Geography Archives: Italy

Andy Merrifield went to Sardinia searching for Gramsci’s phantom. We can’t reinvent Gramsci’s past, shouldn’t reinvent that past. But we might keep his memory alive, find solidarity in that memory, keep him free from any renaming, from the encyclopedia and the axe. His phantom, his death mask, can haunt our present and our future. To remember what happened to him is never to forget his dark times, the dark times that might well threaten us again.

In France, the far right is likely to be the leading political force in the European elections of 9 June 2024, and probably the second (or third) force in the European Union. A relatively large number of far right parties are now on the winning side in national elections, and are even taking part in national governments.

This is truly a new political fact: particularly on the issue of war, but not only, the 20-year-olds are coming back on the scene.

Piero and Nino exchanged ideas, criticized one another, encouraged each other; Nino often used Piero, seven-years his junior, as an intellectual sounding board, as a trusted interlocutor, asking for advice, for suggestions, whether his friend could chase up a source, a book or journal, a magazine or newspaper article, could he confirm this fact and that, find out some precise detail about Croce’s historical studies, if Machiavelli ever wrote anything about economics, or David Ricardo about philosophy.

University professors and activists are calling on the Italian government to cancel joint research funding with Israel unless the country ceases its bombardment of Palestinian civilians.

Since the great climate strikes of 2019, and even more so after the acknowledgment of the environmental roots of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ecological transition seems to be everywhere.

Mattarella: ‘Batons against young people are an expression of failure.’ The president issues a sharp warning to the police and interior minister. The government: ‘Law enforcement is not to be touched.’

Laid-off workers of the former GKN plant in Campi Bisenzio, who have been leading a 900-day long struggle, have proposed to take over the plant by forming a cooperative to facilitate futuristic production.

Some 85 percent of staff of the National Health Service and private medical facilities stayed away from work.

Fifteen thousand people marched through the streets after a young woman’s murder. ‘Femicide is not a crime of passion, it is a crime of power. It is a state murder, because the state does not defend us and does not protect us.’

Ninety-seven years back, via Giovanni Battista Morgagni, number 25, was a more modest lodging house, home of a quietly discreet pensionante called Antonio Gramsci.

Though much marxist theory has explored the recurrent cycles and patterns of historical capitalism, not enough attention has been given to the tendency of moments of politico-economic crisis to become an ideological contestation between fascism and communism in the context of a crisis of liberalism.

“A week or so on, John Berger was still with me, there in spirit. Or, better, I was still with him. When in Rome, I told myself…well, what better thing to do than to visit Gramsci, the great Marxist, whose grave lies in the city’s ‘Non-Catholic Cemetery’ in Testaccio.”

Newly declassified British files shed disturbing light on the origins and internal workings of Operation Gladio, a covert NATO plot deploying fascist terror militias across Italy. Have spies in London applied these lessons in Ukraine?

During the May 2023 Group of Seven (G7) summit, the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, near where the meeting was held.

The Joe Biden administration invited numerous authoritarian far-right leaders to the U.S. State Department’s so-called “Summit for Democracy”, including Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Poland’s Andrzej Duda, India’s Narendra Modi, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and Pakistan’s coup regime.

In a statement released this Thursday, the Italy-Cuba Friendship Association (ANAIC), also stated that it is an “absurd interference by the United States in the internal affairs” of Italy, by “asking for explanations” on this issue from the sanitary authorities, as revealed by Corriere della Sera newspaper.

Kailath, originally from Kerala but settled in the U.S., is one of the foremost names in the world in communications, control and signal processing. I remembered his words while reading the recent startling headlines that China has become the world leader in 37 of 44 critical technologies evaluated by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

One hundred years ago, in October 1922, Benito Mussolini’s paramilitary blackshirts marched on the Italian capital to demand the dissolution of the government of Prime Minister Luigi Facta.

This year is the centenary of the March on Rome, the coup that brought Mussolini’s fascist party to power in Italy in 1922.