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2012

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ABOUT ANTONIO GRAMSCI

Biography of Antonio Gramsci by Frank Rosengarten,

taken from the website of the International Gramsci Society

See also:

Pictures from the book: "Le donne di Casa Gramsci" (The women of Casa Gramsci)

Chronology (in Italian)

Antonio Gramsci was born on January 22, 1891 in Ales in the province of Cagliari in Sardinia. He was the fourth of seven children born to Francesco Gramsci and Giuseppina Marcias. His relationship with his father was never very close, but he had a strong affection and love for his mother, whose resilience, gift for story-telling and pungent humor made a lasting impression on him. Of his six siblings, Antonio enjoyed a mutual interest in literature with his younger sister Teresina, and seems to have always felt a spiritual kinship with his two brothers, Gennaro, the oldest of the Gramsci children, and Carlo, the youngest. Gennaro’s early embrace of socialism contributed significantly to Antonio’s political development.

In 1897, Antonio’s father was suspended and subsequently arrested and imprisoned for five years for alleged administrative abuses. Shortly thereafter, Giuseppina and her children moved to Ghilarza, where Antonio attended elementary school. Sometime during these years of trial and near poverty, he fell from the arms of a servant, to which his family attributed his hunched back and stunted growth: he was an inch or two short of five feet in height.

At the age of eleven, after completing elementary school, Antonio worked for two years in the tax office in Ghilarza, in order to help his financially strapped family. Because of the five-year absence of Francesco, these were years of bitter struggle. Nevertheless, he continued to study privately and eventually returned to school, where he was judged to be of superior intelligence, as indicated by excellent grades in all subjects.

Antonio continued his education, first in Santu Lussurgiu, about ten miles from Ghilarza, then, after graduating from secondary school, at the Dettori Lyceum in Cagliari, where he shared a room with his brother Gennaro, and where he came into contact for the first time with organized sectors of the working class and with radical and socialist politics. But these were also years of privation, during which Antonio was partially dependent on his father for financial support, which came only rarely. In his letters to his family, he accused his father repeatedly of unpardonable procrastination and neglect. His health deteriorated, and some of the nervous symptoms that were to plague him at a later time were already in evidence.

1911 was an important year in young Gramsci’s life. After graduating from the Cagliari lyceum, he applied for and won a scholarship to the University of Turin, an award reserved for needy students from the provinces of the former Kingdom of Sardinia. Among the other young people to compete for this scholarship was Palmiro Togliatti, future general secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and, with Gramsci and several others, among the most capable leaders of that embattled Party. Antonio enrolled in the Faculty of Letters. At the University he met Angelo Tasca and several of the other men with whom he was to share struggles first in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and then, after the split that took place in January 1921, in the PCI.

At the University, despite years of terrible suffering due to inadequate diet, unheated flats, and constant nervous exhaustion, Antonio took a variety of courses, mainly in the humanities but also in the social sciences and in linguistics, to which he was sufficiently attracted to contemplate academic specialization in that subject. Several of his professors, notably Matteo Bartoli, a linguist, and Umberto Cosmo, a Dante scholar, became personal friends.

In 1915, despite great promise as an academic scholar, Gramsci became an active member of the PSI, and began a journalistic career that made him among the most feared critical voices in Italy at that time. His column in the Turin edition of Avanti!, and his theatre reviews were widely read and influential. He regularly spoke at workers’ study-circles on various topics, such as the novels of Romain Rolland, for whom he felt a certain affinity, the Paris Commune, the French and Italian revolutions and the writings of Karl Marx. It was at this time, as the war dragged on and as Italian intervention became a bloody reality, Gramsci assumed a somewhat ambivalent stance, although his basic position was that the Italian socialists should use intervention as an occasion to turn Italian national sentiment in a revolutionary rather than a chauvinist direction. It was also at this time, in 1917 and 1918, that he began to see the need for integration of political and economic action with cultural work, which took form as a proletarian cultural association in Turin.

