Abstract

The article examines the intellectual and political path of the jurist Piero Calamandrei between the fascist and the postwar periods. It considers Calamandrei’s attitude toward politics and engagement within fascism and antifascism. If Calamandrei opposed the regime in-the-making until the mid 1920s, the 1930s were characterized by his political inaction and at the end of the decade the jurist collaborated to the drafting of the Code of civil procedure named after the minister Dino Grandi. In the postwar period Calamandrei reflected upon the fascist period in his speeches collected in the volume Uomini e città della Resistenza (1955). Here Calamandrei confronted the ghosts of his political disengagement, while at the same time identifying with the antifascits who had fallen in the war. He also channelled the public discourse towards a collective identification with the Resistance, which had actually been the experience of a minority.