Abstract

Before becoming an important historian, Paolo Spriano was a remarkable journalist. After a short experience at the Turinese daily newspaper "Giustizia e Libertà" - in whose ranks he had fought as a partisan - while in Turin he worked for "l'Unità", both reporting city news and reviewing history books (among others Gramsci's prison notebooks). By the mid 1950s, he grew more and more puzzled by the forms of development of Italian capitalism and their effects on the workers' conditions. At the same time, he began to question the Leninist conception of the State as unfit for the conditions in which the Pci was called upon to act in Republican Italy, under the rule of an advanced democratic constitution. Although strongly criticizing the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising, in 1956 he chose to remain in the Party. Thirty years later, as shown by his book "Le passioni di un decennio" and by his correspondence with Norberto Bobbio, Spriano proved capable of a balanced re-examination of Stalinism and its fallout with the Italian Left.