The outbreak of the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917 further stirred his revolutionary ardor, and for the remainder of the war and in the years thereafter Gramsci identified himself closely, although not entirely uncritically, with the methods and aims of the Russian revolutionary leadership and with the cause of socialist transformation throughout the advanced capitalist world.

In the spring of 1919, Gramsci, together with Angelo Tasca, Umberto Terracini and Togliatti, founded L'Ordine Nuovo: Rassegna Settimanale di Cultura Socialista (The New Order: A Weekly Review of Socialist Culture), which became an influential periodical (on a weekly and later on a bi-monthly publishing schedule) for the following five years among the radical and revolutionary Left in Italy. The review gave much attention to political and literary currents in Europe, the USSR, and the United States.

For the next few years, Gramsci devoted most of his time to the development of the factory council movement, and to militant journalism, which led in January 1921 to his siding with the Communist minority within the PSI at the Party’s Livorno Congress. He became a member of the PCI’s central committee, but did not play a leading role until several years later. He was among the most prescient representatives of the Italian Left at the inception of the fascist movement, and on several occasions predicted that unless unified action were taken against the rise of Mussolini’s movement, Italian democracy and Italian socialism would both suffer a disastrous defeat.

The years 1921 to 1926, years “of iron and fire” as he called them, were eventful and productive. They were marked in particular by the year and a half he lived in Moscow as an Italian delegate to the Communist International (May 1922- November 1923), his election to the Chamber of Deputies in April 1924, and his assumption of the position of general secretary of the PCI. His personal life was also filled with significant experiences, the chief one being his meeting with and subsequent marriage to Julka Schucht (1896-1980), a violinist and member of the Russian Communist Party whom he met during his stay in Russia. Antonio and Julka had two sons, Delio (1924-1981), and Giuliano, born in 1926, who lives today in Moscow with his wife.

On the evening of November 8, 1926, Gramsci was arrested in Rome and, in accordance with a series of “Exceptional Laws” enacted by the fascist-dominated Italian legislature, committed to solitary confinement at the Regina Coeli prison. This began a ten-year odyssey, marked by almost constant physical and psychic pain as a result of a prison experience that culminated, on April 27, 1937, in his death from a cerebral hemorrhage. No doubt the stroke that killed him was but the final outcome of years and years of illnesses that were never properly treated in prison.

Yet as everyone familiar with the trajectory of Gramsci’s life knows, these prison years were also rich with intellectual achievement, as recorded in the Notebooks he kept in his various cells that eventually saw the light after World War II, and as recorded also in the extraordinary letters he wrote from prison to friends and especially to family members, the most important of whom was not his wife Julka but rather a sister-in-law, Tania Schucht. She was the person most intimately and unceasingly involved in his prison life, since she had resided in Rome for many years and was in a position to provide him not only with a regular exchange of thoughts and feelings in letter form but with articles of clothing and with numerous foods and medicines he sorely needed to survive the grinding daily routine of prison life.

After being sentenced on June 4, 1928, with other Italian Communist leaders, to 20 years, 4 months and 5 days in prison, Gramsci was consigned to a prison in Turi, in the province of Bari, which turned out to be his longest place of detention (June 1928 -- November 1933). Thereafter he was under police guard at a clinic in Formia, from which he was transferred in August 1935, always under guard, to the Quisisana Hospital in Rome. It was there that he spent the last two years of his life. Among the people, in addition to Tania, who helped him either by writing to him or by visiting him when possible, were his mother Giuseppina, who died in 1933, his brother Carlo, his sisters Teresina and Grazietta, and his good friend, the economist Piero Sraffa, who throughout Gramsci’s prison ordeal provided a crucial and indispenable service to Gramsci. Sraffa used his personal funds and numerous professional contacts that were necessary in order to obtain the books and periodicals Gramsci needed in prison. Gramsci had a prodigious memory, but it is safe to say that without Sraffa’s assistance, and without the intermediary role often played by Tania, the Prison Notebooks as we have them would not have come to fruition.

