Giovanni Cassandro (21 April 1913 - 10 October 1989) was an Italian Jurist by training, with a particular focus on Legal history. During the 1930s he worked as a government archivist, first in Venice and then in Naples, which gave him the opportunity to develop an abiding specialism in the wider history of Italy, especially with regard to the south. He also took a growing interest in politics, becoming a liberal activist during the closing years of the dictatorship and a member of the team around Benedetto Croce that re-established the Liberal Party after the arrest of Mussolini in July 1943. He served as party secretary in 1944 and again during 1946/47. Cassandro remained active in national politics till 1947, when he accepted a professorship in Legal history at the University of Bari. He later moved north, taking a series of professorships straddling the interface between Law and History at the Sapienza University of Rome. Between 1955 and 1967 he combined his university work with a position as one of the fifteen judge at the newly established Constitutional Court in Rome.
Biography
Giovanni Italo Cassandro was born in Barletta, an ancient coastal town a short distance to the north-west of Bari. Michele Cassandro (1876-1962), his father, was a school languages teacher, schools inspector and the author of various published historical studies on local topics. He was still exceptionally young when he graduated from the University of Bari in 1933 with a degree in Jurisprudence.
Directly after graduating he competed in the national exam for a management position with the National Archives department, achieving the top position on the results list. In 1934 he accepted a posting by the department to Venice. This gave him the opportunity to get to know the historian-politician Roberto Cessi who had himself worked at the Venice Archives Department between 1908 and 1920, and was now based at the nearby University of Padua as professor of medieval and modern history. He was also able to become well acquainted with the medievalist historian Gino Luzzatto. Cassandro would always acknowledge a huge debt to both men whose history teaching and antifascist advocacy during Cassandro's two and a half years in Venice represented a far more appealing form of university-level further education than he would have received by staying in a university and working for a doctorate. There was at least one respect in which he was even more deeply indebted to the (originally) Neapolitan historian-philosopher and literary critic Fausto Nicolini whom also befriended him during this period. In or before 1936 Giovanni Cassandro married Rachele Nicolini, the daughter of this much respected mentor. In 1936 he moved to Naples, taking an equivalent management position with the Archives department there to the one he had been fulfilling in Venice. Naples was the home city of his newly acquired father-in law, Fausto Nicolini, and he continued to be hugely influenced by Nicolini both on a personal level and with regard to his on-going academic research. He had already published a number of historical studies even before 1933, but on his arrival in Naples, surrounded by the vast repository of material held at the archive, Cassandro embarked on a life-long study of the region identified, before 1860, as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.