Giorgio Spini

Giorgio Spini was born in Firenze on 23 September 1916, the son of Rodolfo Spini, a Waldensian, and his wife Isolina Mascagni (by faith a Catholic). As a young man, he participated in the life of the Waldensian community, developing a sense of academic calling fertilized by his religious life and by a ‘profound and deeply felt’ antifascism. (Spini 2002: 303). He was particularly moved by the Concordat, by which the fascist state abolished all the progress made for religious minorities, and democracy, since the Albertine Constitution. Seeking a response in his reading of history, he was influenced by the publications of Doxa, the publishing house for the circle around Giuseppe Gangale, among these Giovanni Miegge and Valdo Vinay. At the age of seventeen he participated in the Gioventù cristiana and then with Ebenezer and other Protestant youth organizations, during which time he made a trip to India. In these circles, Barthian neo-orthodoxy was a dominant influence, fuelling both his anti-fascism, and also his global vision. In later years, he would write not only about his homeland, but with regard to both American and Indian history. He published a number of articles addressing the political and cultural debates of those years, sometimes in such lively tones as cause his publishers to distance themselves from his opinions.

In 1933 he enrolled at the Università di Firenze, but (as he later remembered) ‘of the professors of history at the University, none had much impact on my life.’ (Spini 1998: 109). Markedly different, then, was the influence of Ernesto Bonaiuti, by whose lectures he was ‘moved as I listened… I learned more about the subject of history from this modernist Catholic priest than from any other.’ (Spini 1998: 109)

At the centre of 'Spini the student', therefore, were the history and role of the protestant minority in the context of fascist Italy. This was moreso even than the history of Cosimo I’s Tuscany, which in 1937 he took as the subject of his ‘tesi di laurea’ [degree thesis], under the supervision of Niccolò Rodolico. This work did, however, lead him into publishing in the technical history of his city of birth: including Cosimo I de’ Medici. Lettere (Firenze 1940); Bibliografia delle opere di Antonio Brucioli (Bibliofilia 42, 1940: 129-180); Tra Rinascimento e Riforma: Antonio Brucioli (Firenze 1940); and Cosimo I e l’indipendenza del principato mediceo (Firenze 1945), based on research carried out in 1940 in the archives at Simancas, while he was a lecturer in Italian at the University of Santiago de Compostela. While Firenze and its history spoke of Spini the man, it was the catalytic role of minorities - both in Italian and in global history - which would become a major organizing point for Spini the scholar.

Conscripted in June 1941, on 8 September 1943 (the surrender of Italy to the Allies) found him recovering in a military hospital in the Valli Valdesi. From 1942 already a member of the Partito d’azione (the Action Party), Spini decided the cross the German lines and join the royal army at Bari. Discharged from the army for his political convictions, he connected instead to the British Army. He worked at Radio Bari, using a false name (Valdo Gigli), and between 1944 and 1945 under this name he also published many political articles on the Italy of the people, in the journals L’Italia del popolo, Corriere del Mattino and La Nazione del popolo. Readmitted into the Italian army, he was attached to the Psychological warfare branch combat team of the British 8th Army and participated in the Italian campaign until his discharge in May 1945. In April of the same year he married Anna Petrucci, daughter of the Methodist pastor of Florence, with whom he had three children: Valdo, Daniele and Debora. In Florence he returned to intense activity as a publicist (Spini 2007). In 1947 he won a competitive place as a student in the history program of the Istituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, directed by Federico Chabod.

During these years of the Istituto Storico, more than in his preceding research project, Spini concentrated on writing of a school manual: the Disegno storico della civiltà italiana for classical, scientific and ‘magistrale’ high schools (vols. I-III appeared from a press in Florence between 1947-1949, texts destined to be reprinted several times). These were textbooks, the editing of which was intertwined with constant historiographical reflection, often hosted in magazines with a decisive activist character.