Gramsci’s intellectual work in prison did not emerge in the light of day until several years after World War II, when the PC began publishing scattered sections of the Notebooks and some of the approximately 500 letters he wrote from prison. By the 1950s, and then with increasing frequency and intensity, his prison writings attracted interest and critical commentary in a host of countries, not only in the West but in the so-called third world as well. Some of his terminology became household words on the left, the most important of which, and the most complex, is the term “hegemony” as he used it in his writings and applied to the twin task of understanding the reasons underlying both the successes and the failures of socialism on a global scale, and of elaborating a feasible program for the realization of a socialist vision within the really existing conditions that prevailed in the world. Among these conditions were the rise and triumph of fascism and the disarray on the left that had ensued as a result of that triumph. Also extremely pertinent, both theoretically and practically, were such terms and phrases as “organic intellectual,” “national popular,” and “historical bloc” which, even if not coined by Gramsci, acquired such radically new and original implications in his writing as to constitute effectively new formulations in the realm of political philosophy

Antonio Gramsci was born on January 22, 1891 in Ales in the province of Cagliari in Sardinia. He was the fourth of seven children born to Francesco Gramsci and Giuseppina Marcias. His relationship with his father was never very close, but he had a strong affection and love for his mother, whose resilience, gift for story-telling and pungent humor made a lasting impression on him. Of his six siblings, Antonio enjoyed a mutual interest in literature with his younger sister Teresina, and seems to have always felt a spiritual kinship with his two brothers, Gennaro, the oldest of the Gramsci children, and Carlo, the youngest. Gennaro’s early embrace of socialism contributed significantly to Antonio’s political development.

In 1897, Antonio’s father was suspended and subsequently arrested and imprisoned for five years for alleged administrative abuses. Shortly thereafter, Giuseppina and her children moved to Ghilarza, where Antonio attended elementary school. Sometime during these years of trial and near poverty, he fell from the arms of a servant, to which his family attributed his hunched back and stunted growth: he was an inch or two short of five feet in height.

At the age of eleven, after completing elementary school, Antonio worked for two years in the tax office in Ghilarza, in order to help his financially strapped family. Because of the five-year absence of Francesco, these were years of bitter struggle. Nevertheless, he continued to study privately and eventually returned to school, where he was judged to be of superior intelligence, as indicated by excellent grades in all subjects.

Antonio continued his education, first in Santu Lussurgiu, about ten miles from Ghilarza, then, after graduating from secondary school, at the Dettori Lyceum in Cagliari, where he shared a room with his brother Gennaro, and where he came into contact for the first time with organized sectors of the working class and with radical and socialist politics. But these were also years of privation, during which Antonio was partially dependent on his father for financial support, which came only rarely. In his letters to his family, he accused his father repeatedly of unpardonable procrastination and neglect. His health deteriorated, and some of the nervous symptoms that were to plague him at a later time were already in evidence.

1911 was an important year in young Gramsci’s life. After graduating from the Cagliari lyceum, he applied for and won a scholarship to the University of Turin, an award reserved for needy students from the provinces of the former Kingdom of Sardinia. Among the other young people to compete for this scholarship was Palmiro Togliatti, future general secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and, with Gramsci and several others, among the most capable leaders of that embattled Party. Antonio enrolled in the Faculty of Letters. At the University he met Angelo Tasca and several of the other men with whom he was to share struggles first in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and then, after the split that took place in January 1921, in the PCI.

At the University, despite years of terrible suffering due to inadequate diet, unheated flats, and constant nervous exhaustion, Antonio took a variety of courses, mainly in the humanities but also in the social sciences and in linguistics, to which he was sufficiently attracted to contemplate academic specialization in that subject. Several of his professors, notably Matteo Bartoli, a linguist, and Umberto Cosmo, a Dante scholar, became personal friends.

