Aldo Garòsci

Aldo Garòsci (October 13, 1907 – January 3, 2000) was an Italian historian, socialist, anti-fascist activist-politician and, in his later professional career, a leading political journalist-commentator. Aldo Garòsci was born at Meana di Susa, a small mountain town overlooking the Susa Valley, roughly equidistant between Turin, to the east, and the mountain pass across into Savoy, to the west. Aldo was his father's third son. Antonio Garosci (1861-1941) was not originally from Piedmont. He had been born in San Remo down by the coast. Antonio Garosci worked as a businessman-entrepreneur in the agri-foods sector. Despite having arrived as outsiders, by the time of Aldo's birth, the Garosci family were well networked in the valley. His mother, born Alessandra Sampò (1879-1938) was significantly younger than her husband. She had been born at Bene Vagienna (Cuneo), another small mountain town, located in the extreme south of Piedmont. Alessandra Sampò had grown up in a family of middle class intellectuals. Her sister Nelda was married to the noted medievalist Giorgio Falco, whom she had met at university. He attended elementary school locally and then moved on, like many sons of the Piedmontese "haute-bourgeoisie" to the "Istituto sociale" (Jesuit secondary school) in Turin: contemporaries included the writers Mario Soldati and Carlo Dionisotti. In 1925 Garòsci enrolled at the university in order to study for a degree in literature, as his aunt Nelda Falco had done. After a year he switched to Law, however. In 1929 he obtained a degree in Legal Philosophy with a dissertation concerning "Jean Bodin's Republic", which subsequently formed the basis for Garòsci's own first published book. His university studies were supervised by Gioele Solari, a strikingly large number of whose students later achieved notability (or, in the eyes of many governments, notoriety) as active anti-fascists: these included Piero Gobetti, Mario Andreis, Giorgio Agosti, Dante Livio Bianco, Norberto Bobbio and Alessandro Passerin d'Entrèves.