Spini was made professor of modern history, from 1952, at the University of Messina, where he taught alongside Rosario Romeo, Luigi Firpo and Ruggero Moscati. From 1960, he returned home to the University of Florence. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, however, the writing or re-publication of school manuals was central to his work, demonstrating a historiographical (moreso, a civil) commitment that he shared with that whole generation of historians which had passed through the tragic events of the last years of the fascist regime, of the war and of the Resistance and who had arrived or returned to studies with full awareness of the civil and political role of historians. This challenge, as Adolfo Omodeo recalled in 1944, aimed at "removing from schools any trace of those two sad decades, of the degradation and enslavement of the culture to vulgar and narrow concepts "(Omodeo 1960: 517). His key trilogy of historical works, Risorgimento e protestanti (Napoli 1956, and reprinted multiple times by Claudiana); Italia liberale e protestanti (Torino 2002); and L’Italia di Mussolini e protestanti (Torino 2007), form the core of his opus, fully explicating his approach to tracing the importance of Italian religious minorities in the context of the larger movements of European history. He placed particular importance on the influence of evangelical romanticism and revivalism, and its influence on the rise of liberalism. Italian Protestantism was not in his view, Calvinist but Methodist, and had "a very homogeneous ideological colour" (Spini 1956: 303).

For Spini, the United States was both a source of influence and also of creative comparison to the problems he saw in Italian and European culture. He published extensively in journals on American themes in the 1960s, and would spend time in that huge country both researching and teaching at institutions such as Harvard and the Universities of Wisconsin and California (Berkeley). In 1968 he published Autobiografia della giovane America. La storiografia americana dai Padri Pellegrini alla Indipendenza (Turin 1968), an inquiry into "the contribution made by historiography to the formation of the awareness of the Americans' own identity and to the development of their religious, moral and political ideals" (Spini 1968: xiii). He also continued his studies of Italian Protestantism: in 1971 he published L’evangelo e il berretto frigio. Storia della Chiesa cristiana libera in Italia: 1870-1904 (Torino); in 1991, Barocco e puritani. Studi sulla storia del Seicento in Italia, Spagna e New England (Firenze); and in 1994 Studi sull’Evangelismo italiano tra Otto e Novecento (Torino).

Spini’s works provide an outline of the civil and political dimensions of his thought: in particular his passion for democracy and socialism, which resulted in participation in republican political life. We see this first in his involvement in defending the values of the Action Party, even after its dissolution, and then in his firm commitment in the 1953 elections against the majority electoral law. From 1957, the same impulse can be seen in his involvement in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), collaborating with the ‘School and University’ sector in support of the reform of the freestanding middle school. From 1975 to 1990 he was a municipal councillor in Fiesole, where he lived, standing for the PSI. In 1976 he participated in the foundation of the Socialist Institute of Historical Studies, of which he was also president. A lay preacher, he was a member of the Waldensian Tavola and participated, during the years of the government led by Bettino Craxi, in the drafting of the agreements with the Protestant churches which reversed the marginalization imposed by the fascist years.

Spini died in Firenze on 14 January 2006.

He left a vast oeuvre, and generations of students who took his work and extended it. His library was donated by his children to the municipal library of Aulla (Massa-Carrara). A street was named after him in Fiesole, and a bridge in Firenze, a fitting testimony to a life lived energetically and enthusiastically in the public square and between multiple worlds.

Sources:

Baldini, A.E. and M. Firpo (eds.) (1996). Tradizione protestante e ricerca storica. L’impegno intellettuale di Giorgio Spini, Firenze.

Omodeo, A. (1960). Libertà e storia: scritti e discorsi politici, Turin.

RAI (2016), 'Giorgio Spini: Un Storico Moderno', Raiplay 20 November, https://www.raiplay.it/video/2016/11/Giorgio-Spini-uno-storico-moderno---Protestantesimo-del-20112016-c8ccfb66-0c2f-4f78-a49f-88258d06430f.html.

Spini, Daniele (ed.) (2007). Bibliografia degli scritti di Giorgio Spini, Firenze.

Spini, G. (1956). Risorgimento e protestanti, Napoli.

Spini, G. (1968). Autobiografia della giovane America. La storiografia americana dai Padri Pellegrini alla Indipendenza, Torino.

Spini, G. (1998). ‘Considerazioni conclusive’, in A. E. Baldini and M. Firpo (eds.), Tradizione protestante e ricerca storica: l’impegno intellettuale di Giorgio Spini, Firenze.

Spini, G. (2002). La strada della Liberazione. Dalla riscoperta di Calvino al Fronte della VIII Armata, V. Spini (ed.), Torino.

Spini, G. (2007). Lo storico e la politica: scritti giornalistici, 1945-1961, M. Bianchi (ed.), Florence.

Verga, Marcello, ‘Giorgio Spini’, Dizionario biografico degli italiani, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giorgio-spini_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/