In 1915, despite great promise as an academic scholar, Gramsci became an active member of the PSI, and began a journalistic career that made him among the most feared critical voices in Italy at that time. His column in the Turin edition of Avanti!, and his theatre reviews were widely read and influential. He regularly spoke at workers’ study-circles on various topics, such as the novels of Romain Rolland, for whom he felt a certain affinity, the Paris Commune, the French and Italian revolutions and the writings of Karl Marx. It was at this time, as the war dragged on and as Italian intervention became a bloody reality, Gramsci assumed a somewhat ambivalent stance, although his basic position was that the Italian socialists should use intervention as an occasion to turn Italian national sentiment in a revolutionary rather than a chauvinist direction. It was also at this time, in 1917 and 1918, that he began to see the need for integration of political and economic action with cultural work, which took form as a proletarian cultural association in Turin.

The outbreak of the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917 further stirred his revolutionary ardor, and for the remainder of the war and in the years thereafter Gramsci identified himself closely, although not entirely uncritically, with the methods and aims of the Russian revolutionary leadership and with the cause of socialist transformation throughout the advanced capitalist world.

In the spring of 1919, Gramsci, together with Angelo Tasca, Umberto Terracini and Togliatti, founded L'Ordine Nuovo: Rassegna Settimanale di Cultura Socialista (The New Order: A Weekly Review of Socialist Culture), which became an influential periodical (on a weekly and later on a bi-monthly publishing schedule) for the following five years among the radical and revolutionary Left in Italy. The review gave much attention to political and literary currents in Europe, the USSR, and the United States.

For the next few years, Gramsci devoted most of his time to the development of the factory council movement, and to militant journalism, which led in January 1921 to his siding with the Communist minority within the PSI at the Party’s Livorno Congress. He became a member of the PCI’s central committee, but did not play a leading role until several years later. He was among the most prescient representatives of the Italian Left at the inception of the fascist movement, and on several occasions predicted that unless unified action were taken against the rise of Mussolini’s movement, Italian democracy and Italian socialism would both suffer a disastrous defeat.

The years 1921 to 1926, years “of iron and fire” as he called them, were eventful and productive. They were marked in particular by the year and a half he lived in Moscow as an Italian delegate to the Communist International (May 1922- November 1923), his election to the Chamber of Deputies in April 1924, and his assumption of the position of general secretary of the PCI. His personal life was also filled with significant experiences, the chief one being his meeting with and subsequent marriage to Julka Schucht (1896-1980), a violinist and member of the Russian Communist Party whom he met during his stay in Russia. Antonio and Julka had two sons, Delio (1924-1981), and Giuliano, born in 1926, who lives today in Moscow with his wife.

On the evening of November 8, 1926, Gramsci was arrested in Rome and, in accordance with a series of “Exceptional Laws” enacted by the fascist-dominated Italian legislature, committed to solitary confinement at the Regina Coeli prison. This began a ten-year odyssey, marked by almost constant physical and psychic pain as a result of a prison experience that culminated, on April 27, 1937, in his death from a cerebral hemorrhage. No doubt the stroke that killed him was but the final outcome of years and years of illnesses that were never properly treated in prison.

Yet as everyone familiar with the trajectory of Gramsci’s life knows, these prison years were also rich with intellectual achievement, as recorded in the Notebooks he kept in his various cells that eventually saw the light after World War II, and as recorded also in the extraordinary letters he wrote from prison to friends and especially to family members, the most important of whom was not his wife Julka but rather a sister-in-law, Tania Schucht. She was the person most intimately and unceasingly involved in his prison life, since she had resided in Rome for many years and was in a position to provide him not only with a regular exchange of thoughts and feelings in letter form but with articles of clothing and with numerous foods and medicines he sorely needed to survive the grinding daily routine of prison life.

