34 Facts About Gaetano Salvemini

Gaetano Salvemini was an Italian Socialist and antifascist politician, historian and writer.

Gaetano Salvemini advocated a third way between Communists and Christian Democracy in postwar Italy.

Gaetano Salvemini was born in the town of Molfetta, Apulia, in the poor south of Italy, in an extended family of farmers and fishermen of modest means.

Gaetano Salvemini's father, Ilarione Salvemini, was a carabiniere and part-time teacher.

Gaetano Salvemini had been a radical republican who had fought as a Red Shirt following Giuseppe Garibaldi in his fight for Italian unification.

Gaetano Salvemini was admitted at the University of Florence, where he met mostly students of northern Italy and engaged with young socialists who introduced him to Marxism, the ideas of Carlo Cattaneo and the Italian socialist Filippo Turati's journal Critica Sociale, as well as his first wife Maria Minervini.

Gaetano Salvemini went on to teach history at the University of Pisa and in 1916 was appointed Professor of Modern History at the University of Florence.

Gaetano Salvemini became increasingly concerned with Italian politics and adhered to the Italian Socialist Party.

Gaetano Salvemini reproached Giolitti for exploiting the backwardness of Southern Italy for short-term political goals by appeasing the landlords while engaging with corrupt political go-betweens with ties to the underworld.

Gaetano Salvemini opposed the costly military campaign in Libya during Italo-Turkish War.

Gaetano Salvemini thought that the war did not meet the real needs of the country in need of far-reaching economic and social reforms but was a dangerous collusion between unrealistic nationalism and corporate interests.

In 1911, Gaetano Salvemini left the PSI because of the "silence and indifference" on the war by the party, and he founded the weekly political review L'Unita, which serve as the voice of militant democrats in Italy for the next decade.

Gaetano Salvemini criticised the government's imperial designs in Africa as chauvinist foolishness.

Gaetano Salvemini became one of the leaders of the democratic interventionists with Leonida Bissolati.

Gaetano Salvemini abandoned the Socialist Party to adhere to an independent humanitarian socialism, but he maintained a commitment to radical reform throughout his life.

Gaetano Salvemini supported the internationalist programme of self-determination of US President Woodrow Wilson, which envisioned a readjustment of the frontiers of Italy along clearly-recognisable lines of nationality, in contrast to the irredentist policy of Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino.

Gaetano Salvemini joined the opposition after the murder of the socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti on 10 June 1924, when it became clear that Mussolini wanted to establish a one-party dictatorship.

Gaetano Salvemini worked to maintain a strong network of contacts among antifascist intellectuals throughout Italy while much of the Italian academic world bowed to the regime.

Gaetano Salvemini's name was on top of the list of the fascist death squads during raids on 4 October 1925 in Florence.

Gaetano Salvemini was dismissed from the University of Florence, and his Italian citizenship was revoked in 1926.

In exile, Gaetano Salvemini continued to actively organize resistance against Mussolini in France, England, and finally the United States.

Gaetano Salvemini first toured the United States in January 1927 and lectured with a clear antifascist agenda.

Gaetano Salvemini published The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy, contradicting the widely held belief that Mussolini had saved Italy from Bolshevism.

In 1934, Gaetano Salvemini accepted a position created especially for him, to teach Italian civilization at Harvard University, where he would remain until 1948.

Gaetano Salvemini wrote articles in important journals like Foreign Affairs and travelled around the country to warn American public opinion against the dangers of fascism.

Gaetano Salvemini joined the Italian Emergency Rescue Committee, which raised money for Italian political refugees and worked to convince American authorities to admit them.

Gaetano Salvemini obtained US citizenship in 1940 in the belief of having greater opportunity to influence US policies toward Italy.

Gaetano Salvemini's fear was that Roosevelt would give Churchill and his conservative agenda a free hand in postwar Italy that would benefit the monarchy and those who had collaborated with Mussolini.

Gaetano Salvemini was a familiar figure in the younger years of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Gaetano Salvemini hoped that the Action Party, a post-war political party that emerged from Giustizia e Liberta, could provide a third force, a socialist-republican coalition uniting reformist socialists and genuine democrats as an alternative for the Communists and the Christian Democrats.

Gaetano Salvemini spent the last period of his life in Sorrento and never ceased to denounce the ancient Italian evils: inefficiency, scandals and the lengthy justicial procedures that continued to favour the powerful.

Gaetano Salvemini lamented the public schools, which he considered not to be forming a real critical conscience.

Gaetano Salvemini was among the first and most effective opponents of fascism.

Nevertheless, Gaetano Salvemini was an imperative force who left a permanent mark on Italian politics and historiography.