‘Am listless and sleepy, as I have never been before. I sleep little at nights: before me I always see the ruin of Italy, . .’ This is from the diaries of the Italian writer and philosopher Benedetto Croce, who died 70 years ago today. Reluctantly, he took on, briefly, active political roles before and after Mussolini’s rise and fall, but he is best remembered for his philosophical works and contributions to liberal political theory.
Croce published other significant works around this time, not least Aesthetic (1902), Logic (1908), and Philosophy of the Practical (1908). In 1903, he also founded (in collaboration with his friend the philosopher Giovanni Gentile) La Critica, a journal of cultural criticism in which, over the next 40 years, he would publish nearly all of his writings. Hitherto, he had eschewed interest in politics, but in 1910 he was persuaded into a more public role, being appointed to the Italian Senate. In 1914, he married Adela Rossi, with whom he had four daughters. He opposed Italy’s participation in the First World War. In 1919, he supported the government of Francesco Saverio Nitti, and was appointed Minister of Public Education - a position he held between 1920 and 1921.
Initially, he supported Mussolini’s fascist government, but by 1925 he had written and signed a Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals. After Mussolini’s fall, in 1943, he became Minister without Portofilio of the new democratic government and a member of the Constituent Assembly. From 1943 to 1947, he was President of the reconstituted Liberal party. In 1947, he retired from politics and established the Institute for Historical Studies in his Naples home, where he had an extensive library. From 1949 until 1952, he was president of PEN International, the worldwide writers’ association, and he was nominated 16 times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died on 20 November 1952. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica and the New World Encyclopedia.
Croce kept a diary for much of his life; and at some point had them privatively printed in six volumes. But after the Second World War, a year’s worth of his diary entries in 1943/1944 were published in Quaderni della Critica. These were then translated into English by Sylvia Sprigge for publication by George Allen & Unwin in 1950 as Croce, the King and the Allies: Extracts from a diary by Benedetto Croce July 1943 - June 1944. This was re-published in 2019 by Routledge - an edition which can be sampled at Googlebooks. Extracts of Croce’s diaries from other periods in his life can also be found in the biography Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism by Fabio Fernando Rizi (which can be digitally borrowed from Internet Archive).
A foreword to the 1943/1944 diary extracts provided by Croce for Quaderni della Critica was also included in the English editions. He wrote: ‘Historical accounts are beginning to appear in print of the nine months from early September 1943 to June 1944, a period when Government and political party activity could only take place in southern Italy and in the islands. I thought I might correct and integrate certain errors and certain omissions not easy to avoid in such accounts, with these notes from a diary, which I have been keeping these last forty years in a fairly brief form, at the beginning or end of my day, and whose purpose has been to note the course of my literary work. But after July 25th 1943, owing to the rush of events, the diary gradually filled with notes on political matters. In the following pages are extracts without the literary and private notes, of which I have left only a few in the early pages so that the character and nature of the Diary may be kept in mind. The political notes were a part of it, and at first were entered occasionally and almost involuntarily. Some details of little importance I have left in, being desirous and careful not to offend the susceptibilities or rouse the resentment of any one, for my purpose is solely that which I have already outlined. I do not know whether I have always succeeded in this, despite the goodwill which I have put into it.’
And here are three extracts (including the first) from Croce, the King and the Allies.
25 July 1943, Sorrento
‘In the morning, historical reading; but in the afternoon, visits from friends. Parente, both the Morellis, Zanotti Bianco, Petaccia. The Dohrns are here too. I was tired and had gone to bed at eleven o’clock when a telephone call from Signorina Elena di Serracapriola’s villa brought the news that Mussolini had resigned and that the new Government had been entrusted to Badoglio by the King. Parente and the Morellis, who had gone away half an hour ago, on hearing the news also arrived, jubilant, and we talked of the event. Back to bed, but I could not close my eyes till four o’clock or later. The feeling I have is of liberation from an evil which weighed upon the heart’s core; derivative evils and dangers remain, but that evil will not return.’
20 August 1943
‘Am listless and sleepy, as I have never been before. I sleep little at nights: before me I always see the ruin of Italy, and the news of Giovanni Laterza’s bad health, rapidly deteriorating, depresses me. When they brought the news of the fall of Fascism to his sick-bed on July 26th, he ordered the words “God be praised” to be written at the head of all letters and bills of that day. In the afternoon, as best I could, took up the threads of work in hand, including the revised elaboration of Blanch. The Giornale d’ltalia has printed my article on the Italian Academy despite the veto of the censors which Bergamini has overridden. But other articles on the subject are forbidden. I am told that the King said, “The Academy is not to be tampered with any more than the Senate.” But the Senate too, unworthy and corrupt as it is, will have to be ‘tampered with.’
17 September 1943
‘In the morning a visit from an American journalist, Kearney, who asked me some political questions, which I answered as best I could, what with being tired, not having slept and it being stiflingly hot. While Elena was helping to translate my answers into English, the English Admiral, J. B. Morse, came to visit me with his aide, Richard Long, and we had a short conversation. The lieutenant asked me who were the dangerous or Fascist people in Sorrento, and I asked to be excused because I could not, in my old age, begin doing things I had never done in the course of my life, to which the lieutenant agreed and said he well understood. The Germans left over there were mentioned in the conversation; but the Dohrn family, although attached to their country, has been noted as ‘neutral.’ In the evening a much famed journalist, Knickerbocker, came to say a lot of kind things to me, and then talked for a long time with my daughters, and wanting to give proof of his admiration, he wrote some lines by which to remember him in a copy of Shakespeare which they had with them.’
22 September 1943
‘Raimondo has left again. Suffocating heat continues. Tight feeling about the heart for Naples in the hands of the Germans. From here we hear explosions and see fires, and get rumours of people killed, devastation and looting. General Donovan and a journalist called Whitaker, together with an American officer called Tomkins, whom I got to know in the last few days and who has been in Italy previously for a long time, came to see me. The General told me that large supplies have been prepared for Naples, to be landed ten or fifteen days after the occupation. He said it might be a good thing if I let this be known in Naples. I said I would spread the news among people I shall see, but that I have no means of communicating with Naples. Similarly, with another of his suggestions that the Neapolitans should try to prevent the Germans from destroying the port. Whitaker offered me presses, paper and ink with which to print a paper here! General Donovan asked me how the spirit of the Italians was, and I said that what all the best Italians wanted, and what would most encourage them, would be permission to form a combatant legion under the Italian flag to co-operate with the Anglo-American armies in liberating Italian soil from the Germans; and then, when he asked me whether there was anybody who could command such a legion, I gave him General Pavone’s name, a man of an old southern family, a patriot and a liberal, and presently a member of the Party of Action.’
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