After being sentenced on June 4, 1928, with other Italian Communist leaders, to 20 years, 4 months and 5 days in prison, Gramsci was consigned to a prison in Turi, in the province of Bari, which turned out to be his longest place of detention (June 1928 -- November 1933). Thereafter he was under police guard at a clinic in Formia, from which he was transferred in August 1935, always under guard, to the Quisisana Hospital in Rome. It was there that he spent the last two years of his life. Among the people, in addition to Tania, who helped him either by writing to him or by visiting him when possible, were his mother Giuseppina, who died in 1933, his brother Carlo, his sisters Teresina and Grazietta, and his good friend, the economist Piero Sraffa, who throughout Gramsci’s prison ordeal provided a crucial and indispenable service to Gramsci. Sraffa used his personal funds and numerous professional contacts that were necessary in order to obtain the books and periodicals Gramsci needed in prison. Gramsci had a prodigious memory, but it is safe to say that without Sraffa’s assistance, and without the intermediary role often played by Tania, the Prison Notebooks as we have them would not have come to fruition.

Gramsci’s intellectual work in prison did not emerge in the light of day until several years after World War II, when the PC began publishing scattered sections of the Notebooks and some of the approximately 500 letters he wrote from prison. By the 1950s, and then with increasing frequency and intensity, his prison writings attracted interest and critical commentary in a host of countries, not only in the West but in the so-called third world as well. Some of his terminology became household words on the left, the most important of which, and the most complex, is the term “hegemony” as he used it in his writings and applied to the twin task of understanding the reasons underlying both the successes and the failures of socialism on a global scale, and of elaborating a feasible program for the realization of a socialist vision within the really existing conditions that prevailed in the world. Among these conditions were the rise and triumph of fascism and the disarray on the left that had ensued as a result of that triumph. Also extremely pertinent, both theoretically and practically, were such terms and phrases as “organic intellectual,” “national popular,” and “historical bloc” which, even if not coined by Gramsci, acquired such radically new and original implications in his writing as to constitute effectively new formulations in the realm of political philosophy.

___

Chronology (in Italian), courtesy: Fondazione Instituto Antonio Gramsci

1891 Il 22 gennaio nasce ad Ales (Cagliari, ora Oristano), da Francesco, impiegato presso l'ufficio del registro di Ghilarza, e da Giuseppina Marcias, quarto di sette figli (Gennaro, Grazietta, Emma, Antonio, Mario, Teresina, Carlo).

1894 Frequenta l'asilo delle suore di Sorgono.

1895 Inizia a manifestarsi la sua malformazione fisica, dovuta al morbo di Pott, ma attribuita dalla famiglia ad una presunta caduta dalle braccia di una donna di servizio.

1898 Il padre è arrestato per una irregolarità amministrativa. La madre si trasferisce, con i 7 figli, a Ghilarza.

1900 Il 27 ottobre il padre è condannato a 5 anni, 8 mesi e 22 giorni di carcere, da scontare a Gaeta.

1903 Consegue la licenza elementare, ottenendo il massimo dei voti in tutte le materie. Per le difficili condizioni economiche della famiglia, deve interrompere gli studi. Inizia a lavorare presso l'Agenzia delle Imposte dirette e del Catasto di Ghilarza.

1904 Il padre viene scarcerato e torna dalla famiglia a Ghilarza.

1905 Nell'autunno del 1905 si iscrive al ginnasio presso l'Istituto Carta-Meloni di Santu Lussurgiu.

1908 Ottenuta la licenza ginnasiale a Oristano, si iscrive al liceo Dettòri di Cagliari.

1910 Pubblica sul quotidiano di Cagliari «L'Unione sarda» il suo primo articolo dal

titolo A proposito di una rivoluzione.

1911 Conseguita la licenza liceale nel mese di luglio, trascorre alcuni mesi ad Oristano ospite dello zio Serafino come ripetitore del nipote Delio. Ad ottobre vince la borsa di studio del collegio Carlo Alberto di Torino per gli studenti disagiati delle vecchie province del Regno di Sardegna. Il 16 novembre si immatricola alla Facoltà di Lettere per Filologia moderna dell'Università di Torino.

