Vida y pensamiento de Antonio Gramsci (1926-1937)

An unavoidable figure of contemporary political thought, in Antonio Gramsci the philosopher and the journalist, the historian and the politician, the literary and cultural critic come together. Elected deputy in April 1924 and secretary of the Communist Party of Italy shortly after, the brilliant Sardinian was sentenced by a fascist Special Court to twenty years' imprisonment in June 1928. After years of ill-treatment and confinement that would ultimately undermine his fragile health , died in Rome in 1937. It is precisely in his last decade of life, years in prison and isolation -except for the visits of his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht, except for Piero Sraffa-, distant the family and increasingly remote from his party, when Gramsci rebuilds, aided by his readings, a whole intellectual world of his own, which will light up the marvelous Prison Notebooks. Heterodox Marxist, his intellectual courage, his concerns for language, for culture, for the popular (subordinate) classes, make his work, created in such difficult conditions, an inexcusable reference for all the left. Giuseppe Vacca, to whom we owe some of the most outstanding contributions on Gramsci, masterfully combines biography and intellectual and political exegesis in this work, an admirable inquiry into what Gramsci was able to think, was able to write, was able to scrutinize.