Giuseppe Galasso storico e maestro

Giuseppe Galasso was a close friend of «Nuova Rivista Storica». Hence, the initiative of the Editors to remember him, one year after his death, with works that, we hope, will meet the challenge that Galasso had launched to the analysis of the past. All contributions focus on the interests of the «Storico e Maestro» whom we want to pay a tribute. Eugenio Di Rienzo, Luciano Monzali, Aurelio Musi deal with the political biography of Croce after 1943, the Italian historians of the «Short Twentieth Century», the History of the Kingdom of Naples, the theoretical and political confrontation between Galasso and the Italian Communist Party and its ideologies. Bruno Figliuolo tackles the theme of the «Longobard question», which Galasso, in his latest volume, had placed as a starting point (from Pietro Giannone, to Ludovico Antonio Muratori, to Carlo Denina) of the enfranchisement of Italian historiography on the history of Italy, from the "prison" of erudition and subjection to the analysis of past, dictated by the Classical Renaissance approach. Figliuolo insists also on the way this theme was treated by Gioacchino Volpe, whom, many times Galasso had defined «the greatest historian of the first half of the Twentieth Century», in his writings and in private conversations. William Mulligan and Andrea Ungari focus on the breakdown, due to the Great War, of the internal and international institutional framework, a theme on which Galasso had returned to reflect in the last months of his existence. Nor is unrelated to the paradigm of the «present history», which Galasso had borrowed from Croce, Gentile and Volpe, the topic chosen by Egidio Ivetic, who investigates, in the longue durée, the history of «Balcanìa» and its identity in the European and Mediterranean space, yesterday, today and tomorrow. The Liber amicorum includes the last Galasso interview given to Aurelio Musi for «Nuova Rivista Storica» and a gallery of images chosen by Giulia Galasso that give us back his unforgettable, warm humanity.