1912 Il prof. Matteo Bartoli gli assegna alcune ricerche sul dialetto sardo e gli affida la cura delle dispense per il corso di glottologia dell'anno accademico 1912-1913.

1913 Con la firma Alfa Gamma scrive sul «Corriere universitario» gli articoli Per la verità e I Futuristi. Assiste in Sardegna alla campagna elettorale in vista delle prime elezioni a suffragio universale maschile (26 ottobre - 2 novembre).

1914 Ad ottobre, nel dibattito sulla posizione del Psi di fronte alla guerra, interviene su «Il Grido del popolo», con l'articolo Neutralità attiva ed operante.

1915 Interrompe gli studi universitari e si dedica al giornalismo, intensificando i rapporti con il movimento socialista. Nel dicembre viene assunto nella redazione torinese dell'«Avanti!». Contemporaneamente collabora al settimanale «Il Grido del popolo».

1917 Nel febbraio esce il numero unico della Federazione giovanile socialista piemontese «La città futura», da lui integralmente curato. A settembre assume la direzione dell'esecutivo provvisorio della sezione socialista di Torino e dirige fino a dicembre il «Grido del popolo». Fonda con un gruppo di giovani socialisti torinesi il «Club di vita morale».

1918 Il 15 dicembre esce il primo numero dell'edizione piemontese dell'«Avanti!» diretta da Ottavio Pastore, di cui è redattore insieme a Leonetti, Togliatti e Galetto.

1919 A febbraio pubblica un articolo dal titolo Stato e sovranità sul quindicinale «Energie nuove» di Piero Gobetti. In aprile, fonda con Togliatti, Tasca e Terracini, «L'Ordine nuovo», settimanale di cultura socialista, il cui primo numero esce il 1° Maggio. Sempre a maggio è eletto nella Commissione esecutiva della sezione socialista torinese. Il 20 luglio durante lo sciopero di solidarietà con le repubbliche comuniste di Russia, è arrestato e inviato per qualche giorno alle Carceri nuove di Torino.

1920 A maggio, partecipa a Firenze, in qualità di osservatore, alla riunione della frazione comunista astensionista di Bordiga. A novembre prende parte al convegno di Imola, dove si costituisce ufficialmente la frazione comunista del Psi.

1921 Il 1° gennaio esce a Torino il primo numero de «L'Ordine nuovo» quotidiano, di cui assume la direzione. Partecipa a Livorno al XVII Congresso del Psi (15-21 gennaio). Entra a far parte del Comitato centrale del Pcd'I.

1922 Nel corso del II congresso del Pcd'I (20-24 marzo), viene designato a rappresentare il partito nell'Esecutivo dell'Ic. Nel maggio si reca insieme a Mosca con Bordiga e Graziadei. Dal 7 all'11 giugno, partecipa alla seconda conferenza dell'Esecutivo allargato dell'Ic. In difficili condizioni di salute, dopo i lavori della conferenza è ricoverato nella casa di cura Serebrjanij bor, dove conosce Eugenia Schucht, che vi è ricoverata, e, a settembre, sua sorella Giulia. Partecipa al IV Congresso dell'Ic (5 nov. - 5 dic.). Il 25 novembre incontra Lenin.

1923 Impossibilitato a rientrare in Italia, a causa del mandato di cattura spiccato contro di lui, rimane a Mosca. A giugno partecipa ai lavori del III Esecutivo allargato dell'Ic. Il 3 dicembre giunge a Vienna occupandosi tra l'altro della redazione della terza serie dell'«Ordine nuovo». Tiene un fitto carteggio con Togliatti, Terracini, Scoccimarro.

1924 Il 12 febbraio esce a Milano il primo numero de «l'Unità». Eletto deputato alle elezioni politiche del 6 aprile nella circoscrizione del Veneto, a maggio rientra in Italia. Entra nell'Esecutivo del Pcd'I e si trasferisce a Roma. Nell'agosto è eletto segretario del partito. Il 10 agosto Giulia dà alla luce il loro primo figlio, Delio.

