Abstract

Since many years, a rich historiographic production has deepened the role of European intellectuals in the period between the two wars, emphasizing resistance, permeability, compromises by academic class towards the state and nation building processes and the colonial expansion policies promoted by national governments. In a city such as Catania, which, since the «impresa of Libya», plays a strategic role in the Mediterranean and North African projection of the Italian colonial expansion, the university and his academic body strengthens its own political and cultural engagement in the transition from the liberal state to fascism. Through the biographies and inaugural lectures of three important professors of the University of Catania, the rectors' inaugural relations and other documentation found in the Historical Archives of the University of Catania and in the Central State Archives, this essay provides a modest contribution for the history of the University of Catania between the nineteenth and twentieth century.