Gaetano Salvemini (; 8 September 1873 – 6 September 1957) was an Italian socialist and anti-fascist politician, historian, and writer. Born in a family of modest means, he became an acclaimed historian both in Italy and abroad, particularly in the United States, after he was forced into exile by Benito Mussolini's Italian fascist regime.
Initially engaging with the Italian Socialist Party, Salvemini later adhered to an independent humanitarian socialism and maintained a commitment to radical political and social reform throughout his life. Salvemini offered significant leadership to political refugees in the United States. His prolific writings shaped the attitudes of American policymakers during and after the Second World War. His transatlantic exile experience endowed him with new insights and a fresh perspective to explain the rise of fascism and shaped the memory of the war and political life in Italy after 1945.
In post-war Italy, Salvemini advocated a third way between the Italian Communist Party and Christian Democracy.
Early life and career
Salvemini was born in the town of Molfetta, Apulia, in the poor south of the Kingdom of Italy, in an extended family of farmers and fishermen of modest means. His father, Ilarione Salvemini, was a carabiniere and part-time teacher. He had been a radical republican who had fought as a Redshirt following Giuseppe Garibaldi in his fight for Italian unification. His mother, Emanuela Salvemini (née Turtur), was a socialist. His parents' political leanings, as well as the poverty of the region, shaped his own political and social ideals throughout his life.
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, which he would revise critically later, the ideas of Carlo Cattaneo, and the Italian socialist Filippo Turati's journal Critica Sociale, as well as his first wife Maria Minervini. After completing his studies in Florence in 1894, his historical studies on medieval Florence, the French Revolution, and Giuseppe Mazzini established him as an acclaimed historian. In 1897, he married Maria Minervini, the daughter of an engineer from Apulia, whom he had met in Florence and with whom he had five children: Filippo, Leonida, Corrado, Ugo and Elena.
In 1901, after years of teaching in secondary schools, Salvemini was appointed as Professor of Medieval and Modern History at the University of Messina. While in Messina, he lost his wife, five children, and his sister in the devastating 1908 Messina earthquake before his eyes, while hiding under an architrave of a window; an experience that shaped his life. He wrote: "I am a miserable wretch, without home or hearth, who has seen the happiness of eleven years destroyed in two minutes." He went on to teach history at the University of Pisa and in 1916 was appointed Professor of Modern History at the University of Florence. Over the years, he aligned with the economist Luigi Einaudi and gradually developed a pragmatic inquiry and inductive analysis, which he called concretismo – a combination of secular values from the Age of Enlightenment, liberalism, and socialism – in contrast to more philosophical thinkers like the liberal Benedetto Croce and the Marxist Antonio Gramsci.
Engaging with socialism
Salvemini became increasingly concerned with Italian politics and adhered to the Italian Socialist Party (, PSI). In 1910, he published an article in the socialist newspaper Avanti!, "The Minister of the Underworld" ("Il ministro della malavita"), in which he attacked the power system and political machine of the liberal prime minister Giovanni Giolitti, who dominated Italian political life in the early 20th century. 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. According to Salvemini, Giolitti exploited "the miserable conditions of the Mezzogiorno in order to link the mass of southern deputies to himself."