1925 A febbraio conosce a Roma Tatiana Schucht, sorella maggiore di Giulia. Tra il marzo e l'aprile, torna a Mosca e partecipa ai lavori del V Esecutivo allargato dell'Ic. A maggio interviene alla Camera contro il disegno di legge sulle associazioni segrete, presentato da Mussolini e da Alfredo Rocco. Nell'estate inizia a lavorare insieme a Togliatti alle tesi per il congresso. Nell'autunno Giulia e il piccolo Delio lo raggiungono a Roma.

1926 Al III congresso del Pcd'I (Lione, 20-26 gennaio) presenta la relazione sulla situazione politica generale. Nell'estate compie una breve vacanza a Trafòi (Bolzano), con Delio, Eugenia e Giulia. Quest'ultima, nuovamente incinta, torna a Mosca, dove il 30 agosto nasce Giuliano. L'8 novembre, in seguito alla promulgazione delle leggi eccezionali, è arrestato e rinchiuso nel carcere di Regina Coeli in assoluto isolamento. Il 18 novembre è assegnato al confino di polizia a Ustica, dove giunge il 7 dicembre.

1927 Il 14 gennaio il Tribunale militare di Milano emette contro di lui un mandato di cattura. Il 20 gennaio è tradotto al carcere di San Vittore a Milano. La dura vita del carcere si ripercuote sulla sua salute; la cognata Tatiana lo assiste, trasferendosi a Milano.

1928 Il 28 maggio si apre a Roma, presso il Tribunale speciale per la difesa dello Stato, il processo - il cosiddetto «processone» - contro Gramsci e il gruppo dirigente del Pcd'I. Il 4 giugno la sentenza lo condanna a 20 anni, 4 mesi e 5 giorni di reclusione. A causa delle sue compromesse condizioni di salute è destinato alla casa penale per minorati fisici e psichici di Turi.

1929 A gennaio ottiene il permesso di scrivere, e il 9 febbraio inizia la stesura dei Quaderni. Al momento di lasciare Turi, ne avrà redatti ventuno.

1930 Il 16 giugno riceve la visita del fratello Gennaro. Verso la fine dell'anno, con l'arrivo a Turi di alcuni compagni di partito, comincia un ciclo di discussioni sugli intellettuali e il partito e sulla Costituente. Queste posizioni provocano le reazioni di alcuni compagni di carcere, che l'accusano di non essere in linea con la politica dell'Ic, che ha abbandonato la tattica del fronte unico.

1932 In seguito ai provvedimenti di amnistia e al condono per il decennale della Marcia su Roma, la condanna viene ridotta a 12 anni e 4 mesi. Inizia la stesura dei «Quaderni speciali». Il 30 dicembre a Ghilarza muore la madre.

1933 In seguito all'aggravarsi della sua malattia, il 19 novembre lascia la casa penale di Turi e, dopo una breve permanenza nell'infermeria del carcere di Civitavecchia, raggiunge la clinica del prof. Cusumano a Formia. Riceve la visita di Piero Sraffa. In ottobre inoltra la richiesta per la libertà condizionale che viene accolta.

1935 In seguito ad una nuova crisi, nell'agosto del 1935 è trasferito alla clinica Quisisana di Roma. Interrompe definitivamente la stesura dei Quaderni, di cui ne risultano redatti complessivamente 29 di note e 4 di traduzioni.

1937 Terminato il periodo di libertà condizionale e riacquistata la piena libertà, il 25 aprile è colpito da emorragia cerebrale. Due giorni dopo muore. Le sue ceneri sono dapprima depositate nel cimitero del Verano e nel settembre dell'anno successivo trasferite al Cimitero acattolico di Roma.

Antonio Gramsci, 1916

Gravestone of Gramsci at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.

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