Armando Saitta

Armando Saitta (15 March 1919 – 26 May 1991) was an Italian historian.

Biography

Born at Sant'Angelo di Brolo, a comune in the Metropolitan City of Messina, Saitta attended the University of Palermo, where he studied History of Philosophy under Giovanni Gentile. Later he entered, at only sixteen years of age, the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa directed by Gentile, and there he counted among his teachers Giorgio Pasquali, Guido Calogero and Luigi Russo.

Graduated in Letters in 1941 with a thesis on Andrea Luigi Mazzini (Italian politician of the nineteenth century, disciple of Moses Hess) and specialized in historical studies, he gradually approached the Marxist historiography, thanks to the friendship with the historian Delio Cantimori, who passed from fascism to communism, (and translated the first book of Marx's Capital), and later became a member of the Executive of the Italy-Urss Association.

In the early fifties, Saitta was director of the magazine Movimento Operaio published by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, while in the sixties he founded and directed the magazine Critica Storica for the publishing house D'Anna. He collaborated, moreover, to the prestigious literary magazine Belfagor, directed by his master Luigi Russo.

He became full professor of Modern History at the University of Pisa in 1954, then moved to Rome in 1967 where he held the same chair at the Faculty of Education. In 1971, he moved to the Faculty of Political Science at the University " La Sapienza", teaching the same discipline for about twenty years, until his dismissal in 1989.

Career overview

Armando Saitta dedicated himself to French history since the beginning of his career, showing his interest above all in the historical and sociological horizons, as demonstrated by his studies on the social-political thought of the early nineteenth century (Saint-Simon and Fourier) and his careful examination of the evolution of the political and constitutional system of modern and contemporary France, starting from the season preceding the outbreak of the French Revolution. It deals with the last decades of life of the Ancien Régime, when the reform attempts of the illuminists (Montesquieu and Voltaire) and the liberalization process wanted by the economist Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, clashed with the political, economic and cultural immobility that the political forces of the kingdom (the court nobility (parlements), landowners, financiers and magnates of the corporations), were able to strengthen with intransigence, winning the hesitancy of Louis XVI who dismissed him, sanctioning the futile victory of the reactionary and corporate pressure groups on the process, moreover ineluctable, of reform.

He was a member of various Italian and foreign Academies (including the prestigious Lincean Academy and the Supreme Council on Archives at the Ministry of Cultural and Environmental Property) and the author of numerous works of a historical nature. He is remembered, among other things, for having written a widespread manual of History for high schools on which entire generations of students have been trained.

Although a historian of the modern age, Armando Saitta was a scholar of wide range, so that his research and his contributions embraced and extended from medieval to contemporary history. In addition to having deepened the Italian Jacobinism, to the point of becoming, together with the historian and jurist Alessandro Galante Garrone, the scholar who has best investigated and dissected the revolutionary conspiracy in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, the career of Philippe Buonarroti, and the French institutional history of the revolutionary period, Saitta was also a talented historiographer, as evidenced by his valuable contributions of historical criticism.

Although a left-wing intellectual of Marxist inspiration, as well as a militant in the ranks of the anti-fascist activism, Armando Saitta never took the membership of the Italian Communist Party, and did not hesitate to express his disappointment with the Party on the occasion of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 (this episode must be traced back to the heated quarrel addressed to François Furet, distinguished French historian, united to Saitta by the same historical studies and political ideals).

His critical voice, inspired by an intellectual pride devoted to teaching and to the moral and cultural formation of young people, had its highest and most severe expression following the student protests of 1968 when, in frank polemic with the Communist Party itself, he manifested all his regret at "seeing the ancient system, [...] of an entire scholastic system for the formation of intellectual honesty, methodological rigor, and of the ruling class, destroyed with a conscious political design to move from the classrooms to the secretariats of parties and unions and to the ministerial cabinets the formation not of intellectuals but of yes-men."

This thought that expressed the bitterness of an authoritative protagonist who assisted helpless to an improvised and artful political renovatio, did not gone unnoticed in the learned circles of the left, to the point that the medievalist Franco Cardini, in remembering the Saitta just after his death, did not hesitate to define him as a "Marxian with moderation... forgotten by the left." In 1976, Saitta sued La Nuova Italia, publisher of his manual for high schools, accusing it of having censored several pages. The Court of Florence gave him reason and, with the judgment of October 21, 1976 recognized the illegal interventions to the detriment of the author in 11 points of the text. They had been reduced: the direct responsibilities of the extra-parliamentary left in terrorism; the critical remarks on the depotentiation of the regions; the reservations on union privileges.

Armando Saitta served as Director of the Institute of Medieval, Modern and Contemporary History and of Paleography and Diplomatics at the University of Pisa (now Department of Medieval Studies), as well as President of the prestigious Istituto storico italiano per l'età moderna e contemporanea in Rome, to which he donated his rich private library.

An entire generation of scholars was trained in the teachings of Armando Saitta, including historians such as Adriano Prosperi, Roberto de Mattei, Paolo Simoncelli, Marco Minerbi and Carlo Ginzburg.

Works

• Filippo Buonarroti. Contributo alla storia della sua vita e del suo pensiero (1972)
• Il cammino umano. Manuale di Storia per il triennio (1978; 3 volumes)
• Guida critica alla storia contemporanea (1983)
• Antologia di documenti e di critica storica (1985)
• Le costituenti francesi del periodo rivoluzionario (1789-1795) (1989)
• La memoria storica. Corso di storia per la Scuola media (1990)
• Guida critica alla storia moderna (1994)
• Momenti e figure della civiltà europea, Storia e letteratura (1994)
• Storia e miti del '900. Antologia di critica storica (1999)
• Dalla Granada mora alla Granada cattolica. Incroci e scontri di civiltà (2006)
• Avvertimenti di don Scipio di Castro a Marco Antonio Colonna quando andò viceré in Sicilia (2011)

External links

• Saitta, Armando