmiro Togliatti

Thereafter, she devoted her energies for more than 50 years to various campaigns for women’s and children’s rights, as well as, in 1996, organising a petition demanding a new trial for Erich Priebke, a former Nazi officer responsible for a massacre of more than 300 Jews and others in Rome in 1944 and for murdering dozens of Italian Resistance members detained in the city’s prisons. Priebke was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment.

Having returned in later life to live in Tuscany, Mattei died in 2013 at the age of 92 in Usigliano, a village about 35km (22 miles) southeast of Pisa.

Florence University has several sites in the centre of the city, including this one, the Palazzo San Marco
Florence University has several sites in the centre of the city,
including this one, the Palazzo San Marco
Travel tip:

The University of Florence, which has 12 schools, swells the population of the city by some 60,000 students each year. Its Law, Economics and Political Science faculties are in the Novoli district, while those Medicine and Surgery, Pharmacology and certain scientific and engineering departments are in the Careggi district, close to the city’s main hospital. Among the alumni are the former President of Italy Alessandro Pertini, two popes - Nicholas V and Pius II - the poet Dante Alighieri and two prime ministers, Lamberto Dini and Matteo Renzi.


The Palazzo Pretoria in Pontedera
The Palazzo Pretoria in Pontedera
Travel tip:

Usigliano is a fairly remote village in Tuscany, with a couple of villas offering agriturismo-type accommodation and very few amenities. The nearest muncipality of any substantial size is Pontedera, the town at the confluence of the Arno and Era rivers notable for housing the headquarters of the Piaggio motorcycle and scooter company, the Castellani wine company and the Amadei chocolate factory. Pontedera was the seat of several historical battles, including a Florentine victory over the Milanese army of Barnabò Visconti in 1639 and a pyrrhic victory in the Republic of Siena’s struggle to retain its independence from Florence, two months before a decisive defeat at the Battle of Marciano.

Pontedera hotels from TripAdvisor.co.uk

More reading:

Giovanni Gentile, intellectual advocate of Fascism

Teresa Noce - partisan and activist who became an elected Deputy

Palmiro Togliatti, the Communist leader who survived an assassination attempt

Also on this day:

1690: The birth of virtuoso violinist Francesco Maria Veracini

1891: The birth of engineer Corradino D'Ascanio, inventor of the Vespa scooter

1922: The birth of opera singer Renata Tebaldi

(Picture credits: University building and Pontedera palazzo by Sailko via Creative Commons)


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30 May 2017

Giovanni Gentile – philosopher

The principal intellectual spokesman for fascism


Giovanni Gentile wrote part of The Doctrine of Fascism for Benito Mussolini
Giovanni Gentile wrote part of The Doctrine
of Fascism for Benito Mussolini
Giovanni Gentile, a major figure in Italian idealist philosophy, was born on this day in 1875 in Castelvetrano in Sicily.

Known as ‘the philosopher of Fascism’, Gentile was the ghostwriter of part of Benito Mussolini’s The Doctrine of Fascism in 1932. His own ‘actual idealism’ was strongly influenced by the German philosopher, Georg Hegel.

Gentile's rejection of individualism and acceptance of collectivism helped him justify the totalitarian element of Fascism.

After a series of university appointments, Gentile became professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Rome in 1917.

While writing The Philosophy of Marx – La filosophia di Marx – a Hegelian examination of Karl Marx’s ideas, he met writer and philosopher Benedetto Croce. The two men became friends and co-editors of the periodical La Critica until 1924, when a lasting disagreement occurred over Gentile’s embrace of Fascism.

Gentile was Minister of Education in the Fascist government of Italy from October 1922 to July 1924 carrying out wide reforms, which had a lasting impact on Italian education.

In 1925 he served as president of two commissions on constitutional reform, helping to lay the foundations of the Fascist corporate state.

Gentile is buried in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence
Gentile is buried in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence
After acting as president of the Supreme Council of Public Education and as a member of the Fascist Grand Council between 1925 and 1929, he saw his political influence steadily decline.

His most important achievement was the Enciclopedia Italiana, which he began to plan in 1925 and edited until 1943 and he also wrote prolifically on the subjects of philosophy and education.

After the fall of Benito Mussolini in 1943, Gentile supported the Fascist Social Republic established by the Germans at Salò. He served as president of the Academy of Italy, Italy’s foremost intellectual institution, until his death.

In 1944 a group of anti-Fascist partisans shot Gentile dead as he returned from the prefecture in Florence. Ironically he had been there arguing for the release from prison of anti-Fascist intellectuals.

The church of Santa Maria Assunta, also known as the Chiesa Madre - mother church - in Castelvetrano
The church of Santa Maria Assunta, also known as the
Chiesa Madre - mother church - in Castelvetrano
Travel tip:

Castelvetrano, the birthplace of Giovanni Gentile, is in the province of Trapani in Sicily. It is first mentioned in historical records dating from the 12th century. The Church of St John, which is just outside the city walls, was founded in 1412. The mother church, Chiesa Madre, which dates back to the 16th century, is in the town’s main square, Piazza Tagliavia. The remains of Selinunte, an ancient Greek city, are just outside the city, on a site overlooking the sea.

The Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence
The Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence
Travel tip:

Gentile was living and working in Florence when he was shot dead by anti-Fascists on 15 April, 1944. He is buried in the church of Santa Croce beside the remains of Galileo and Machiavelli. The Basilica of Santa Croce is the principal Franciscan Church in Florence and is the burial place of some of the most illustrious Italians. It is also known to Italians as the Temple of the Italian Glories.

More reading:


Why Luigi Einaudi signed the Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals 

Benito Mussolini and the Founding of the Italian Fascists

How the Republic of Salò was Mussolini's last stand

Also on this day:


1924: The anti-Fascist speech that cost a socialist politician his life