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By Root 1667 0

but underperforming in peace and war. I think this led to an ingrained feeling of marginality and provincialism. Italians had reconciled themselves to the belief that the real historical action, the centres of civilization and intellectual authorities were elsewhere. Since the seventeenth century nobody had actually looked to Italy for models of cultural and intellectual achievement and example outside music; since the nineteenth century not even in opera. Fascism, though in some sense strengthening a feeling of national identity, had tried and failed to cure the Italian sense of political and military inferiority, and certainly did nothing to deprovincialize Italian culture. Post-fascist Italy, it was felt, had an enormous amount of cultural catching-up to do, and, one way or another, the place to look for it was abroad. Translations of foreign authors still remain more prominent on the Italian book market than in any other country of comparable size. And almost any foreign recognition of Italian achievement was welcomed. Giulio Einaudi knew very well what he was doing even as late as 1979, when he launched the publication of Gerratana’s superb critical edition of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, not in Rome but in Paris, as he had launched his great multi-volume Storia d’Italia (History of Italy) in Oxford. The stamp of Paris approval or Oxford prestige was still the way to market them in Italy. And of course after the eighteenth century Italian culture was largely provincial, as is evident from Gramsci’s own reading and writing. Even at its best, leaving aside mathematics, opera and a temporary interest in futurism, nobody had taken much notice of Italian productions outside.

Perhaps the most impressive and unexpected achievement of the Italian Republic born of the anti-fascist Resistance was to change all this, and in doing so to demonstrate what was always evident to any unprejudiced foreigner, namely that Italians had not lost any of the intellectual, artistic and entrepreneurial gifts that had produced such amazing and universally admired achievements between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. In some ways the postwar paths of French and Italian culture have followed opposite directions. While France after 1945 lost the cultural hegemony it had so long taken for granted, and retreated into what was, in effect, a francophone ghetto, the prestige of Italian art, science, industry, design and lifestyle was rising, the image of Italy was moving from the margins to the centre of western culture. Even the talents that had flourished or been tolerated under fascism – such major figures of Italian cinema as Rossellini, Visconti and de Sica were in action well before Mussolini fell – were liberated by Resistance. In the 1950s it would have been inconceivable that the international high-fashion industry would one day look to Milan and Florence rather than to Paris.

Nevertheless, except in completely transnational fields such as the mathematical and natural sciences, Italian thinking found it hard to shake off the provincialism of the past; not least because of the long resistance of the Italian university system, with its deeply ingrained combination of control by national bureaucrats and politicians and the manoeuvres of its own ‘barons’ with their powerful patronage system. Hence the exceptional importance in the Italian intellectual life of the first three or four postwar decades of commercial publishing houses such as Laterza, Einaudi and Feltrinelli. In fact, as in postwar Federal Germany, they largely substituted for the unreconstructed universities as intellectual and cultural powerhouses or, if one prefers the fashionable post-1989 jargon, organs of ‘civil society’.

The prince of these cultural architects of post-fascist Italy was Giulio Einaudi (1912–99), my friend and publisher, son of Italy’s most eminent free market economist and later the country’s first President, who had founded his publishing house at the age of twenty-one in 1933 and led it for fifty years thereafter. Paradoxically, he was not himself